Stephen de Vere

Sir Stephen Edward De Vere, 4th Baronet (26 July 1812 – 10 November 1904) was an Anglo-Irish, Whig Party, Member of Parliament for County Limerick, who in the Famine year 1847 bore personal witness to the conditions aboard the "coffin ships" that carried Irish emigrants to North America, and who converted to Roman Catholicism.

Biography He was the second son of Sir Aubrey de Vere, 2nd Baronet and Mary Spring Rice, and elder brother of the poet Aubrey Thomas de Vere. He had three sisters, although only one, Elinor, survived until adulthood. De Vere's other siblings were; Horatio, William and Vere Edmond.

As the Great Famine developed from late 1845. de Vere assisted in the local administration of relief, and in the efforts of the Mansion House committee to lobby for greater government assistance. Like his uncle, Lord Monteagle, he had favoured assisted emigration, to British North America and the United States, as a solution for the congestion and poverty of rural Ireland. But, but such was the death toll aboard and in quarantine stations on arrival, that vessels carrying Irish emigrants across the Atlantic were acquiring a reputation as "coffin ships".

In the spring of 1847, de Vere took passage on an emigrant ship to Canada to investigate conditions for himself. His cousin Vere Foster took a similar passage to New York in 1850. De Vere composed a withering report on his voyage now contained within The Elgin-Grey Papers. When Colonial Secretary Earl Grey read this report, he forwarded it to Lord Elgin, Governor-General of Upper Canada and Lower Canada in the hope that these inhumane conditions could be improved. The Passenger Act 1847 (10 & 11 Vict. c. 103) made "coffin ships" illegal, though many still operated.

On arrival in Montreal in 1847, de Vere was received into the Roman Catholic church, a conversion attributed to his "admiration for the moral fortitude in hardship of the catholic peasantry".

In the 1860s and 1870s he was agent for the family estate and fulfilled the traditional role of the gentry at sessions, assizes, and meetings of boards of guardians. He was made High Sheriff of County Limerick in 1870. He welcomed Gladstone's Land Law (Ireland) Act 1881, but did not follow the Liberal leader in embracing the cause of Irish Home Rule. On his death in 1904 the baronetcy became extinct. He never married and his estate, together with that of his unmarried brother Aubrey, went to their nephew Aubrey Vere O'Brien, while the Foynes Island farm went to their other nephew, Robert Vere O'Brien.