Researching Frank Taylor

A farmer before entering politics, he was first elected to the Dáil Éireann as a Fine Gael Teachta Dála (TD) for the Clare constituency at the 1969 general election, recapturing the seat held by Fine Gael TD William Murphy, who had died in 1967 and been replaced at the Clare by-election by Fianna Fáil's Sylvester Barrett.

Taylor was re-elected at the 1973 and 1977 general elections. When he retired from Dáil Éireann at the 1981 general election, his daughter Madeleine Taylor-Quinn was elected as his successor.

He had unsuccessfully fought Newcastle-under-Lyme in 1955. He was elected for Moss Side in a by-election in 1961 caused by the death of the Conservative incumbent James Watts, and held the seat until he was defeated by Labour's Frank Hatton in February 1974, partly due to Taylor's seat having been merged with part of Hatton's former seat of Manchester Exchange.

In a later paper he proposed that this occurred by their being dragged towards the equator by tidal forces during the hypothesized capture of the moon, resulting in "general crustal creep" toward the equator. The initial key to his proposal, the complementary shapes of the continental masses, had been observed as early as the 16th century by Abraham Ortelius, but had lacked a credible driving force. His own proposition was that the moon was captured by the Earth's gravity during the Cretaceous period 100 million years ago, and came so close to the earth that its tidal pull dragged the continents toward the Equator. This lacked evidence, thus undermining the credibility of the continental drift observation. He had proposed that the continents ploughed through the ocean floors towards the equator, wrinkling their Equator-facing fronts to produce the Himalayas and Alps. Although his proposed mechanism was wrong, he was the first to come to the insight that one of the effects of continental motion would be the formation of mountains due to the collision of continental plates.