William Sharman Crawford

William Sharman Crawford (1780–1861) was an Irish landowner who, in the Parliament of the United Kingdom, championed a democratic franchise, a devolved legislature for Ireland, and the interests of the Irish tenant farmer. As a Radical representing first, with Daniel O'Connell's endorsement, Dundalk (1835-1837) and then, with the support of Chartists, the English constituency of Rochdale (1841–1852) he introduced bills to codify and extend in Ireland the Ulster tenant right. In his last electoral contest, standing on the platform of the all-Ireland Tenant Right League in 1852 he failed to unseat the Conservative and Orange party in Down, his native county. Early life William Sharman Crawford was born on 3 September 1780 at Moira Castle, County Down, the son of William Sharman who had been a colonel in the Irish Volunteer movement and for many years the member for Lisburn in the Irish parliament. In 1819 he sold the family estates, which he had inherited in 1803, and moved to Dublin where he became a patron of the philanthropic Royal Dublin Society. Eight years later he returned to County Down as the heir to the estates of his brother-in-law Arthur Johnston Crawford of Crawfordsburn, whose name, Crawford, he added (by royal licence) to his own. An advocate of Catholic relief since 1812, he publicly supported emancipation in 1829, and the following year was strenuous in his efforts as a county magistrate to disperse Orange demonstrations. When he stood as a Westminster candidate for parliamentary reform in Down in 1831 and in Belfast in 1832, he was successfully opposed by the local Ascendancy interest (the dominant Downshire, Londonderry, and Donegall families). Radical MP and democratic suffragist Sharman Crawford had resisted approaches from Daniel O'Connell in 1831 to join in the campaign to repeal of the Act of Union and to restore an independent Irish parliament. He declared that the dissolution of the legislative union would "undermine the connection between Great Britain and Ireland upon which the prosperity, happiness, and security of the country depended" (Northern Whig, 24 Jan. 1831). Sharman Crawford, however, was sufficiently dissatisfied with the pace of reform in Ireland to outline case for devolved self-government within the United Kingdom: The expediency and necessity of a local legislative body in Ireland (Newry, 1833).