Donnellan, Michael (‘Mick’) (1900–64), politician and GAA footballer, was born in Dromore, Co. Galway, the eldest of four children (two boys and two girls) of a local farmer. After being educated at the local national school and St Jarlath's College, Tuam, Co. Galway, he worked the family farm and was noted for his modern approach to farming, especially tillage farming on which he concentrated. An outstanding GAA footballer, he excelled in sport at St Jarlath's, played with teams in his native Dromore, and captained Galway to provincial honours in the 1920s and 1930s, and the All-Ireland SFC title in 1925; he was also captain of the team beaten in the 1933 All-Ireland final. He was captain of the Connacht Railway Cup team when the province won that championship for the first time in 1934, after which he retired from inter-county football.
Politically active from an early age, he served as a Sinn Féin councillor in 1917 on the Glenamaddy district council, and as a justice in local Sinn Féin courts during the war of independence. He joined the newly founded Fianna Fáil party, being elected in 1927 to Galway county council, where he remained a councillor until 1945. However, in the late 1930s Donnellan played a pivotal role in organising opposition to Fianna Fáil's agricultural policies, articulating a widespread feeling that the west of the country was being neglected, despite the party's championing of small farmers. In 1938 he became the founder and first leader of a new farmers’ party, Clann na Talmhan, dedicated to promoting the interests of the western small farmers, their agenda including land reclamation, lower taxes on farm lands and more intensive afforestation. It particularly appealed to small farmer groups in Galway, Mayo and north Roscommon, much of whose ire was centred on the Land Commission which they viewed as embodying the government's indifference to instigating an effective national drainage scheme. Initial indications were that the party would operate as an agricultural pressure group rather than an overtly political group, and Fianna Fáil's Gerry Boland (qv) at first did not object to fellow party members joining, but this changed when in August 1939 Clann na Talmhan decided to enter the electoral arena.
In 1940 Donnellan unsuccessfully contested the West Galway by-election, but the party polled well in the 1942 local elections and made a breakthrough in the 1943 general election, winning ten seats, securing 8.6% of the vote nationally and 33.3% in its three central regions: Galway, Roscommon and Mayo. Donnellan was elected TD for Galway East (1943–8), topping the poll, and became party leader; he was later TD for Galway North (1948–61) and again for Galway East (1961–4). By 1943 the party's rhetoric had become more acerbic, displaying a hostility towards bureaucracy, trade unions and big business, citing corruption in high places and calling for the abolition of ministerial pensions. Latter-day political scientists saw it as a voice of rural petty-bourgeois protest which, in its demands for derating, tillage subsidies and farmers’ pensions at an earlier age, did nothing to challenge the culture of dependency into which its ageing, declining agrarian support base was slipping. Despite radical undertones, however, the message remained fundamentally conservative. The party's manifesto, published prior to the 1944 general election in which it again won ten seats, declared that ‘the farmer has a God-given right to complete ownership in the land he inherited from his forefathers’.
Fianna Fáil's Seán MacEntee (qv), sensing the threat the new party posed to his party's electoral domination, was quick to denounce Donnellan as ‘the boss of the Galway totalitarians’ and ‘the Galway dictator . . . Herr Von Donnellan’. Clann na Talmhan's decision to merge with the Farmers’ Federation of Leinster in 1943 forced compromise with larger farmers, and the party's decision to abstain on the vote for de Valera (qv) as taoiseach after the election of that year caused considerable internal dissension. Undoubtedly recognising that his rhetoric was offending more prosperous farmers, Donnellan allowed fellow party member Joseph Blowick (qv) to take over the party leadership in 1944. Donnellan and Blowick readily embraced membership of coalition government, the former serving as parliamentary secretary to the minister for finance in the inter-party coalition governments of 1948–51 and 1954–7; he assumed responsibility for the Office of Public Works and brought his considerable experience of farming to bear on drainage and special employment schemes. Senator Joseph Connolly (qv) suspected that he found the mechanics of the OPW bewildering and, though characterising him as ‘reasonable and agreeing’, noted his inability to refuse constituency requests for drainage schemes. However, support for Clann na Talmhan steadily declined: it won seven dáil seats in 1948, six in 1951, and five in 1954; in 1961 only Donnellan and Blowick were elected TDs, and the party ceased to have any real organisation.
Donnellan died suddenly while a spectator at the All-Ireland football final at Croke Park on 27 September 1964 while watching his two sons, John and Patrick, playing for the Galway team which beat Kerry. He also had five daughters from his marriage to Brigid Dempsey in 1933. His sons were unaware of his death until after the victory presentation, though there was a general acknowledgement that there could not have been a more appropriately symbolic place for him to die. His son John won his dáil seat as a Fine Gael candidate in the subsequent by-election (December 1964).