O'Gorman, Purcell (1820–88), army officer and home rule MP, was born in Dublin, the third son of Nicholas Purcell O'Gorman (qv), QC, of Ennis, Co. Clare, and his first wife, Frances Anne (d. 1824), the daughter of Charles Smith of Castle Park, Co. Limerick. He entered TCD on 5 November 1836 and graduated BA in 1840. In February 1843 he entered the army as an ensign in the Ceylon Rifle Regiment and initially served in Ceylon. Having been promoted lieutenant on 2 May 1845, he transferred into the 90th Foot. O'Gorman served in South Africa during the ‘Kaffir war’ of 1847, taking part in the successful campaign against the Xhosa tribe after they crossed the Keiskamma River into the Cape Colony. He was stranded on Mauritius when the troopship Maria Soames, on which he was travelling, was wrecked on its coast. In April 1852 he was promoted captain and during the Crimean War was at the siege of Sebastopol, enduring the sevedaugre winter of 1854–5. (His obituary in the Waterford News claimed he distinguished himself in combat – ‘many stories of his personal daring while in the line are still told round camp fires’.) At this time Garnet Wolseley (qv) served under him as a sub-lieutenant. In 1853 he married Sarah Mellor (d. 1910), a protestant daughter of Thomas Mellor of Ashton, Lancashire; they had one son and two daughters. O'Gorman retired from the army with the rank of substantive major in August 1855 and settled at Springfield House, Co. Kilkenny (close to Waterford City), which around 1870 had 261 acres attached. He also owned 604 acres in Co. Clare, possibly inherited from his mother's family.
O'Gorman was appointed adjutant of volunteers in 1860 and later served as JP for Co. Kilkenny; however, he was removed from the bench while serving as MP because of comments he made about Judge William Keogh (qv). He was also an active elected and ex-officio poor law guardian for Waterford City. O'Gorman was associated with the Home Government Association from its foundation in 1870. In the 1874 general election he contested the two-seat Waterford City constituency in alliance with Richard Power (1851–91) as a home-ruler, taking the second seat with a majority of 114. (The three unsuccessful candidates included Edward Gibson (qv) and the sitting Liberal, Bernal Osborne (qv).)
O'Gorman frequently spoke in parliament, rapidly establishing a reputation as a humorist; his obesity made him conspicuous, and his Irish Times obituarist recalled that he ‘always left the hearer doubtful whether the bull was not intended and the blunder deliberate and whether the big Irishman was laughing in his sleeve at the legislature, which thought it was laughing at him . . . when the signal flew along the line “O'Gorman is up”, the diner dropped his fork, the bibber his grog, the smoker his cigar, and from dining-room, smoke-room and bar the crowd came packing.’ Disraeli is said to have advised a depressive MP to cheer himself up by being present for O'Gorman's speeches (Ir. Times, 27 Nov. 1888). The Vanity Fair issue of 13 March 1875 carried a cartoon of O'Gorman as ‘The Joker for Waterford’ by its cartoonist ‘Ape’. According to the London magazine Society, O'Gorman loved to entertain his friends ‘in the tea-room or other resorts . . . with a rich fund of anecdote related in a still richer brogue . . . was a most accomplished whistler, and frequently entertained a select circle with selections from the Irish melodies’ (repr. Munster Express, 1 Dec. 1888).
On 23 April 1875 O'Gorman cast the only vote in support of a motion, moved by Edward Kenealy (qv), for a royal commission of inquiry into the Tichborne case (Kenealy and his seconder acted as tellers and thus did not vote). This was unexpected behaviour from an Irish catholic MP, since the Tichborne campaign had anti-catholic overtones; his vote has been explained both by a chivalrous impulse and by belief that there would be more fresh air in the ‘yes’ lobby than among the 433 MPs who voted ‘no’.
O'Gorman became associated with the small group of ‘obstructionist’ MPs around Charles Stewart Parnell (qv) and Joseph Biggar (qv) who made their presence felt by disrupting parliamentary proceedings with endless speeches. His obituarist in Society claimed that his principal motive in doing so was to advance the claims of a nephew against the government and that ‘his Irish associates . . . were little to his taste’ (Munster Express, 1 Dec. 1888); this may, however, represent the author's own political bias. He expressed support for the Land League and was acquainted with Michael Davitt (qv).
At the 1880 general election O'Gorman was defeated by the Parnellite loyalist Edmund Leamy (qv). His downfall seems to have been the result of a feeling that what was required were ‘men more in touch with the advanced opinions of the people and better fitted for the serious battles of militant Ireland’ (Freeman's Journal, 26 Nov. 1888), together with the opposition of the drinks trade. While O'Gorman, who once compared Irish whiskey to ‘a torchlight procession going down your throat’, had been a strong opponent of the Irish Sunday Closing Bill, his view that, if carried, it should be applied to Waterford and the four other cities which had been excluded from such legislation in 1878 (Dublin, Cork, Limerick, and Galway) antagonised the drink trade. He retired from politics after his defeat and died at Springfield House on the night of 24–5 November 1888.