Researching James Tully

A native of Carlanstown, near Kells in County Meath, Tully was educated in Carlanstown schools and in St. Patrick's Classical School in Navan. He was first elected to Dáil Éireann as a Labour Party TD for the Meath constituency at the 1954 general election. He lost his seat at the 1957 general election, but was re-elected at the 1961 general election and served until 1982. When Labour entered into a coalition government with Fine Gael in 1973, he was appointed Minister for Local Government. While serving in that post he gained prominence for a massive increase in the building of public housing, and notoriety for an attempt to gerrymander Irish constituencies to ensure the re-election of the National Coalition at the 1977 general election. His electoral reorganisation effort via the Electoral (Amendment) Act 1974, which came to be called a "Tullymander", backfired spectacularly and helped engineer a landslide for the opposition, Fianna Fáil. He was regarded as a conservative within the Labour Party, though tended to support party decisions, even if he disagreed with them. For many years he was opposed to coalition, though finding the years in opposition fruitless, he changed his mind and became increasingly in favour of Fine Gael.

Also as Minister for Local government, Tully decided on alterations to the plans for the controversial Dublin Corporation Civic Offices.

Tully was appointed Deputy Leader of the Labour Party under Michael O'Leary in 1981, and Minister for Defence in the short-lived 1981–82 Fine Gael-Labour Party government. In that capacity he traveled to Cairo, in 1981, as Ireland's representative in Egypt's annual 6 October military victory parade. While in the reviewing stand, next to President Anwar Sadat, he suffered a shrapnel injury to his face when Sadat was assassinated by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad who had infiltrated the Egyptian Army.

In 1982, a few months after the event, James Tully retired from politics. He died ten years later at the age of 76.

In May 2014, he was awarded the University of Victoria's David H. Turpin Award for Career Achievement in Research. In 2010, he was awarded the prestigious Izaak Walton Killam Memorial Prize and the Thousand Waves Peacemaker Award in recognition of his distinguished career and exceptional contributions to Canadian scholarship and public life. Also in 2010, he was awarded the C. B. Macpherson Prize by the Canadian Political Science Association for the "best book in political theory written in English or French" in Canada 2008–10 for his 2008 two-volume Public Philosophy in a New Key. He completed his doctorate at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom and now teaches at the University of Victoria.

His research and teaching comprise a public philosophy that is grounded in place (Canada) yet reaches out to the world of civic engagement with the problems of our time. He does this in ways that strive to contribute to dialogue between academics and citizens. For example, his research areas include the Canadian experience of coping with the deep diversity of multicultural and multinational citizenship; relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous people; and the emergence of citizenship of the living earth as the ground of sustainable futures.

Tully was born in Grafton and was educated at the Grafton Superior Public School. He became a teacher in 1896, initially in Grafton for approximately three and a half years, and then being in charge of a series of one-teacher rural schools: Cockatoo Flat near Walcha for two and a half years, Yarrowyck for eight years, and Lorne for two years. He resigned from the Education Department in September 1912 and took up farming and sawmilling at Tullamore; he was also the secretary for the Tullamore branch of the Australian Carriers Union during a pay dispute in 1914. He rejoined the Education Department in August 1923 as an assistant teacher at Hurstville Junior Technical School and taught there until his resignation to contest the federal election in 1928. Tully was also a vice-president of the St George Rugby League Club. He was previously an unsuccessful candidate at the 1917 state election, 1919 federal election and 1922 state election.

In 1928, he was elected to the Australian House of Representatives as the Labor member for Barton, defeating incumbent Nationalist Thomas Ley, and was re-elected in 1929. He retained the seat until 1931, when he was challenged in the wake of the 1931 Labor split by both the United Australia Party's Albert Lane and Lang Labor's John Eldridge, the member for Martin. Lane won the seat, making it the only time in Australian history that two sitting members have been simultaneously defeated for the same seat.

In 1961, he was living with his daughter in the Sydney suburb of Westmead. He died in 1962.