John Philpot Curran (24 July 1750 – 14 October 1817) was an Irish orator, politician, and lawyer known for his skills in defence of civil and political liberty.

In the 1790s he was celebrated as a champion in the Irish House of Commons of Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, and in court as defence counsel for United Irishmen facing charges of sedition and treason.

He eventually overcame his nerves, and got rid of his speech impediment by constantly reciting Shakespeare and Bolingbroke in front of a mirror, and became a noted orator and wit.

In retaliation, Doneraile horse-whipped the elderly priest, evidently secure in the belief that a jury, all Protestant, would never convict him on charges pressed by a Catholic.

In cross examination Curran demolished the credibility of Doneraile's witnesses and persuaded the jury to set aside sectarian considerations and award his client 30 guineas.

His eldest daughter Amelia was born in 1775, and eight more children resulted from the union, but his marriage disintegrated, his wife eventually deserting him and eloping with Reverend Abraham Sandys, whom Curran sued afterwards for criminal conversation in 1795.

In his first major speech in the Irish House of Commons, Curran supported Henry Flood's attempt to build on the Volunteer success in securing legislative independence with parliamentary reform.

Flood proposed to abolish the "pocket boroughs" that allowed the aristocracy, already seated in the Lords, to nominate and control two-thirds of the Irish Commons.

Speaking on the tenth anniversary of 1782, Curran credited the achievement of legislative independence to a "partial union" between Protestants and their Catholic "fellow countrymen".

The Patriots accepted the support of Catholics, but with neither "the justice or gratitude to let them share the fruits of the victory", had allowed them to "relapse into their former insignificance and depression".

[12] It was a question, Curran insisted, not merely of Catholic "sufferings or their relief":[A] partial liberty cannot long subsist ... alienation of 3 millions of our people, subserviency and corruption in a fourth ... [T]he inevitable consequence would be a Union with Great Britain.

[13]Identified with the patriot Whig opposition of Henry Grattan, a personal friend, Curran pressed the case for Catholic Emancipation.

After the extension (under pressure from London) of the limited right to vote in 1795, this focussed on removing the sacramental bar to Catholics sitting in Parliament and taking public office.

[15]In October 1796, Curran supported Grattan's motion, in face an anticipated French invasion, that a defence of the kingdom could best be secured by legislation to guarantee "the blessings and privileges of the constitution without distinction of religion".

[16] Once this last effort of the constitutional opposition to obtain a conciliatory policy from the government was rejected, Curran and his colleagues withdrew from the Commons and ceased to attend its debates until the parliament adjourned on 3 July.

The Sheares Brothers, and William Byrne, at the height of the Rebellion in July 1798, were hanged, drawn and quartered。 In Ireland, the government could secure a conviction of treason on the testimony of just one witness.

Curran represented a proven loyalist who had collapsed a treason trial by convincing a jury of the "infamous" character of Sirr's key witness.

Sirr and his colleague were alleged then to have used wrongful arrest, imprisonment incommunicado, and condemnation to hanging as means of extortion and personal satisfaction.

[1] Curran was bitterly disappointed by the Act of Union of 1800 that abolished the Irish Parliament in favour of representation at Westminster, and which he had anticipated would be the result of failure to reform.

[23] Although in its wake his house was searched and he was brought before the Privy Council to answer inquiries, Curran had no truck with the attempt by Robert Emmet in July 1803 to mount a new insurrection in Dublin.

[1][24][25] Curran did appear on 1 September 1803 for several of the nineteen persons who were tried for complicity with Emmet in the rising, though he spoke only on behalf of the tailor, Owen Kirwan.

Napoleon, he said, would have rewarded "his rapacious generals and soldiers by parcelling out the soil of the island among them, and by dividing you into lots of serfs to till the respective lands to which they belonged".

But his latter days were embittered both by domestic troubles and by political disappointment and despair:[30]Everything I see disgusts and depresses me: I look back at the streaming of blood for so many years, and everything everywhere relapse into its former degradation--France rechained, Spain again saddled for the priests, and Ireland, like a bastinadoed elephant, kneeling to receive the paltry rider.In the summer of 1817, he was seized by paralysis while dining at the table of Thomas Moore.

In 1845 a white marble memorial to him, with a carved bust by Christopher Moore,[31] was placed near the west door of St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin.

Sir Jonah Barrington (infamous for his removal from the judiciary by parliamentary petition to the King in 1830)[32] recalled, from an "intimacy" that was "long and close", that:Curran's person was mean and decrepit; very slight, very shapeless--with nothing of the gentleman about it; on the contrary, displaying spindle limbs, a shambling gait, one hand imperfect, and a face yellow, furrowed, rather flat and thoroughly ordinary.

Yet his features were the very reverse of disagreeable; there was something so indescribably dramatic in the eye and the play of his eyebrow, that his visage seemed the index of his mind, and his humour the slave of his will.

... [H]is rapid movements, his fire, his sparkling eye, and fine and varied intonations of his voice, these conspired to give life and energy to every company he mixed with.

In Fisher's Drawing Room Scrap Book, 1832, Letitia Elizabeth Landon includes an illustrative poem to the engraved portrait therein, this being by Sir Thomas Lawrence.

"It is only two words, and it will explain your profession, your elevation, and your contempt for the people's ridicule; it has the advantage of being in two languages, Latin and English, just as the reader chooses.