elected for Ennis, 1830, and entered lengthy quarrel with O’Connell; unseated in Parliament for using his wife’s dowry to bribe voters and threatening others with the Terry Alts, March 1831; quit England for France, where he served as a colonel in the army and fought in North Africa; afterwards served in the bodyguard of Tsar of Russia travelled in Turkey, India and China; crossed the Atlantic and served as a general in Uruguay, a commander of a Chilean fleet, a colonel in Brazil during the Empire, and a Union officer in the American Civil War; returned to Europe and visited Prussia, supposedly befriending Bismarck; returned to Ireland and elected MP for Clare as Home Rule candidate, 1879; retained his seat in 1880-85 and became the sole MP but one to have held a seat since before the Reform Act; proposed Parnell for chairmanship of Irish Parliamentary Party at retirement of Isaac Butt; troduced Parnell to Capt. O’Shea with whose wife Parnell had his famous affair - leading to the rupture of the Irish Parliamentary Party and his own death from pneumonia; elected for Carlow, 1887; d. at home in London, and bur. in Glasnevin, Dublin; Mahon had a son by his first wife and a son by his second, who predeceased him. RIA

He has a very striking physiognomy, of the corsair character ... His figure is tall and he is peculiarly free and dégagé in all his attitudes and movements. In any other his attire would appear singularly fantastical. His manners are exceedingly frank and natural, and have a character of kindliness as well as of self-reliance imprinted upon them ... His talents as a popular speaker are considerable. He derives from external qualifications an influence over the multitude, which men of a diminutive stature are somewhat slow of obtaining ... When O’Gorman Mahon throws himself out before the people, and, touching his whiskers with one hand, brandishes the other, an enthusiasm is at once produced, to which the fair portion of the spectators lend their tender contribution. Such a man was exactly adapted to the excitement of the people of Clare; and it must be admitted, that by his indefatigable exertions, his unremitting activity and his devoted zeal, he most materially assisted in the election of Mr. O’Connell.

The O’Gorman Mahon, a grotesque character even by the exotic standards of some of the Irish Members in this period, was a figure of pure self-invention. Possibly descended from the medieval MacMahons of county Clare, he shared a common ancestor (Bryan the elder of Loughrea, county Galway) with Thomas Mahon of Corbally, county Clare, and Sir Ross Mahon of Castlegar, county Galway, who briefly sat for Ennis in 1820. His father (Bryan’s great-grandson), a Catholic who married a local heiress in 1798, was a respectable Ennis merchant and Clare magistrate, although his grandfather was apparently a poor farmer and his father a tithe proctor, while later gossip would have it that Patrick himself was once imprisoned for sheep-stealing. This Member’s personal details seem to have been obscured by his own delusions of grandeur: he gave his birth year as 1803, which would make him an exact contemporary of his school friend Maurice O’Connell, but he was probably born in 1802. The birth date of 17 March, St. Patrick’s Day, although possibly accurate, he may have adopted in honour of his patronymic; the first name Charles would appear to be a later genuflection to the cult of Charles James Fox since he was christened James Patrick; and the addition of O’Gorman as an extra name was doubtless an erroneous usage derived from the confusing status of his chosen title. This last, the O’Gorman Mahon, was a preposterous conceit; unlike, for instance, the O’Conor Don’s, [...]
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 Later that year he began to travel in Europe and visited several other continents, but he sat for Ennis as a repealer in the 1847 Parliament. After another period in Paris, where he was a journalist and financial speculator, he resumed his quixotic adventures abroad in the 1850s and 1860s; among other tales that he later told, he supposedly served as a lieutenant in the tsar of Russia’s bodyguard, as a general in the government forces in Uruguay, as a commander of a Chilean fleet, as a colonel under the emperor of Brazil and as an officer on the Union side in the American civil war. His always tottering financial situation had collapsed by 1872, but he re-entered Parliament as Home Rule Member for Clare in 1879, acting with Charles Stewart Parnell, to whom he delivered O’Shea’s challenge in 1881. He was the original of “the Mulligan” in Thackeray’s Mrs. Perkins’ Ball (1881). Alluding to his reputation as a duellist, William Ewart Gladstone wrote of him in 1889 that the ‘Commons is now familiar with the stately figure of an Irish gentleman advanced in life, who carries with him the halo of an extraordinary reputation in that particular, but who is conspicuous among all his contemporaries for his singularly beautiful and gentle manners’. As Member for county Carlow, he was, after the death of Christopher Rice Mansel Talbot in 1890, the last surviving Member of the unreformed House to hold a seat in the Commons, although several others outlived him, including the longest survivor of all, John Charles George Savile, Viscount Pollington (the 4th earl of Mexborough). He died in June 1891, a throwback to an imagined ideal of Irish chieftainship. [End.]

Charles James Patrick Mahon (The O’Gorman Mahon) (1803–1891), politician and adventurer, was born (or so he claimed) 17 March 1803 at Ennis, Co. Clare, eldest son among three sons and one daughter of Patrick Mahon, merchant and JP, and Barbara Mahon (née O’Gorman), an Ennis heiress. Educated at Clongowes Wood College, Co. Kildare, he entered TCD, graduating BA (1822). Soon after leaving Trinity he assumed the grandiloquent title “The O’Gorman Mahon” by which he was always known; even in his final years fellow MPs called him “Chieftain”. In 1821 his father died and he became a JP for Co. Clare. A proud Roman Catholic, he became involved in the Catholic Association, and encouraged Daniel O’Connell to oppose William Vesey Fitzgerald in Clare in 1828. Reluctantly, O’Connell decided to contest the seat, and Mahon threw all his energies into securing his election. In the aftermath of the victory he became a hero, and despite a break with O’Connell was himself elected for Co. Clare in 1830; he was unseated, however, after it was discovered that he had illegally used his new wife’s dowry to help procure the result. Defeated when he stood at the general election the following year, he never forgave O’Connell for opposing his candidacy.
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  A frequent visitor to Ireland, he became a supporter of the home rule movement and a friend of Charles Stewart Parnell. As a result, he was asked to stand for election once more and became MP for Clare in 1879, being re-elected the following year (1880–85). By now an elder statesman of the commons, Mahon engaged enthusiastically in obstructionism, and it was he who proposed Parnell for chairman of the parliamentary party after the resignation of Isaac Butt. He befriended William O’Shea (qv), and persuaded him to pay for his election expenses in 1880; he also introduced O’Shea to Parnell, thus indirectly bringing Katharine O’Shea to the Irish leader's attention. In 1887 he was elected for Co. Carlow, a constituency he represented until his death. He died 21 June 1891 at his home in London, and was buried at Glasnevin cemetery, Dublin, near his one-time friend O’Connell.