John Pinkerton (1845 – 4 November 1908) was an Irish Protestant nationalist politician and Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.
He was a tenant farmer, a JP of County Antrim, and served as a member of the Coleraine Board of Guardians.
He sympathised increasingly with the Catholics of north Antrim in their support for the national Land League.
[3] Pinkerton was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1885 general election in which he stood as an independent "representative of small farmers and labourers" for the North Antrim constituency.
[3] In 1913, their son, John Wallace Pinkerton (1878–1949),[5] a solicitor, was an organiser in Ballymoney of a “Meeting of Protestants” at which Roger Casement, Alice Stopford Green, and Captain Jack White spoke in protest against “the illegal policy of Carsonism”—the preparation by unionists of an armed resistance to an Irish parliament.