William Martin Murphy (1845-1919) was one of the most successful of Irish entrepreneurs and businessmen. As well as being a good employer, Murphy was an international financier, and a contractor of railways and tramways on three continents as well as in Britain and Ireland. He revolutionised the Irish newspaper industry, was a patriot who opposed concessions in the Home Rule Bill, supported Sinn Fein as a political party, and vigorously opposed conscription and partition. Although he was a man with a strong social conscience and sense of social responsibility, he came to be viewed as something of an ogre and regarded as the man who starved the workers of Dublin into submission in 1913-14 and who called for the execution of James Connolly in 1916. This book re-examines Murphy's remarkable career.

Thomas J. Morrissey, SJ, is a graduate of the National University of Ireland, and a former headmaster of Crescent College Comprehensive in Limerick and president of the National College of Industrial Relations Dublin. He has written some thirteen books on Irish Labour, Ecclesiastical, Jesuit, and Educational History. These include Towards a National University: William Delany, SJ, 1835-1924 (Dublin 1983), As One Sent: Peter Kenney, SJ, 1779-1841 (Dublin 1996), William J. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, 1841-1921 (Dublin 2000), William O'Brien, 1881-1968. Socialist, Republican, and Trades Union Leader (Dublin 2007), Jesuits in Hong Kong, South China and Beyond, 1926-2006 (Hong Kong, 2008), Edward J. Byrne, 1872-1941: The Forgotten Archbishop of Dublin (Dublin 2010), and editor of Social Teaching of James Connolly (Dublin 1991).