Richard Tierney Character Analysis

Richard Tierney, a corrupt and moneyed career politician, is the Nationalist candidate in an upcoming municipal election. He employs the canvassers in Joyce’s story. As a Poor Law Guardian, Tierney is in charge of distributing welfare to the poor, but he seems far from qualified for this duty. John Henchy calls him a two-faced “little shoeboy,” and Joe Hynes calls him “Tricky Dicky.” As these insults suggest, Tierney’s main function in the story is to illustrate a high level of corruption and moral degradation in the current Nationalist party. Readers never see Tierney, who hides out in his pub (his absence from the campaign’s front-lines shows how little he cares about politics), but Joyce gives a sense of Tierney’s arrogance and immorality through his employees’ complaints about him. The major gripe, which nearly everyone shares, is that Tierney never pays on time. It’s a complaint that damns both the insulted and the insulter: while Tierney’s lateness proves that he doesn’t care about others (a quality that no politician should have), Mat O’Connor’s constant complaints about his lateness prove that O’Connor himself is only in the campaign for a paycheck. Furthermore, Tierney is considering giving a warm welcome to Edward VII’s upcoming visit. This friendly gesture toward an English monarch would be unthinkable to most Irish Nationalists, which shows Tierney’s lack of principle. That lack of principle trickles down to all of the party’s underlings, who show themselves to be just as spineless and hypocritical as their boss. This demonstrates the rot that pervades the party from the top down.