Sir Thomas Russell, 1st Baronet

Sir Thomas Russell, Bt MP PC
Member of Parliament for Tyrone North
In office 6 October 1911 – July 1918
Preceded by	Redmond John Barry
Succeeded by	Constituency abolished
Member of Parliament for Tyrone South
In office July 1886 – January 1910
Preceded by	William O'Brien
Succeeded by	Andrew Long Horner
Personal details
Born	28 February 1841 Cupar, Fife, Scotland
Died	2 May 1920 (aged 79)
Political party	Liberal (1910-1918)
Other political affiliations	Russellite Unionist (1904-1910) Liberal Unionist (1886-1904) Liberal (pre-1885)
Religion	Presbyterian

Sir Thomas Wallace Russell, 1st Baronet MP PC (28 February 1841 – 2 May 1920), was an Irish politician and agrarian agitator. Born at Cupar, Fife, Scotland, he moved to County Tyrone at the age of eighteen. He was secretary and parliamentary agent of the Irish temperance movement and became well known as an anti-alcohol campaigner and proprietor of a Temperance Hotel in Dublin.

He unsuccessfully contested Preston in 1885 as a Liberal. However, he opposed William Ewart Gladstone's Home Rule policy and was elected to the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland as a Liberal Unionist in 1886 for South Tyrone. He served between 1895 and 1900 as Parliamentary Secretary to the Local Government Board in the Unionist administration of Lord Salisbury.

However, Russell's views on Home Rule underwent a change around the turn the century and he gradually became a critic of Unionist policies in Ireland. From 1900 put himself at the head of the Farmers and Labourers Union, an Ulster tenant-farmer protest movement demanding compulsory land purchase, similar to the land and labour movement in the south. His 1901 book Ireland and the Empire was an attack on the Irish agrarian system. From 1902 to 1903 he was a key Ulster farmer representative at the Dublin "Land Conference" which resulted in the passing of the Land Purchase Act of 1903. This defused the Protestant tenant-farmers' revolt.

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