Laurence O’Neill, described on the occasion of his election to a fifth successive term of office as a ‘popular, useful, independent and energetic Lord Mayor’, was the last person to hold the office under the British regime and the first to hold it under the Free State administration. His term, then, straddled a very turbulent period in Ireland’s political and social history. It began in the midst of the First World War and continued through the ‘troubles’ of the early 1920s, coming to an end – perhaps- with the abolition of Dublin Corporation in 1924. The word ‘perhaps’ is apposite, because O’Neill did not vacate the Mansion House until 1925 and as late as 1926 a court case failed to conclude that he was no longer lord mayor, with the judge suggesting that ‘probably’ he remained lord mayor. In any case, it was O’Neill who was the proposer, in 1930, of the next elected lord mayor of the city, that well-known and charismatic leader Alfie Byrne, discussed in the following chapter.