Oliver Grace

Oliver Dowell John Grace (Mantua, County Roscommon, Ireland, 19 October 1791 – Mantua, 25 January 1871) was a landowner in County Roscommon and politician who served at various times as a magistrate, a Grand Juror of Roscommon (1820s and 1830s), High Sheriff of Roscommon (1831), and as a member of Westminster Parliament for the county (1847-1859). Grace was elected as a Whig MP in 1847, as an Independent Irish Party MP in 1852, and again as a Whig in 1857. In 1867, Grace was appointed Vice Lieutenant of Roscommon, an office he held until his death five years later. His deep Irish roots (Grace's family had been established in Ireland for hundreds of years ), his Roman Catholicism, and the fact that he lived on his estate among his tenants distinguished Grace from many of the landed class of the time, who were often Anglo-Irish or English Protestant “absentees” who resided in Dublin or London. Although Grace has been described as sharing the attitudes of the landlord class concerning the rights of property, he frequently identified with the causes of the native Irish when their interests diverged from those of the gentry. Grace was, by his own description, “an unflinching opponent of any Government that will not advance and promote [Ireland’s] interests”. This was evident when, in 1832, he took the extraordinary step of declining to join in the customary address of the clergy, nobility, gentry and landed proprietors to Lord Lorton (the largest landowner in Roscommon) on his appointment as Lord Lieutenant of the county. Grace instead subscribed to a counter declaration in which he and several other prominent figures in the county denounced the appointment, stating that they “view[ed] with indignation the appointment of a nobleman who has always been the enemy to reform. That the opinion of the great majority of landed proprietors, as well in number as in property, is decidedly hostile to this appointment and that it is in direct opposition to the middle classes of society in this county, and the entire body of the people.” Grace was an outspoken champion of legislation to guarantee “Tenant Right”, which aimed at bettering the condition of tenants “by giving them a legal security in the lands they live in”. His particular ties to the tenantry on his estate are reflected in his funding of a new National School for Mantua in 1869, and his willingness to allow his house to serve as a chapel before the building of the local church in 1870.