Thomas Power O'Connor was a contemporary of Davitt, who ended up representing an English seat at Westminster. . O'Connor pursued Irish Independence from within the very heart of the system, using the power of the popular press and a long career in parliament to advance the nationalist cause.

Nicknamed 'Tay-Pay', O'Connor was born in Athlone in 1848 and educated at Queen's College, Galway. He became a journalist for the Dublin based Saunders' Newsletter and then joined the staff of the Daily Telegraph in London.

He was first elected to Parliament in 1880 as Irish Nationalist MP for Galway, although he also continued to work as a journalist. In 1885 he became the first Nationalist MP to be elected to an English constituency - Liverpool's Scotland division, a seat he continued to hold until his death in 1929. O'Connor helped to pioneer the development of the mass circulation newspaper. In 1887, he founded a new radical newspaper, The Star, the first to feature a regular political cartoon and which survived until 1960, followed by The Sun in 1893 and T.P.'s Weekly in 1902.

O'Connor wrote several books including The Parnell Movement (1886) and Memoirs of an Old Parliamentarian (1928).

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