Timothy Michael Healy was the most brilliant and controversial politician of the Irish Parliamentary Party. A rhetorician of savage fluency, he did much to shape the idiom of modern Irish nationalism. His political career spans three disparate eras: the Parnellite decade, the ascendancy of John Redmond and John Dillon which ensued, and the rise of Sinn Fein and the establishment of the Irish Free State.

His political career opened with polemics against Isaac Butt, and ended with denunciations of Eamon de Valera. A complex and thwarted temperament, his oratory and journalism were of unique vehemence and emotional range.

Healy's career was a succession of violent antagonisms: against Butt, Parnell, Dillon, Redmond and lastly de Valera. In loose confederacy with his former adversary William O'Brien and William Martin Murphy the Dublin entrepreneur, he did much to subvert the Irish Party of Redmond and Dillon. Resigning from parliament in 1918, he skilfully effected a juncture with the rising Sinn Fein.

He continued to press for a political settlement, and in the treaty negotiations of late 1921 conveyed informal assurances from Churchill and Lloyd George to Collins and Griffith in relation to the Boundary Commission. Healy was Governor-General of the Irish Free State 1922-8. This is the first study to re-assess the career of the most flagrantly neglected figure of modern Irish politics.