He was elected as Irish Parliamentary Party MP for Dublin St Patrick's at the 1885 general election, taking his seat in the House of Commons of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. He was a member of the informal grouping, the "Bantry band" – a group of politicians who hailed from the Bantry Bay area. The Bantry Band was also disparagingly dubbed the "Pope's brass band". Its most famous member was Timothy Healy MP and included Timothy Harrington MP, sometime Lord Mayor of Dublin City – however, Harrington (unlike Healy and Murphy) was a Parnellite in the 1890s. (Tim Harrington MP was not the same individual as TR Harrington, who edited the Irish Independent from 1905–31, though they both came from the Bantry/Schull area in West Cork.)