Stories of the Four Courts

What I Have Seen and Heard,’ by J.G. Swift MacNeill (1849-1926), available to read free of charge at this link, is replete with fascinating information about the Irish Bar and Bench in the period 1870-1914.

Particularly intriguing is MacNeill’s account of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Stonyhurst schoolmate John Francis Moriarty, later Lord Justice Moriarty of the Court of Appeal in Ireland, widely believed to be the inspiration for Professor Moriarty of the Sherlock Holmes stories:

“Among my contemporaries as law students and at the Bar was Mr. John Francis Moriarty, whose career was probably unique. His father was a very well-known solicitor in Mallow, and when J.F. Moriarty was called to the Bar, apart from his own high intellectual powers, he had all the help of influential friends and of people who were under considerable obligation to his father. He got rapidly into business, and his affairs seemed so full of promise that he used to say that, as Philip Yorke had become Solicitor-General for England within five years of his call to the Bar, he failed to see why he should not become Solicitor-General for Ireland within the same period.  When the position of Crown Prosecutor at the Dublin Commission at Green Street (the Irish Old Bailey) fell vacant Moriarty expected that he would be appointed, more especially since it was in the gift of the Irish Attorney-General, who held the seat at Mallow largely through the support and influence of Moriarty’s father.  The appointment, however, was given elsewhere, and Moriarty became not only disappointed but eager for revenge. An opportunity soon came, if not against the Attorney-General, at any rate against the Whig Government to which that official belonged. The Attorney-General, Mr. Johnson, was promoted to the Bench, and a by-election became necessary at Mallow.  Mr. Naish, the Irish Solicitor-General, was standing in the Liberal Interest for what was deemed a safe seat. Moriarty came forward in opposition also as a Liberal candidate, and the resulting split Liberal vote led to the defeat of Mr. Naish and the return of the Nationalist. So Moriarty obtained his revenge, but the door was shut upon his chances of promotion.

Realizing this, he abandoned his practice at the Bar, and, drifting, became a constant attendant at turf meetings and a heavy better. A considerable period of his life suffered almost total eclipse. Then after several years he returned to the Bar, finding himself unknown and practically briefless, and in a very different position from that which he had thrown up long before.  His skill was recognized in some quarters, but his record precluded him from advancement. The Attorney-General of the day would have given him a Dublin Police Magistracy but was peremptorily forbidden to do so by the late Lord Cadogan, who was then Lord-Lieutenant. At last, his masterly conduct as counsel in the ‘remount scandal’ cases of the Boer War, which attracted considerable attention at the time, brought him unexpectedly a very considerable practice. In 1904, twenty-seven years after his call, he took silk and was junior at the Inner Bar to many men called long after him. He was made a Serjeant-at-Law, thereby obtaining precedence next after the Law Officers of the Crown; he became successively Solicitor-General and Attorney-General, and finally was promoted to the Bench as a Lord Justice of Appeal. Thus his career forms an instance, almost unique in the history of the Irish Bar, of the rehabilitation of a man whose personal character has been besmirched.”

The curious case of Lord Justice Moriarty, and his penchant for playing unscrupulous tricks on opponents in court, is further discussed by Maurice Healy in ‘The Old Munster Circuit’ and by Alexander Martin Sullivan in ‘The Last Serjeant.’

 As it happened, Moriarty only served a short time on the bench, dying not long after his second marriage to a witness in one of the cases in which he acted as advocate, a young woman accused of forging her late husband’s will; over the next two decades, she went on to bury two more husbands, including Moriarty. Conan Doyle himself could hardly have scripted it better.

Due to Moriarty’s early death, there are, alas, no judgments to provide further insight into his intriguing personality.   Though his many obituaries were generally laudatory, some corroboration of MacNeill’s account of his early years at the Bar may be found in the occasional reference to his love of the turf and the below piece from the Fermanagh Times of 6 May 1915: