The Most Reverend Dr. Thomas Nulty or Thomas McNulty (1818–1898) was born to a farming family in Fennor, Oldcastle, Co. Meath,[1][2] on 7 July 1818, and died in office as the Irish Roman Catholic Bishop of Meath[3] on Christmas Eve, 1898.[4]
Nulty was educated at Gilson School, Oldcastle, County Meath, St. Finians, Navan Seminary and Maynooth College. He was ordained in 1846. Nulty was a cleric during the Great Famine. During the course of his first pastoral appointment, he officiated at an average 11 funerals of famine victims (mostly children or the aged) a day, and in 1848 he described a large-scale eviction of 700 tenants in the diocese,[5] thought to have been near Lough Sheelin, a freshwater lough at a meeting point of Counties Westmeath, Meath and Cavan.
Nulty rose to become the Most Reverend Bishop of Meath and was known as a fierce defender of the tenant rights of Irish tenant farmers throughout the 34 years that he served in that office, from 1864 to 1898.[6][7] Nulty was in agreement with the economic ideas of the progressive reformer Henry George. Nulty read George's book Progress and Poverty multiple times and agreed with every word.[8] Henry George even said that 'Georgism' could just as well be known as 'Nultyism'.[9]
Thomas Nulty is famed for his 1881 tract Back to the Land, wherein he makes the case for land reform of the Irish land tenure system.[10] Nulty was a friend and supporter of the Irish nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell until Parnell's divorce crisis in 1889.[11][12]
Dr. Thomas Nulty, who had attended the First Vatican Council in 1870, said his last mass on 21 December 1898.