Johnson, Philip Francis (1835–1926), political activist and labour organiser, was born at Mallow, Co. Cork. He was well educated and travelled widely as a youth, spending eight years in India and visiting the South Sea Islands. He had returned to Ireland by the late 1850s, and worked as a stationmaster and commercial agent. On 10 September 1857 he married Teresa Rourke; they had two daughters. In 1860 he became proprietor of the substantial Egmont Arms Hotel in Kanturk, Co. Cork, which he rented from the estate of the earl of Egmont.
From 1869 Johnson took a prominent role in the Amnesty Association, which campaigned for the release of Fenian prisoners, displaying his fierce and often incoherent style of oratory at the first open-air rallies organised by the association at Mallow and Skibbereen. He also addressed pro-Fenian meetings, including commemorations at the site of the death of Peter O'Neill Crowley (qv) in Kilclooney Wood, and contributed letters to the pro-Fenian weekly the Irishman as well as the Cork Examiner. His exact relationship with the IRB remains unclear; he repeatedly denied that he had ever been a sworn Fenian, though he publicly advocated a republican form of government. He was active in the Home Government Association from its formation by Isaac Butt (qv) and campaigned actively in several elections, always opposing Gladstonian candidates even where this meant backing a conservative. In October 1872 Johnson went on a speaking tour of Britain with Isaac Butt and the Amnesty Association leader, John Nolan (qv).
In September 1869 Johnson co-founded the Kanturk Labourers’ Club (the first organised body to attempt to represent agricultural labourers) and was elected its secretary in January 1870. The club (which had several hundred members and attracted thousands to its rallies) was largely recruited from Fenian sympathisers; it discouraged conflict with tenant farmers over wage rates, and focused on calling for Gladstone's 1870 land legislation to incorporate provisions to make housing and smallholdings available to labourers at a ‘fair rent’. Johnson attempted (with extremely limited success) to organise similar clubs elsewhere in Ireland: while agricultural labourers were generally discontented, their dwindling numbers, widespread dispersal, irregular work patterns, and limited horizons made them difficult to organise. Hence labourers’ organisations tended to be run by activists such as Johnson who were not labourers themselves.
From 1871 Johnson operated the club as an adjunct to Butt's Home Government Association, but his genuine commitment to the labourers’ cause and his sense that British radicals were natural allies of Irish republicans led him to establish contact with the nascent National Agricultural Labourers’ Union (NALU) in Britain; a few NALU activists came to Ireland to assist him. In August 1873 the Irish Agricultural Labourers’ Union (IALU) was founded at a meeting at Johnson's hotel, attended by Butt, P. J. Smyth (qv), and representatives of the NALU. Despite some success in establishing branches in Munster and Leinster, the IALU had collapsed by 1875. The home rule MPs, though nominally its leaders, took little interest in its activities; its Fenian connections and the rhetoric of some speakers (such as the London-based Irish journalist Thomas Mooney (qv), known as ‘Transatlantic’) aroused conservative and clerical suspicions, and its nationalism led to a breakdown of relations with the NALU. Johnson, who was suffering poor health after an accident, turned to advocating emigration to Canada and added an emigration agency to his hotel business.
During the land war of the early 1880s Johnson was nominated to the (largely symbolic) founding executive of the Land League, and was a leading activist in north Cork and adjacent counties. From December 1880 he attempted to revive a labourers’ organisation in order to counter landlord attempts to encourage divisions between farmers and workers. In May 1881 Johnson took a leading role at a conference in Limerick which established the Munster Labour League; this functioned as a pressure group within the Land League movement, campaigning for attention to be paid to the labourers’ needs as well as to the interests of the farmers, and as an umbrella body uniting local ‘labour leagues’ which had appeared spontaneously in response to the agricultural crisis. Some of his supporters advocated his return to parliament, while the police considered him a candidate for arrest, but he was neither elected nor arrested.
From mid 1882 Johnson scaled back his political involvement, partly from a justified sense that the national organisation was neglecting labourers, and reducing their organisations to satellites of the Irish National League. He remained active in the Kanturk branch of the National League, but was never again prominent on the national stage. He was an outspoken anti-Parnellite, and in the years before the first world war supported the Redmondite faction against the All-for-Ireland League founded by William O'Brien (qv), which was backed by a newer labourers’ association led by D. D. Sheehan (qv). Johnson bought his hotel and 6 acres of adjoining land in the 1890s and remained in business in Kanturk until 1917, when he sold the hotel and retired to live with grandchildren at Clifden. He died there 3 November 1926.
Although he was primarily a believer in a cross-class nationalist alliance rather than a trade unionist in the later sense of the word, Johnson was genuinely committed to the well-being of labourers. He took a formative role in the creation of a kind of ‘labour–nationalist’ politics, centred on Munster, which played a noticeable (albeit subordinate) part in nationalist politics throughout the home rule movement and had some influence on the post-independence Labour Party.