FERGUSON, William Dwyer. & VANCE, Andrew. The Tenure and Improvement of Land in Ireland Considered with Reference to the Relation of Landlord and Tenant, and Tenant-Right.

Dublin: Milliken, 1851. Octavo. pp. xxi, 450. Publisher’s blind-stamped brown cloth. From the library of Constantine Molloy with his signature ‘Constantine Molloy / Tullamore’ on titlepage. Ex lib with neat circular stamps. Spine professionally rebacked. A very good copy with an excellent provenance.
Constantine Molloy QC, Tullamore (1832-1897), a prominent member of the Molloys of Tullamore. The Molloy family in Tullamore can include among their number two of the town’s most prominent citizens in the 1820s to the 1840s, Michael Molloy and Anthony Molloy. Michael Molloy founded the Tullamore Distillery in 1829 and from it came the Bernard Daly distillery and that of Tullamore DEW. Michael Molloy was a patron of schools and of the new Mercy convent of 1838-40. The family were the owners of Tullamore up to the 1620s and were the principal landowning family in the baronies of Ballycowan, Ballyboy and Eglish until the Jacobite and Cromwellian plantations. Some such as Charles Molloy had extensive landholdings at Greatwood in Killoughy up to the 1850s.
Constantine Molloy was on the prosecution side in the first Parnell trial in 1880 and is, perhaps, better known for his publications including Molloy’s Justice of the Peace, a work that became the leading text of the day with one reviewer describing Molloy as ‘the most eminent criminal lawyer at the Bar’.
Molloy was born in the house now occupied by Conway & Kearney, solicitors in High Street, Tullamore and was called to the bar in 1858 and to the inner bar in 1882. He was the only son of a Tullamore shopkeeper and spirit grocer, William Molloy and his wife Mary (née Molloy) and was born in 1832 and educated at TCD and King’s Inns. Molloy got to be known early on in Tullamore for his legal knowledge and assisted the local business community with the preparation of the paperwork for the formation of the first limited liability company in the town in 1860 to promote the provision of gas lighting and the formation of the first town commission in the same year. He served as a commissioner for a short time.
Molloy had been appointed crown prosecutor for King’s County in 1880 and, in 1884, was succeeded in that position by another circuit member, David Sherlock of Rahan Lodge, Tullamore when Molloy was appointed crown prosecutor for the counties of Carlow and Kildare. Constantine Molloy was a junior counsel on behalf of the crown in the Parnell trial that began on 28 December 1880 and was regarded as the greatest authority on the criminal law at the time. He had been consulted on the indictments and when the nineteenth count, which involved a lengthy discussion, was dropped to shorten the proceedings it gave rise to some wit in the Law Library. The verse ran as follows:
‘In the Library he sat, / / Someone cried “Ahoy” / / Holy saints what name was that? / / Constantine Molloy!! / / But the nineteenth count was bad / / Would not do, my boy; / / This is very, very sad, / / Constantine Molloy/ /’
He died at his home in Dublin on 12 May 1897 while dressing to attend a King’s Inns banquet. While a leading member of the home circuit, Constantine Molloy joined the Leinster circuit bar in 1884, preferring it to remaining associated with King’s County as crown counsel, which from 1885 would have involved him in joining the Connaught circuit. It was due to Molloy as treasurer and John Henry Edge as secretary, that the two volumes of surviving home circuit minute books were deposited in the King’s Inns in 1885. These provide a useful repository for the legal history of the ‘senior branch’ of the profession on what is now the Midland Circuit.

[L4 8H]