Hugh Holmes

Holmes was born in Dungannon, County Tyrone, the son of William Holmes of Dungannon and Anne Maxwell. He attended the Royal School Dungannon and Trinity College, Dublin. He was called to the English bar in 1864 and to the Irish Bar in 1865.

Holmes became a Queen's Counsel (QC) in 1877. he was appointed Solicitor General for Ireland on 14 December 1878 and served until the Conservative government was defeated in 1880. He became Attorney General for Ireland 1885–1886 and 1886–1887. He was made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland on 2 July 1885. He was MP for Dublin University 1885–1887.

Holmes resigned from the House of Commons when he was appointed a Judge in 1887. He was a Justice of the Common Pleas Division of the High Court of Justice in Ireland until 1888 when he became a Justice of the Queen's Bench Division. He was promoted to be a Lord Justice of Appeal in 1897. Ill health caused his retirement in 1914.

He appeared to be a stern judge, who did not suffer fools gladly and often imposed exceptionally severe sentences in criminal cases. Although the story is often thought to be apocryphal, Maurice Healy maintained that Holmes did once sentence a man of great age to 15 years in prison, and when the prisoner pleaded that he could not do 15 years, replied "Do as much of it as you can".[1] His judgments did however display some good humour and humanity, and the sentences he imposed often turned out to be less severe in practice than those he announced in Court.

The quality of his judgments was very high and Holmes, together with Christopher Palles and Gerald FitzGibbon, is credited with earning for the Irish Court of Appeal its reputation as perhaps the strongest tribunal in Irish legal history.[2] His retirement, followed by that of Palles (FitzGibbon had died in 1909), caused a loss of expertise in the Court of Appeal from which its reputation never recovered. Among his more celebrated remarks is that the Irish "have too much of a sense of humour to dance around a maypole".[3] His judgment in The SS Gairloch remains the authoritative statement in Irish law on the circumstances in which an appellate court can overturn findings of fact made by the trial judge.[4]

In 1869 Hugh Holmes married Olivia Moule, daughter of J.W. Moule of Sneads Green House, Elmley Lovett, Worcestershire; she died in 1901.[5] Their children included Hugh junior, Sir Valentine Holmes KC (1888-1956), who like his father was a very successful barrister, and a noted expert on the law of libel, Violet (died 1966),who married Sir Denis Henry, 1st Baronet, the first Lord Chief Justice of Northern Ireland, and Elizabeth, who married the politician and academic Harold Lawson Murphy, author of a well known History of Trinity College Dublin.

• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

• Hansard 1803–2005: contributions in Parliament by Hugh Holmes