Hoctor, Patrick (1861–1933), republican and GAA activist, was born in December 1861 in Islandbawn, Co. Tipperary, son of Patrick Hoctor, millowner and publican, and Teresa Hoctor (née Thorne). Educated locally, after his father's death he moved to Newport, Co. Tipperary where he worked briefly as a draper's assistant, and then as a commercial traveller for a wine merchant firm. By the early to mid 1880s, he was apparently working for P. N. Fitzgerald (qv) as an IRB organiser. He formed a branch of the Young Ireland debating society in Newport, and during 1885 helped to establish the first GAA clubs in Clare and Tipperary. He also gave occasional lectures before the Dublin Young Ireland Society, encouraging T. W. Rolleston (qv) and others to join that club and proposing to its members the establishment of a new republican-oriented nationalist newspaper. Elected a vice-president of the GAA in September 1886, five months later he was instrumental in introducing the controversial ban on members of the RIC joining the association, after the police began attempting to suppress the Plan of Campaign. As a protest, Maurice Davin (qv) resigned as GAA president, prompting the republicans in the association to appoint Hoctor as acting president till such time as Davin reconsidered. In April 1887 Hoctor established and co-edited with John O'Leary (qv) a GAA journal entitled The Gael (Dublin). This reprinted writings by members of the Dublin Young Ireland Society, including W. B. Yeats (qv) and Douglas Hyde (qv), and promoted non-sectarian attitudes among the rural poor. After Dublin clubs began protesting against Hoctor's authoritarian management of the GAA, the Munster clergy made concerted attempts to remove republican influence over the association, resulting in very tense GAA conventions that winter – tensions that Hoctor heightened by engaging in ill-judged anti-clerical behaviour. This dispute resulted ultimately in the termination of The Gael (January 1888) and the removal of Hoctor and other republicans from the central committee of the GAA.
Soon afterwards he left for New York, spending about eighteen months in the USA, where he associated with Irish revolutionaries but, it appears, failed to find employment. Accused by some senior republicans in Ireland of badly mishandling the GAA controversy during 1887, he was perpetually denied a position of authority within the IRB thereafter, much to his resentment – a fact that may have prompted him, for a short time, to act as an informer against some of his comrades, despite his continued republican sympathies. After his return to Ireland in February 1890, he became a leading promoter of the amnesty agitation, though, unlike many republicans, he refused to take part in the Irish party split that winter.
During the 1890s he resided first in Limerick and then in Kingstown (Dún Laoghaire), Co. Dublin, where his mother ran a hotel, and where he tried (unsuccessfully) to stand for the town council. Though he promoted republican commemorative work, he continued to be marginalised in republican circles. Partly as a result, during the later 1890s he supported a rival secret organisation to the IRB, known as the Irish National Brotherhood (INB), which existed from roughly 1895 to 1900 and was led by Mark Ryan (qv) in London. He generally opposed the IRB supreme council's policy for the management of the 1798 centenary movement, accusing it of being divisive. After attending a Philadelphia convention of Clan na Gael in July 1900, he became a prominent member of that organisation as well as successful businessman, being appointed president of the International Jury of Awards in Louisiana and the Purchase Exposition in St Louis, Missouri (1903). During the mid to late 1900s, by which time he had withdrawn from Irish revolutionary affairs, he settled permanently in London, where he established a successful distillery. In 1910 he was nominated as an Irish party candidate for Tipperary North by locals, but this nomination was opposed by the leaders of the Irish party who, knowing his past, suspected that his real sympathies lay with Sinn Féin. In 1915 he did actually stand for Tipperary North, this time as an independent candidate, but adopting a perceptibly pro-Sinn Féin stance. He polled well but failed to win the seat. Returning to London, he largely withdrew from political affairs, though he remained a popular figure in the London Irish community, and in 1933 returned briefly to Tipperary, where his old republican sympathies and past services to the GAA were still remembered. He died 2 November 1933 at his home in Belmont Park, Lewisham, London, and was buried nearby. He had married young but was separated from his wife (of whom nothing else is known) during his period of personal difficulties in the mid 1890s.