Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony

Pierce Charles de Lacy O'Mahony (9 June 1850 – 31 October 1930), known up to 1901 as Pierce Mahony, and from 1912 also as The O'Mahony of Kerry, was an Irish Protestant nationalist politician and philanthropist, who practised as a barrister from 1898 to 1900. He was remarkable in having had successively three names, two wives and three faiths, and for being honoured by the Kings of two opposing countries in World War I.

He should not be confused with his grandfather Pierce Mahony (1792–1853), a close associate of Daniel O'Connell, who was elected as MP for Kinsale in 1837 but unseated on petition; or with his son Pierce Gun Mahony (1878–1914).

Born in Dublin to a Church of Ireland family, Mahony was the only surviving son of Peirce Kenifeck Mahony of Kilmorna, Duagh, County Kerry, and of Jane, daughter of Robert Gun Cuninghame, D.L., of Mount Kennedy, County Wicklow. His father died shortly after he was born. When he was six his mother married Col. William Henry Vicars, and the family moved to Leamington, Warwickshire. Mahony was educated at Rugby School and at Magdalen College, Oxford, where he did not take a degree, but established an Irish Home Rule club and formed a friendship with his later Parliamentary colleague J. G. Swift MacNeill. Mahony went on to the Royal Agricultural College, Cirencester, where he won the Haygarth Gold Medal in 1875. In 1877 he married Helen Louise, only daughter of Maurice Collis, a member of the Royal Irish Academy. She died in 1899 and in 1901 he married a first cousin, Alice Johnstone, who died in her turn in 1906. An ancient stone cross taken (with permission) from the Bulgarian monastery at Banska stands over Alice's grave in the church cemetery at Ballinure in West Wicklow, Ireland.

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