Glynn, Patrick McMahon (1855–1931), politician and lawyer in Australia, was born 25 August 1855 in Gort, Co. Galway, third among eleven children of John McMahon Glynn (1824–79), owner of a large general store, and Ellen Glynn (née Walsh; 1835–1918). Patrick was educated by the Sisters of Mercy in Gort and by the Holy Ghost Fathers at French (later Blackrock) College in Dublin. After leaving school (1872) he was articled for three years to James Blaquiere, a Dublin solicitor. In 1875 he entered TCD, and the following year enrolled in the King's Inns. He graduated BA (1878) and after studying in the Middle Temple, London, was called to the Irish bar in April 1879 and began practising as a barrister. However, he found the Irish bar nepotistic; briefs were slow; his only success was in obtaining the silver medal from the Law Students Debating Society of Ireland, and after a year he decided to leave. On 4 September 1880 he sailed from London to Australia, where he lived for the rest of his life.
His first two years in Melbourne were miserable: though he was admitted to the Victorian bar he could get no briefs; he spoke at political societies and published a pamphlet, Irish state trials, on the 1844 trials of Daniel O'Connell (qv) and his fellow repealers, but neither of these activities generated much interest. He was almost destitute when in January 1882 he began working as a travelling agent for the Mutual Life assurance society and for Singer sewing machines. Six months later he was taken on by the Adelaide law firm of Hardy & Davis to open a branch office at Kapunda. On 21 July 1883 he was admitted a practitioner of the South Australian supreme court. Being one of the few catholic lawyers in South Australia he was much employed by catholics, and by 1886 had made enough to buy the Kapunda practice. He was by this time a prominent citizen; in 1883 he took on the editorship of the Kapunda Herald which he continued until 1891, revealing a talent for witty, pithy articles and good political understanding. In 1884 he helped found the South Australian Land Nationalisation Society, and wrote the manifesto; its aims included free trade and a single land tax. He was also for many years president of the Irish National League in South Australia and supported home rule for Ireland in a leading article in the Kapunda Herald. He arranged for John Redmond (qv) to visit Kapunda, and for John Dillon (qv) to address meetings in Adelaide. However, he was not particularly enthusiastic about Irish politics, holding that Ireland was a country of ‘patriots, quacks, grandiloquent bombast, real and poetical grievances . . . its leaders a flatulent lot’ (O'Farrell, 235). A confirmed imperialist and federationist, he preferred a fully federalised UK as a solution to the home rule question.
In April 1887 Glynn was elected to the lower house of assembly in South Australia as a member for the Light constituency (1887–90). During his first term he aligned himself with the conservatives by voting for free trade, and with the liberals by supporting female suffrage and payment for MPs, and was maverick in his advocacy of land nationalisation. He lost his seat in 1890 but was elected five years later for North Adelaide (1894–6, 1897–9). In 1897 he was elected to the federal convention, which brought together members of the parliaments of New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Western Australia, and Tasmania. Glynn led the judiciary committee and distinguished himself by his legal knowledge and his broad learning. The future premier Alfred Deakin (1856–1919) termed him ‘the encyclopedia of the convention’. His best-known contribution to the constitution was a reference to God in the preamble. Glynn was attorney general in 1899 in V. L. Solomon's short-lived government.
Glynn was elected to the federal house of representatives as a free trader in 1901 and sat for the division of Angas from 1903 to 1919, serving as attorney general in Deakin's fusion government (1909–10), minister for external affairs in the Cook liberal administration (1913–14), and minister for home and territories in W. M. Hughes's nationalist government (1917–19). He was the last of the ‘founding fathers’ to sit in the commonwealth parliament. He remained devoted to the interests of South Australia and promoted the movement to lock the Murray waters for irrigation. In 1905 he prepared two volumes of legal opinion on the Murray rights and was rewarded by the Commonwealth Murray Waters Act (1915), which finally gave South Australia a water supply. He was appointed KC in July 1913 and the following year was a strong advocate of the Entente offensive in the first world war; at the invitation of the Empire Parliamentary Association, he visited France and England on a lecture tour in 1916, and took that opportunity to visit his mother in Ireland.
After his defeat in 1919 he resumed legal work; his Adelaide firm had by now expanded to incorporate three new partners and was called Glynn, Parsons, McEwin, & Napier. He died 28 October 1931 in North Adelaide and was survived by four daughters and two sons; his wife, Abigail Dynon (m. 1897), predeceased him. A list of his numerous writings on politics and literature is found in Who Was Who.
A small, dapper man with a bushy moustache, Glynn was a teetotaller and non-smoker, a fearless rider, and an excellent cricketer. His political attributes were his integrity, his work ethic, and his fine oratory, which was, however, marred by his rapid delivery and his apparently incomprehensible Irish accent. He was generally admired but Deakin thought him ‘so unpractical in mind and in law so overburdened with knowledge that his judgment is heavily handicapped’ (LaNauze, ii, 570). His letters home reveal a witty, passionate man with a direct, colourful writing style, but in his contact with people he was reserved and unemotional.