November 2024

William O’Brien was born in 1852 and died in 1927. He is remembered today largely for three reasons:

• First, he was one of Parnell’s closest associates – and, in the 1880s, was editor of Parnell’s personal organ, the weekly United Ireland newspaper;
• Second, he was a long-time leader of the movement for land reform in Ireland – most particularly, the Plan of Campaign in the late 1880s – and he was one of the architects of Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903; and
• Third, he was an Irish Party MP at Westminster from 1883 to 1918, albeit with some interruptions and with an increasingly maverick profile in the final years of the party.

Less well known are his earlier achievements as the star reporter on Dublin’s leading daily newspaper, the Freeman’s Journal, in the late 1870s and early 1880s when he was still in his mid-twenties. His highly innovative journalism in this period qualifies him to be considered Ireland’s first investigative journalist, and it parallels similar developments in journalism in Britain at that time, developments now regarded as the first phase of a new genre of journalism – the so-called New Journalism – associated with the legendary W.T. Stead. O’Brien’s work in the Freeman is an early example of the New Journalism, though it is not generally acknowledged as such in studies of the New Journalism published to date. This is due to some extent to the dearth of research on the history of Irish newspapers, but the limited research that has been done tends to ignore O’Brien’s journalism in the Freeman – or at least fails to recognise its importance. Among media historians, only Chris Morash – in his recent History of the Media in Ireland – refers to it, though even he does not put it centre stage as the harbinger of change in Irish journalism. My purpose this afternoon is briefly to consider O’Brien’s first and most famous piece of investigative journalism, the series of five articles entitled ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ published in the Freeman in December 1877 and January 1878.

When these articles appeared, the Freeman’s Journal had been the property of the Gray family for over 35 years. It was the Grays who made the Freeman an important newspaper. Founded in 1763, it was purchased by Sir John Gray and a small group of likeminded associates in 1841, and Gray became its sole proprietor in 1850. The repeal of the oppressive duties on advertisements, on the newspapers themselves and on paper in the 1850s and early 1860s opened the way for a great expansion in the newspaper market in Ireland. Gray exploited this opportunity, growing the circulation of the Freeman from as little as 2,000–3,000 copies per day to approximately 10,000 at his death in 1875. A Protestant, Gray supported repeal of the Act of Union, and later the Irish Tenant League and disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. He sat as MP for Kilkenny from 1865 onwards and had begun to ally himself with Isaac Butt’s home rule party in the last year of his life. He is best known today for his work as a member of Dublin corporation in bringing the Vartry water supply to the city, for which achievement he received his knighthood – and later a statue of him was erected in O’Connell Street, Dublin.

His son, Edmund Dwyer Gray, controlled the Freeman from 1875 until his death at the early age of forty-two in 1888. Under his stewardship, the Freeman’s production capacity was further increased; its circulation again grew threefold – to over 30,000 copies per day, a market share of about forty per cent – and it became extremely profitable. Like his father, Edmund Dwyer Gray was also active in politics. He was a Dublin city councillor and home rule MP, and was intensely ambitious for political advancement. But for Charles Stewart Parnell, his almost exact contemporary, he might have led the Irish Party at Westminster. A moderate, Edmund Dwyer Gray was first elected to parliament in 1877, two years after Parnell. They were rivals and never fully reconciled, though Gray eventually acquiesced in Parnell’s ascendancy and the Freeman became the semi-official organ of the Irish party.

Mark Hampton, in his work on perceptions of the Victorian press, reminds us that ‘before 1855 and for some time afterwards, newspaper owners and writers were chiefly “publicists”, not “journalists”: they wrote to advocate their politics and not primarily to sell newspapers’. The Grays père et fils aimed to do both – that is, to sell copy and to use their newspaper to promote their political objectives and ambitions. For them, these were not contradictory activities. On the contrary, their pursuit of business success complemented their political agenda. Their influence in politics was largely a function of their ownership of the Freeman’s Journal, and they had to ensure the newspaper’s survival in order to protect their political interests. However, the business of running a newspaper was at least as important to them as politics: they were exceedingly rich, and wished to preserve and expand their business. This, in turn, had an impact on the politics of the Freeman, requiring it to have regard to public opinion and to articulate positions broadly acceptable to its readers, so as not to lose customers. Likewise, the Grays as MPs needed to have regard to public opinion in order to attract and retain political support, particularly in a time of change – like the 1870s. They had to trim their sails to the shifting political wind. Such were the interrelated political and business contexts for the investigative journalism which William O’Brien would undertake, but the fact that the journalism in question must be seen in these contexts does not compromise its integrity in any way or lessen its significance as innovative journalism that conforms in style and content to the early model of the New Journalism. Edmund Dwyer Gray’s backing for William O’Brien’s investigative journalism reflects Gray’s appreciation of the business and political potential of the New Journalism – and it justifies the tribute that O’Brien paid to the younger Gray when, in his Recollections, he described him as ‘the most enterprising newspaperman Ireland ever produced’ and praised him for ‘those newspaper coups for which he had a Napoleonic genius’.

In his Recollections, O’Brien recalls that Gray personally gave him the commission to write the ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ articles – described in O’Brien’s own words as ‘the investigation of a historic agrarian struggle on an estate around the Galtee mountains’. The estate in question was ‘a poor mountainous estate’ in Co. Tipperary, which had been acquired by a wealthy English manufacturer, Nathaniel Buckley. He raised the rents – in most instances, by a factor of two or three – and resistance to this impossible burden escalated to the point where a bailiff was killed, and the estate agent and a policeman wounded, in a gun attack. The plight of the tenants on the estate was highlighted in letters from a prominent local Fenian, John Sarsfield Casey, published in the Freeman and in the Cork Examiner, which resulted in a libel suit against Casey. When the suit failed and Casey was vindicated, Edmund Dwyer Gray decided to pursue the matter further, for the estate was located in the constituency for which he had recently been elected MP. The candidate he defeated on that occasion was the same John Sarsfield Casey who had first drawn attention to the deplorable conditions on the estate, and Gray was clearly anxious not to be outflanked in his own political backyard.

O’Brien was dispatched to Co. Tipperary with instructions ‘to see for myself; to avoid heated and exaggerated language; and to tell the plain truth, whatever it might be, without fear or favour’. These are O’Brien’s own words. Sally Warwick-Haller in her biography of O’Brien has outlined the shocking contents of his articles – ‘the shameful scenes which passed under my own eyes’, to quote O’Brien again – and there is no need to repeat her summary here. Suffice it to say that what makes these articles extraordinary is the quality of the analysis that underpinned O’Brien’s powerful exposition of the wretched circumstances of the tenants and its focus on the experience of individual tenants. It is this combination of precise analysis and vivid language that makes ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ such a perfect specimen of the early New Journalism. In this regard, O’Brien himself writes:

The inquiry was original in this sense, that it was, so far as I know, the first time when, in place of general statements, there was substituted a house-to-house visitation, telling in detail the story of every family – their crops, their stock, their debts, their struggle for life – from documents examined on the premises, and in words taken down in shorthand from the peasants’ own lips. Two hundred and twenty-six households on the Galtee estate were thus visited, one by one, and the statements of thirty other tenants were inquired into.

O’Brien’s articles also display the passionate advocacy that is so much a part of the New Journalism. The fifth and final article concludes with the following appeal to public opinion, which, with its implicit assumption that the articles would galvanise public opinion, is entirely characteristic of the New Journalism:

This, then, is the issue – whether a quiet, pious, simple race, whose hands have made the barren places give forth food, are to be driven from their poor shelter, or forced to undergo burdens which are in reality a species of veiled eviction, in order to add one paltry thousand more to the revenues of a princely stranger? Time was when, in those distant glens, a wrong like this might have been done and nothing have been heard of it, save some maddened wretch sent to the gallows, some procession of houseless paupers, some emigrant ship gone down. That time is, one may hope, passed ... One wave of that English opinion, before which Cabinets have fallen and nationalities been raised up – one generous impulse, such as was at the call of undeserved human misery in Bulgaria – would either end this unhappy strife or sweep away for ever the law that allows it.

This passage prefigures by nearly a decade W.T. Stead’s famous boast that, and I quote, he had ‘seen Cabinets upset, Ministers driven into retirement, laws repealed, great social reforms initiated ... by the agency of newspapers’. By linking his exposé of conditions on the Galtee estate with the Bulgarian atrocities controversy of 1876, O’Brien was very deliberately identifying himself with the newly-minted, crusading school of journalism that would become known as the New Journalism. Stead, as editor of the Darlington Northern Echo, had played a central role in publicising the Bulgarian atrocities, and this first brought him to national prominence in Britain. Many elements of the New Journalism began in the provincial press in Britain and were brought to London by former provincial journalists such as Stead, who arrived there in 1880 to become assistant editor, and later editor, of the Pall Mall Gazette. The Freeman’s early espousal of the New Journalism put it on par with the British provincial press – at the very cutting edge of innovative journalism. And, of course, within the framework of the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, the Freeman’s profile was indeed that of a provincial newspaper.

The consensus view among historians of the press is that the launch of William Martin’s Murphy’s new halfpenny Irish Independent in 1905 marks the advent of modern journalism in Ireland. Not so, in my view. The Independent may have been our first mass circulation newspaper, but the publication of O’Brien’s ‘Christmas on the Galtees’ articles is a much more significant watershed, the first instance of the New Journalism in Ireland. Though the purpose of the articles may have been to shore up Edmund Dwyer Gray’s political base, their publication was, as William O’Brien notes, ‘not without perils for the proprietor of a great newspaper’ – specifically, the risk of a libel action. Gray must be given credit for his courage in publishing the articles in these circumstances, as well as for his openness to the new kind of journalism which they exhibited. In addition, their focus on the land question at this relatively early stage is remarkable. The articles appeared almost twenty months before the founding of the Land League by Michael Davitt. Gray, notwithstanding his personal agenda, was extraordinarily prescient in attempting to bring this issue to public attention.

But did the articles have any immediate impact? O’Brien concedes that they did not. He states in his Recollections that ‘no relief came to the Galtee estate, or to any other, until, a couple of years later, the Land League Revolution shook the earth’. The failure of his ground-breaking journalistic effort leads him to ask this awkward, somewhat despondent question: ‘who can be surprised if, in the cabins among the Galtee Mountains, there was sometimes a weary suspicion that the only effective force of public opinion lay in the crack of Ryan’s blunderbuss?’ Ryan was the name of the man who had killed the bailiff on the Galtee estate. This is one instance when the crusading impulse of the New Journalism had no obvious political effect – and I suggest, in conclusion, that this may be why it has been largely forgotten.

Many media scholars have remarked on the dearth of research on the press in Ireland. This remains a problem, but it has been rectified to some extent in the last decade or so – partly (though not exclusively) through the work of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, founded in 2008. The Forum has held annual conferences which have stimulated interesting work – and, in addition, several essay collections have been published which, while not formally promoted or supported by the Forum, nevertheless originated in papers delivered at the Forum’s conferences and/or comprise work by authors who were – and are – active members of the Forum. Mark O’Brien, of Dublin City University, and I have recently edited another such volume, which was published at the end of last year – for details, see below. It seeks to address a particular gap in the field of press history in Ireland, namely the links between periodicals or journals of the twentieth century and current affairs journalism. The work that has been done to date on Irish periodicals has tended to concentrate on the journal as literary miscellany rather than as a vehicle for news and commentary. In contrast, our volume singles out for study fourteen journals that are broadly representative of the periodicals published in Ireland in the twentieth century, and evaluates their journalistic activities – and, by extension, their contribution to Irish society and political culture. My paper will attempt briefly to outline that contribution.

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Roy Jenkins, then British home secretary, pointed out in a Granada Guildhall Lecture in 1975 that ‘choice is as essential to a free press as the prestige of journalists and the protection of resounding constitutional declarations’ (such as in the U.S. Bill of Rights). In other words, there is no genuine freedom of expression in the public sphere unless a wide variety of outlets is available to accommodate those with something to say. In twentieth-century Ireland many of the national and provincial newspapers were effectively organs or semi-organs of political parties or other dominant interest groups, and there was little space for diversity of opinion. Professor Joe Lee, in his magisterial Ireland, 1912–85, notes ‘the intellectual poverty of Irish journalism ... [and] the lack of public demand for superior analysis’. He observes in this context that ‘any newspaper that sought to run too far ahead of its readers would quickly become defunct’. Whereas newspapers must appeal to a wide readership, periodicals – with a smaller cost base – can afford to reflect specialist or minority interests. Thus, the importance of Irish periodicals of the twentieth century is that, for however small an audience, many projected an alternative view of the world to the narrow one which was propagated by the Irish establishment in its various incarnations, both before and after independence – and which, in fairness, was accepted by the vast majority of the population. By providing an outlet for those writing against the grain of mainstream Irish society, they made freedom of expression a reality in Ireland. They created a space for diversity of opinion that was not available in the national newspapers or in the provincial press, or elsewhere.

From the early 1900s onwards journals advocating an Irish-Ireland, a republican Ireland, a workers’ republic, a Catholic Ireland, as well as journals promoting the Irish language, the co-operative movement and the rights of women began to appear. After independence in 1922, a new breed of journal flourished, critiquing the kind of society that was emerging in the new state. In the latter forty years of the twentieth century, the most prominent journals were those that concentrated on politics, promoted investigative journalism and exposed the often opaque goings-on within the world of Irish business. By virtue of their influence on the ideas of an intellectual elite who were the makers of public opinion in Ireland – in politics, the public service and the universities, to name but a few – many of these journals helped shape the final phase of the struggle for independence in Ireland and then, post-independence, the thinking that ultimately led to a more open society in Ireland from the late-1960s onwards. Malcolm Ballin, in his book Irish Periodical Culture, 1937–72, summarises this process as follows:

Journals record the evidence of challenge and change, and their contents illustrate the complex and interwoven terms of the contemporary debate, which commanded for these periodicals a relatively small, but committed and growing audience. This new audience had a key part to play in the process of change, in creating the climate that nurtured it and in making the democratic decisions that encouraged it.

Of course, the periodicals were never anything other than doubtful ventures in business terms; but individual journals had a faithful readership that sustained them for relatively long runs of publication, and the influence they had via that readership was entirely disproportionate to their circulation levels and profits, if any. They were the fulcrum on which the intellectual foundations of Irish society moved – slowly, but irrevocably. If sometimes it seemed as if these periodicals were – to again quote Joe Lee – ‘casting pearls before Paudeens engrossed in their pitch and toss’, the seeds that they sowed did eventually bear fruit. They are therefore worthy of study.

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Inevitably, the process of choosing the subjects for inclusion in our volume was a trade-off between, on the one hand, the editors’ view of which titles should be there and, on the other, the research that has been undertaken or is in progress. The editors needed to find an author willing and able to write about a specific periodical before it could realistically be included in our selection. So we make no claim that ours is a definitive selection of the ‘best’ or ‘most important’ Irish periodicals of the twentieth century; it is merely a representative selection, with a clear focus on the journalistic rather than on the literary or cultural aspects of the titles under review. However, we encouraged our contributors to take a ‘long view’ and locate each of the chosen periodicals within the general framework of media history in Ireland, especially the preceding, competing and subsequent titles with similar aims and interests. In this way, we think we have made our volume as comprehensive as possible.

So what titles in the volume? Tom Clyde, in his bibliographical study of Irish magazines, identifies the years 1892 to1922 as, and I quote, ‘the second golden age of Irish literary magazines, the period of greatest fecundity and innovation since before the Great Famine’. It is therefore not surprising that over half the journals considered in this volume, eight out of the fourteen, were founded in that period. The earliest of them are the United Irishman and An Claidheamh Soluis, both launched in 1899 and both notable for seminal pieces of journalism that undoubtedly changed the course of Irish history. Arthur Griffith, editor of the United Irishman, first published his Resurrection of Hungary as a series of articles in that journal in 1904; it provided the blueprint for the final phase of Ireland’s struggle for independence. Eoin MacNeill’s article ‘The North began’ that called for and led to the foundation of the Irish Volunteers was published in 1913 in An Claidheamh Soluis.

D.P. Moran, editor of The Leader, is often bracketed with Griffith as the two leading dissident journalists of the pre-independence period in Ireland, though each was, in fact, strongly opposed to the other and they ridiculed one another in their journals – a good example of the ‘narcissism of small differences’. We also have a chapter on Moran and The Leader. The spotlight is on the Irish suffrage movement and the Irish labour movement in chapters on the Irish Citizen and on The Worker, and the latter chapter includes a reference to James Connolly’s final editorial in The Worker that was presumed ‘lost’ because it was thought all copies of the issue in which it appeared had been destroyed in February 1915.

Each of the aforementioned journals clearly represented a specific minority interest and sought a popular following for the principles and policies it espoused. The Irish Bulletin, the official paper of the pre-independence Dáil Éireann, was different: it was not intended primarily for popular consumption but was rather a tool with which to provide information to foreign journalists and public figures of influence. The Irish Bulletin is therefore something of an outlier in our volume, but it is arguably more important – and more influential – than many of the other periodicals in our selection.

The Irish Statesman, modelled on the British New Statesman, had two separate periods of publication, 1919 to 1920 and 1923 to 1930 – and while this journal has received much scholarly attention to date, in our volume its two phases are considered in tandem for the first time. Of particular interest is the extent to which this journal in its second phase was financed by Irish-American backers channelling money anonymously through Sir Horace Plunkett, its founder. The chapter on the Irish Statesman in our book explores in some detail the circumstances behind the Irish-Americans’ support for it.

There is also a chapter on Dublin Opinion, a humorous magazine started in the very first months of the new Irish state with the aim of using the healing power of laughter to counter deep-seated tensions in Irish public life resulting from the Civil War divisions. In its later years, Dublin Opinion conveyed serious – and effective – criticism of politicians and others through the medium of humour. It continued publishing until 1968, a run of forty-six years.

Such longevity in Irish periodicals is not as unusual as is sometimes thought. The Leader survived until 1971, a run of seventy-one years, and An Claidheamh Soluis folded in 1932 after thirty–three years of publication. In comparison, the Irish Statesman closed a mere seven years after its ‘second coming’ in 1923. None of the other journals discussed in our volume that were established during Tom Clyde’s second ‘golden age’ of Irish magazines survived beyond 1922, the end date of that ‘golden age’.

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This accounts for eight of the journals included in our volume. The remaining six fall equally into two distinct categories: the first, publications founded in the first three decades of the Irish state which, while not primarily current affairs journals, nevertheless offered their readers coherent and sophisticated analysis of the new state and its institutions and culture – thus complementing what was already appearing in the earlier journals that survived after 1922: An Claidheamh Soluis, The Leader, the Irish Statesman and Dublin Opinion. The dominant theme was disillusionment with the new state and its failure to live up to expectations. The second category is the brasher, post-1960s current affairs journals – essentially organs of investigative journalism and radical social commentary. Their focus was on the strictly contemporary: they had moved beyond post-revolutionary angst, and drew inspiration from sources other than the unrealised expectations associated with the 1916 Rising and its aftermath.

Of the journals in the first of these categories – journals of the early years of the new state – The Bell is the pre-eminent one, easily the most famous. Like the Irish Statesman, it has been put under the academic microscope on many previous occasions – most recently, in a full-length study by Kelly Matthews. However, its contribution to the development of journalism in Ireland has not been assessed in any study to date, and that is the focus of the relevant chapter in our volume – with reference especially to Sean O’Faolain’s editorship from 1940 to 1946, though the journal survived until 1954. The other two pre-1960s periodicals that we consider are both overtly Catholic organs, but very different in character. The first is the Capuchin Annual, edited from 1930 to 1954 by a remarkably charismatic priest, Fr Senan Moynihan – a larger-than-life figure. Hitherto largely neglected by students of post-independence Ireland, the Capuchin Annual was a powerful force in defining the conservative culture of that period. At the opposite end of the spectrum was The Furrow. Under the editorship of another extraordinary priest, Fr J.G. McGarry, from 1950 to 1977, it became a beacon for change and renewal within the Catholic Church in Ireland in the period immediately before and after the Second Vatican Council. Its ‘quietly subversive effect’ is the focus of a particularly interesting chapter in our volume.

The final three chapters of the book focus on Hibernia, Hot Press and Magill – post-1960s journals of investigative journalism and radical social commentary. None of them have been the subject of extended analysis before. The chapter on Hibernia characterises it ‘as an independent, frequently dissenting voice’ in Irish media in the years 1968 to 1980, but it had a prior existence as a Catholic publication associated with the influential lay order, the Knights of St Columbanus – the equivalent of a Masonic lodge for Catholics. Hot Press, established in 1977 and still extant, is best known as the magazine of the Irish music industry, but it has also been an important platform for alternative opinion in Ireland, both political and social, especially that of disaffected youth. Particularly noteworthy has been the impact of the ‘Hot Press Interview’, highly innovative in its capacity to provide deep insight into the personalities of well-known figures. The chapter on Magill magazine locates that journal within the context of the party political battles and the social and moral debates that defined the 1980s in Ireland. The British newspaper, The Guardian, bestowed this encomium on Magill in 1986: ‘Magill has gained a political influence that has no parallel in British, or indeed European, magazine publishing’ – a tribute without equal in the history of Irish periodicals.

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What, if anything, did these journals have in common? The most obvious common feature is the omnipresence within each of them of a dominant personality, or two – as editor and/or proprietor. Those that I have already mentioned – Griffith and Moran, Eoin MacNeill and Sean O’Faolain, Frs. Senan and McGarry – were not aberrations. To that roll call must be added the names of Eoin MacNeill and P.H. Pearse (An Claidheamh Soluis), Francis Sheehy Skeffington and James Cousins (Irish Citizen), James Connolly (The Worker), Desmond FitzGerald and Erskine Childers (Irish Bulletin), Sir Horace Plunkett and George Russell (Irish Statesman), C.E. Kelly and Tom Collins (Dublin Opinion), John Mulcahy (Hibernia), Niall Stokes (Hot Press) and Vincent Browne (Magill). Every one of the journals considered in our volume can be identified with specific individuals, and this omnipresence of a dominant personality is the generally recognised paradigm for journals both in Ireland and elsewhere. Thus, Malcolm Ballin – in his study of Irish Periodical Culture – observes that, and I quote, ‘a periodical is produced by a guiding intelligence, seeking to project an identity’.

Another common feature is that the periodicals were largely a metropolitan phenomenon. Even where the journal was one that championed the ideal of Irish-Ireland or Irish language revival, its message was addressed principally to urban readers – mainly Dublin-based ones. The content of the journals is, by and large, indicative of a middle class urban elite engaging in public debate. The only exception was the Irish Statesman in its second phase under the editorship of George Russell (‘Æ’): it had absorbed the Irish Homestead, the organ of the agricultural co-operative movement, in 1923 and it retained some bucolic elements of the Homestead for at least a few years afterwards.

 Finally, these journals had in common a certain style, which derived perhaps from a sense of their own necessity: without them, who or what would facilitate critical thought – or, indeed, any thought – in the Ireland in which they strove to exist? Without them, how would change occur in Ireland? The journals were not always stylish in their physical appearance (quite the contrary, in fact), but there was a quality in the writing – and, in the case of Dublin Opinion, in its cartoons – that conveyed a confidence that the work they were undertaking was important. It should therefore be done well, and it usually was. And this is another reason why these journals are worthy of study.

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Mark O’Brien & Felix M. Larkin, Periodicals and journalism in twentieth-century Ireland
Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2014.

One of the themes of our conference this year is ‘transitions’ – and in 1963, when Radio Éireann broadcast a series of Thomas Davis lectures on the Irish revolution of 1916 and the succeeding years, it was under the title ‘The years of the great transition’. The idea that the Irish revolution had entailed a ‘great transition’ – substantive change – is a commonplace not only of our public history, but also of our historiography. I want to challenge that idea in this paper – hence the question mark in its title.

One of Yeats’ lesser-known poems is an odd little couplet, entitled ‘Parnell’: ‘Parnell came down the road, he said to a cheering man: / Ireland shall get her freedom and you still break stone’. These bleak lines indicate Yeats’ scepticism about the value of independence to the ordinary man in the street. He is saying that it required more than a political revolution to improve the lot of the ordinary people of Ireland – and no one will quarrel with that. His poem, written in 1937, reflects a disappointment, shared by many, that the achievement of Ireland’s independence had not been accompanied by a social revolution. The participation of the Citizen Army in the Easter Rising, and the adoption of the Democratic Programme by the First Dáil in 1919, had seemed to indicate that the political revolution would be accompanied by a social one, but that was not to be. For many (and perhaps for Yeats too) that compromised the value of the independence won with so much blood and sacrifice.

However, focusing on the absence of a social revolution in tandem with the political one is to miss an important point. There had been a social revolution in Ireland – though it occurred before the political revolution. The political revolution was, in fact, the end of a process of change – not the beginning. The changes had begun with the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland in 1869 – and that was followed by the Ballot Act 1872, which introduced the secret vote and helped strengthen Irish nationalist representation at Westminster. Then came the Land War, leading eventually, with Wyndham’s Land Act 1903, to the wholesale transfer of the land of Ireland to owner-occupation. In addition, 1898 saw the democratisation of local government in Ireland, and in 1908 the National University was created – and it would provide educational opportunities that had previously been denied to the Catholic elite in Ireland.

All these developments were carried by Liberal and Tory administrations under pressure from the Irish Party at Westminster, and they changed the social and economic landscape in Ireland. Today, they are overshadowed by the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. The decades before the Rising are thus dismissed as, in the words of Conor Cruise O’Brien, ‘a sort of crease in time, a featureless valley ... a time in which nothing happened’. Yet, as the historian Ian d’Alton has argued, the incremental progress made through government initiatives in the years 1869 to 1916 was probably more significant in shaping modern Ireland than ‘all the dreamers, poets, dynamiters, language enthusiasts and [radical] editors put together’. Certainly, one prominent British politician, Arthur Balfour, thought so: a former Prime Minister and more importantly in this context a former Chief Secretary for Ireland, he spoke in 1928 of ‘the Ireland we made’ – and he was proud of the conservative, devout country of land-owners and petit bourgeoisie that Ireland had by then become. The 1916 Rising and the struggle for political independence that followed must be seen as but one element – the tip of the iceberg – in a greater Irish revolution spanning fifty years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

The Land War was a critical part of that greater revolution, and the one with the most profound consequences. There were two phases in the Land War: the first, under the Land League, from 1879 to 1882; the second, the so-called Plan of Campaign, from 1886 to 1891. Traditionally portrayed in our history books as the inevitable consequence of, and response to, a rapacious landlord system, this is no longer regarded as a tenable interpretation of what happened. Taking a cue from work such as James Donnelly’s magisterial The land and people of nineteenth-century Cork, published in 1975, historians now tend to see the Land War more as a ‘revolution of rising expectations’ resulting from the determination of tenant farmers to preserve their recent material gains in a period of temporary agricultural crisis. There was a mid-Victorian boom in Irish agriculture in the decades after the Famine, and the majority of tenants throughout the country had enjoyed ‘an era of palpable prosperity’ – to quote Professor Vincent Comerford. A collapse in agricultural prices in the late 1870s and again in 1886, brought that boom to an end. The loss, or curtailment, of their expectations of continuing and ever-growing prosperity propelled Irish tenant farmers into the Land League and later into the Plan of Campaign.

The concept of a ‘revolution of rising expectations’ was developed by the French intellectual and diplomatist, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 1850s in his history of the French revolution. He wrote:



It is not always by going from bad to worse that a society falls into revolution. It happens most often that a people which has supported without complaint, as if they were not felt, the most oppressive laws, violently throws them off as soon as their weight is lifted.

In other words, revolutions ‘seldom, if ever, take the form of mere spontaneous outbursts against tyranny, oppression or utter destitution; both the experience of and the hope of something better are important factors in the story’ – that passage is taken from George Rudé’s elaboration of Tocqueville’s theory.

Like the Land War, the Irish revolution conforms to the classic model of ‘a revolution of rising expectations’. The social and economic advances enjoyed by the vast majority of the Irish people in the period since 1869 created the circumstances that brought about the 1916 Rising and the War of Independence. They prompted expectations of further advances. Home Rule would have been the next step in this process of incremental progress. It embodied the hopes of the Irish people, and it appeared to have been secured in 1912. Once again, however, the aspiration to self-government was frustrated. Expectations were dashed, and revolution ensued.

Nevertheless, the revolution at its outset – the Rising on Easter Monday 1916 – had no popular support. That only came afterwards – because of the executions, the imposition of martial law, and the rounding up and internment of all sorts of people who had had no involvement in the Rising but who were, for various reasons, considered disloyal. The priest-historian, F.X. Martin, writing in 1966, commented ruefully that the leaders of the Rising ‘were not deterred by the fact that they were a small [and unrepresentative] minority’. And the anti-democratic character of the Rising was the predominant theme in editorial commentary in the national press in the immediate aftermath. Take the Freeman’s Journal, for example – the oldest daily newspaper in Dublin in 1916. It described the Rising as ‘an armed assault against the will and decision of the Irish nation itself, constitutionally ascertained through its proper representatives’. Those representatives were the Irish MPs at Westminster committed, under John Redmond, to achieving Home Rule by peaceful means. The Freeman was the semi-official organ of those MPs, and it was only natural that it should defend their interests against the rebels. But the point that the newspaper made was an entirely valid one. The Rising was as much a rebellion against Redmond and the elected representatives of the Irish nation as it was a coup d’état against the British Government.

Despite the broad popular sympathy with the Rising after the event, there was no general repudiation of the parliamentary tradition to which the Irish people had steadfastly adhered throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. On the contrary, the post-1916 phase of the revolution was played out as much in the arena of constitutional politics as in the violence of the War of Independence – with critical by-elections in 1917 and 1918, Sinn Féin’s victory in the 1918 General Election, the subsequent establishment of Dáil Éireann and its shadow administration to challenge that of Dublin Castle, and Sinn Féin’s takeover of the vast majority of local authorities in Ireland after the elections to these authorities held in 1920. As Anne Dolan and William Murphy have stated in their recent study of Michael Collins, ‘political activity was a necessary corollary to the shooting’. Indeed, the fact that the War of Independence was prosecuted under the nominal authority of the First and Second Dáil was, and remains, its source of legitimacy. Unlike the Rising in 1916, it could claim an electoral mandate – though even the rebels in 1916 had looked forward in their Proclamation to ‘the establishment of a permanent National Government, representative of the whole people of Ireland and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women’. This was an unambiguous genuflection towards the constitutional heritage that their actions appeared to repudiate.

As the late Brian Farrell observed in 1972, the leaders of the Irish revolution ‘did not seek to destroy the institutional status quo in Ireland; they sought to take it over’. The Westminster model was the form of political activity that they adopted both during and after the revolution. They commandeered the parliamentary tradition inherited from Parnell and his successors in the Irish Party and used it for their own purposes, and the governmental apparatus of the new State that emerged after 1921 drew upon that tradition in almost every detail. While the leaders of the revolution would have been loath to admit it , constitutional politics had served the Irish people well – especially in the four decades before 1916 when the Irish Party under Parnell and later under Redmond skilfully exerted pressure in Westminster to demand a solution to the land question and to address other grievances. Parliamentary agitation in those years had delivered the ameliorative measures that, as outlined earlier, transformed Irish society beyond recognition. Moreover, the Irish Party had come within a whisker of winning Home Rule – and thus satisfying the demand of the Irish people for some form of self-government.

For the great majority of the Irish people, that demand had not been for complete independence from Britain – a republic, as was proclaimed outside the GPO on Easter Monday 1916 – but was instead for a measure of devolution, Home Rule, rather like what the Scots parliament in Edinburgh has today. This goal was pursued by successive generations of constitutional nationalists freely elected by the Irish people to the Westminster parliament – and under the leadership of Charles Stewart Parnell, the validity of the demand was eventually conceded in 1886 by William Gladstone, then British Prime Minister. He, of course, failed to get his legislation accepted by parliament on two separate occasions – in 1886 and in 1893.

Parnell’s moral victory in converting Gladstone and the majority of his Liberal Party to Home Rule was followed by John Redmond’s very real achievement in getting a Home Rule Act onto the statute book. After two inconclusive general elections in 1910, the Irish nationalists at Westminster had held the balance of power. Under Redmond’s skilful leadership, they exploited that situation in order to get Home Rule once again on the agenda. A Home Rule Bill was passed by parliament, but its implementation was blocked because a very substantial and geographically-concentrated number of Irishmen in the province of Ulster opposed it – for a combination of religious, economic and tribal considerations. The British government were not prepared to force these people – the unionist community in Ulster – into a Home Rule Ireland. Nor were Irish nationalists prepared to concede to the unionists what they themselves wanted, namely self-determination. The result was stalemate, and on the outbreak of the First World War, the matter was shelved for the duration of the war – by agreement between all parties. This left the way open for more extreme nationalist elements in Ireland to say that constitutionalism had failed to secure even a modest measure of self-government, and that it was necessary to resort to violence. 

However – to quote Brian Farrell again – ‘any objective assessment of the evidence obliges us to believe that a deep-rooted (and, on occasions, violent) opposition to British rule [in Ireland] involved no rejection of its operational machinery and pragmatic norms. The value of stable representative institutions resting on an extended and fair franchise was recognised as early and as widely by the Irish as by the British.’ This is the background to the emergence of the re-invigorated Sinn Féin party in 1917 – claiming descent from the 1916 Rising, but nevertheless willing to contest parliamentary by-elections in 1917 and 1918, the General Elections of 1918 and 1920 – albeit on an abstentionist platform – and the local elections of 1920. That represented a return to constitutional politics after the wanton violence of 1916. Hand-in-hand with the Sinn Féin pledge not to take their seats in the Westminster parliament was their commitment to set up their own assembly in Dublin as a de facto Irish parliament – Dáil Éireann – a parallel administration in opposition to, though imitative of, the British one. As the distinguished historian of the Irish Party, F.S.L. Lyons, reminded us: ‘Dáil Éireann had scarcely started to function before, almost unconsciously, it began to utilise and build upon the constitutional tradition it inherited. If to the survivors of the old Irish Parliamentary Party this seemed the last and most intolerable irony, to us, looking back, it may rather stand as perhaps the last and perhaps the highest tribute [to Parnell and his successors].’

It is, therefore, a gross exaggeration to suggest that ‘All changed, changed utterly’ in the Irish revolution. The strong element of continuity evident in the political sphere parallels the failure to effect a social revolution alongside the political one. The changes in politics and society in the period of the revolution were not nearly as fundamental as is generally represented. The landscape that characterised the new state was in place well before the revolution, the result in large measure of the process of change in Ireland that stretched back to 1869. That landscape was essentially unaffected by the revolution, though the changes that had already occurred may have helped create the circumstances – the ‘rising expectations’ – that led to revolution.

Let me begin by saying that the commemoration of the 1916 Rising last year was not as bad as it might have been. Most people take the view that it was a “Goldilocks moment” – whereas the 50th anniversary celebrations in 1966 were too hot and those for the 75th anniversary in 1991 too cold, 2016 was just right. I do not agree, however. At a time when democratic values are under threat from Brexiteers in Britain and Northern Ireland and from Donald Trump in the US, there is something indecent – in my opinion – about honouring men and women who set out to impose their extreme nationalist agenda on an unwilling population in Easter Week 1916 by force of arms.

In this regard, I recall the words of Eoin MacNeill addressed to his fellow officers in the Irish Volunteers in February 1916, two months before the Rising. I quote:  ‘... we believe that we think rightly on national matters, and even if we do not all agree on every point, we believe that the consensus we hold among us is right as far as it goes ... [It is] our duty to so act that our country itself, i.e. the Irish nation, shall learn, as far as may be secured, to think in the same way ... In other words, if we are right, it is our duty to get our country on our side, and not to be content with the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong.’

Many in the senior ranks of the Irish Volunteers rejected this very reasonable proposition – and, as we all know, they would defy MacNeill’s authority as their Chief of Staff in Easter Week. Their disregard for basic democratic values – ‘the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong’ – is what Professor John A. Murphy of UCC referred to, in a characteristically acerbic assessment of last year’s commemoration, as ‘the magic (sometimes black) of the Easter Rising’. It is the reason why I believe that we need to jettison from our public history what Professor Murphy calls ‘the fantasy world of “the Republic as in 1916 established”’. It is a myth, and we cannot hope for a humane, healthy and stable polity built on fantasy and myths.

Patrick Pearse himself quite deliberately fashioned the fantasy of 1916 in his writings, and the myths were then endorsed and propagated by the independent Irish state through its education system and in many other insidious ways – right up to, and including, last year’s commemoration. Thus, in his poem ‘The Mother’, written shortly before his execution, Pearse put these words into the mouth of his mother:

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge

My two strong sons that I have seen go out

To break their strength and die, they and a few,

In bloody protest for a glorious thing,

They shall be spoken of among their people,

The generations shall remember them,

And call them blessed ...

Pearse was right about later generations remembering the men and women of 1916. But it is simply not right to regard the rebellion which he and a very few others instigated as a ‘glorious thing’. I suggest that it would be more correct to regard it as an example of ‘altruistic evil’, a concept developed by the former British chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks, in a book published last year, Not in God’s name. He writes, by way of explanation:

Only in fiction are the great evils committed by caricatures of malevolence: Darth Vader, Lord Voldemort, Sauron or the Joker. In real history the great evils are committed by people seeking to restore a romanticised golden age, willing to sacrifice their lives and the lives of others in what they regard as a great and even holy cause. In some cases, they see themselves as ‘doing God’s work’ ...  That is how dreams of utopia turn into nightmares of hell.

Sacks adds that we need a term to describe how ‘ordinary, non-psychopathic people’ can be turned into ‘cold-blooded murderers’ for ‘a great and ... holy cause’, and so he gives it a name: ‘altruistic evil: that is, evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals’. We must, I believe, face up to the awkward reality that ‘altruistic evil’ may be an apt description of the Easter Rising. Instead of celebrating it, we must try to neutralise its ‘black magic’.

I accept, of course, that the leaders of the Rising were men and women of high ideals, but their actions were profoundly undemocratic and morally suspect. The Rising was conceived as a ‘bloody protest’: that was how Pearse described it in the poem quoted above, a quixotic gesture intentionally involving the loss of life – his own, and that of others. It did result in the loss of many lives – and the majority of the victims were non-combatants, innocent civilians (including children). But the Rising was carried out in furtherance of what the rebels regarded as a noble cause. It is, therefore, a classic instance of ‘altruistic evil’ as defined by Jonathan Sacks. 

The Rising had no popular mandate at the time – nobody can deny that. The priest-historian, F.X. Martin, writing in 1966 on the fiftieth anniversary, characterised the Rising as ‘a conspiracy of a conspiracy of a minority’. He pointed out that the leaders of the Rising ‘were not deterred by the fact that they were a small minority’, and he went on to say:

On close examination it will be found that they were a far smaller minority than is usually supposed ... The Easter Rising was a coup d’état against the British Government, it ran flat counter to the wishes of Redmond and the majority of Irish Nationalists, it was a mutiny against MacNeill and the constitution of the Irish Volunteers, and it usurped the powers of the IRB [the Irish Republican Brotherhood].

And, as already noted, the case against the Rising on democratic grounds had been eloquently stated by Eoin MacNeill in a memorandum to the officers of the Irish Volunteers just two months earlier – but it was disregarded by most of them. In that memorandum, MacNeill also asserted that ‘the only reason that could justify general active military measures ... would be a reasonably calculated or estimated prospect of success, in the military sense ... [and] not merely some future moral or political advantage which may be hoped for as a result of non-success’. Thus he disposed of Pearse’s ‘blood sacrifice’ ideal.

Pearse’s view of the Rising – blood sacrifice, leading to the redemption and resurrection of the nation, modelled (some would say, blasphemously) on the Easter story in the Christian tradition – is undoubtedly seductive. It has weaved its black magic, and coloured the popular imagination. Historians, and others, have had great difficulty in countering it with the unadorned facts and stripping away the rhetorical baggage – an effort generally referred to, sometimes disparagingly, as ‘revisionism’. To again quote Fr Martin:

The academic historian may knowingly shake his head, confident that Pearse and his followers have misinterpreted Irish history, but it has not been the academic historians ... who have directly influenced the political views of Irish youth since 1917. The Pearse view of Irish history may be inaccurate ... but it has sent and is sending young men out to die more certainly than did [Yeats’ play] Cathleen ni Houlihan.

That was written in the journal Studia Hibernica in 1967, before the outbreak of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. It shows that Martin anticipated the concern that later influenced the writings of Conor Cruise O’Brien and others when the Troubles did break out. Simply stated, this concern was that the 1916 Rising, the foundational event of the Irish state, could be used as a precedent for subverting that very state and for violence in Northern Ireland – in other words, the memory of 1916 keeps the cult of political violence alive and well in Ireland.

            And note that Fr Martin claims in the passage just quoted that Pearse and his followers were responsible not merely for a misinterpretation of 1916, but also for a misinterpretation of Irish history generally, His point is that, while the story of the Rising has been idealised, our understanding of the prior history of Ireland has also been distorted in order to portray the Rising as the culmination of a splendid heritage of fighting, dying and killing for Irish freedom. Martin argued that the 1916 proclamation had put forward ‘a historical interpretation of over seven hundred years of Irish history’ which, though misguided, subsequently took hold of the public mind. He wrote:

It began with the resonant assurance that the insurgents were acting in the name of God and of the dead generations of Irishmen; it went on to insist that England’s long occupation had given it no right to the country, that in every generation the Irish people had rebelled against the usurpation of their rights, that there had been six rebellions during the previous three hundred years, and that these rights were now once more being affirmed by the soldiers of the Irish Republic ... At the very outset of the Rising, therefore, the pitch was being queered for the historians.

Sadly, this queering of the pitch has continued apace – and was a feature of last year’s commemoration. One particularly egregious example was the three-part television documentary on the Rising and its background and legacy produced by the University of Notre Dame with the blessing of the Irish government and its advisory committee on the Decade of Commemorations. The production values of the documentary cannot be faulted – it is superbly well made – but it is not ‘history’. It is, to coin a phrase, ‘fake history’ – ‘alternative facts’ – simply a sophisticated rehash of the film ‘Mise Éire’, released on the eve of the 1960s before the ‘revisionist’ impulse in Irish historiography had borne fruit. Like ‘Mise Éire’, the Notre Dame documentary glorifies 1916, its violent antecedents and the violence that has flowed from it, down to the present day, to the strains of highly evocative music. If I may be allowed a pun on the sobriquet bestowed on Notre Dame’s famous college football team, it presents Irish history as the story of the ‘fighting Irish’.



The first episode begins with the arrival of Henry II in Ireland in 1171, thereby perpetuating the myth of 700 (or is it 800?) years of English occupation in Ireland without any attempt to contextualise the Anglo-Norman presence in Ireland in the twelfth century by reference to the medieval world in which the concept of ‘nationhood’ was largely irrelevant. Then, in its survey of the nineteenth-century, the programme airbrushes Daniel O’Connell, the father figure of Irish democracy, out of the picture completely. There is no mention of him – the ‘Liberator’, who achieved Catholic Emancipation through non-violent means. That achievement represented real political, economic and social progress for the Catholic majority in Ireland – unequalled in modern times – but that counts for nothing in the Notre Dame pantheon. The other great popular leader of nineteenth-century Ireland, Charles Stewart Parnell, is reduced to a peripheral figure – a kind of Quisling, prepared to compromise with the ‘hated oppressor’, England. Meanwhile, there are paeans of praise for the dynamite campaigns of O’Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke in British cities – campaigns which parallel terrorist incidents in London, Manchester, Paris and elsewhere in recent times. This privileging of the physical force tradition over the constitutional one is simply unhistorical – and it is devoid of a moral compass. 

Furthermore, the first episode makes reference to an ‘alien’ Protestant landowning class in Ireland without acknowledging that these families had been in Ireland for about as long as European settlers had been in North America – a significant omission given the American provenance of this documentary. And the model of American ‘liberty’ which, it is claimed, the Fenians and later the men and women of 1916 imbibed is not one that would be celebrated by Native Americans deprived, like the so-called ‘native Irish’, of their ancestral lands.

Such distortion of history is not only regrettable, it is reprehensible. It ignores the complexities of the past, and so has the potential to do great harm. The producers of that documentary, and the many others who abuse the historical record, may have cause to be troubled in future years by the concerns expressed by W.B. Yeats in one of his last poems, to which I have already alluded: ‘Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English shot?’. It has become fashionable to pour scorn on Yeats’ conceit about the influence his work may, or may not, have had – hence these lines by Paul Muldoon: ‘If Yeats had saved his pencil lead / Would certain men have stayed in bed’. But this is a trite and superficial response to a very real issue, and the fact that it is a real issue was brought home to me many years ago by my old history professor in UCD, the late Kevin B. Nowlan. In 1966 Kevin B. was the history advisor to Telefís Éireann (as it then was) on their programmes marking the fiftieth anniversary of the Rising, and he was alarmed to find later on that the children in the area where he lived in Dublin were playing ‘Rebels and Soldiers’ instead of ‘Cowboys and Indians’ or ‘Cops and Robbers’. He realised that it had all gone too far. He was troubled by fears similar to those of Yeats.

1916 happened, and we cannot avoid that. We cannot alter the past, no matter how much we may regret aspects of it. The challenge for those of us who live in the independent Irish state is how to accommodate our past and prevent it undermining the democratic and genuinely republican character of that state. Can I suggest, for a start, that we should now date the origin of the state not to the 1916 Rising, but instead to the 1918 general election and the first meeting of Dáil Éireann in January 1919 – orderly political events, not wanton violence? By continuing to celebrate the Rising as the foundational event of the state, we signal approval of what the men and women of 1916 did, and we associate ourselves with values – profoundly undemocratic – which today we emphatically reject, and we are right to reject them. My argument here is that we should reject them also in our public history.

I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to share some of James Joyce’s writing with you today. My thanks to Niall O’Donoghue for inviting me to do this, and to Pól Ó Duibhir for volunteering me for it – and thanks also to all of you for turning up here this morning.

Since I was director of the Parnell Summer School for three years, from 2012 to 2015, I would like to begin by reading the brief exchange between those who, in the ‘Hades’ episode of Ulysses, visit Parnell’s grave after attending the interment of Paddy Dignam. I quote:

The mourners moved away [from Dignam’s grave] slowly without aim, by devious paths, staying at whiles to read a name on a tomb.

– Let us go round by the chief’s grave, Hynes said. We have time.

– Let us, Mr Power said.

They turned to the right, following their slow thoughts. With awe Mr Power’s blank voice spoke:

– Some say he is not in that grave at all. That the coffin was filled with stone. That one day he will come again.

Hynes shook his head.

– Parnell will never come again, he said. He’s there, all that was mortal of him. Peace to his ashes.

Joyce venerated Parnell's memory. There is absolutely no doubt which side of the argument he favours in the famous Christmas dinner scene in the Portrait when the rights and wrongs of the Parnell split are rehearsed. To quote from the Portrait, the young Stephen Dedalus was ‘for Ireland and Parnell, and so was his father’. His nationalism was firmly rooted in the Irish constitutional tradition, and he rejected any form of militant republicanism and narrow cultural nationalism. This is clear from his lampooning of Michael Cusack, the founder of the GAA, as ‘the citizen’ in the ‘Cyclops’ episode of Ulysses, but arguably it comes across more starkly in the Portrait of the Artist, in the discussion which Stephen Dedalus – Joyce’s alter ego – has with his friend Michael Davin, ‘the peasant student ... [who] had sat at the feet of Michael Cusack’ and who was thought of ‘as a young fenian’ by his fellow students. Joyce wrote of him in the Portrait that ‘whatsoever of thought or of feeling came to him from England or by way of English culture his mind stood armed against in obedience to a password’. Davin was based on George Clancy, who went on to become Sinn Féin mayor of Limerick and was murdered by crown forces on 6 March 1921, shortly after his election as mayor. The discussion in the Portrait that I am referring to goes as follows:

– Try to be one of us, repeated Davin. In your heart you are an Irishman but your pride is too powerful.

– My ancestors threw off their language and took another, Stephen said. They allowed a handful of foreigners to subject them. Do you fancy I am going to pay in my own life and person debts they made? What for?

– For our freedom, said Davin.

– No honourable and sincere man, said Stephen, has given up to you his life and his youth and his affections from the days of Tone to those of Parnell, but you have sold him to the enemy or failed him in need or reviled him and left him for another. And you invite me to be one of you. I’ll see you damned first.

– They died for their ideals, Stevie, said Davin. Our day will come yet.

Some things don’t change: republicans are still using the phrase ‘Our day will come’ – ‘Tiocfaigh ár lá’. I wonder do they take that phrase from Joyce; somehow I doubt it.

Joyce’s rejection of Irish cultural nationalism – the so-called ‘Celtic revival’, what Yeats would call culture that ‘must come from the soil’ – is likewise comprehensive. Thus his portrait of Miss Ivors, the Irish language revival enthusiast, in ‘The Dead’ is unsympathetic – and she was based on Kathleen Sheehy, one of the daughters of Mrs David Sheehy who features in the ‘Wandering Rocks’ episode of Ulysses. In ‘The Dead’, Joyce identifies with Gabriel Conroy’s more cosmopolitan outlook: though a Catholic, Gabriel writes for the unionist Daily Express newspaper in Dublin – and when he rejects Miss Ivors’ invitation to go on an excursion to the Aran Islands for a whole month and he tells her that he likes to go every year on ‘a cycling tour with some fellows  ... to France or Belgium or perhaps Germany’, she chastises him with these words: “... haven’t you your own land to visit ... that you know nothing of, your own people and your own country?’ Gabriel responds: ‘I’m sick of my own country, sick of it’.

By the end of the story, however, Gabriel has been overwhelmed by the Celtic Twilight – and is, both physically and metaphorically, in darkness. The discovery of his wife's deep affection for her dead lover, Michael Furey – the hold from beyond the grave that he still has on her imagination – and her nostalgia for the West of Ireland where he is buried, devastates him. She has rejected Gabriel’s tentative sexual advances in favour of a romantic evocation of something long dead and gone. The Celtic Revival was analogous to that in Joyce's eyes – the very antithesis of what he wanted, which was to reach out and explore new horizons, looking towards Europe and its culture for inspiration, instead of wallowing in the past in a backward-looking Irish-Ireland. Gabriel is a broken man at the end of ‘The Dead’, and in the beautiful final paragraph of the story he concedes that ‘The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward’. That sentence is the measure of how thoroughly he has been defeated. I will now read that paragraph in full:

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly on the Bog of Allen and, further westward, falling softly into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Joyce, unlike Gabriel Conroy, did escape from Ireland and from its constraints, both political and cultural – spending the rest of his life in Trieste, Zurich and Paris. As he wrote in Finnegans Wake:

He ... ran away with hunself and became a farsoonerite, saying he would far sooner muddle through the hash of lentils in Europe than meddle with Irrland’s split little pea.

As so often with Joyce, this passage is packed with a multitude of allusions: ‘ran away with hunself’ identifies Joyce with the Asiatic people who invaded Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries – he too had 'invaded' Europe – and, furthermore, it acknowledges Germany’s powerful position in Europe in the early years of the twentieth century; ‘Irrland’s split little pea’ sums up our history, especially in the years since the 1916 Rising; and ‘a hash of lentils in Europe’ captures the mishmash of empires and kingdoms, nationalities and loyalties, that Joyce encountered when he went into exile.

This highlights what is one of the great attractions for me of Joyce’s work: while it is not history or even a sound historical source, it is nevertheless deeply rooted in actuality and suffused with a sense of history. It is, to quote Elizabeth Bowen about her novel The Last September, ‘fiction with the texture of history’. Joyce himself told the sculptor Arthur Power: ‘In Ulysses, I tried to keep close to fact’. Joyce had a deep knowledge of history – that is evident everywhere in his work – but, more importantly, he seems to have understood what the discipline of history is actually about. It is quite distinct from public memory or political-cum-ideological narratives of the past, and it may often be in stark opposition to such. The approach that should characterise the work of the historian is one of interrogating the past, questioning received orthodoxies and restoring their frail and imperfect humanity to heroes – the mindset is sceptical, iconoclastic, disruptive. Bluntly, the historian should be a kind of ‘bullshit detector’, with zero tolerance – and that is the spirit in which Joyce approaches his material. His alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, is described in the Portrait by his friend Davin as a ‘born sneerer’. Nothing is sacred to Stephen or to Joyce, and it is relevant in this context to recall that the French historian Pierre Nora wrote that:

Memory instils remembrance within the sacred; history, always prosaic, releases it again.

Moreover, historians must always be aware of the importance of contingency in shaping the past. As the distinguished American historian, David McCullough, the biographer of John Adams and Harry Truman, has stated in a recent interview:

Nothing ever had to happen the way it happened. History could have gone off in any number of different directions in any number of different ways at almost any point, just as your own life can.     

Joyce anticipated this insight – and I think expressed it rather better than McCullough did – when, during the class that Stephen teaches in the ‘Nestor’ episode of Ulysses, he speculates in his own mind about what might have happened in the past, the ‘what if’ questions of history, what historians call ‘counterfactual history’. I quote:

Had Pyrrhus not fallen by a beldam’s hand in Argos or Julius Caesar not been knifed to death. They are not to be thought away. Time has branded them and fettered they are lodged in the room of the infinite possibilities they have ousted. But can those have been possible seeing that they never were? Or was that only possible which came to pass?

I propose now to illustrate the extent to which Ulysses is rooted in actuality by considering the opening sequence of the ‘Aeolus’ episode which is set in the offices of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper in North Prince’s street, Dublin – beside the GPO. There are many casual references to the Freeman throughout Ulysses – and Leopold Bloom is employed as an advertisement canvasser for the Freeman’s evening newspaper, the Evening Telegraph – but it is in the ‘Aeolus’ episode that Joyce firmly locates the Freeman’s Journal ‘in the heart of the Hibernian metropolis’, socially as well as physically. The episode begins at about 12 noon – in other words, at about this very hour – on 16 June 1904, and Mr Bloom is in the Freeman’s offices on business concerning an advertisement for the firm of Alexander Keyes. With a colleague, Red Murray, he observes the ‘stately’ arrival in the building of the long-time editor of the newspaper, W.H. Brayden – editor from 1892 to 1916. Bloom, noticing Brayden’s ‘fat folds of neck’, recalls Simon Dedalus’s gibe that ‘all his brains are in the nape of his neck’ – Simon is, of course, Stephen Dedalus’s father. Let me read some of this opening sequence (beginning outside the GPO, and then moving seamlessly inside the Freeman’s premises):

Under the porch of the general post office shoeblacks called and polished. Parked in North Prince’s street, His Majesty’s vermilion mailcars, bearing on their sides the royal initials, E. R., received loudly flung sacks of letters, postcards, lettercards, parcels, insured and paid, for local, provincial, British and overseas delivery ...

– There it is, Red Murray said, Alexander Keyes.

– Just cut it out, will you? Mr Bloom said, and I’ll take it round to the Telegraph office.

The door of Ruttledge’s office creaked again. Davy Stephens, minute in a large capecoat, a small felt hat crowning his ringlets, passed out with a roll of papers under his cape, a king’s courier.

Red Murray’s long shears sliced out the advertisement from the newspaper in four clean strokes. Scissors and paste.

– I’ll go through the printingworks, Mr. Bloom said, taking the cut square ...

Red Murray touched Mr Bloom’s arm with the shears and whispered

– Brayden.

Mr Bloom turned and saw the liveried porter raise his lettered cap as a stately figure entered between the newsboards of the Weekly Freeman and National Press and the Freeman’s Journal and National Press ... It passed statelily up the staircase, steered by an umbrella, a solemn beardframed face. The broadcloth back ascended each step: back. All his brains are in the nape of his neck, Simon Dedalus says. Welts of flesh behind on him. Fat folds of neck, fat, neck, fat, neck.

– Don’t you think his face is like Our Saviour? Red Murray whispered.

The door of Ruttledge’s office whispered: ee: cree. They always build one door opposite another for the wind to. Way in. Way out.

Our Saviour: beardframed oval face: talking in the dusk. Mary, Martha. Steered by an umbrella sword to the footlights: Mario the tenor.

– Or like Mario, Mr. Bloom said.

– Yes, Red Murray agreed. But Mario was said to be the picture of Our Saviour.

Jesusmario, with rougy cheeks, doublet and spindle legs. Hand on his heart. In Martha.

Co-ome, thou lost one,

Co-ome, thou dear one! ...

They watched the knees, legs, boots vanish. Neck.

A telegram boy stepped in nimbly, threw an envelope on the counter and stepped off posthaste with a word:

– Freeman!

Mr Bloom said slowly:

– Well, he is one of our saviours also.

A meek smile accompanied him as he lifted the counterflap, as he passed in through a sidedoor and along the warm dark stairs and passage, along the now vibrating boards. But will he save the circulation?

The question ‘But will he [Brayden] save the circulation?’ is significant – for, while the Freeman was still the leading daily newspaper in Dublin in 1904, Joyce knew with the benefit of hindsight that it was doomed. In the following year (1905), William Martin Murphy would launch the modern Irish Independent, at half the price of the Freeman – a halfpenny, instead of a penny – and with a more popular format and a less partisan editorial policy. In effect, he copied what Lord Northcliffe (Alfred Harmsworth) had done in London in 1896 when he launched the Daily Mail, the first mass circulation newspaper in these islands. It also cost a halfpenny, and Joyce belittles Northcliffe’s achievement by referring to him in ‘Aeolus’ as ‘Harmsworth of the farthing press’. Murphy’s new Independent was an immediate success, and its success came at the expense of the Freeman. The Freeman began to incur heavy trading losses and no dividends were paid to shareholders after 1908. Brayden was replaced as editor in 1916 in an effort to save the paper, but it would eventually close in 1924.

The passage that I have just read includes references to two people other than the Freeman’s editor, W.H. Brayden. The first of these is William Ruttledge, who was a business manager with the Freeman – in fact, the cashier of the newspaper. The other was a well-known Dublin newspaper vendor, Davy Stephens. He is characterised by Joyce as ‘a king’s courier’, because Stephens’s newspaper stand was at Kingstown (now Dun Laoghaire) harbour and he was reputed to have offered King Edward VII a newspaper when the king disembarked at Kingstown on his visit to Ireland in 1903.

Brayden, Ruttledge and Stephens appear in Ulysses under their own names. This is not unusual, and reflects the fact that only passing reference is made to them. Joyce tends, however, to give pseudonyms to those who feature more prominently in Ulysses. Thus, Pat Meade – the editor of the Evening Telegraph – is Myles Crawford in ‘Aeolus’, and he later makes another appearance in the ‘Circe’ episode. Likewise, John Wyse Nolan is John Wyse Power, formerly of the Freeman staff and later editor of the Evening Herald, the Evening Telegraph’s rival published by the Independent; and Professor MacHugh is Hugo MacNeill, not a journalist at all – but described by Terence Killeen as ‘a somewhat under-achieving classical scholar’ who was a habitual loiterer in the Freeman office. Others who play lesser parts in the episode and appear under their own names – undisguised – include Patrick (‘Paddy’) Hooper, who was the last editor of the Freeman from 1916 to 1924, but he had been previously a London correspondent for the Freeman. This explains why it is said of him in ‘Aeolus’: ‘Came over last night’. It is reported that he had ‘gone round to the Oval [public house] for a drink’ with Jack Hall, and J.B. Hall was a long-serving reporter with the Freeman and later the author of Random Records of a Reporter, published in 1928. Patrick Hooper was the son of Alderman John Hooper, himself an editor of the Evening Telegraph – from 1893 to 1897. In Ulysses, Joyce accords the elder Hooper the dubious honour of having been one of Molly Bloom’s many casual lovers, and on a mantlepiece in the Blooms’ home at No. 7 Eccles Street was an embalmed owl described as ‘the matrimonial gift of Alderman John Hooper’. Leopold Bloom remembers this gift when he spots a bird ‘tamely perched on a poplar branch’ in Glasnevin cemetery, and he links Hooper’s name with the hooting sound which owls make.

The Freeman is described in ‘Aeolus’ as ‘a great daily organ’, but the thrust of the episode nevertheless suggests that Joyce held the Freeman and its staff in some disdain. This is revealed most sharply by his identification of the newspaper with Aeolus, the Greek god of the winds. That is typical of Joyce’s style of mockery – he was indeed a ‘born sneerer’. It conveys not only his view of the journalists as windbags, but also – to again quote Terence Killeen – ‘the inconsistency and changeability of the journalistic profession, its responsiveness to every wind that blows’. Joyce thus characterises journalists as ‘weathercocks’ – he writes: ‘One story good till you hear the next’. Moreover, the journalists and others gathered in the Freeman’s offices in ‘Aeolus’ seem singularly out of touch with the contemporary world. In the words of Terence Killeen:

[‘Aeolus’] gives the impression of people existing in a cut-off world of their own, unaware of anything outside the confines of their own circle — and this despite ostensibly being the people with their fingers on the pulse of public opinion.

The ‘Aeolus’ motif similarly denotes the ephemeral nature of newspapers – they have a shelf-life of one day, hardly ever longer than that. This is encapsulated in the quasi-Biblical aphorism which Joyce inserted into the ‘Aeolus’ episode: ‘Sufficient for the day is the newspaper thereof’ – and also in the confusion over the horse ‘Throwaway’, which Bantam Lyons thinks Bloom has tipped to win the Ascot Gold Cup race because he told Lyons when he met him outside Sweny’s chemist shop in Lincoln Place that he was about to throw away his copy of the Freeman.

Joyce’s final sneer at the Freeman in Ulysses occurs in the ‘Circe’ episode, set in Dublin’s nighttown: the title of the newspaper and that of its weekly compendium edition, the Weekly Freeman, are transmogrified into the ‘Freeman’s Urinal and Weekly Arsewiper’. There was, however, one indignity which the Freeman was spared in Ulysses: when, in the ‘Calypso’ episode, early in the morning of 16 June 1904, Mr Bloom visits the privy behind his home in Eccles Street, he did not use the Freeman to wipe himself clean but instead relied on the popular English magazine, Titbits. I quote:

He felt heavy, full: then a gentle loosening of his bowels. He stood up, undoing the waistband of his trousers ...

A paper. He liked to read at stool. Hope no ape comes knocking just as I’m.

In the tabledrawer he found an old number of Titbits. He folded it under his armpit, went to the door and opened it ...

Asquat on the cuckstool he folded out his paper, turning its pages over on his bared knees. Something new and easy. No great hurry. Keep it a bit. Our prize titbit: Matcham’s Masterstroke. Written by Mr Philip

Beaufoy, Playgoers’ Club, London. Payment at the rate of one guinea a column has been made to the writer. Three and a half. Three pounds, three. Three pounds, thirteen and six.

Quietly he read, restraining himself, the first column and, yielding but resisting, began the second. Midway, his last resistance  yielding, he allowed his bowels to ease themselves quietly as he read ... He read on, seated calm above his own rising smell ...

He tore away half the prize story sharply and wiped himself with it. Then he girded up his trousers, braced and buttoned himself. He pulled back the jerky shaky door of the jakes and came forth from the gloom into the air.

What this passage shows is that Joyce was every bit as analytical about matters scatological as he was about history. In both instances, he understood the process of production. Of Ulysses we can truly say ‘All human life is there’ – the motto of the News of the World, now also a defunct newspaper like the Freeman’s Journal.

On Strand Road in Killiney, there is a row of very grand castellated, granite-faced houses which back on to Killiney beach. They were built around 1875 on sites originally occupied by summer huts for some of Dublin’s elite. Among the elite who had one of these was the family of Sir John Gray. Gray is remembered today – if he is remembered at all – because of his statue, which stands in O’Connell Street and commemorates his work as a member of Dublin corporation in bringing the Vartry water supply to the city. In addition, John Gray was MP for Kilkenny city from 1865 until his death in 1875 – and he was the owner of the Freeman’s Journal, Dublin’s foremost nationalist daily newspaper in the nineteenth century, which features prominently in Joyce’s Ulysses. The ‘Aeolus’ episode of the novel is set in the Freeman’s offices in North Prince’s Street, Dublin, adjacent to the GPO and near where the Gray statue is located. After Sir John Gray’s death, his widow owned one of the newly constructed castellated houses, which she named Vartry Lodge in honour of her husband’s work in bringing water to Dublin. It retains that name today. It was presumably built on the site of the family’s old summer hut.

The story I will share with you here dates from late September 1868, and Sir John Gray’s son, Edmund Dwyer Gray, was in residence in the summer hut. During a storm in Killiney Bay one evening, a schooner named the Blue Vein was wrecked – and young Gray, aged 22, swam out with a rope to the doomed craft, saving five lives. He was awarded the Tayleur Fund gold medal and the Royal National Lifeboat Institution’s silver medal for his bravery. Tayleur medals were awarded for gallantry in the Irish Sea and its environs by the committee that administered a fund set up to assist survivors of a vessel, called the Tayleur, lost in 1854 at Lambay Island, off the north Co. Dublin coast. The Tayleur was an emigrant ship bound for Australia from Liverpool, and many of those who did not survive and whose bodies were recovered from the sea are buried in a mass grave near the church on Lambay Island. 

But back to Edmund Dwyer Gray and his heroic deed: A young Englishwoman with an interesting pedigree happened to be visiting Dublin in September 1868 – and, by chance, witnessed Edmund’s great feat and was afterwards introduced to him. They were married in the following year, 1869. She was the daughter and namesake of the notable Victorian philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, celebrated as the ‘emigrants’ friend’ for her work on behalf of female emigrants to Australia. The elder Caroline was the wife of a British army officer, and she had settled with her husband in Sydney in 1838. Before long, she became aware of the pitiful plight of young girls newly arrived from England in search of a better life – many of whom, stranded and penniless, became prostitutes. She began helping these girls find shelter and jobs, and went on to set up an employment registry and temporary home for them in an old barracks in Sydney. By her efforts, thousands of girls were settled happily in New South Wales.

The Chisholms returned to England in 1845, and their daughter Caroline – the future wife of Edmund Dwyer Gray – was born there in 1848. Mrs Chisholm’s philanthropic work continued apace. She travelled throughout Britain and Ireland tracing relatives of former convicts and other settlers in Australia, and helping to reunite them by arranging for the relatives to go out to Australia. She became an enthusiastic advocate of Australian emigration as the best way of coping with over-population at home, and in 1849 launched the Family Colonisation Loan Society, which provided savings facilities for intending emigrants and then, after a certain amount had been saved, would lend them the balance of the money required to pay for their passage. She is so revered in Australia that she was depicted on their $5 banknote in issue between 1968 and 1991.

This extraordinary woman was caricatured by Charles Dickens as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House, probably his most critically acclaimed novel. Dickens knew her in London, and he portrays her unsympathetically as obsessed with good causes in far-away places – characterised by Dickens as ‘telescopic philanthropy’ – and, as a result, shamefully neglecting her person, her family and her household. At one point, Mrs Jellyby proclaims that ‘my public duties … [are] a favourite child to me’. It is an amazingly hostile portrait of Edmund Dwyer Gray’s future mother-in-law.

Edmund succeeded his father as proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal in 1875 and followed him into politics, becoming – from 1877 onwards – home rule MP successively for Tipperary county, Carlow county and the prestigious St Stephen’s Green division of Dublin. But for the advent of Parnell, he might have led the Irish Party at Westminster. He was lord mayor of Dublin in 1880, and he and his wife made the Mansion House a glittering social venue during his mayoralty. Gray died suddenly, aged 42, on 27 March 1888. After his death, his widow effectively controlled the Freeman newspaper for the next four years. The Parnell Split occurred during that period, ushering in a time of unprecedented volatility in Irish politics which had huge implications for the Freeman. The paper’s decline, which led ultimately to its closure in 1924, had its origins in the Split and its turbulent aftermath. Mrs Gray’s response to the challenge of steering the Freeman through the crisis was ham-fisted. Neither her bizarre family background, nor her marriage to an ambitious politician, had equipped her for the problems she had to face – but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that Mrs Gray sold off her interest in the Freeman in 1892.

The Grays, Edmund and Caroline, had four children – of whom the eldest, born in 1870, emigrated to Australia in 1894, two years after his family had disposed of the Freeman. He was also named Edmund Dwyer Gray. He eventually settled in Tasmania, where he became a journalist and politician of note. In 1928 he was elected to the Tasmanian parliament for the Labour Party; and he was treasurer and deputy premier of Tasmania from 1934 until his death in 1945, except for six months in 1939 when he served briefly as premier. When speaking in Hobart on 14 October 2017 at the unveiling of a monument honouring Irish convict women transported to Tasmania, President Higgins made a passing reference to the younger Edmund Dwyer Gray and to his successful career in Tasmania.

His mother, Caroline Gray (née Chisholm) – a fabulously wealthy woman after her husband’s death – did not remain a widow for long. She remarried in November 1891. Her second husband was a Captain Maurice O’Conor, of the Connaught Rangers and a scion of the Catholic gentry of Connacht. She was twelve years older than her new husband. They made their home in the late 1890s on Inisfale Island in Lough Allen, near Drumshanbo, Co. Leitrim – a property of the O’Conor family. Caroline passed the last thirty years of her life there in melancholy obscurity, afflicted by failing eyesight. She died in 1927.

It is a prosaic end to a love story that began in such dramatic circumstances in Killiney in 1868. Those circumstances were recalled in an article by a well-known Irish journalist John Augustus O’Shea that appeared in the Universe, the English Catholic newspaper, in 1888 and was reproduced in the Freeman’s Journal. O’Shea wrote with some flourish, as follows:

On the 25th of September, twenty years ago, the schooner Blue Vein was wrecked in Killiney Bay, and Gray swam through the hiss and surge of waters to the doomed craft with a rope, and was the means under God of rescuing five fellow creatures. For this he was rewarded with the Tayleur gold medal … but he also gained the affections of a daughter of Caroline Chisholm, the Emigrants’ Friend, who was a witness of his intrepidity.



Remember this story when next you go for a walk on lovely Killiney beach. The ghosts of Edmund Dwyer Gray and his wife Caroline may be hovering close by.

It is a great honour for me to chair An Post’s Philatelic Advisory Committee. What we, as a committee, try to do is to showcase the very best of Ireland and the Irish in recommending who or what should be noticed in a special way by a stamp or stamps – and by and large, I think we succeed in doing that.

Ireland is often referred to “The Land of Saints and Scholars”, and we have featured a number of saints in recent stamps – most notably, Our Lady of Fatima and St Kevin of Glendalough. There have been few scholars, however. And that is the reason why I particularly welcome this set of four stamps that we are launching here today commemorating the Carnegie Libraries in Ireland. Libraries are the foundation of all scholarship, where books, newspapers, photographs, prints and drawings – and now digital material too – are lovingly preserved for posterity. And they are preserved not only for use by the elite scholar labouring away in a university, in an ivory tower (so to speak), but for everyone with the curiosity to want to learn more about history, literature and a host of other things – or indeed just to enjoy the pleasure of reading and be enriched by it. Libraries are fundamentally democratic centres of learning, open to everyone – and free.

T W Lyster, the first director of the National Library of Ireland, wrote in 1903 that (and I quote) “in that wide world of the record of mankind which we call a Great Library all things, good and evil, fall into their true place, are seen in their true proportion. Thus keepers of libraries may with truth inscribe above their doors the words of the Governor of the city in the New Atlantis: ‘We maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor for any other commodity of matter, but only for God’s first creature, which was Light’." I love that thought: that the trade of a library is in Light, in the light that comes from scholarship and the pursuit of truth in scholarship – or, in other words, in ENLIGHTENMENT.

So it is right and proper to celebrate the place of libraries in our country, and throughout our country – and this set of stamps does that. It also recognises that at the roots of our public library network in Ireland are some 80 libraries which were funded by Andrew Carnegie between 1897 and 1913 – just a small part of his philanthropic efforts in the United States, Britain and Ireland. Carnegie was born in Scotland, emigrated to the US in 1848 at the age of 12, and rose – without the benefit of much formal education – from very humble origins to become the richest industrialist in America, surpassing in wealth even John D. Rockefeller. In the last decades of his life, he devoted himself to philanthropy – Carnegie Hall in New York City being perhaps his most famous project – and his contribution to Ireland was the libraries that we celebrate in these stamps. His philosophy in this regard was that “surplus wealth is a sacred trust which its possessor is bound to administer in his lifetime for the good of the community” – those were his own words, not mine. He died in 1919, one hundred years ago – and the centenary of his death provides us with the opportunity of celebrating the libraries which he gave to Ireland. He is buried in the gloriously-named Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in the town of Sleepy Hollow in New York state; if we must lie somewhere after we pass from this world, Sleepy Hollow sounds pretty heavenly to me.

A characteristic of the Carnegie libraries is that, apart from their contribution to scholarship and learning, they were invariably housed in beautiful buildings – architectural ornaments in the towns and cities in which they were located. It is appropriate that these institutions trading in Light should have buildings as least as grand and as imposing as the buildings of those who trade in gold, silver and such like – banks, big corporations etc. The stamps being launched today show four of the 80 buildings that comprise the Carnegie libraries in Ireland, and they are representative of the types of buildings that Carnegie built as libraries. I’m very glad to say that the exquisite drawings of these buildings that are featured on the stamps complement the excellent design of the buildings themselves. I would like to pay tribute to my colleagues on An Post’s Stamp Design Committee, under the chairmanship of Mick O’Dea RHA, for the wonderful work they have done on this issue – and on the work they do generally in translating our ideas for stamps into the beautiful objects that we see on our envelopes every day and which stamp-collectors all over the world greatly admire and covet. And, of course, the people on the ground in An Post who do all the hard work on the stamp programme also deserve our thanks, and our praise – Aileen Mooney and her team.

In relation to this particular issue, the illustrator of the library buildings – the artist who did the drawings – was Dorothy Smith, and I would like to congratulate her on her work. And a word of thanks also to Gillian Buckley who photographed the drawings for us and to Anne Brady, of Vermillion Design, for her work on the final design of the stamps.



Just one final word: My committee is always open to suggestions about suitable subjects for stamps. If you have any thoughts about this, please let us know by writing to An Post. I guarantee that we will consider every suggestion. But the production of a stamp takes quite a long time, so you need to get your suggestions in early – at least eighteen months before the year in which your stamp would appropriately appear.

The killing of Lord Frederick Cavendish by the Invincibles in the Phoenix Park in May 1882 was the first assassination of a major figure in British politics that had occurred within the then United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland since Spencer Percival was shot dead in the lobby of the House of Commons in 1812. Assassination has not been a significant feature of British political life in the past two hundred years – and it is noteworthy that all instances of it, with just three exceptions, are manifestations of Irish unrest. Of the three exceptions, two were at a significant remove from Britain and Ireland. One was the murder of Lord Mayo, Viceroy of India, by a disgruntled convict in India in 1872; the other was the killing of Lord Moyne, a member of the Guinness family, by Jewish terrorists in Cairo in 1944. The third exception was Percival – who is the only British prime minister to have been assassinated, and it appears that his killing was the result of a largely personal grievance. It is the only truly ‘home grown’ political assassination in recent British history, with no Irish or other non-British aspect. In contrast, four US presidents have been assassinated – Lincoln, Garfield, McKinley and Kennedy – and thirteen others were the intended victims of credible assassins, though Ronald Reagan was the only serving US president actually to have been injured in an unsuccessful assassination attempt.

Of course, another British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, was the target of an attempted assassination – the Brighton hotel bombing in 1984. That bomb killed Sir Anthony Berry, deputy chief whip in Thatcher’s government – and he was one of four MPs killed by the IRA during the recent Northern Ireland ‘troubles’, the others being two Conservative MPs close to Thatcher – Airey Neave in 1979, and Ian Gow in 1990 – and also Robert Bradford, the unionist MP for South Belfast, who died in 1981. To that list of victims of political assassination linked to the recent ‘troubles’ must be added the names of Christopher Ewart-Biggs, the British ambassador to Ireland blown up by a car bomb in 1976, and Lord Mountbatten, murdered in Sligo in 1979. There was also an earlier, unsuccessful attempt by the IRA in 1973 on the life of the Conservative MP Sir Hugh Fraser – then still married to the historian, Lady Antonia Fraser – and the car bomb that was intended to kill him very nearly killed Caroline Kennedy, daughter of John F. Kennedy, who was in London at the time working in Sotheby’s and lodging with the Frazers, and she was due to be dropped off at her work by Sir Hugh Frazer on his way to the House of Commons.

Between the death of Spencer Percival and the attempt on the life of Hugh Fraser in 1973, there were just three British political assassinations. In reverse chronological order, these were: the aforementioned assassination of Lord Moyne in Cairo in 1944; the killing of Sir Henry Wilson MP by the IRA in 1922 shortly after he had been appointed security advisor to the new government of Northern Ireland; and, finally, the murder of the man about whom I will speak this morning, Lord Frederick Cavendish. That took place little more than nine months after the shooting of President Garfield in the United States by a disappointed office-seeker, though (as far as I know) nobody has ever suggested that Garfield’s killing might have inspired the Invincibles to adopt assassination as a political weapon – but I suppose it is possible, especially given the American antecedents of the Fenian movement.

I mention these instances of political assassination in order to place the killing of Lord Frederick Cavendish in its proper context, to show the extent to which it was an aberration in British political life – and all the more shocking for that. As I have said, nothing like it had happened since the death of Spencer Percival seventy years earlier – and, in contrast to Percival’s killing, it was politically motivated (though, as the evidence given at the trial of the Invincibles clearly shows, Cavendish was not the intended target). The murder was, in short, very foreign to British traditions, and it was particularly gruesome – since long surgical knives were the assassins’ chosen instruments. This aspect appealed greatly to the popular press’ instinct for sensationalism, which was then coming to the fore. The outrage that the killing caused amongst the political elite in Britain and the horror which it engendered in the British public generally were both writ large within no. 10 Downing Street – because Cavendish had married in 1864 Mrs. Gladstone’s favourite niece, Lucy Lyttelton, and the young couple were part of the prime minister’s inner family circle. Lucy was the daughter of the fourth Lord Lyttelton and his first wife, Mary (née Glynne), a sister of Mrs. Gladstone – and she was taken under Mrs Gladstone’s wing, so to speak, when her mother died in 1857. The couple made their home at Holker Hall, a Cavendish house at Cark-in-Cartmel, Cumbria. Portraits of both of them by Sir William Richmond hang there today, and there is a monumental statue of Lord Frederick nearby in Barrow- in-Furness.

Lord Frederick Charles Cavendish was born on 30 November 1836, the second son of the seventh duke of Devonshire. So he was nearly 46 when he died, almost the same age as JFK at the time of his assassination. His elder brother was the marquis of Hartington who would later split with Gladstone over Home Rule for Ireland in 1886 and, after voting against the first Home Rule Bill, he became leader of the Liberal Unionists in parliament – and he declined to become prime minster on no less than three occasions. To what extent Hartington’s opposition to Home Rule was influenced by the murder of his brother is a matter for speculation – though Lucy Cavendish was later a supporter of Home Rule despite the sorrow that she had suffered at the hands of Irishmen.

In any event, Lord Frederick was educated at home by private tutors and at Trinity College, Cambridge – where he took a BA in 1858. From 1859 to 1864 he was private secretary to Lord Granville, leader of the Liberal Party in the House of Lords – and then, from 1865 until his death in 1882, Liberal MP for north-west Yorkshire. Gladstone was most assiduous in advancing his career: he became private secretary to Gladstone in 1872 during Gladstone’s first administration, and he served as a lord of the treasury from August 1873 until Gladstone’s government resigned in February 1874. When the Liberals returned to power in 1880, he was appointed financial secretary to the treasury. As Gladstone was combining the office of chancellor of the exchequer with that of prime minister, it fell to Cavendish as financial secretary to do the routine work of the chancellor.

When W.E. Forster quit as chief secretary for Ireland in May 1882 in protest at the so-called ‘Kilmainham treaty’, Cavendish succeeded him – but, unlike Forster, without a seat in the cabinet. Gladstone intended that the ‘treaty’ should inaugurate a policy of conciliation in Ireland, and his reason for appointing Cavendish was that the latter had, while at the treasury, drawn up a new land purchase scheme for Ireland – he was thought, therefore, to know something about Ireland and to be in favour of conciliation. His appointment, however, was greeted with incredulity – even derision. Cavendish had a speech impediment, and that seriously compromised his standing and effectiveness as a politician. But for his Cavendish name and the Gladstone connection, it is unlikely that he would ever have held office. Nevertheless, he was regarded as amiable, high-minded and industrious.

I don’t need to tell this audience that on his very first day in Dublin as chief secretary (6 May 1882), Cavendish was assassinated near the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park by the Irish National Invincibles, an extremist Fenian society – a splinter group of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, who may also have had links with the Land League, perhaps through the League’s treasurer, Patrick Egan. The details are well-known: Cavendish knew Dublin reasonably well and, having met with officials in Dublin Castle immediately after his arrival in Dublin, he decided to walk to the Chief Secretary’s Lodge in the Phoenix Park, now the residence of the American ambassador. As he was walking along Chesterfield Avenue, a cab pulled up behind him and the undersecretary, Thomas Burke – the most senior Irish civil servant – got out and joined him. They walked amiably onwards, but were then set upon by the Invincibles just opposite the Viceregal Lodge and were both killed. It is accepted that Burke, not Cavendish, was the Invincibles’ intended target. They had originally planned to assassinate Cavendish’s predecessor as chief secretary, W.E. Forster, but after Forster’s resignation they decided to kill Burke instead. On 5 May, the day before the actual assassinations, they had waited for Burke in the Phoenix Park but missed him. They returned the following day to carry out their grim task, and – unfortunately for Cavendish – he happened to be in Burke’s company on that occasion and died simply because he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. It is unlikely that the Invincibles knew who the man was who was with Burke. They killed him because he tried to defend his colleague.

Burke is himself an interesting figure, a scion of the Catholic landed gentry of county Galway and a grand-nephew of Cardinal Wiseman, the first Archbishop of Westminster. He had served in the office of the chief secretary in Dublin Castle since 1847, and was appointed under secretary in 1869. He was a conscientious and hardworking official, and W.E. Forster – Cavendish’s predecessor – said of him that he was ‘the most efficient permanent official I ever came across, and my only fear about him is that he will literally work himself to death’. He was closely identified with and involved in the coercion policies espoused by Forster in response to the first Land War from 1879 onwards, and no doubt this explains why the Invincibles targeted him for assassination. It is notable that, to quote from James Quinn’s entry on Burke in the Dictionary of Irish biography.

Although Irish national leaders were quick to denounce what had happened, some of their statements avoided mentioning Burke or did not condemn his killing in quite the same unequivocal terms as that of Cavendish whose appointment had generally been welcomed in Ireland.

This may confirm that some Land League elements were in cahoots with the Invincibles – and that those convicted of the murder of Cavendish and Burke were only foot soldiers, behind whom were more important, shadowy figures who masterminded and financed the gruesome deed. The chief suspect is Patrick Egan, treasurer of the Land League, who strongly disapproved of the more moderate approach towards land agitation which the ‘Kilmainham Treaty’ presaged. He mysteriously disappeared after the murders – first to Paris, but ultimately to the United States. Donal McCracken, in his recent biography of the famous Inspector Mallon of the Dublin Metropolitan Police, suggests that Mallon, unable to get hard evidence against Egan, may have connived in his flight to safety in return for information about the murders. Such pragmatism would not have been untypical of Mallon. In fact, the murders of Burke and Cavendish brought Mallon his greatest success: he was fêted for securing the convictions of the Invincibles. However, Cavendish and Burke had been given little or no police protection, a lapse for which Mallon was partly to blame. He was well aware before the murders of the threat posed by the Invincibles – and indeed was due to meet an informer in their ranks on the very evening of the murders – but he had not yet discovered their plans at that time.

I mentioned earlier that Cavendish’s widow had supported home rule for Ireland – and she was also identified with a number of other good causes, notably in the field of education. Lucy Cavendish College, Cambridge, is named after her. Her marriage to Lord Frederick was without children, and her lonely widowhood lasted forty-three years – she died in 1925. She showed extraordinary forbearance and generosity in her misfortune. Thus, she wrote to Earl Spencer, lord lieutenant of Ireland, immediately after her husband’s death that she ‘could give up even him if his death were to work good to his fellow-men’. Such benevolent thoughts were also her first thoughts when she heard of her husband’s death. She was in London – and in her Diary, published posthumously in1927, she records that Gladstone visited her immediately after he learned of her husband’s death. She writes as follows:

I saw his [Gladstone’s] face, pale, sorrow-stricken, but like a prophet’s in its look of faith and strength. He came up and almost took me in his arms, and his first words were: ‘Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do’. Then he said to me: ‘Be assured it will not be in vain’, and across all my agony there fell a bright ray of hope, and I saw in a vision Ireland at peace, and my darling’s life-blood accepted as a sacrifice for Christ’s sake to help to bring this to pass.

Moreover, Lucy Cavendish sent a small crucifix to the first of the men executed for the murders of her husband and Burke. The story was told, albeit in a garbled version, by her nephew, George Lyttelton, in one of his remarkable letters to his former pupil, the publisher Rupert Hart-Davis – and I quote:

My aunt Lucy (Lady Frederick Cavendish)’s husband was murdered in the Phoenix Park, Dublin, in 1882, and it broke her heart. She was very religious and quite enchanting, so full of humour and understanding; we children all loved her. Well, the murderers were rounded up and several put to death. The ring-leader Casey, nicknamed ‘Skin-the-goat’, was to be hanged on a certain day, and the evening before Aunt Lucy sent his wife the little gold crucifix she always wore, as a sign of forgiveness – and other things. Of course, she never told anyone, but Mrs C probably did. Anyway, old George Trevelyan tells it in his Life of Macauley, and says it is the most beautiful human action he ever heard of. That makes me cry whenever (very rarely) I have told it. It could be misunderstood, but Aunt Lucy was the most entirely genuine person that ever lived.

Some of the details here are wrong, but there is no doubt that this most touching story is essentially true. Trevelyan, whose life of Macauley is mentioned by George Lyttelton, was, in fact, Lord Frederick Cavendish’s successor as chief secretary for Ireland – so he is an authoritative source; and, in addition, Tim Healy confirms the substance of the story in his Letters and leaders of my day. Curiously, Ronan Fanning in his new book, Fatal Path, records that in 1922 the then colonial secretary, the ninth duke of Devonshire – a nephew of Lord Frederick Cavendish – supported Healy’s appointment as governor general of the new Irish Free State because he said Healy put flowers on the grave of his uncle every year on the anniversary of his assassination. The tragedy of Cavendish’s death threw a long shadow in certain influential circles in England.

To conclude: Lord Frederick Cavendish’s funeral was held on 11 May 1882. It was a huge affair, reputedly attended by 30,000 people, including 300 MPs – the crowd no doubt swelled much beyond what it would otherwise have been as a gesture of protest at his violent death. He is buried in his family’s plot in Edensor churchyard, near Chatsworth house, the principal seat of the dukes of Devonshire. Ironically, next to his grave is the grave of Kathleen Kennedy, sister of John F. Kennedy – the first U.S. President of Irish Catholic descent. In 1944 she had married William, marquis of Hartington, son of the tenth duke – and William, had he not been killed in the Second World War, would in time have succeeded to the dukedom. She died in a plane crash in 1948. A tablet on her grave records that President Kennedy visited her grave on 29 June 1963, just after his trip to Ireland and shortly before his own assassination. It is fortuitous that Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline, should have so narrowly escaped being, like Lord Frederick Cavendish, an unintended victim of Irish terrorism.

We are gathered on Australia Day, and it is indeed very appropriate to launch this book on this day.  For Australia Day commemorates the establishment of the first European settlement in Australia, with the arrival of the First Fleet at Sidney Cove on 26 January 1788.  And this book is about that remarkable woman Caroline Chisholm who devoted her life to improving the lot of people of European origin in the colonies – especially women who, newly arrived in search of a better life, often found themselves penniless and stranded in a pitiful situation.  So, at this book launch today, we mark two contrasting aspects of the colonial experience: on the one hand, the glory and adventure of discovering new worlds; on the other, the harsh reality of the conditions that some of the early settlers had to endure.

You may well ask why I, an Irishman who has never been to Australia, should have been invited to speak on this occasion.  Was it to inject a boringly predictable anti-colonial note?   Not at all.  There are, in fact, two good reasons why I am here.  The first is because Ireland features in Mrs Chisholm’s life and work.  She made a very well-publicised visit to Cork and Dublin in 1852 to encourage Irish emigration to Australia, and this is covered in Carole Walker’s book.  Moreover, her work for female immigrants in Australia included the Irish, and she is honoured for this in a tableau which is part of a permanent exhibition ‘The Queenstown Story’ at the Cobh Heritage Centre in Co. Cork.  Cobh, formerly known as Queenstown, was the main port from which ships left Ireland for far-distant destinations – the United States and Australia – and it is perhaps best known as the last port of call of the Titanic.

There was, however, an even stronger connection with Ireland.  Mrs Chisholm had a daughter, also named Caroline, who married in 1869 a young Irishman from a prominent and wealthy Dublin family who would later become a significant political figure in Ireland and at Westminster.  He was Edmund Dwyer Gray, a constitutional nationalist, MP for various Irish constituencies from 1877 until his death at the early age of 42 in 1888.  Gray inherited from his father the main nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin, the Freeman’s Journal – and much of his political influence derived from the ownership of that paper.  When he died, his wife effectively controlled the paper for the following four years – disastrously for the future of the paper, but that’s another story and this is neither the time nor the place to tell it.  She remarried – another Irishman, twelve years her junior – and she lived on in Ireland until her death in 1927, at the age of 79.

The eldest son of the younger Caroline – in other words, Mrs Chisholm’s grandson – was also named Edmund Dwyer Gray, like his father.  He was born in Dublin in 1870, emigrated to Australia in 1894 and eventually settled in Tasmania – where he became a successful politician and served as premier for a brief period in 1939, one hundred and one years after Mrs Chisholm had first arrived in Australia.

These Irish links are important, but the other reason why I am speaking here today is equally important – and that is because of the author of this book, Carole Walker.  I had been working on the history of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper, and so had an interest in the daughter of Caroline Chisholm.  I learned of Dr Walker’s interest in the mother and made contact with her – and that was the start of a fruitful collaboration on our respective projects which, I am happy to say, has grown into friendship.  I am particularly grateful to Carole Walker for alerting me to a photograph of the younger Caroline in the Rathbone papers in the library of the University of Liverpool which I was able to reproduce in an article that I published about Mrs Chisholm’s daughter.

Carole Walker is that rare thing – a generous scholar, who is willing to share her research and her insights.  She is also a woman of considerable achievement herself – who returned to further education after raising her family and obtained a BA in English Literature at Loughborough University and afterwards a Master’s degree in Victorian Studies at Leicester University, before embarking on a doctorate on the life and work of Caroline Chisholm.  This book is the by-product of her doctoral thesis.  It is, by my reckoning, the fourth modern biography of Caroline Chisholm – and all of them are written by women.  What is it about this courageous, feisty woman that so appeals to other women?  Maybe we get some insight into her appeal when we remember that the great Sir George Gibbs, governor of New South Wales from 1838 to 1846, wrote after meeting Mrs Chisholm that he was astonished to find that, and I quote,  she ‘thought her reason, and experience too, to be worth as much as mine’.

In any event, what distinguishes Carole Walker’s work from the earlier biographies is the depth of its scholarship, its objectivity and its balanced conclusions.  While undoubtedly written in admiration of its subject, the book nevertheless eschews hagiography and is instead concerned to reveal the truth, or at least ‘the best obtainable version of the truth’ (to quote Woodward and Bernstein, the Watergate journalists).  It seeks to understand and to explain, not just to celebrate.  And that is how it should be.   

There is no place for hagiography in the study of history – not even when someone earns the formal title of saint, and let us not forget that Mrs Chisholm may some day be so recognised by the Catholic Church.  Figures in the past were human, just like us – flesh and blood, each a mixture of the good and the not-so-good, each with talents and shortcomings, each with failures as well as achievements.  We do nobody any favours by enlarging them beyond what they were in life, by turning them retrospectively into plaster saints.  Our heroes are actually more attractive, and their lives have more meaning for us, when we pay them the compliment of presenting them as real human beings, in all their complexity.  Carole Walker has done this with Caroline Chisholm.  She herself outlined her approach when she wrote the following in the introduction to her book: ‘By portraying Caroline in her ordinariness, I hope I show Caroline’s achievements for what they are, something quite extraordinary.’

Launching any book is much less dramatic than launching a ship: there is no bottle of champagne to be broken against the hull of A Saviour of Living Cargos.  This book, however, inevitably brings to mind the great sailing ships of old.  It records the life of a remarkable human being who made a unique contribution to the history of Australian emigration in the nineteenth century – a phenomenon which was, of course, only possible because of those ships.  Anyone who has read David Copperfield will remember the wonderful passage towards the end describing the departure of the ship that will bring Mr. Macawber and others to Australia.  Dickens captured there the hope and the promise, as well as the sadness, of emigration.  Caroline Chisholm helped thousands of emigrants to realise that hope and that promise.  She deserves this fine biography, and it gives me great pleasure to launch it today in this splendid school dedicated to her memory.

G.K. Chesterton once said that newspapers were ‘the largest work ever published anonymously since the great Christian cathedrals’.  This anonymity has huge implications for historians using newspapers as a source for their research.  Undoubtedly, newspapers are valuable sources of information.  However, there are obvious dangers in relying on any newspaper – or, indeed, periodical – without some background knowledge of the publication in question, in particular its political bias and the people who controlled it.  That is why research on the history of the press is so important – apart altogether from its inherent interest.  It was for the purpose of fostering such research that our Newspaper and Periodical History Forum was founded just two years ago.  The new Dictionary of Irish Biography has made a significant contribution to lifting the veil of anonymity that has shrouded the history of Irish newspapers, and what I would like to do this afternoon is to illustrate this by reference to the Freeman’s Journal, the newspaper which has been my long-time research interest.

The Freeman’s Journal was published in Dublin continuously for 161 years, from 1763 to 1924.  In its early years, it was associated with the ‘patriot’ opposition in the Irish parliament.  There was then a brief interlude when it had a dubious connection with Dublin Castle – under the editorship and later proprietorship of Francis Higgins (known as the ‘Sham Squire’), between 1784 and 1802.  It would later become the foremost nationalist daily newspaper in Ireland in the nineteenth century, and eventually (from the 1880s onwards) the unofficial organ of the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster.  Its decline and fall had its origins in the Parnell spilt, and parallels the slow decline and fall of its political masters in the Irish party.  After the 1918 General Election and the collapse of the Irish party, it was saved – albeit for a brief period – by a prominent Dublin businessman, Martin Fitzgerald.  Under Fitzgerald, it became the unofficial organ of the Free State government – a political role similar to that it had had with the Irish party.

The central position that the Freeman occupied in Irish society for most of its long life is reflected in the Dictionary of Irish Biography.  The search mechanism on the DIB website throws up 340 entries that contain a reference to the Freeman.  That’s over 3¾ per cent of the total.  Some are merely references to the newspaper in the bibliographical paragraph at the foot of the entries, and it seems to me that the option of excluding the bibliographies from a word-search would be a worthwhile modification to the website, enhancing the ease with which scholars can find entries relevant to their field of study.

A word-search will, by default, list the required entries in alphabetical order – by surname of the subjects.  This is not particularly helpful if, for example, you are working on the Freeman as a source for, say, the 1850s, and wish to find out something about the proprietors and/or leading journalists in that decade.  However, help is at hand – for you can re-sort the list under a number of criteria.  The most useful is, I think, the date of death of the subjects.  This will bring together somewhere on the list most of the people that you seek – since it is likely that they were at the peak of their careers, or not long passed it, when they died. 

Another criterion on offer is ‘relevance’.  This may seem at first glance the best way of arranging the search results, but I do not find it so.  The first page of 25 entries on the Freeman’s Journal listed by ‘relevance’ includes nobody of top-rank importance except Martin Fitzgerald, the last owner. Francis Higgins, the Sham Squire, appears on the second page.  You have to scroll down to the fifth page to find Sir John Gray (proprietor from 1841 to 1875) and Thomas Sexton (chairman from 1893 to 1912).  Arguably the pre-eminent figure in the history of the Freeman is Edmund Dwyer Gray, Sir John Gray’s son (proprietor from 1875 to 1888), and he does not emerge on the list sorted by ‘relevance’ until page 10 (out of a total of 14 pages).  I don’t know how ‘relevance’ has been established for the purpose of ordering the entries, but suffice it to say that it isn’t very effective for researching the Freeman’s Journal – the ‘death date’ criterion is a much handier search tool.

But this is a minor quibble, and the information to be found in the DIB about the Freeman at any point in its 161 years of publication is remarkably comprehensive – and in many cases represents the fruit of original research not previously published.  The entries in question are too numerous for me to review fully in the time remaining to me this afternoon, but let me draw your attention to the highlights.

Three generations of the Gray family were associated with the Freeman.  Sir John Gray, who purchased the paper in 1841 and whose statue is in O’Connell Street, Dublin, has a fine entry contributed by Christopher Woods – while Fergus Sinclair has written about Sir John’s brother, Moses Wilson Gray, also associated with the Freeman in the 1840s before emigrating to Australia and later New Zealand.  I have written about Sir John Gray’s son, Edmund Dwyer Gray – and about Edmund’s remarkable wife, Caroline, who was a daughter of the English philanthropist, Caroline Chisholm, caricatured by Charles Dickens as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House.  Their son, also Edmund Dwyer Gray, is the subject of an entry by Richard P. Davis, a former professor of history in Hobart, Tasmania – appropriately so, for ‘Young Gray’, as he was known in Dublin, emigrated to Australia after his family lost control of the Freeman and settled in Tasmania where he became a successful politician, serving briefly as premier in 1939. 

James Joyce has left us a very harsh assessment of the Grays: in his story ‘Grace’ in Dubliners, when one of the characters recalls the elder Edmund Dwyer Gray ‘blathering away’ at the unveiling of his father’s statue, another comments that ‘none of the Grays was any good’.  However, it was the Grays who made the Freeman’s Journal an important newspaper.  The repeal in the 1850s of the oppressive duty on advertisements and on the newspapers themselves opened the way for a great expansion in the newspaper market, and Sir John Gray exploited this opportunity – growing the circulation of the Freeman from between 2,000 and 3,000 copies per day to approximately 10,000.  Under his son, Edmund Dwyer Gray, the Freeman’s production capacity was further increased, its circulation grew threefold – to 30,000 copies per day – and it became extremely profitable.  So successful was it that in 1887 – the year before he died – Edmund converted the Freeman into a public company, while retaining control for himself.  William O’Brien MP – who first came to the fore as the Freeman’s star reporter in the 1870s – wrote of Edmund Dwyer Gray that he was ‘the most enterprising newspaperman Ireland ever produced’.

O’Brien himself has, as you would expect, a lengthy entry in the DIB – a very good one, by Philip Bull.  Its focus is (correctly) on O’Brien’s political career, and there is little information about his time with the Freeman or his many later ventures in journalism.

For the Freeman’s early years, before the advent of the Gray family, there are entries on the first editor, Henry Brooke, by Seán P. Donlon; on Francis Higgins (the ‘Sham Squire’), by Christopher Woods; on his successor as owner of the Freeman, Philip Whitfield Harvey, by Bridget Hourican; and on the next owner, Henry Grattan, a son of the parliamentarian, by Daniel Beaumont – all highly competent pieces on essentially obscure people.  The owner between Grattan and Sir John Gray, Patrick Lavelle, is unfortunately missing – but much information can be found about him in the entry for his nephew and namesake, Fr. Patrick Lavelle, a radical advocate of Tenant Right in the 1850s and ’60s, again written by Christopher Woods.  Of the journalists working on the Freeman in this period, there are excellent entries on Mathew Carey by Johanna Archbold and Sylvie Kleinman, and on Michael Staunton by Bridget Hourican.

I have been responsible for many of the entries relating to the Freeman in the period after the Grays, and those of most value to the general historian are, I think, my entries on Thomas Sexton and Martin Fitzgerald – both persons I have mentioned already.  I have also written about the last two editors, William Henry Brayden (editor from 1892 to 1916) and Patrick Hooper (editor from 1916 to 1924).  Brayden was replaced as editor for policy reasons after the 1916 Rising – in the course of which the Freeman’s premises beside the GPO were completely destroyed.  Brayden’s predecessor but one, Edward Byrne (editor from 1884 to 1891), is the subject of another fine entry by Christopher Woods.  The man who served as editor for just a few months between Byrne and Brayden, William J. McDowell, does not merit an entry of his own – but much valuable information about him can be found in a fascinating entry on his granddaughter, Kay McDowell, a trade union activist, written by Lawrence William White.  White, however, does not tell us that William was also the great-grandfather of Michael McDowell, the former leader of the PDs.   

Freeman people other than journalists and proprietors are also represented in the DIB, notably the printer J.P. Nannetti, who was also a local politician and Lord Mayor of Dublin from 1906 to 1908 – his entry is by Marie Coleman.  The famous late nineteenth-century cartoonist John Fergus O’Hea is profiled by Carmel Doyle. 

When the last edition of the Freeman’s Journal appeared on 19 December 1924, Dublin Opinion magazine commented:  ‘The Freeman is dead.  Bad circulation.’  A nice pun, but (of course) not the whole story.  The message I want to leave with you this afternoon is that the whole story of the Freeman’s rise and fall can be reconstructed by judicious browsing in the DIB – and I daresay that the same is true for many of the other influential newspapers that historians constantly use as source material.  Use them at your peril if you don’t first check out their credentials in the DIB!

Thank you, Ceann Comhairle, for those words – and thank you for your presence here today. And, since I have to chair the proceedings for the rest of day, thank you also for your advice earlier on how to control an unruly assembly. Let’s hope this one is not going to be too unruly.

We have a distinguished panel of speakers, and I want – first of all – to pay tribute to our host, Murt O’Sullivan, for putting together this latest in a series of seminars that he has organised entirely on his own initiative to mark the decade of commemorations. I can think of few other people who, when he puts out a call for papers, can secure the services, not only of the Ceann Comhairle, but also of two former Taosigh – 50% of the cohort of living former Taoisigh. It is a remarkable achievement. I am very happy to be associated with him in this endeavour and to have been asked to chair the seminar today. For those of you who don’t know me, my name is Felix Larkin – now working as a historian, but in a previous life (as a public servant) I have had the pleasure and good fortune of working for both John Bruton and Bertie Ahern when they were Ministers for Finance.

Our topic today – the 1918 general election – is something which, I think, we can commemorate without reservation. We have become accustomed to celebrating the 1916 Rising as the foundational event of the independent Irish state, but some of us are uncomfortable with that since there was no popular mandate for the Rising. In fact, it was deplored by the vast majority of the Irish people when it occurred. It is, therefore, far more appropriate to date the origin of our democratic state to the 1918 general election and the meeting of the First Dáil in January 1919 – orderly political events reflecting the will of the people, not wanton violence disrespecting public opinion. And let us not forget that, in contrast to 1916, the violence of the Irish War of Independence derived at least a veneer of legitimacy from the mandate for independence given by the 1918 general election and from being prosecuted, at least nominally, under the authority of Dáil Éireann.

So today, in commemorating the 1918 general election, we celebrate our democracy – and it is right and proper that we should do this. Our first two speakers are outstanding sons of that democracy – the two former Taoisigh who are with us today, John Bruton and Bertie Ahern.

It is a pleasure and a great honour for me to speak at the launch of Michael Pegum’s book this evening. We Irish do book launches very well. They hardly ever happen in Britain and never in America, but they are significant events in the Irish cultural and social calendar. Indeed, I often say – and only half in jest – that, without book launches, I wouldn’t really have a social life. And there is one rule for those who attend book launches, and that is that you must buy the book. That’s why you’re being given all the free wine, canapés, etc. And this is a book well worth buying.

It is a remarkable book, the product of over a decade of careful research and writing. It is a book about heroes, and it is itself a heroic piece of work – for which no words of praise are good enough. But the heroine of the book is Michael’s wife, Colette, who has had to live with him and his pet project for all those years and who has travelled the world with him in search of military graves, war memorials, battle-fields and God knows what else in connection with the research for this book.

Reading the book, you get very close to the experience of war through the detailed and intimate accounts which Michael has given us of the lives of the men about whom he writes – all members of our antecedent Clubs, the Kildare Street Club and the Dublin University Club. By way of analogy, I remember many years ago when I first visited the Vietnam War memorial in Washington DC, the famous black wall on the Mall in Washington, I was so moved that I wanted to identify more closely with the soldiers who are commemorated there – most of them almost exact contemporaries of mine – and so I went to the index, looked up my own surname and found that there were four soldiers listed with the same surname. I picked the one closest in age to me, and then found his name cut into the wall and paid silent homage to him. I think the readers of this book will find lives that similarly resonate with their own for various reasons, and will say: ‘there, but for the grace of God, go I’.

The person in the book who most resonates with me was a member of the University Club, Captain Frank Browning, of the Irish Rugby Football Union Volunteer Corps, one of the so-called ‘pals’ units formed to encourage recruitment in the First World War by enlisting men from a particular district or with some other common bond and keeping them together. Most of the Dublin ‘pals’ were sent to the Dardanelles in 1915 and very many died there – but not Frank Browning. He was too old, 46 in 1914. Instead, he was posted to the Volunteer Training Corps here in Dublin – the ‘Georgius Rex’ or, as they were irreverently known, the ‘Gorgeous Wrecks’. Frank Browning was killed in Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 when rebels under the command of Éamon de Valera in Boland’s Bakery opened fire on the unarmed Volunteer Corps returning to Beggar’s Bush Barracks after spending the day on a training exercise in the Dublin mountains. In fairness, the rebels probably didn’t know they were unarmed.



Now I have read a lot of books about 1916, but I know of no more detailed or more authoritative description of this little-known encounter than the one that I read in Michael’s book. And I have no doubt his descriptions of other battles, great and small, are equally detailed and authoritative. And the forty-seven individual lives surveyed here have been located very skilfully for us in the general history of the First and Second World Wars by means of concise but well-judged chapters setting out the progress of the two wars year-by-year. So, as I have said, this book is a remarkable achievement. I commend Michael on it and I thank him, on your behalf as fellow members of this Club, for all his great work in bringing back to life the memory of our ‘fallen members’.

I am delighted to have been asked to chair this seminar today, and for this reason:  In the past few months, we have commemorated – and some have celebrated – the centenary of the Easter Rising and also the centenary of the Battle of the Somme. And most of us would agree, I think, that these events were better organised and were of a much better character than we might have expected. But there was a gap in the historical landscape that was presented to us this year – a gap which John Bruton tried to close, though without success. That gap arose from the failure to give due recognition to the Irish parliamentary tradition and to its contribution to the achievement of an independent Irish state and to shaping the political culture of the state.

In fact, that tradition was singled out for quite extraordinary disrespect in the curious incident of the banners on the facade of the Bank of Ireland building in College Green. These banners were a minimalist attempt to commemorate at the home of the pre-1801 Irish parliament some heroes of the parliamentary tradition – Henry Grattan, O’Connell, Parnell and John Redmond – but the Sinn Féin members of Dublin City Council led a chorus of complaints about the banners on the grounds of, in the words of the Irish Times, ‘their seeming inappropriateness in the context of the 1916 centenary’. The Sinn Féin protests were supported by a motley crew of councillors from Fianna Fáil, the Anti-Austerity Alliance-People before Profit and Independents, and the banners were removed immediately after the matter was considered at a meeting of the Council.

At the Parnell Summer School in August this year, I tackled Eoin Ó Broin, the Sinn Féin TD, about this mean-spirited effort by his party to denigrate what was the majority tradition in Irish nationalist politics throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and his response was that three of the four individuals were not around in 1916 and so were not relevant to the history of 1916. I feel pretty sure he would not have taken that view if the banners had featured Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, James Stephens and O’Donovan Rossa.

So I think it is timely that we should today remember the ‘forgotten patriots’ of the Irish parliamentary tradition, and in that spirit I welcome you all here today – and have great pleasure in introducing our four speakers.

This paper is a report on work-in-progress on a project to analyse the editorials in the Freeman’s Journal in the years 1916 to 1918, and I should begin by explaining why these editorials are of interest to historians – for that may not be self-evident. After all, the Freeman was not at that time the foremost Irish daily newspaper. The Irish Independent, the Freeman’s main nationalist competitor, enjoyed a circulation many times that of the Freeman – due in part to being half the price of the Freeman, but also due to its more popular style of journalism. Moreover, while the circulation of the Irish Times stood at about the same level as that of the Freeman, the former was the more prestigious newspaper by virtue of its ‘quality’ readership in the upper strata of Irish society. Nor at that time did the Freeman exercise much influence over public opinion, unlike in certain earlier phases of its long history. In fact, one of the more remarkable phenomena of the 1916-18 period is that, as the late Professor F.X. Martin has noted, the Irish press generally – though united in opposition to Sinn Féin (if in nothing else) – found itself impotent to ‘stem the rising tide of feeling in favour of the rebels’. 

So, what is the significance of the Freeman for historians of this period? The answer lies in the fact that – to invert Tim Pat Coogan’s phrase – newspapers at that time saw their role not as ‘stimulators of the mind’, but rather as ‘retailers of received prejudices’. The Freeman was, until after the general election of December 1918, the semi-official organ of the Irish Party at Westminster. By 1916, it had become – to quote an anonymous memorandum in the Redmond papers – ‘a sort of political bulletin, circulating amongst already staunch friends of the Party, and bringing them information and arguments with which they supported the movement and [its] policy’. The editorial columns of the Freeman were known to reflect the views of the party leadership – in particular, those of John Dillon. Thus, by examining their contents from April 1916, the month of the Easter Rising, through December 1918, one can trace the response of the Irish Party to the sequence of events that culminated in its downfall. In effect, the Freeman’s editorials enable us to view the rise of Sinn Féin, and the reasons for it, through the eyes of what it displaced.

The Freeman’s editorial comment over this period falls into six phases, as follows: 

The 1916 Rising and its immediate aftermath (May 1916 – July 1916);
Marking time (July 1916 – November 1916);
Between the devil and the deep sea (December 1916 – October 1917);
The rally of constitutionalism (October 1917 – April 1918);
Conscription (April 1918 – June 1918); and
Armageddon (June 1918 – December 1918). 

I propose in this paper briefly to outline the main thrust of the Freeman’s editorials in each of these phases.

The 1916 Rising and its immediate aftermath (May 1916 – July 1916)

The Freeman’s reaction to the 1916 Rising was predictably condemnatory, trenchant and bitter. In its first editorial after the Rising (on 5 May), it spoke of the ‘stunning horror of the past ten days’ and pointed out that ‘the insurrection was not more an insurrection against the connection with the Empire than it was an armed assault against the will and decision of the Irish nation itself, constitutionally ascertained through its proper representatives’, i.e. the Irish Party.

The Freeman was in no doubt about the causes of the Rising. It would not have happened but for ‘the licence’ that the unionists had ‘arrogated to themselves [in resisting home rule by force], and thus extended to every fomenter of civil strife’. Subsequently, the inclusion in the coalition government formed in 1915 of ‘the mouthers of sedition in Ulster’ had ‘robbed it of the confidence and respect of the people, and converted it into a scandal’.

The Government’s reaction to the events of Easter week 1916 was, from the start, of concern to the Freeman. In that first editorial after the Rising, it warned that ‘if good and not evil is to issue from the sufferings and sacrifices of the past ten days, the Government and those endowed with authority must have careful regard for Irish feeling and opinion in the measures that are to be taken’. On 9 May, in its first overt reference to the death sentences passed on the Rising’s leaders, the Freeman protested that ‘sympathy is being aroused with the victims [i.e. the executed leaders] where nothing but indignant condemnation of their criminal enterprise previously existed’, and on 12 May it warned that ‘the military dictatorship’ has produced ‘a lamentable revulsion of feeling’. In the following weeks it became increasingly concerned about the ‘condition of feeling generated … by the detention of prisoners and the prolongation of the court-martial regime’, and it condemned both the military and the governmental authorities for introducing ‘anger and disaffection where the masses of the people were wholly on the side of order’.

There was an abortive attempt to settle the home rule question soon after the Rising. The initiative was announced by the British premier, Herbert Asquith, at the end of May 1916, and Lloyd George was put in charge of the negotiations with the various interests in Ireland – both nationalist and unionist. The Freeman, speaking for the nationalists, pledged that ‘there is no sacrifice that they are not prepared to make, short of the genuine freedom and the permanent integrity of their country, to remove the fears, secure the rights and conciliate the prejudices of their northern fellow-countrymen’. The settlement proposals when they became known were, from the nationalist point of view, less than ideal. They involved partition – albeit, it was understood by the nationalists, on a temporary basis. But the Irish Party decided to endorse them, and the Freeman inevitably followed suit. The proposed settlement collapsed when it was revealed that, in contradiction of assurances given to the party leaders, Lloyd George had privately conceded to the unionists that partition would be permanent. The Freeman, reflecting the response of the Irish Party to this subterfuge, was aghast and an editorial published on 25 July 1916 noted that this ‘breach of faith will inflame the feeling already sufficiently inflamed by the blunders of the coalition [government]’.

Marking time (July 1916 – November 1916)

During the months following Lloyd George’s settlement attempt, the Freeman and the Irish Party found themselves in a difficult political dilemma. Their policy was inextricably based – as it had been since Parnell’s time – on an alliance with the British Liberals, yet they realised that the events of May, June and July had effectively shattered that alliance and that the trust they had placed in the Liberal alliance had been betrayed. More importantly, public opinion in Ireland had been alienated. The only course open to the newspaper during this period was to avoid the issues raised by the break-up of the Liberal alliance – for the Irish Party had no alternative plan to move its Home Rule agenda on – and simply to reiterate the need for ‘a salutary and effective measure of Irish freedom’.

The threat of conscription dominated the editorial columns of the Freeman at this time, but that threat petered out – at least for the moment – towards the middle of November 1916, enabling the Freeman to claim a victory for the Irish Party leaders. The Freeman wrote: ‘They [the party leaders] defeated for the second time the cabal of Conscriptionists who endeavoured, when Ireland lay prostrate and Martial Law reigned, to extend compulsory military service to the country’.

Between the devil and the deep sea (December 1916 – October 1917)

For the Freeman, the year 1916 ended on a note of optimism - despite all that had happened since Easter, and despite Lloyd George’s accession to the premiership in December 1916 in circumstances that could only enhance the power of the unionists within the British government. Three factors influenced that optimism: General Maxwell’s appointment in Ireland was terminated in November; at Christmastime more than six hundred prisoners, interned without trial since the Rising, were set free; and the Irish Party had won the West Cork by-election on 15 November, taking the seat from William O’Brien’s dissident ‘All-for-Ireland’ League in its own heartland.

But its mood of confident jubilation was shortlived – for the next four by-elections were lost by the Irish Party in quick succession: lost to Count Plunkett in North Roscommon in February; to Joseph McGuinness in South Longford in May; to Éamon de Valera in East Clare in July; and to W.T. Cosgrave in Kilkenny in August. The Freeman accepted that these results meant that the electorate was (and I quote) ‘repudiating the policy of a constitutional settlement of our secular quarrels with Great Britain and … declaring uncompromisingly for an Irish Republic’. The Party now saw itself, in the words of John Dillon, spoken in the House of Commons, ‘between the devil and the deep sea. On one side we have the Irish revolution, and on the other side we have the Castle gang’.

The rally of constitutionalism (October 1917 – April 1918)

Throughout 1916 and for most of 1917 – despite the by-election victories already noted – the Freeman viewed the evolving political situation in Ireland in terms of an exclusively extra-constitutional challenge to the supremacy of the Irish Party. Towards the end of 1917, however, all this changed. Following the Sinn Féin convention held on 25 October, the Freeman began to appreciate that the country would now be faced with a trial of strength between two essentially constitutional movements: one espousing representation at Westminster; the other, abstention – but with an eventual appeal to a post-war peace conference. The Freeman took some satisfaction in the apparent abandonment by Sinn Féin of physical force. It stated: ‘It is quite evident that the “men who went out” [in 1916] are now a small minority of the conglomerate political party which has rallied under Meagher’s tricolour’.

Ironically, in the weeks and months immediately after the Sinn Féin convention and its adoption of a constitutional programme, the Freeman detected signs of a revival in the Irish Party’s fortunes. To some extent, this was because of the Irish Convention which had been meeting since July 1917. When the Convention assembled on 25 July, the newspaper had exuded a cautious optimism about it – even publishing a ‘Special Convention Number’. It remained hopeful at the dawn of the New Year, 1918. In an editorial on 1 January, it proclaimed: ‘… 1917 was not totally barren, and the assembling of the Convention will always be memorable as the first attempt by Irishmen, on Irish lines, to achieve a settlement of Irish difficulties … [It] offers the best hope of a satisfactory solution of the problems that have baffled the wit of British statesmen for generations’. The revival of the Irish Party, of which the Freeman spoke, derived in no small measure from these great expectations.

The evidence for the revival was the three by-election successes enjoyed by the Irish Party in the first months of 1918 – in South Armagh, Waterford and East Tyrone. The Freeman claimed that these victories had ‘turned the tables [on Sinn Féin] with a vengeance’ and noted that a few more victories like these ‘would leave such prestige as their party can still boast, sorely tattered and torn’.

Conscription (April 1918 – June 1918)

Whether genuine or not, the Irish Party’s revival in early 1918 came to an abrupt halt in April – for two reasons. One was the ‘ineffectual’ report of the Irish Convention, but more important was the renewed British government’s resolve to impose conscription upon Ireland in the wake of the German offensive in March. The Freeman protested that ‘all this talk of imposing conscription upon Ireland is sheer lunacy. The mere agitation of the question will do untold harm in Ireland. It was this cry … that made the insurrection of two years ago possible’. It added that the threat of conscription would ‘defeat any chance of a peaceful settlement of the Irish question upon the lines of Home Rule’. This did sound the death-knell of the Irish party: their Liberal alliance was now irrevocably ruptured – and the Irish Party revealed its strategic bankruptcy by withdrawing from Westminster to co-operate with Sinn Féin and others in a nationwide campaign of opposition to conscription. The Freeman commented that ‘the most indifferent of people have now been made to realise what serfdom is, and what alien rule signifies’.

To make matters worse, there was in May 1918 what the Freeman called the ‘fantastic episode of the “German plot”’ with the rounding up and imprisonment of Sinn Féin leaders. It was scathing about the Government’s failure to connect the individuals arrested with any German agent. One of those arrested was Arthur Griffith, and he went on to win a by-election in East Cavan in June 1918 – of which the Freeman wrote: ‘Six weeks ago, the Nationalists of East Cavan were confident of being able … to repeat the victories of South Armagh and East Tyrone’ but then the government ‘came to the rescue with the story of the fake plot’.

Armageddon (June 1918 – December 1918)

Between the East Cavan by-election and the 1918 General Election campaign, there was little that the Freeman could say to redeem the situation. It complained, with some eloquence, but to no avail, that the government’s ‘sole formula for dealing with Irish problems is the formula of Chichester, Cromwell and Castlereagh – naked, brutal force, divorced from even the pretence of statesmanship. Irish history is one long demonstration of the utter futility of such a policy as that on which the Government has embarked’.

Needless to say, the Freeman recognised that the Irish Party’s position in the upcoming General Election was untenable – and it warned as early as in September 1918 that ‘if the mood of popular exasperation is maintained by the measures of the government, the mood will express itself, at the coming General Election, in a fashion that may seem to doom all hopes of a friendly and honorable settlement of the Irish question’. 

However, while the Freeman correctly anticipated that the General Election would oust the Irish party from its long-standing position of political supremacy in Ireland, it did not foresee just how complete and overwhelming its defeat would be. When the results were announced, its reaction was one of incredulity – and horror. In an editorial of considerable length, it acknowledged that the party ‘has, for the time being, practically ceased to exist’. The Freeman listed reasons for the result: ‘The executions, the courtsmartial, the imprisonments without trial … the successive betrayals of the constitutional leaders by the so-called guardians of the Empire [and] the threat of conscription’.

More in sorrow than in anger, the Freeman noted that ‘the Sinn Féin leaders asked the people to condemn as a betrayal of Ireland attendance at the Westminster parliament and to denounce as traitors to Ireland those who would venture to take the oath of allegiance to the British monarch. Thus they invited the people not merely to throw away the weapon of parliamentary action, but to condemn as false to Irish nationality the long line of leaders whom the Irish people had followed in the past – from Grattan and O’Connell, to Parnell and Davitt. The people have given an unmistakable answer’. That is how the Freeman finally portrayed the collapse of the movement with which it had been identified since that movement’s glory days under Parnell.

Conclusion

After the Irish Party’s defeat in 1918, the Freeman itself was in danger of sinking with its political masters. It was not viable without the support of the Irish Party. It was, however, saved for a brief period by a prominent Dublin businessman, Martin Fitzgerald – who purchased the paper in October 1919, and gallantly kept it going for another five years. Its last issue appeared on 19 December 1924 – and so it passed into history, unlamented just like the Party whose cause it had upheld to the bitter end.

I was delighted when Richard asked me to say a few words about Fr Tony on this great occasion marking the 60th anniversary of his ordination, and I am very happy to do so – but first let me say “thank you” to Richard and Loretto for inviting us to their lovely home and for entertaining us so generously. They have been wonderful friends of Fr Tony, and I know how much their friendship means to him.

There is a passage quoted with approval by Fr Tony towards the end of his autobiography, At the coalface, which is, I think, an appropriate text for this occasion. It is from an address by the eminent Jesuit theologian, Karl Rahner – and it is as follows:

A priest is not an angel sent from Heaven. He is a man chosen from among men. This means that we priests are just as human as you are, not a shade different, not a bit better – poor, weak weary men in need of God’s mercy. The darkness of the world darkens our minds too; we travel the same road you travel, out of darkness into God’s light.

The point here is one we often forget: that priests are just ordinary people – who have, however, made a choice about how to live their lives that is quite extraordinary and is, in fact, nothing short of courageous. For they have chosen to take a step into the unknown – and it is unknown, no matter how strong one’s faith is – and to give their all for what Tom Kettle memorably called “a dream born in a herdsman’s shed”. And after ordination, they continue to do so every day of their lives. To have done so for sixty years, as Fr Tony has done, is certainly something to celebrate.

Those of us who have had priests in our families or among our close friends know how lonely the life of a priest is – and how difficult, with so much time spent attending to the needs of others, especially people who are in crisis through illness, bereavement, addiction, family problems, financial woes or the many other sources of human misery. There are, of course, moments of great joy – but never underestimate the huge demands, emotional and otherwise, that are necessarily made of a priest. And to all these burdens we must add the loss of morale among priests in recent times as a consequence of the malfeasance of a few and the cover-up of this at the highest levels. A priest may not be an angel, but the good ones – like Fr Tony – are certainly heroes, and largely unsung heroes.

But his priesthood is only one aspect of the very full life that Fr Tony has led over the past sixty years. He is a scholar as well as a priest, and he combines these two callings at a time when very often the two are regarded as antithetical. Thus, on the farming programme, CountryWide, on RTE Radio 1 a couple of weekends ago, I heard the presenter of the programme, Damien O’Reilly, state that, and I quote, “If you’re a scientist, it’s very hard to be going to Mass on Sunday” – and this sentiment would, I believe, be shared by many scholars in the humanities as well as in the natural sciences. But Fr Tony’s work as a philosopher and as a historian is testament that faith has its place in the intellectual world and is not incompatible with rigorous intellectual inquiry. All that is required is an open mind about all things.

And we can see evidence of Fr Tony’s openness of mind in the range of the subjects that he has written about. First and foremost, there is his four-volume magnum opus on Alfred O’Rahilly – Catholic intellectual and controversialist. But the Catholic focus of that great work – Catholic with a capital C – is balanced by his books on the first Labour Party leader in Dáil Éireann, Tom Johnson; on the Quaker businessman, Senator and humanitarian, James Douglas; on the die-hard Republican, Austin Stack; on Thomas O’Donnell, Irish Party MP for West Kerry; and on the Knights of Glin – and that is by no means an exhaustive list of his books. I suspect his favourite among his own books is his history of his beloved native town of Listowel. If Fr Tony ever has to make a choice between the Kingdom of Kerry and the Kingdom of Heaven, I’m not at all confident that heaven would prevail. On the other hand, Fr Tony probably regards the two kingdoms as one and the same – which illustrates that there are limits to his critical faculties.

Fr Tony described Alfred O’Rahilly as a “controversialist”, and indeed that term could equally be applied to him. He is a man of strong opinions, and has never shied away from speaking his mind about a multiplicity of issues. He has done this as an individual, as well as in the capacity of chairman of Irish PEN for over twenty years – PEN being that admirable association of writers dedicated to upholding the right of freedom of speech. Such is Fr Tony’s disputatious character that he once even wrote to the Irish Catholic taking issue with a book review that I had written for that newspaper. He described it “as a classical example of an all-too-common revisionism” – which he thought was criticism, but I regarded it as the highest compliment and so our friendship was not affected. I suppose our divergent views on militant Irish nationalism has been the area of greatest disagreement between us over the years of our friendship, and I don’t think either of us has made any progress in converting the other. Certainly, Fr Tony continues to read the Belfast Irish News in preference to any other Irish daily newspaper – on the basis that it is the greenest of the lot.

I have known Fr Tony for many years, having first met him when I was a young civil servant through the good offices of his great friend and my then boss and mentor in the civil service, Maurice O’Connell. Later, I worked closely with Fr Tony on the committee of the National Library of Ireland Society, the association of friends of the Library, of which he was chairman and I was treasurer and then vice-chairman. One of the annual outings organised by the National Library Society occasioned my own favourite story about Fr Tony. The outing was to Belfast, and we visited Stormont and Hillsborough Castle. There was no parliament or assembly at Stormont at that time – political dysfunction reigned, as now, up there – and so we were able to arrange to have lunch in the parliament building, in the members’ dining room, a wonderful location. We were all seated, waiting for our food, when I – as organiser of the outing – was approached by the maître d’ and called aside by him. I wondered what was wrong. It didn’t take long to find out, for he whispered to me: “Is your clergyman not going to say grace?” So, of course, I gave Fr Tony his marching orders – and he stood up and said the traditional Catholic grace in that hallowed place where another disputatious clergyman more usually held sway. I hope old Ian Paisley would have approved – on the principle of “better some religion than none”, but maybe not.

I referred earlier to Fr Tony’s autobiography, At the coalface – and I am going to do so again. He recalls in that book that an older priest of his acquaintance would almost invariably end a conversation with the words: “Let us pray for each other” – and that is how I would now like to end these few remarks. I say to Fr Tony on behalf of all of us here gathered: thank you for your sixty years of service in the priesthood, and let us pray for each other.

Thank you!

The title of this paper carries quite deliberate echoes of Sir Charles Gavan Duffy’s famous autobiography, for the careers of Gavan Duffy and Edmund Dwyer Gray Junior are strikingly similar in many respects. Both were born in Ireland – Duffy in 1816, Gray in 1870. Both achieved prominence in Irish public life through their association with newspapers, and both came to play a significant role in Irish politics – albeit for brief periods. Both, much disillusioned by their experiences in Ireland, emigrated to Australia. In Australia, both engaged in radical politics, and both served as prime minister in a regional government – again, for relatively short periods. Duffy, having attained the office of premier of the colony of Victoria in 1871, fell from power in 1872; and Gray was premier of the state of Tasmania for a period of nine months in 1939. By a curious coincidence, when in 1855 Duffy sailed into exile in Australia, one of his shipmates was Moses Wilson Gray, whose brother, Sir John Gray, was the grandfather of the subject of this paper. Duffy records in his autobiography that during the tedious journey to Australia he had ‘daily confabulations with Wilson Gray on the destiny of the new country and all we hoped to do and achieve there’.

The two brothers – Wilson Gray and John Gray – were born of Irish protestant stock in Claremorris, Co. Mayo, in 1813 and 1816 respectively. Wilson became a lawyer and went to America in 1838. John qualified as a medical doctor; but he enjoyed only a brief career as a physician. Notwithstanding his Protestantism, he was a staunch supporter of O’Connell’s campaign for repeal of the Act of Union and was thus drawn into political journalism. In 1841 he purchased the Freeman’s Journal newspaper with some associates; and when his brother, Wilson Gray, returned from America in 1844, he joined him in managing and editing the Freeman. John Gray became sole proprietor of the newspaper in 1850. In 1852 he was elected to Dublin corporation, and in that capacity was responsible for bringing the Vartry water supply to the city – for which achievement he was knighted. He was MP for Kilkenny city from 1865 until his death in 1875, and he had begun to ally himself with Isaac Butt’s home rule movement in the last year of his life. The statue of him that stands in O’Connell Street, Dublin, was erected in 1879. Wilson Gray also died in 1875. In Australia after 1855, he had been active – with Gavan Duffy – in the land reform movement in Victoria, and he served a member of the legislative assembly of Victoria from 1860 to 1862. He then moved to New Zealand, where in 1864 he became district judge of the Otago goldfields, a position he held until his death.

Wilson Gray was not the only connection that the Gray family had with Australia. Sir John Gray’s son and successor as owner of the Freeman’s Journal, Edmund Dwyer Gray Senior, married the daughter and namesake of the Victorian philanthropist Caroline Chisholm, celebrated as ‘the emigrants’ friend’ for her work for female emigrants to Australia, but caricatured by Charles Dickens as Mrs Jellyby in Bleak House. The younger Caroline, on a visit to Ireland, met her future husband in most unusual circumstances. A schooner was wrecked during a storm in Killiney Bay in September 1868 and Gray – whose family had a summer house nearby – swam out with a rope to the doomed craft, saving five lives. Miss Chisholm, by chance, witnessed this heroic deed and was afterwards introduced to him. They married in the following year. The subject of this paper was their eldest child; a second son died in infancy, and they also had two daughters. Writing in the Sidney Morning Herald in 1924, Edmund Dwyer Gray Junior recalled his maternal grandmother – then an invalid, and living in London – telling him as a child ‘of the lovely land of Australia’, and there is no doubt that Australia had a great fascination for him as a result of these conversations.

Caroline Gray (née Chisholm) was a Catholic: her children were raised as Catholics, and her husband – Edmund Dwyer Gray Senior – converted to Catholicism in 1877. Also in 1877, he became MP for Tipperary county. He later represented successively Carlow county and the St Stephen’s Green division of Dublin. But for the advent of Parnell, he might have led the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster. To protect his own political prospects, Gray strongly opposed Parnell’s rise within the party; and when, after the 1880 general election, Parnell was elected party leader, Gray was one of eighteen MPs who voted against him – out of a total of forty-three. Thereafter, however, he largely supported Parnell’s leadership – and the Freeman’s Journal became the unofficial organ of the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster.

The Gray family’s involvement with the Freeman’s Journal lasted for fifty years and it spanned three generations of the family – Sir John Gray, and his son and grandson, both named Edmund Dwyer Gray. The Grays made the Freeman an important newspaper, the foremost nationalist daily newspaper published in Dublin in the nineteenth century. The repeal in the 1850s of the oppressive duty on advertisements and then on the newspapers themselves opened the way for a great expansion in the newspaper market, and Sir John Gray exploited this opportunity, growing the circulation of the Freeman from as little as 2,000–3,000 copies per day to approximately 10,000 at the time of his death in 1875. Under his son, Edmund Senior, the Freeman’s production capacity was further increased, its circulation again grew threefold — to over 30,000 copies per day — and it became extremely profitable. In 1887, he converted the Freeman into a public company, while retaining control for himself. He died at the early age of forty-two in 1888, and for the next four years the company was effectively under the control of his widow and their son, Edmund Junior, who was aged only 18 when his father died. At that time, the younger Edmund Dwyer Gray – having left school the previous year – was touring in Australia and New Zealand, and he learned of his father’s death while visiting the town of Rotorua, in New Zealand, through ‘a small notice in a newspaper’. That quote is taken from the letter that he wrote to his mother from Rotorua, which is in the National Library of Ireland. He immediately made arrangements to return home, but – though his mother controlled more than forty per cent of the share capital of the Freeman company – he was too young to have any real influence in the management of the newspaper, and he returned to Australia in early 1890.

He was still in Australia when the Parnell ‘split’ occurred in December 1890. At the outset of the ‘split’, the board of the Freeman declared in favour of Parnell – a decision which Mrs. Gray, as the principal shareholder in the company, fully endorsed. When her son returned to Ireland in the following February, he too indicated that he would support Parnell. However, in March 1891 the anti-Parnellites launched their own daily newspaper, the National Press, and the Freeman began as a result to lose circulation and revenue. Young Gray – justifiably fearful for his inheritance – then persuaded his mother that the Freeman should abandon Parnell. This required a special general meeting of the Freeman company, held on 21 September 1891, at which the pro-Parnell board was replaced with one that included both Mrs Gray’s son and the man soon to become her second husband, Captain Maurice O’Conor. 

After the Freeman switched sides, the Parnellites established the Irish Daily Independent in December 1891 to fill the vacuum caused by the Freeman’s defection. There was not room at that time for three nationalist daily newspapers in Dublin, and certainly it made neither commercial nor political sense to have two anti-Parnell organs. Accordingly, the Freeman and its erstwhile rival, the National Press, merged in March 1892. In simultaneous transactions, the National Press company bought Mrs Gray’s Freeman shares for £36,000 and the Freeman company purchased the National Press newspaper for exactly the same sum – and promptly shut it down. It was a condition of any merger that Mrs Gray should sell her interest in the Freeman’s Journal; the National Press had broken the Gray family’s dominance of the nationalist newspaper market in Dublin and the Grays would not be permitted to assume that role again. Mrs Gray had no option but to accept this – since, quite apart from any other consideration, her health had collapsed under the strain of the previous four years. Her son and Captain O’Conor both ceased to be directors of the merged company in 1893. Edmund Junior was left with no prospects in Ireland, and so he emigrated to Australia in 1894 – never to return, except on a brief visit in 1898 after his marriage in Sydney to a Miss Clara Agatha Rose.

In his early years in Australia, Gray enjoyed little success: he seems to have dabbled in mining and in farming, but nothing more is known of his activities until he emerges from obscurity as the editor of the Daily Post, the organ of the Labour Party in Tasmania, in 1912. He was now aged 42. He was a leading figure in the Australian labour movement, both as a journalist and as a politician, for the remainder of his life – but a somewhat erratic one, due to heavy drinking. His father too had had a serious drink problem which contributed to his early death. Gray Junior continued as editor of the Post and of its successor newspaper, the World – with a brief interruption due to ill health – until 1922, when he was dismissed after a quarrel with the Labour Party leadership. He then worked briefly in Sydney as a journalist for Jack Lang, later Labour Prime Minister of New South Wales, before returning to Tasmania in 1925 to edit a new Labour weekly, the People’s Voice. He continued as editor of the Voice until his death twenty years later in 1945. Despite the Voice’s links to the Labour Party, Gray strove as editor to maintain a measure of independence from the party. In this, he emulated his father’s example as editor and proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal: neither father nor son ever blindly followed a party line, though the newspapers they controlled were clearly identified with specific political movements.

In 1928 Gray was elected to the Tasmanian parliament for the Labour Party – having first hyphenated his name in order to gain a higher place on the ballot paper. He became deputy leader of the Labour Party in 1932, and when the party came to power in Hobart two years later, he was appointed state treasurer and deputy to premier Albert Ogilvie. When Ogilvie died suddenly in 1939, Gray was the compromise choice to succeed him – but this was intended merely as an interim arrangement, and he resigned after six months. He was then re-appointed as treasurer under the new premier, Robert Cosgrave, and he remained in that office until his death in 1945. He was regarded as a highly effective treasurer who, to quote the author of his entry in the Australian Dictionary of Biography, Professor Richard Davis, ‘managed to “bring home the bacon” and laid the basis for [Albert] Ogilvie’s post-Depression reforms’. The reference to ‘bringing home the bacon’ refers to Gray’s success in obtaining favourable treatment for Tasmania from the federal government’s Commonwealth Grants Commission established in 1933 by the Labour prime minister of Australia Joseph Lyons to provide grants for the smaller, less well-off states like Tasmania.

Lyons was himself a former prime minister of Tasmania, and he shared with Gray a sense of grievance about Tasmania’s position as a small island dominated by the adjacent landmass. Like Gray, Lyons had an Irish background – he was the grandson of Irish immigrants – and no doubt both were mindful of parallels between Ireland and Tasmania vis-à-vis London and Canberra respectively. Ironically, however, the effect of the Commonwealth Grants Commission was gradually to increase the influence of the federal government over the affairs of the states – and this process was accelerated by the introduction of a uniform federal income tax as a war measure by the Canberra government in 1942. That measure effectively destroyed the autonomy of the state treasurers, but Gray – unlike other state treasurers – did not oppose it as he felt it offered a better way of addressing Tasmania’s perennial economic problems than anything the state government could do on its own initiative.

Gray always retained an interest in Irish politics, and as a journalist during the years 1916 to 1922 he stayed faithful to his family’s long-standing moderate nationalist sentiments. His newspapers at that time – the Daily Post and the World – supported the Irish demand for independence and, in the words of Richard Davis, rejected ‘the hysterical fear that support for Irish self-determination would lead to the disintegration of the British Empire and the end of White Australia’. Gray, however, was unwilling to abandon the Irish constitutional nationalist tradition and espouse Sinn Féin. He condemned the Easter Rising in 1916, and argued that the insurgents should have been suppressed earlier – and later, during the War of Independence, he made it clear that murders on both sides were equally abhorrent to him. He supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, arguing that it should satisfy Irish aspirations, and he opined – somewhat optimistically – that Ulster ‘would soon join the rest of Ireland when she saw how well the new Free State was governed’.

Gray’s success as a politician – albeit in Tasmania – had been forecast by Justin McCarthy MP, who wrote of the young Gray in 1891: ‘I see in him the future prime minister of an Irish parliament’. And this eventuality – Gray as prime minister of an independent Ireland – is, in fact, conjured up by Patrick Maume in a remarkable piece of counterfactual history, published as an appendix to Paul Bew’s recent biography of Parnell, Enigma. Maume postulates that, if Captain O’Shea had been struck by a horse-drawn vehicle and killed while crossing a street in, say, 1887, then the Parnell ‘split’ would not have occurred; Parnell might have lived on well into the twentieth century and delivered home rule for Ireland; the Freeman’s Journal would almost certainly have survived as the predominant nationalist newspaper in Dublin; and, instead of losing his inheritance and emigrating to Australia, Edmund Dwyer Gray Junior might have matured into one of Parnell’s chief lieutenants and perhaps his chosen successor among a younger generation of home rulers. Thus would Justin McCarthy’s prophesy have been fulfilled, but it was not to be.

I am delighted to be associated with the launch of this booklet, which is a valuable source of information about Arthur Griffith – a forgotten man of Irish history. But he deserves to be remembered both for his journalism and for the part he played in the foundation of the modern Irish state. He was a brilliant polemicist, and his ideas shaped the final phase of Ireland’s struggle for independence and the early politics of the new state.

He was born in Dublin in 1871, and trained as a printer. Active in advanced nationalist circles from an early age, he first came to prominence in opposing the Boer war; he had spent a brief period in the Transvaal in 1897–98. In 1899 he started the United Irishman, the first of a number of radical newspapers that he edited. It was replaced by a paper called Sinn Féin in 1906 and, after the latter’s suppression in 1914, by Scissors and Paste and later by Nationality. He wrote most of the material for his papers himself, and he followed his own agenda in each of his papers. Indeed, he once turned down a job as a leader-writer on the Freeman’s Journal so that, to quote one student of his journalism, ‘he could continue through his [own] newspapers to try to break up what he saw as Irish political apathy and torpor’.

The most significant of Griffith’s ideas was that Ireland’s elected representatives should refuse to sit in the Westminster parliament, but instead set up a rival assembly and administration at home. His model was the Hungarian nationalists who secured their own parliament in 1867 through a policy of abstention from the Imperial Diet in Vienna. Austria and Hungary had thus become separate political entities linked by the Emperor in a ‘dual monarchy’, and Griffith concluded that a similar arrangement might satisfy both unionist and nationalist opinion in Ireland. He explored these themes in a series of articles in 1904, reprinted as The Resurrection of Hungary: a parallel for Ireland. He saw another model for ‘dual monarchy’ in Grattan’s parliament and the so-called ‘constitution’ of 1782.

In addition, influenced by the German economist Friedrich List, he advocated a system of protective tariffs to encourage native Irish industries; this remained a guiding principle of economic policy in independent Ireland from the 1930s until the 1960s. Likewise, he sought to foster a distinctive Irish culture; he published Yeats and other Irish authors in his newspapers, and supported the use of the Irish language. However, he was among those who condemned Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World for its unedifying portrayal of Irish rural life. Moreover, his writings – for example, on the Dreyfus affair – reveal unfortunate racist, even anti-Semitic, tendencies.

Aiming to unite all strands of advanced Irish nationalism behind his policies, Griffith launched his ‘Sinn Féin’ programme in November 1905. The Sinn Féin party was founded in 1907. It attracted some initial support, but in the years 1909–16 it was outflanked by a re-invigorated Irish Republican Brotherhood. Griffith, however, retained a high public profile through his prolific journalism – with the result that the name ‘Sinn Féin’ was attached to almost all advanced nationalist activity, including the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. Griffith took no part in the Rising, but was nevertheless arrested and interned afterwards. After his release in December 1916, the Sinn Féin party became the main focus of activity for those committed to furthering the aims of the Rising. In 1917 he stepped down as party leader in favour of Éamon de Valera, the senior surviving veteran of the Rising – an act of incredible political generosity, putting the interests of his party and of the country before his own self-interest. He recognised that he didn’t have the charisma necessary for the leadership of a popular movement; he was essentially a ‘backroom’ man – a man of ideas, not of action.

While once more in jail, Griffith won the Cavan East by-election on an abstention platform in June 1918. Sinn Féin subsequently enjoyed an overwhelming victory in the 1918 General Election. The successful Sinn Féin candidates then met in Dublin in January 1919 and, styling their assembly Dáil Éireann, proclaimed themselves the parliament of the Irish Republic. The War of Independence that followed derived legitimacy from Sinn Féin’s electoral success, though Griffith himself considered that violent methods could not succeed in winning Irish independence and he had developed his abstention policy as an alternative to violence.

Griffith held the posts of minister for home affairs and minister for foreign affairs successively in the Dáil Éireann governments of 1919–22, was acting president of Dáil Éireann – i.e. head of the government – when de Valera was in the United States from mid-1919 to end-1920, and in January 1922 succeeded de Valera as president after the Dáil approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. He had led the Irish delegation that negotiated the Treaty, and was the first of the Irish delegates to agree to sign it. The Treaty gave Ireland a measure of independence broadly comparable with the ‘dual monarchy’ concept, and this accounts for the force and passion with which Griffith defended it against its critics. The intemperance of his statements contributed to the polarisation of opinion on the Treaty which ultimately resulted in the civil war. With Ireland in the throes of civil war, Griffith died suddenly on 12 August 1922.

I began these remarks by saying that Arthur Griffith was a forgotten man. A nation’s choice of whom to remember – and how to remember them – is, of course, profoundly significant. As President John F. Kennedy told his audience at Amherst College on 26 October 1963, just a month before his assassination, ‘a nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but also by the men it honours, the men it remembers’. It seems, therefore, appropriate to ask why the Irish nation in nearly one hundred years of independence has chosen not to honour – has, in fact, largely forgotten – the intellectual architect of that independence, Arthur Griffith. 

Was it because we rejected his intemperance, his belligerence and personal abuse, in defending the Treaty against its critics – and wished to finesse the divisions in Irish public life that he had thus exacerbated? Certainly, he could be relentlessly and viciously polemical in pursuit of his objectives, and he was clearly unable to credit any opponent with good faith.

Alternatively, does it simply reflect a reluctance to rejoice in a compromise solution – an outcome to the struggle for Irish independence that fell short of what was considered ideal, even by those who accepted it? If the latter, then the contrast between our continuing commitment to the settlement represented by the Good Friday agreement on Northern Ireland in 1998 and the virtual airbrushing of Griffith out of Irish history is an indicator of remarkable growth in the political maturity of the Irish nation in the past one hundred years. We have learned the art of political compromise, and we are all the better for that.



I commend those who have put together this booklet, and I urge you all to read it and learn more about the remarkable man that it honours.

One of the ways we find God – or, more accurately perhaps, how He finds us – is through the art and architecture of places like this lovely church, and so it is most appropriate to celebrate this building and its art in the little publication that it is my honour to launch this morning.

And I think our appreciation of a church like this is greatly enhanced by the knowledge that we follow in a long line of people, over many generations, who have worshipped here – and for whom the beauty of the building itself and of its decoration has served as a conduit to God. Founded in 1839, it has been extended and renovated extensively on various occasions since then – most recently, under the late Monsignor Paddy Finn in 2011. Peter Costello records in his book on Dublin churches that the first church here 'was simple in style, even to having an unpaved earth floor'. Things have improved in the intervening years, and St Mary’s has long been regarded as the most important outpost of the Dublin diocese on the south side of the city. With the archbishops residing on 'The Northside', first in Parnell Square, and then – from 1890 – in Drumcondra, their auxiliary bishops reigned here as parish priest in St Mary’s for most of the twentieth century. Nicholas Donnelly, Edward Byrne, Francis Wall and Patrick Dunne are in that particular apostolic succession – auxiliary bishops of Dublin and parish priests of St Mary’s. Byrne is the only one of them who went on to become archbishop, and he was here for less than a year before he was appointed archbishop in succession to William Walsh in 1921 – not long enough for him to have left his mark here or for Haddington Road to have left its mark on him.

Nicholas Donnelly is, arguably, the most significant – as well as the first – of the auxiliary bishops who were PPs here. This is reflected in his very elaborate memorial in the east transept – not, I think, of any genuine artistic merit and so there is no reference to it in this book. He died in 1920, and all historians of the Dublin diocese are indebted to him for his histories of the parishes of Dublin, published in a series of seventeen pamphlets between 1904 and 1917. Based on extensive original research, they are regarded today as having stood the test of time quite well. Donnelly himself was what one would describe as a 'Castle Catholic', not a unionist but very much out of sympathy with the advanced nationalist and radical agrarian sentiments of many of his episcopal colleagues – including his own archbishop, William Walsh, and the formidable Archbishop Croke of Cashel. Relations were, accordingly, very difficult between Dublin Castle and the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – and it was for that reason that the Westminster government blocked Walsh’s appointment as cardinal in 1893, though his two predecessors as archbishop of Dublin, Paul Cullen and Edward McCabe, had been made cardinals. In these fraught circumstances, Bishop Donnelly was the back channel through which the Castle authorities and the hierarchy communicated in the days before independence. He was the low-profile go-between when other bishops flinched from doing business directly with the Castle – a very necessary and important role, which is now forgotten or, if not forgotten, is derided.

I suspect it is because of Bishop Donnelly that we have in St Mary’s the only First World War memorial in a Catholic church in Dublin, and probably in Ireland. There are some memorials elsewhere to individuals who fell in that war, but nowhere else is there a general memorial listing all who fell from a parish. Honouring those who died in the Great War despite the events of 1916 in Dublin was consistent with Bishop Donnelly’s politics, but let’s not forget that most of those from this parish who fought in the war would have been nationalists – supporters of John Redmond, who felt that serving the war effort was furthering the cause of Home Rule for Ireland as well as upholding values of sovereignty and freedom in the face of unprovoked German aggression. One of the names on our war memorial is that of Tom Kettle, very prominent in nationalist circles in Dublin and a former Irish Party MP, and he wrote in his famous last poem before being killed at the Somme in 1916 that he



Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream, born in a herdsman’s shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.

In other words, he fought for a higher ideal than realpolitik – one that was grounded in his Catholic faith, and linked to notions of human dignity and decent standards of behaviour both internationally and in the domestic sphere. The memorial, with a crucifix as its central motif, is in the west transept – directly opposite the memorial to Bishop Donnelly. There are nearly 100 names on it, including one woman’s name – and remember that these are all from just one parish in Dublin, a grim testament to the extent of the carnage of the Great War.

The publication that we launch today is entitled Rich in faith, beauty and history – and that indeed captures the essence of this wonderful church of St Mary’s. In my remarks so far, I have concentrated on the history of the church, but this booklet is largely about its beauty – the beauty of its artefacts and, in particular, its stained glass. As stated in the booklet, the stained glass is 'central to the interior of the church ... and is one of the highlights of the building. It could be described as the Gospel in glass.' There is here an outstanding selection of work from the great phase of Irish stained glass production in the first half of the twentieth century, with work by A.E. Child, Beatrice Glenavy and Earley’s Stained Glass Studio. My own favourite window – that of 'Christ the King' in the east transept – is by Earley, as is the Rose Window at the back of the church. A beautiful panel from the Rose Window features on the cover of this book – a serene image of Our Lady, patron of this church. Our Lady’s Chapel in the west transept is also a magnificent shrine to the patron of this church, with an exquisite image of the 'Madonna and Child' on the side wall which is difficult to see properly from outside the sanctuary – but it is well worth making an effort to see it.

The third strand in the title of this booklet – faith – is, of course, what has inspired all this beauty and defined the history of this church, and one can only wonder at the power of that faith and marvel at the physical evidence of it that this building and its art represent. At the same time, we should remember the words of T.S. Eliot from the Four Quartets in reference to St John’s Church at Little Gidding in Huntingdonshire:

... You are not here to verify,

Instruct yourself, or inform curiosity

Or carry report. You are here to kneel

Where prayer has been valid.

This is what we believe, that prayer has been valid here – hence the history and the beauty of the place. I think it is appropriate to conclude these remarks on that note. But before concluding, may I congratulate Fr Pat Claffey on his photographs and his other editorial work in this fine booklet – and thank him, and Fr Fachtna McCarthy, for their initiative in arranging for its publication. It certainly does justice to this church, so beloved of so many of us – and it is my very great pleasure now to launch it. 

Many of us – whether cocooning, or just observing “social distancing” rules – have been exchanging jokes and cartoons via the electronic media in recent weeks in an effort to cheer one another up. It is a worthy activity among friends, and it reflects one of the three classical theories of humour.

The first of these is superiority theory – humour as derision or mockery, with a victim as the butt of humour. The second is incongruity theory – humour as a response to the illogical or unexpected. The third is relief theory, which posits that humour serves to release tensions. It is that final one that is relevant to our present circumstances. Humour by this reckoning is a form of therapy. It is, in the words of the celebrated classicist Mary Beard, “the emotional equivalent of a safety valve”.

The literary critic Terry Eagleton likewise uses the metaphor of a “safety valve” in a recent study of humour. He writes that humour “provides a safety valve for ... subversive energies. In this sense, its closest parallel today is professional sport, the abolition of which would no doubt be the shortest route to bloody revolution.” Humour, in other words, turns our discontents and anxieties into a joke, and thus serves to reconcile us to our fate.

Perhaps because of our troubled history, we Irish have a fine tradition of humour. We are a naturally irreverent people. Swift is the pre-eminent exemplar of this , but the late Professor Vivian Mercier has argued that the “Irish comic tradition” is the central one of Irish and Anglo-Irish literature and can be traced back to oral Gaelic roots in the ninth century. He identified the elements of this tradition as “a bent for wild humour [and] a delight in witty word play”. It continues right down to the present day, through Wilde and Shaw, to Roddy Doyle.

We can trace it too in cartoons, from the iconic images published by the Freeman’s Journal and United Irishman newspapers in the 1880s, through Dublin Opinion in the first half of the twentieth century, to Martyn Turner in the Irish Times today. Anyone interested in the history of Irish cartoons might like to read an article by me on this subject published in the Irish Times on 26 June 2019.

I will give the final word to Martin Rowson, one of the best of contemporary British cartoonists. Writing about his own particular brand of humour, he says that “satire in general and cartoons ... exist because we need them – to contextualise the greater hideous, often horrific absurdities of reality into a manageable and therefore controllable format which might then also make us laugh and thus feel better”. In short, humour is a safety valve – and no matter how bad things get, let us hope that we never lose our capacity to laugh at whatever life throws at us.

The wreath of ivy leaves that we have just laid on the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell honours his life and achievements – achievements that the poet W B Yeats referred to in these lines from his poem ‘Come gather round me, Parnellites’:

He fought the might of England

And saved the Irish poor,

Whatever good a farmer’s got

He brought it all to pass…

Elsewhere in this poem, Yeats refers to the last year of Parnell’s life and writes as follows:

The Bishops and the Party

That tragic story made…

The bishops and the party were not, however, the only ones to blame – and it is perhaps surprising that Yeats did not include the press as another of the great forces within Ireland that brought Parnell down in 1891.  It was equally important.

The power of the press to influence public opinion was reaching its zenith in the years of Parnell’s public career.  And few attested more eloquently to the central position which the press occupied in political and social life at that time than Parnell himself.  Speaking at the end of August 1891, just over two months before his death, he said:

The profession of journalism is a great and powerful one in these days.  It is likely to become more influential as the years go by.  The readers of newspapers increase, and the press is becoming even mightier than the politician… In these days politics and journalism run very much together, and the trend is more and more to combine the two.

This was a very prescient comment – and indeed it is remarkable that many of Parnell’s closest associates were, or had been, journalists.  The most prominent examples are William O’Brien, Justin McCarthy, TP O’Connor, Thomas Sexton, TC Harrington, JJ O’Kelly – and, of course, Tim Healy and his uncles, the Sullivan brothers.

At the start of his career in the late 1870s, as well as at its end, Parnell was opposed by elements of the press.  The main nationalist daily newspaper then published in Dublin was the Freeman’s Journal, controlled since 1875 by Edmund Dwyer Gray – who is also buried in Glasnevin cemetery.  From 1877 onward, Gray was successively MP for Tipperary county, Carlow county and the St Stephen’s Green division of Dublin. But for the advent of Parnell, he might have led the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster.

So as to protect his own political prospects, Gray strongly opposed Parnell’s rise within the party. He threw the weight of the Freeman unsuccessfully against Parnell’s candidate in the decisive Ennis by-election of 1879 – and he later smeared Parnell by accusing him of having called certain colleagues in the Irish party ‘papist rats’. When, after the 1880 general election, Parnell was elected chairman of the party, Gray was one of some eighteen MPs who voted against him.

Thereafter, however, he largely supported Parnell’s leadership – partly because he accepted that Parnell was now invincible, but also because Parnell established in 1881 his own newspaper, the weekly United Ireland, with William O’Brien, as editor. The threat that United Ireland might be turned into a daily publication to rival the Freeman was enough to copper-fasten Gray’s loyalty to Parnell.

The United Ireland newspaper remained under O’Brien’s management until the Parnell split – though from November 1887 it was edited by Matthias McDonnell Bodkin, later county court judge for Clare.  At the outset of the split, acting on instructions from O’Brien who was in America, Bodkin followed the majority view in the party and steered United Ireland into the anti-Parnell camp.  He declared his position unequivocally in the issue of 6 December 1890, at which time the Irish party’s protracted debate in Committee Room Fifteen at Westminster on the question of Parnell’s continued leadership was drawing to a conclusion, and its sad outcome was abundantly clear. 

When Parnell returned to Dublin four days later, the first thing he did was to re-establish his authority over United Ireland, forcing his way into the offices of the newspaper with some associates and ejecting Bodkin.  One of the Parnellites present described the scene thus: ‘I went up to Matty Bodkin.  “Matty”, says I, “will you walk out or would you like to be thrown out” and Matty walked out.’  An attempt by anti-Parnellites, led by Tim Healy, to re-occupy the offices failed.

In contrast to United Ireland, the Freeman’s Journal came out strongly in favour of the beleaguered leader when the split occurred.  Edmund Dwyer Gray had died in 1888, and the Freeman was now under the control of his widow, Caroline Agnes Gray.  A somewhat histrionic woman, she was proactive in her support of Parnell.  She even appeared in public with him in Dublin in early 1891, dressed – according to Archbishop Walsh of Dublin – in a scarlet cloak.  Walsh subsequently described Mrs Gray as ‘a rock of scandal’. 

However, once the anti-Parnellites launched their own daily newspaper, the National Press, in March 1891 and the Freeman began as a result to lose circulation and revenue, Mrs Gray wavered in her support. Under the influence of her son – just returned from an extended visit to Australia, aged 21 and justifiably fearful for his inheritance – Mrs Gray resolved that the Freeman should abandon Parnell. This required a special general meeting of the Freeman company, held on 21 September 1891, at which the pro-Parnell board was replaced with one opposed to him.

When he realised that the Freeman would switch sides, Parnell – now in the final weeks of his life – made arrangements to establish a new daily newspaper to counter the opposition of both the Freeman and the National Press.  This was the Irish Daily Independent, the precursor of today’s Irish Independent.  It first appeared on 18 December 1891, two months after Parnell’s death.  It survived as the organ of the Parnellite wing of the Irish party until the party’s reunification under John Redmond in 1900, and was then purchased by William Martin Murphy.  In 1905 Murphy transformed the paper into the modern Irish Independent, at half the price of the Freeman – a halfpenny, instead of a penny – and with a more popular format and a less partisan editorial policy.  In effect, he copied what Lord Northcliffe had done in London in 1896 when he launched the Daily Mail, the first mass circulation newspaper in these islands. 

The new Independent was an immediate success, and it would eventually absorb the old Freeman’s Journal when the Freeman went out of business in 1924.  We might well be justified in regarding the Independent as Parnell’s most enduring legacy to the Irish people – though that newspaper rarely acknowledges Parnell as its founder, but instead locates its origin in the restructuring effected by William Martin Murphy in 1905.  This is presumably because of its pro-clericalist editorial policy under Murphy and, afterwards, under his son and grandson – before it was acquired by Tony O’Reilly, now Sir Anthony O’Reilly, in 1973

But it is right and proper that we today should recognise both Parnell’s engagement with the world of newspapers in Dublin and his lasting contribution to it.  He would be proud of that contribution, as well as proud of his real political achievements, for – and again I quote from the Yeats poem –

… Parnell was a proud man,

No prouder trod the ground,

And a proud man’s a lovely man.

Long may we remember and pay tribute to that ‘lovely man’ – who is buried in Glasnevin cemetery under a fine rock of Co. Wicklow granite which, most appropriately for a proud man, bears no inscription other than his surname. 

It is my very pleasant duty this afternoon to thank Dr Aidan Collins for his fine, thought-provoking address to us.  In doing this, I would like to acknowledge the wonderful work that the Glasnevin Trust has done in restoring this historic cemetery and, in particular, the area here around Parnell’s grave.  We are joined today by Shane MacThomáis, the Glasnevin Trust’s Education and Development Officer; a special word of welcome to him – and may I ask you, Shane, to convey our thanks and appreciation to the Trust.

Since we last gathered here a year ago, the new visitors centre has been opened at the gates of the cemetery.  This beautiful building, with its state-of-the-art facilities and imaginative presentations, makes it possible for the public generally to readily appreciate the importance of this cemetery in the recent history of our country and its capital city.  Glasnevin is, of course, the final resting place of many of Ireland’s greatest heroes – not only Parnell, but also O’Connell, Collins, de Valera and Arthur Griffith.

The last of these, Arthur Griffith, was a great admirer of the man we honour today, Charles Stewart Parnell.  Griffith was truly the intellectual architect of our independence, but we have largely forgotten him – which leads me to wonder about the significance, or otherwise, of our nation’s choice of whom to remember and how to remember them.  Such choices can say a lot about our society.  For, as President John F. Kennedy told his audience at Amherst College on 26 October 1963, just a month before his assassination, ‘a nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces, but also by the men it honours, the men it remembers’.

The restoration of Glasnevin cemetery reflects the sense we have as a nation that a proper remembrance and understanding of our past, and of the people who shaped that past, is essential in order to understand the present.  History is not merely a sequence of dates, wars and political controversies – not just a record of births and deaths – and, most definitely, not some politician’s self-serving version of the past, not some politician’s choice of whom to remember and whom to airbrush out of the past.  It is something in which we can find a meaning, a meaning that has relevance to the concerns of the present.  There are no simple lessons to be gleaned from the past, but it is a maturing experience to study, and to learn from, how others in the past worked out how to live their lives and how they coped with the predicaments of life – things which we ourselves have to do, both as individuals and as a community, albeit in circumstances that are often very different from those of our forebears.



Glasnevin cemetery, now restored to its full glory, represents a kind of clarion call, challenging us to redouble our efforts to understand the past and appreciate its true significance for our own times.  Acts of commemoration like this afternoon’s wreath-laying and address are similar clarion calls, and are important for that reason – if for no other.  And so, once again, on your behalf, I thank Dr. Collins most sincerely for his address today. 

I am honoured today to have been asked to express thanks on behalf of all here present to my friend and fellow-Parnellite, Victor Hamilton, for conducting the traditional wreath-laying ceremony here at the grave of Charles Stewart Parnell, and then for speaking to us.  Victor’s faithful attendance here on Ivy Day Sunday each year and at the Parnell Summer School at Avondale in August is an inspiration to us all – and whereas most of us travel from no further away than the environs of Dublin, Victor comes all the way from Hollywood in County Down.  He is that very rare thing, an Ulster Parnellite – and we salute him for that.

And here today I want to salute him also for his great work in restoring, at his own expense, the grave of Captain Henry Harrison – and of his parents and his only son – in the Old Priory graveyard in Hollywood, work which he undertook at the suggestion and with the help of Deirdre Larkin, Secretary of the Parnell Society.  Henry Harrison was Parnell’s last personal secretary – and, having been elected an MP in 1890 at the age of only 23, he was the last surviving member of Parnell’s parliamentary party when he died in 1954.  After Parnell’s death, he had a varied career as a banker, soldier and journalist – and he was eventually close to Eamon de Valera through his work in the 1940s for the Anti-Partition League in Great Britain.  I can think of no other figure who served those two colossi of modern Irish history – Parnell and de Valera.  And we should remember that de Valera is himself buried here in Glasnevin, not far from where we stand.   So close to Parnell was Henry Harrison that Katherine O’Shea chose him to place wreaths on her husband’s coffin on her behalf at his funeral – which, of course, she did not attend.

Victor Hamilton, in restoring the grave of Henry Harrison, has helped to keep fresh the memory of a very special Parnellite – and he has thus placed present-day Parnellites everywhere much in his debt.  It was therefore a great privilege for us to hear him speak here today, and I thank him most sincerely on your behalf.

Can I begin by affirming my detestation of any restrictions on freedom of expression? I reject utterly the proposition that anyone has the right to tell me what I may, or may not, laugh at. And my academic interest in the history of the press, and specifically cartoons, has served to reinforce my horror of censorship. I wrote the entry for the Dictionary of Irish Biography on Patrick Hooper, the last editor of the Freeman’s Journal newspaper, and I quoted him as saying in 1927 that ‘restrictions on publication have the habit of growing, and they should not be imposed except where absolutely necessary’. Apt words for a newspaperman, as valid today as 88 years ago.

And Hooper had earned the right to say them. He had been imprisoned in December 1920 for publishing in the Freeman a story of army brutality which broke the censorship regulations then in force. Later, after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed, the Freeman’s printing plant was smashed up by a party of anti-Treatyite IRA because they objected to an article about a convention of their military council. The Freeman, however, would not be silenced. A much reduced version of the newspaper was produced on Gestetner machines every day until it could resume normal publication.

The reaction of Charlie Hebdo to the massacre of so many of its staff was a similarly spirited response to terrorism. The ‘survival issue’, with its controversial cover, was appropriately defiant – and, as such, greatly to be praised. I believe that it had a duty to offend – in order to assert unambiguously that it would not be silenced. I regret that so few of the world’s media saw fit to reproduce the cover – despite much admirable rhetoric about the ‘freedom to offend’. Their failure had the effect of ceding ground to those who would silence us all.

Of course, I acknowledge the censure – and worse – that can follow from the exercise of one’s ‘freedom to offend’, but we negate that freedom if we exercise it only when it is safe or ‘politically correct’ to do so – or only when the target is something not sacred in our own culture. We must not be hypocritically one-sided in our defence of freedom of expression. The gold standard on this is to be found in the words of Justice William Brennan, of the US Supreme Court: ‘... we must be willing to abide someone else's unfamiliar or even repellent practice because the same tolerant impulse protects our own idiosyncrasies’.

So, are there no limits to freedom of expression? My heart tells me ‘none’ – but I have a few qualifications. I could not defend a person knowlingly speaking an untruth or shouting personal abuse. Nor would I attempt to argue that we have a right to articulate naked prejudice, to present material or images that are irredeemably racist or xenophobic, anti-Semitic or anti-Islamic, sexist or homophobic. I object to targeting individuals for what they are, as distinct from what they do. There is a world of difference between these two categories. Both may give offence – that is of the essence of cartoons, and of comedy generally – but, whereas the first category is gratuitously offensive and hateful, the second is aimed at making people think and question their values and received orthodoxies with a view to correcting folly, pomposity and injustice. That is fair game.

And we should not overestimate the impact of the offence that is allegedly suffered by the victims of cartoons and other forms of comedy – or be too sympathetic to the supposedly afflicted victims. There are some people who make it their business to take offence at the slightest thing – professional offendees. We should take no account of them. As regards the very few who may be genuinely offended – who cannot bring themselves to entertain ideas that are foreign to their way of thinking – it is open to them simply to disregard the offending item. Nobody is forcing them to look at it, or to read it. Offence is very easily avoided.



But I believe much of the so-called ‘offence’ is contrived – and the call for censorship is often not about avoiding offence, but about control. Those who exercise control over others – political, religious, economic or otherwise – wish (understandably) to retain it and expand it, and will try to exclude anything that might undermine their authority and the value system upon which that authority rests. Protestations of offence are thus just a cover for denying those they subjugate the intellectual means to challenge them. It is an insidious manifestation of tyranny. That was what motivated those who ordered the Charlie Hebdo massacre. We must not assist them – or appease them – by imposing, or tolerating, restrictions on free speech. Je suis Charlie!

OTHER GUEST SPEAKERS: Dr Laurent Muzellec (UCD), Professor Roy Greenslade & Professor Farrel Corcoran.

President John F. Kennedy, speaking in 1963, said that ‘a nation reveals itself not only by the men it produces but by the men it honours, the men it remembers’. Now the men of 1916 may have been men of high ideals, but their actions were profoundly undemocratic and morally suspect. By commemorating them we signal approval of what they did, and thus we associate ourselves as a nation with values and modes of behaviour which today we emphatically reject, and we are right to reject them. For this reason, I believe that commemorating 1916 is perverse, both hypocritical and potentially dangerous.

The Rising had no popular mandate. The distinguished UCD historian, F.X. Martin, writing in 1966 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, characterised it as ‘a conspiracy of a conspiracy of a minority’. He wrote that ‘the Easter Rising was a coup d’état against the British Government, it ran flat counter to the wishes of Redmond and the majority of Irish Nationalists, it was a mutiny against MacNeill and the constitution of the Irish Volunteers, and it usurped the powers of the IRB [the Irish Republican Brotherhood]’.

And the case against the Rising on democratic grounds had been eloquently stated by Eoin MacNeill in a memorandum that he circulated to his fellow officers in the Irish Volunteers in February 1916, two months before the Rising. MacNeill wrote, and I quote:

We believe that the consensus we hold among us [on national matters] is right as far as it goes ... [It is] our duty to so act that our country itself, i.e. the Irish nation, shall learn, as far as may be secured, to think in the same way ... In other words, if we are right, it is our duty to get our country on our side, and not to be content with the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong.

He concluded as follows:

I am definitely opposed to any proposal that may come forward involving insurrection. I have no doubt at all that my consent to any such proposal ... would make me false to my country besides involving me in the guilt of murder.

Here is a clear statement of the reasons why MacNeill opposed the Rising and sought to stop it, and it explains the problems that the Rising presents for the democrat and the theologian – then and now.

This brings me to the moral argument. There are, traditionally, five criteria which, taken together, would justify revolution. The first is just cause. In the context of 1916, the government would have to have been an oppressive tyranny. Second, violence must be the last resort: there should be no other option for getting rid of the tyranny. Third, there should be proportionality between the evil caused by the revolt and the evil that it aims to replace. Fourth, there should be a reasonable prospect of success – and fifth, the action should have the approval of the community at large. It is, frankly, doubtful whether even one of these criteria was met when the men of 1916 marched out on that Easter Monday. Indeed, in an important book just published, Violence, Politics and Catholicism in Ireland, the Irish Jesuit-historian, Fr Oliver Rafferty, states categorically that at no time in the past two hundred years did conditions exist in Ireland that would have justified revolutionary violence under the terms of Catholic moral teaching.

I accept, of course, that the UK parliament had denied the will of the Irish people for some form of self-government, but the Irish people since O’Connell’s time had chosen electorally to pursue their goal of self-government by constitutional means. The support for those who advocated other means – for example, Young Ireland in 1848 and the Fenians in 1866 – had been derisory. The men of 1916 thus flouted the will of the Irish people as regards the means by which they wished to pursue the goal of self-government.

Some will say that, in the general election of 1918, the Irish people gave its approval in retrospect to the Easter Rising. But history isn’t as simple as that. The 1918 election was won in Ireland by the Sinn Féin party which had no hand, act or part in the 1916 Rising and was after 1917 a much broader coalition of advanced nationalists than the IRB cabal that had brought about the Rising. Moreover, the Sinn Féin triumph in December 1918 was boosted by the anti-conscription campaign earlier in 1918. So there is no clear line of descent from 1916 to 1918.



In any event, the claim of ‘retrospective endorsement’ of the Rising brings us into dangerous political territory. The sophistry of thus attempting to justify the Rising leaves it open to any crackpot movement to claim that its actions are justified by imagined or hoped-for retrospective vindication. That is precisely what successive generations of republican subversives here in Ireland have argued in defence of their armed campaigns since 1922. This legacy of political violence bequeathed to us by the men of 1916 is, in my view, another reason why we should not, and I will not, commemorate the Rising.

OTHER GUEST SPEAKERS: Ambassador Dominic Chilcott (UK), Kevin Myers, John Green, Professor Bríona Nic Dhiarmada, Mary Condren & Patsy McGarry. 

Before I begin, I think I should declare an interest: I am the son of a Scots lassie, my mother having been born in Glasgow some 91 years ago. In these circumstances, I’m not sure that I can bring the right level of objectivity to the task which I have been given this evening. But I will try.

And it seems to me only right that, if I am to speak about the lassies, I should acknowledge the importance for women of the centenary that we observed last Monday here in Ireland – the centenary of the first public meeting of Dáil Éireann. That assembly comprised the majority of Irish MPs elected in the General Election held in December 1918, and that was the first parliamentary election in which women had the vote in these islands. The MPs in question had pledged that, if elected, they would not take their seats in Westminster, but would set up a rival assembly in Dublin – and that is precisely what they did.

One of their number was Countess Markievicz. She was the first woman ever elected to the House of Commons – but since she had been elected on an abstentionist platform, she did not take her seat in Westminster. Instead, Nancy Astor was the first woman to sit in Westminster – elected in November 1919, almost a year after Markievicz’s election. She was an American, and it strikes me as very strange that neither the first woman elected to the House of Commons nor the first woman to take her seat there were actually British. I don’t know what that tells us about the British political system, but clearly there was no aversion to ‘blow-ins’ in those days. 

One of the first thing the First Dáil did was to elect a government to challenge the writ of the Dublin Castle regime – and, remarkably, Countess Markievicz served as Minister for Labour in that government. This was ten years before Margaret Bondfield became the first female cabinet minister in Britain and fourteen years before Frances Perkins was appointed the first female member of the US cabinet. And, in Ireland, we had to wait until 1979 before another woman entered the cabinet. Markievicz’s achievement is, therefore, worthy of note in the context of this toast.

Markievicz was, of course, also one of the rebels in 1916. Whereas most women participants in the Rising acted as messengers or nurses or simply fed the fighting men, she was a combatant and, as we shall see, didn’t hesitate to fire a gun. She was second-in-command of the Irish Citizen Army contingent that took over St Stephen's Green, and later the College of Surgeons. Here, in the University Club, one of the members  ̶ Stephen Kelleher, a professor of mathematics in Trinity College  ̶ witnessed the events in Stephen's Green on Easter Monday 1916. In a letter his wife wrote to her family in Derry, she recounted how her husband had seen the rebels going into Stephen’s Green and expelling the public. I quote: “The gates of the Green were all shut – the chains keeping them back broken and the inside barricaded with seats etc ... Next they [the rebels] started digging trenches.”

Kelleher saw Countess Markievicz arrive at the Green, and his wife states that “she was dressed in male attire – all in green – boots, puttees, a tunic almost to the knee, a feather in her hat, and she appeared in great form”. Later, Kelleher was present in the Club when Markievicz aimed a shot at one of his fellow members, Dr Daly – fired from St Stephen’s Green into the Club where, as Mrs Kelleher wrote, “he was foolish enough to show himself at a window”. Dr Daly was an officer in the Royal Army Medical Corps and was in uniform. Mrs. Kelleher comments: “Anything in uniform was potted”. Fortunately, on that occasion, Markievicz missed her target – though the window was shattered – but she is alleged to have shot an unarmed policeman at one of the gates of St Stephen’s Green at another time on Easter Monday, and to have run triumphantly into the Green afterwards shouting “I got him, I got him” – and one of the witnesses to this episode (not Professor Kelleher) reported that “some of the rebels shook her by the hand and seemed to congratulate her”. The policeman later died from his wounds.

Still on the subject of Markievicz and guns: it is said that, when she was Minister for Labour, she once produced a revolver and placed it on the table in order to facilitate the settlement of an industrial dispute in which she was mediating. I’m sure that focused the minds of both parties wonderfully. 

As is well known, Markievicz was court-martialled after the 1916 Rising and condemned to death, but her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. The record shows that she behaved in a cowardly manner at her trial, breaking down and pleading for clemency – saying “I am only a woman, you cannot shoot a woman, you must not shoot a woman”. This gender-specific plea for mercy has not prevented her from becoming a feminist icon – celebrated as a female combatant in 1916 and as the first woman elected to the Westminster parliament.

It may, however, be more appropriate to see her as a stereotypical example of her generation as depicted by Roy Foster in his book, Vivid Faces. He argues that the radicalism of that generation represented as much a “generational shift” as anything else: they were, in Foster’s words “reacting against their fathers”. He writes: “a cohort of people emerged in Ireland who ... were determined to destabilize the worlds they were born into”. In this respect, they were the same as revolutionaries at any time and in any place – young, educated, upper- or middle-class people revolting against their parents and their parents’ values, both political and social. In that sense, Dublin in 1916 was no different to Paris in 1789, Russia in 1917, student revolts in Paris and elsewhere in 1968 - even Baader-Meinhof in Germany. I suspect Markievicz would have been quite at home in the Baader-Meinhof gang.

All I can say is: thank God all lassies are not like her. Nevertheless, I think it is right that we should salute the advance represented by the enfranchisement of women and the election of the first woman to the House of Commons – and her subsequent selection as the first female Cabinet minister in these islands. In toasting the lassies this evening, remember those momentous events of one hundred years ago and give thanks that lads and lassies now enjoy the same rights and obligations in the political sphere in both Britain and Ireland. We are – all of us, both men and women – all the better for that.

And so, the toast: TO THE LASSIES

At a public lecture in Dublin in February, held under the auspices of Studies, the Jesuit journal, I heard Chris Patten (Lord Patten of Barnes), former British Conservative MP and last Governor of Hong Kong, describe George Eliot’s Middlemarch as “the greatest English novel”. That was not the first time that I heard it so described, but I had never found time to read it. I decided that I should use the period of seclusion required by the government’s Covid-19 regulations to finally read this much admired work.

What constitutes a “great” novel? For me, greatness in literature is a function of its ability still to speak to us despite being the product of a different era and/or a different culture. By that standard, Middlemarch – first published in 1871-72 – is certainly “great”.

It is a novel about ordinary people – one is tempted to say “normal people”, making a genuflection to one of our currently popular novels and television adaptations. The characters live “faithfully a hidden life”, to quote from the famous final sentence of the novel. This focus on the ordinary is something that resonates with us today: there are no heroes, just people whose lives are spent “in channels which had no great name on the earth”.

There is, however, a villain – one whose villainy is familiar to us. Mr Bulstrode is a dodgy banker, with a dark secret of past malfeasance. He tries to compensate for his past with a stridently evangelical Christianity, leading one of the locals in the town of Middlemarch to say of him after he is eventually exposed: “what’s more against a man’s stomach than a man coming and making himself bad company with his religion, and giving out as the Ten Commandments are not good enough for him, and all the while he’s worse than half the men at the tread-mill?” This could well be said of some evangelical zealots in Trump’s entourage.

At the core of the novel are certain “love problems” – marriages and courtships – which are every bit as tortured as Connell and Marianne’s affair in Normal People. Unlike Normal People, there are no sex scenes in Middlemarch – but a definite frisson is evident when Dorothy and Ladislaw overcome their reticence and admit their love for one another at the end of the novel. 

One of the problematic marriages involves a young doctor, Lydgate, who has ambitious plans for a new hospital in Middlemarch and is, at one point, concerned with “preparing a new ward in case of the cholera coming to us”. This adds a contemporary dimension to the novel, with the threat of Covid-19 hanging over us. There was a cholera epidemic in Britain in 1831-32 – and Middlemarch is set over the period of a few years ending in 1832.

And how could a curmudgeonly old bachelor like me not respond sympathetically to Mr Brooke’s pronouncement on marriage: “I never loved any one well enough to put myself into a noose for them. It is a noose, you know.”

It had been many years since I read a Victorian novel, and I will confess that I found Middlemarch challenging. It is long and moves at a stately pace, and the language is very formal – though beautiful. I am happy to acknowledge it as “great” and am glad to have read it, but I have not changed my view that the greatest English novel – pace Chris Patten – is Dickens’ Bleak House.

Trollope aficionados in the Kildare Street & University Club may, of course, have other ideas about what is the greatest English novel. Please discuss!       

3 NOVEMBER 2012

Sir, – In a statement issued on October 31st which has so far received little press attention, Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform Brendan Howlin announced the Government’s decision to abolish the board of the National Library of Ireland and return the library to within the civil service structure in which it languished before the coming into effect of the National Cultural Institutions Act 1997. I write, as a member of the statutory Readers Advisory Committee of the Library, to protest against this retrograde step.

When the National Cultural Institutions Act was being debated in the Seanad in 1996, it was described by the then Minister for Arts, Michael D Higgins (now, of course, our President), as representing “one of the most significant legislative initiatives, in cultural heritage terms, that the Irish State has undertaken since its foundation”. Its aim, according to Mr Higgins, was “to establish a modern legislative structure within which our major cultural institutions [including the National Library] could be enabled to thrive”.

He went on to say that “autonomy provided by means of statutorily established boards will give these institutions greater discretion and accountability over the handling of budgets; some flexibility over personnel resources; stronger powers to develop policies on acquisitions, the holding of exhibitions and integrating these important institutions into the national culture”.

I believe the National Library of Ireland, under the two boards which have served since the 1997 Act was brought into effect in 2005, has fulfilled the promise of which Mr Higgins spoke. The progress which the library has made in these years is in marked contrast to the preceding decades of under-resourcing, inactivity and neglect when the library was part of the civil service structure, most notoriously in the hands – more accurately, at the mercy – of successive ministers for education.

To return the library to that earlier, failed administrative framework is the greatest folly. It will exacerbate the immense difficulties which the library is already facing with very severe, indeed disproportionate, cutbacks in budgets and staffing. The National Library of Ireland is the worst resourced national library in Europe and is, in some respects, less well resourced than some of our county libraries.

How can any Government which professes to value our cultural heritage defend such deplorable circumstances? The National Library is the key repository for the materials required for research into our past and our cultural heritage. The oversight of the library’s activities by a board, accountable to but independent of the Government, guarantees that priority is given to the public interest in facilitating such research and that issues of vital importance to scholars and others concerned with the development of an understanding of our culture and history are not lost in bureaucratic obfuscation or short-term political agendas.

The board is there to protect this public interest, and the library as an institution and the quality of the service it provides will be greatly weakened by its abolition.

Future generations will curse this Government for compounding the errors of their predecessors by what is, in effect, an act of gross cultural sabotage, perpetrated – and what an irony this is – in the name of “balancing the books”.

Incidentally, it is not at all clear how savings are to be realised by this measure as I understand the board had agreed to serve on a pro bono basis. Certainly, the purported savings have not been spelt out by the Government.

Edmund Burke wrote that “all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing”, and it is in this spirit that I feel it necessary to highlight the damage that is being done to the National Library – an institution which, I believe, is deeply valued by the people of Ireland.

Yours, etc., FELIX M LARKIN

13 NOVEMBER 2012

Sir, – I would like to endorse Felix Larkin’s trenchant critique of the Government’s recent decision to abolish the National Library’s board and take over management of that splendid institution. His cogent and well-informed letter (November 2nd) stresses the utter “folly” of entrusting the library’s affairs to a bureaucracy that knows little or nothing about what transpires daily inside those hallowed precincts on Kildare Street.

I write on the basis of more than 50 years’ experience of reading and writing in the NLI. In fact, I could never have completed any of my books and articles on Irish history without its marvellous resources and all kinds of help from the friendly staff. Over the years I have watched the library’s gradual emergence from the dark ages of the 1950s and 1960s and its transformation into an efficient, benevolent, refurbished, and even computerised institution. To my delight it took a mere five minutes for a book to be delivered to my desk. In recent years – especially under the enlightened leadership of Brendan O’Donoghue – the quality of the library staff as well as the hospitable ambience reached a peak. Since then, ominous budget cuts have eroded those wonderful services while reducing opening hours and greatly increasing the length of book delivery.

To quote that estimable Irishman, Mr Murphy: “If a thing ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. In my opinion the only thing that needs fixing in the NLI is the budget that has shrunk in size over the last few years. Of course, the bottom line is money – hardly a surprise in these hard times. Nevertheless the NLI does not deserve to become a sacrificial lamb simply because it is a centre of cultural production rather than a producer of stout or computers or pharmaceuticals. Continued under-financing of the NLI is bound to result in not only more layoffs, but also a further decline in readers and services.

As Mr Larkin points out, the NLI is now “the worst resourced library in Europe”. That sobering pronouncement should be a cause of huge embarrassment to the Government as well as the nation. Quite rightly he declares that the NLI is “deeply valued by the people of Ireland.” To this truism I must add my conviction that scholars of Irish history, literature, and culture around the world also hold the NLI in high esteem.

Their profound indebtedness to the NLI and their concern for the wellbeing and autonomy of this national treasure should not be ignored when contemplating any scheme of managerial reform.

Yours, etc., L. PERRY CURTIS Jr, Emeritus Professor of History, Brown University, North Pomfret, Vermont, USA

5 DECEMBER 2012

Sir, – Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan’s defence of his proposed emasculation of the National Library and the National Museum (Opinion, December 3rd) is an almost comical example of Orwellian doublethink.

He describes as “reforms” a package of measures which, in fact, would undo the very real reforms effected by the Cultural Institutions Act 1997. That act freed the library and the museum from the control of the civil service in which they had been shamefully neglected for decades. Mr Deenihan now wishes to return them to that failed administrative structure, and to abolish the boards and advisory committees which guarantee their integrity as centres of scholarly pursuit.

He claims that abolishing these boards and committees will save “some €350,000 per annum based on 2011 figures”, but this is misleading. The members of the boards and committees have agreed to serve on a pro bono basis, so the savings in question have already been realised.

Mr Deenihan needs a better justification than that for abolishing the boards.

Yours, etc., FELIX M. LARKIN

7 JANUARY 2013

Sir, – It is most depressing to note that Minister for Arts Jimmy Deenihan refuses to respond in any meaningful way to the near-universal rejection of his plan for the National Library and National Museum by the academic community in Ireland (News Agenda, January 3rd). He appeals to us to give his plan a chance to work, but he doesn’t seem to recognise that his plan is to revert to the failed administrative structure which was reformed by the National Cultural Institutions Act 1997 that he now proposes to dismantle. In other words, his plan has been tried and has failed.

He also persists in providing misleading figures for the costs of the boards of the National Library and National Museum: he quotes historic 2011 figures, not current figures. The current figures would reflect the fact that the members of these boards have agreed to serve on a pro bono basis, and so the bulk of the savings which he seeks have already been achieved without the retrograde step of abolishing the boards.

The boards are essential in order to preserve the independence of these vital cultural institutions. Moreover, if (as he claims) Mr Deenihan wants to encourage philanthropic support from the private sector for the

National Library and National Museum, I suggest that such support is much less likely to be forthcoming if these institutions are lost in the miasma of the civil service. Strong, independent and accountable corporate structures are necessary in order to attract philanthropic interest.

Yours, etc., FELIX M LARKIN

11 FEBRUARY 2013

Sir, – I write on behalf of the professional staff of the National Library of Ireland who are members of Impact to express our concerns about the proposed reform of the National Library. We are in agreement with recent commentators and correspondents to this newspaper (Fintan O’Toole, Michael Ryan and Felix M Larkin) in their negative assessment of the decision by the Minister for Arts to abolish the board of the National

Library and replace it with an advisory council serving both the National Library and the National Museum.

Reform of the library was undertaken in 2005 when it became a semi-state body. The National Cultural Institutions Act (1997) legislated for this to enable the library to work independently, with its own board. A great deal of time and effort were expended by civil servants and library staff to bring its provisions into effect. It seems a waste of scarce public resources to attempt to undo this work, with little prospect of any real gain and, probably, considerable loss.

The National Library and the National Museum have entirely different functions, with no natural connection. The National Library collects and makes accessible the printed, manuscript and visual record of the life of the nation and is meeting the demands of the digital era by digitising its own collections and by capturing born-digital material. It is vital that the National Library be able to maintain and promote its own identity and autonomy to attract the philanthropic funding now necessary to carry out its mission.

The National Library will always require a core of funding to carry out the day-to-day work of acquiring, processing and preserving publications and historic documentary material. It has suffered a decline of 85 per cent in purchasing power since 2008. Its overall budget has been cut by 44 per cent in the same period. This compares to the 28 per cent cut imposed on the other cultural institutions. We fear this trend will worsen under the governance structure proposed.

The current proposal cannot adequately serve the National Library, the National Museum or the citizens of the State.

Yours, etc., MATT STAUNTON, National Secrteary, Services & Enterprise Division, Impact Trade Union, Nerney’s Court, Dublin 1

Joseph Biden, now the 46th president of the United States, is one of fifteen U.S. presidents who were previously vice-presidents. He and Richard Nixon are the only two among the fifteen who did not immediately succeed the president under whom they served as vice-president, but were elected president some years later – Biden, four years later; Nixon, eight years later. Nixon had, however, sought the presidency as the outgoing vice-president in 1960, and was defeated by John F. Kennedy. Ironically, in the 1968 presidential election he defeated the then outgoing vice-president, Hubert H. Humphrey.

Outgoing vice-presidents have rarely won election to the presidency. The second and third presidents, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, both did it – as did Martin Van Buren in 1836. The next outgoing vice-president to win a presidential election was the elder George Bush in 1988. Curiously, Van Buren and the elder Bush were both one-term presidents – losing to William Henry Harrison and Bill Clinton respectively when they sought second terms.

The other vice-presidents who succeeded to the presidency did so as a result of the death of a president – or, in the case of Gerald Ford in 1974, because of Nixon’s resignation. None who thus attained the presidency in the nineteen century were subsequently elected to the office in their own right – John Tyler (1841-45), Millard Fillmore (1850-53), Andrew Johnson (1865-69) and Chester Arthur (1881-85). Each was discarded when he had served his predecessor’s unexpired term of office.

By contrast, all the vice-presidents who assumed the presidency on the death of a president in the twentieth century were subsequently elected for one full term – Theodore Roosevelt (1901-09), Calvin Coolidge (1923-29), Harry S. Truman (1945-53) and Lyndon Johnson (1963-69). Ford, however, failed in his attempt to be elected president in his own right.

Theodore Roosevelt sought a second full term as president in 1912 – as a Progressive, though he had been a Republican during his presidency – but was defeated by Woodrow Wilson. Coolidge, Truman and Johnson did not seek second full terms despite being eligible to do so. The prohibition on a president serving more than two terms only had effect after Truman’s presidency. If, however, the vice-president succeeds to the presidency during the second half of his predecessor’s term, he is entitled to seek two subsequent full terms. Since Lyndon Johnson succeeded Kennedy after the latter had served almost three years of his four-year term, he could have sought re-election in 1968 and indeed was expected to run.

Nixon and Humphrey were not the only outgoing vice-presidents to seek and fail to win the presidency. Vice-presidents Charles Pinckney and Al Gore were defeated in the presidential elections of 1808 and 2000 respectively. Two other vice-presidents ran unsuccessfully for president. Henry Wallace, vice-president from 1941 to 1945, was the Progressive candidate for president against Truman in 1948 – and attracted over one million popular votes, but none in the Electoral College. In 1988, Walter Mondale was defeated by Ronald Reagan; like Biden, he sought the presidency four years after his term as vice-president ended.

At least two presidents tried unsuccessfully to win the vice-presidency before running for president. Franklin D. Roosevelt was the defeated vice-presidential candidate in 1920, and John F. Kennedy sought but failed to secure the vice-presidential nomination of the Democratic party in 1956. The Democrats’ candidate for president in 1956 was Adlai Stevenson, and he was trounced by Eisenhower. Kennedy was lucky not to be associated with that disaster, but his performance at the nominating Convention was widely admired and it laid the foundation for his bid for the presidency in 1960.

John Tyler, the first vice-president to assume the presidency on the death of his predecessor, had the most controversial later life of any who served in both offices. After his presidency ended in 1845, he returned to his native Virginia. He supported that state’s secession from the Union in 1861 and was elected a member of the Confederate Congress. When he died in 1862, his coffin was draped in the Confederate flag. Bizarrely, one of his grandsons, Harrison Ruffin Tyler, is still living – aged 91. His father was Tyler’s son by a much younger second wife, and he is the son of his father’s second marriage – also, to a much younger woman. The three generations of the Tyler family span 230 years, President Tyler having been born in 1790. 

I would like to thank the UCD Humanities Institute and the UCD School of English, Drama and Film – and in particular, Lindsay Janssen – for inviting me to chair this panel this afternoon.

While I regard myself strictly as a historian, my BA here in UCD many years ago was in English and History. I had the privilege back then of studying under the great Denis Donoghue. In preparing these comments, it occurred to me that the School of English has been home to some of the finest and most charismatic scholars in UCD – not only Denis Donoghue, but Seamus Deane, Declan Kiberd, Gus Martin, Andrew Carpenter, Terry Dolan and, now, Margaret Kelleher (who is one of our speakers today). So I am proud of my former association with UCD School of English, and accordingly pleased to chair this panel of speakers today.

Another reason why I am pleased to chair this panel is because it is about newspapers and periodicals. For much too long, the press in Ireland – both newspapers and periodicals – has been a neglected field of study by historians and other scholars. Thankfully, this deficiency has been rectified in recent years – most especially, though not exclusively, through the efforts of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland, which Mark O’Brien of DCU and I co-founded in 2008. Our annual conferences since then, and the various publications which these conferences have generated, have advanced the cause of press history in Ireland. I welcome this symposium today as a further contribution towards advancing that cause.



We have three speakers on this panel, and I will now introduce them briefly...

Richard Crossman, the British politician and political scientist, wrote in the 1960s about Cabinet government in Britain becoming increasingly Prime Ministerial government – and the same phenomenon has been evident here in Ireland, as I am sure John Bruton would confirm from his experience. For historians, who inevitably look at the past through the prism of the present, that has meant that we have perhaps concentrated disproportionately on the careers and personalities of heads of government in the first fifty or so years of the new Irish State. The recent series of books published by the Royal Irish Academy – Judging Dev, Judging Lemass and Judging W.T. Cosgrave – is emblematic of this tendency, and in addition Costello and Lynch have both been the subject of major biographies. However, the governments headed by those five – Cosgrave, de Valera, Costello, Lemass and Lynch – contained ministers who in certain respects at least overshadowed their leaders, and so far these figures have received limited attention from historians. Two such figures are the subject of today’s seminar, and I very much welcome this opportunity to focus our attention on them. They were towering figures in W.T. Cosgrave’s government. They were, to use a biblical analogy, the David and Jonathan of that government: great personal friends. They were not 1916 men, not IRB – but active in Sinn Féin after 1916, and with significant links back beyond the Sinn Féin movement to the older nationalist tradition of Parnell’s Irish party at Westminster. In O’Higgins’ case, there was his family connection with the Sullivans and the Healys; and Hogan married the young widow of Michael Davitt’s son. So we have an interesting afternoon ahead of us, and I warmly welcome you all here.

I am the ‘odd one out’ on this panel – not a Protestant, and not a scholar of Irish Protestantism. Indeed, most of what I know about the history of Irish Protestantism I have learned from Ian d’Alton – and I would like to pay tribute here to the wonderful, seminal work that he has done in this area over so many years. The reason I am on this panel – and in this book (Protestant and Irish) – is that I am a historian of cartoons (though not, I hope, a cartoon historian – there is a subtle difference!).

Cartoons are a valuable, but under-used, historical source – for as Steve Bell, The Guardian’s brilliant cartoonist, has observed, ‘cartoons can say things that are perhaps less easy to say in a more straightforward journalistic context’. Good journalism – like good history – has to be nuanced, reflecting the complexity of the situation or issue under consideration; a cartoon, by contrast, cuts through the verbiage with a simple truth that overrides complexity – and, through humour or irony, appeals to instincts within us that are visceral rather than rational. I would argue that historians cannot afford to ignore the insights of cartoonists: how and what they have chosen to examine, parody and challenge should always be of interest to historians. So the editors of this book and I agreed that it might be worthwhile to examine how southern Irish

Protestants were depicted in cartoons in Irish newspapers and magazines after independence, and that is what I have done in my chapter.

Satire, whether in literary form or in cartoons, is regarded as something that mainly ‘punches up’ – in other words, a weapon of the powerless against dominant groups and people. The perception of southern Irish Protestants as a powerful elite makes them an obvious target for cartoonists. From the late 1870s onwards, vivid and colourful cartoons were published as supplements by the Weekly Freeman and by United Ireland, both nationalist newspapers. When southern Irish Protestants featured in these cartoons – and they featured a lot – it was almost invariably in the guise of rapacious landlords guilty of abusing vulnerable tenants, and they were demonised. I have reproduced in this book a typical example, from the Weekly Freeman of 18 December 1886, in which the plight of an evicted family at Christmastime is juxtaposed with the good fortune of their former landlord enjoying the festive season snug inside the Big House in the distance.

Images such as that inevitably informed how the southern Protestants were presented in cartoons in Irish newspapers and periodicals after 1922. They are almost always gentry – an elite, and so fair game for satire – even though, as Ian d'Alton is always at pains to remind us, the gentry were only a small part of the Protestant population. A good example of a cartoon from the post-independence period is 'Ceilidhe in the Kildare

Street Club' by C.E. Kelly, published in Dublin Opinion in 1934. Its humour lies in the incongruity of what was still a bastion of the Anglo-Irish gentry and the Protestant professional classes hosting an event redolent of the Irish-Ireland cultural revival. We see blimpish men in formal evening dress – white tie and tails – and with monocles whizzing round in jigs and reels with their stout ladies. The cartoon includes clever word play with names and titles, and the use of the Irish language alongside these names and titles adds greatly to the incongruity. This is gentle mockery, tempered by social envy.

For Protestants, on the receiving end of such humour, being treated as ridiculous ‘relics of oul’ decency’ was infinitely preferable to being portrayed as a people to be feared and hated, as the landlords were in the 1880s. In this respect, this cartoon mirrors a movement in the perception of southern Protestants as no longer a threat to Irish independence or to the social and economic aspirations of the majority population.

Nevertheless, it brings the ‘outsider status’ of Protestants into sharp focus and demonstrates just how much of a chasm separated them from mainstream Irish society.

Likewise, the well-known cartoon of the newsroom in the Irish Times, published by Dublin Opinion in 1930, emphasises the ‘outsider status’ which that newspaper retained until the 1960s – a defiantly Protestant institution, like the Kildare Street Club. This cartoon is also by C.E. Kelly, and much of its humour derives from the anachronistic atmosphere of the newsroom as portrayed by him – staff in top hats or mortarboards, a porter with medals from ancient wars, Burke’s Peerage and Debrett’s on the bookshelves (described as ‘works of deference’), and references to Sackville Street and Kingstown. The cartoon’s pièce de résistance – inverting marginality – is the depiction of the ‘Irishman’s diary’, corralled off from the rest of the newsroom and occupied by a peasant and his pig. It demonstrates that, whereas the Protestant minority may be ‘outsiders’ in Irish society, the majority population is marginal within the world of the Irish Protestant.

Less gentle – and less humorous – was the cartoon published in the inaugural issue of the Irish Press on 5 September 1931. It shows a line of men and a woman in chains en route to the guillotine, and the first two are dubbed ‘old order’ and ‘social pretension’. Their imagined fate is absurd fantasy, but there is a serious message: Protestants, and others who do not subscribe to Fianna Fáil’s version of Irishness, will be in trouble when Fianna Fáil comes to power. The caption on the cartoon, slightly misquoting the song of the Lord High Executioner in The Mikado, reads: ‘We’ve got them on the list, and they’ll none of them be missed’.

The cartoons that I have mentioned above are reproduced in all their glory in the book Protestant and Irish. In fairness, however, Irish newspapers and magazines post-independence did not concern themselves very much with Protestants – and I found relatively few cartoons targeting southern Irish Protestant society, institutions or individuals after 1921. While those that did highlighted the ‘outsider status’ of Protestants, the most significant thing about the cartoons is, in fact, their paucity. This indicates that, despite the many advantages Protestants continued to enjoy, they were largely invisible in Irish society post-independence. That was probably by choice; they wished to be ignored. Invisibility was part of their strategy for survival – a point made repeatedly in this book. Caleb Richardson, another contributor to the book, has commented elsewhere on ‘how little Protestants mattered in independent Ireland’ – and my chapter confirms precisely that. 

I’ll begin on a personal note, if I may. I had an aunt, sadly recently deceased, who was a nurse in St Vincent’s hospital over sixty years ago – and, as Patrick pointed out in his paper, Fr Francis Shaw directed the sodality of the nursing staff there and my aunt, who was a pious lady, was accordingly a great friend of his. When I was born in the nearby Hatch Street Nursing Home – now gone – my aunt arranged for Fr Shaw to visit my mother, and he blessed me in my cradle. I like to think that that early encounter with Fr Shaw set me on the path to becoming the unapologetically revisionist historian that I am, and that my revisionist ethic – the imperative to question received versions of the past – is thus divinely sanctioned, if not divinely inspired.

My only other encounter with Fr Shaw was an intellectual one – reading his essay, “The Canon of Irish History – A Challenge”, when it appeared in Studies in Summer 1972. I was then completing my MA in Modern Irish History in UCD, and I can well remember the enormous public controversy which the essay generated. For many, it was (as Patrick has stated) a piece of secular blasphemy – an irreverent, irresponsible debunking of the foundation event of the Irish state, the 1916 Rising, and of a revered figure, Patrick Pearse. To evoke a contemporary parallel, it offended many in much the same way as certain cartoons in Charlie Hebdo. The difference, of course, was that Fr Shaw was already dead when his work appeared – precluding the possibility that some latter day ‘patriot’, an Irish equivalent of a Jihadist, might take a pot shot at him. Many, of course, did take metaphorical pot shots at his work – Patrick has mentioned in particular the critiques offered by Pádraig Ó Snodaigh and Professor Joe Lee – and, as Patrick has explained, the editor of Studies had self-censored it in 1966 when Fr Shaw offered it for publication in the volume of Studies which commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of the 1916 Rising. I had not realised, until Patrick told us this evening, that it was only when a manuscript copy of the essay was acquired by the New Ulster Movement and began to circulate informally in certain quarters that it was decided to publish it in Studies so as to assert the Jesuits’ copyright interest in the piece. It became a key text in revisionist Irish history, and we this evening are greatly indebted to Patrick Maume for again bringing it to our attention – and for doing so at this particular time when we are soon to commemorate the centenary of the Easter Rising.

But it is important not to overestimate the importance of Fr Shaw’s essay. The scholarly re-assessment of the Easter Rising had begun long before the publication of Fr Shaw’s essay in 1972 – and indeed some years before it was written in 1966. ‘Revisionism’ as applied to 1916 can be traced back to the publication by the Revd Professor F.X. Martin of Eoin MacNeill’s two memoranda on the Rising in Irish Historical Studies in 1961 – which publication Fr Martin himself later described as ‘the first sharp question mark against the accepted story about 1916’. The first of these memoranda, written in February 1916 (two months before the Rising), set out the case against a precipitate insurrection for the benefit of those members of the Volunteers’ headquarters staff who advocated such action – Pearse, Plunkett, Ceannt and MacDonagh. The memorandum was an eloquent plea for a more modest, realistic and practical approach to furthering the aims of the Volunteer movement. MacNeill wrote that ‘the only reason that could justify general active military measures ... would be a reasonably calculated or estimated prospect of success, in the military sense ... [and] not merely some future moral or political advantage which may be hoped for as a result of non-success’. Thus he disposed of Pearse’s idea of ‘blood sacrifice leading to national redemption’. The second memorandum was written in 1917, and gives MacNeill’s account of the events leading up to the outbreak of the Rising: his late discovery of the plans for the Rising which had been withheld from him; his discussions with Pearse and others (both those who supported the imminent insurrection and those opposed to it); and his issuing of the countermanding order which he hoped would abort the Rising. This document shows ‘that MacNeill had been deceived in particular by Pearse, MacDermott, Plunkett and MacDonagh, and that at least Pearse and Plunkett had lied to him about their intentions’. I am here quoting from Fr Martin’s commentary. The subliminal message for readers of the two MacNeill memoranda in 1961 was that there were valid narratives and interpretations of the Rising other than those that had been self-consciously fashioned by the 1916 leaders themselves and later endorsed by the Irish state through its education system and in so many other insidious ways. This was revisionism at its best!

Martin followed up his work on MacNeill by publishing a collection of fourteen letters written by the veteran county Tyrone republican, Dr Patrick McCartan, a member of the Supreme Council of the IRB, while in hiding both during and immediately after the Rising. They were addressed to his close friend and mentor, Joe McGarrity, a leader of Clan-na-Gael, the American organisation that had assisted financially and otherwise in the preparations for the Rising. McCartan – like MacNeill – had opposed the Rising, and he regarded MacNeill’s countermanding order as ‘an act of rare moral courage’: Martin explained that ‘for McCartan it was unjustifiable to lead the Irish Volunteers into an armed revolt, ill-prepared as they were in arms, training and officers’. The letters recounted the manoeuvrings within the IRB in the months preceding the Rising, and they reveal a story of insubordination and deceit on the part of the 1916 leaders that parallels almost precisely their behaviour within the Irish Volunteers. In short, ‘the powers of the Council ... [had] been usurped by a few’ – to quote McCartan. Thus, Fr Martin concluded that ‘the Rising was “a conspiracy of a conspiracy of a minority”, that is an armed rebellion, the result of an intrigue of the Military Council, operating secretly within the IRB, who in their turn were operating secretly within the Irish Volunteers, who were an acknowledged minority among Irish nationalists”.

Fr Shaw was aware of F.X. Martin’s work – we know that because the MacNeill memoranda were cited in his Studies essay – but I have found no record of what Fr Martin felt about Shaw’s essay when it appeared in 1972. Shaw was, however, a Celtic scholar rather than a pure historian and, as Patrick has outlined, his essay involved a close textual analysis of Pearse’s writings. Most historians – ‘revisionists’ included – would be uneasy with that modus operandi and with the somewhat polemical tone of Shaw’s work. My instinct is that Fr Martin would probably have shared that unease, and he would certainly have regarded Shaw’s focus on Pearse as misplaced. In a Thomas Davis lecture given on Radio Éireann in 1966, he had argued that Pearse’s putative role in 1916 was exaggerated and that MacDermott was the real mastermind. He stated that ‘if any single person is to be given credit ... it was Sean MacDermott’– and in Michael Tierney’s biography of Eoin MacNeill, edited and published by Martin after Tierney’s death, Tierney wrote that ‘Pearse himself was merely an actor directed and stage-managed by the real chief conspirator, MacDermott’. So I think Fr Martin’s silence in this instance was significant: he would not have wanted to criticise a fellow-scholar who was determined, like himself, to change the accepted interpretation of 1916.

Before concluding, I would like to mention another priest-historian, Fr Brendan Bradshaw, whose work is out of sympathy with the revisionist impulse of Fr Shaw and Fr Martin. Bradshaw studied under F.X. Martin in UCD, but in an essay in Irish Historical Studies in 1989 he took issue with the methodology and values of revisionist historiography not just as applied to the Easter Rising, but across the full range of Irish history – and his work has had great influence on a younger generation of Irish historians who now regard themselves as ‘post-revisionists’. Indeed, Fr Bradshaw could be described as the godfather of post-revisionism, just as Fr Shaw and Fr Martin were dubbed the ‘two godfathers of revisionism’ by Pádraig Ó Snodaigh. I am tempted to regard all three as a ‘holy trinity’ of priest-historians, but Bradshaw’s conception of the role of the historian is radically different from that of the other two – and of revisionist historians in general. He seems to regard historians as having a duty to create, or at least to contribute to creating, a sense of national cohesion through the agency of the history they write, to reinforce a sense of an ‘imagined community’ (to borrow Benedict Anderson’s phrase) – albeit without doing violence to high standards of professional accuracy. In the essay to which I refer, he wrote about the need to develop ‘a perception of Irish history as the “nation’s past”’ and he deprecated

...a perspective on Irish history that would depopulate it of heroic figures, struggling in the cause of national liberation; a perspective which would depopulate it of an immemorial native race, the cumulative record of whose achievements and sufferings constitutes such a rich treasury of culture and human experience; a perspective, indeed, from which the modern Irish community would seem as aliens in their own land – for ‘the past is a foreign country’.
 

This is very close to a view of history as propaganda – atavistic, even anti-intellectual. It has been characterised by Roy Foster as ‘nationalism with footnotes’. It is ‘history’ as presented in the film ‘Mise Éire’, released on the eve of the 1960s and glorifying 1916 and the War of Independence to the strains of Seán Ó Riada’s evocative music – comparable in its patriotic fervour and triumphalism with Sibelius’ symphonic poem ‘Finlandia’. In contrast, the approach that should characterise the work of historians is one of interrogating the past, questioning received orthodoxies and restoring their frail and imperfect humanity to heroes – the mindset is sceptical, almost iconoclastic. This is how advances in knowledge and understanding are made. For me, the activity of being a historian is well summed up in these words of Professor John O’Meara of UCD, one of the foremost Catholic thinkers of the mid to late twentieth century in Ireland, taken from his autobiographical volume The singing-masters:

Yet one goes on, partly perhaps for reasons of history: to make known the truth, however little more, about some important figure in the past; to remove from him the imputations, favourable or unfavourable, which successful groups in bolstering their power, in good faith or confusedly or in simple bad faith, attribute to him. This, however small an achievement in itself, participates in the transcending importance of the discovery of truth, which is ultimately one.
 

Fr Shaw and Fr Martin tried to remove some imputations, some illusions and some of the mythology about 1916. Hopefully we can emulate their good example, most especially in this decade of centenary commemorations when the temptation to do otherwise seems overwhelming. Patrick Maume has made a good start this evening, and I thank him for it.

The leaders of the 1916 Rising were certainly men and women of high ideals, but they were no heroes – for their actions were profoundly undemocratic and morally suspect.

They had no popular mandate for what they did – nobody can deny that. The distinguished historian, F.X. Martin, writing in 1966 on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary, characterised the Rising as ‘a conspiracy of a conspiracy of a minority’. He wrote that ‘the Easter Rising was a coup d’état against the British Government, it ran flat counter to the wishes of Redmond and the majority of Irish Nationalists, it was a mutiny against MacNeill and the constitution of the Irish Volunteers, and it usurped the powers of the IRB [the Irish Republican Brotherhood]’.

And the case against the Rising on democratic grounds had been eloquently stated by Eoin MacNeill in a memorandum that he circulated to his fellow officers in the Irish Volunteers in February 1916, two months before the Rising. MacNeill began by asserting that ‘the only reason that could justify general active military measures ... would be a reasonably calculated or estimated prospect of success, in the military sense ... [and] not merely some future moral or political advantage which may be hoped for as a result of non-success’. He then wrote, and I quote:

Now we believe that we think rightly on national matters, and if possibly we do not all agree on every point we believe that the consensus we hold among us is right as far as it goes ... [It is] our duty to so act that our country itself, i.e. the Irish nation, shall learn, as far as may be secured, to think in the same way ... In other words, if we are right, it is our duty to get our country on our side, and not to be content with the vanity of thinking ourselves to be right and other Irish people to be wrong.

He concluded as follows:

I am definitely opposed to any proposal that may come forward involving insurrection. I have no doubt at all that my consent to any such proposal at this time and under these circumstances would make me false to my country besides involving me in the guilt of murder.

That is a clear statement of the reasons why MacNeill opposed the Rising and sought to stop it, and it explains the problems that the Rising presents for the democrat and the theologian.

This brings me to the moral argument. There are, traditionally – going back to St Thomas Aquinas – five criteria which, taken together, would justify revolution. The first is just cause. In the context of 1916, the government would have to have been a tyranny, without a legitimate title to rule Ireland. Second, violence must be a last resort: there should be no other option for getting rid of the tyranny. Third, there should be proportionality between the evil caused by the revolt and the evil that it aims to replace. Fourth, there should be a reasonable prospect of success – and fifth, the action should have the approval of the community at large. It is, frankly, doubtful whether even one of these criteria was met when the men of 1916 marched out on that Easter Monday. 

I accept, of course, that the UK parliament had denied the will of the Irish people for some form of self-government, but the Irish people since O'Connell's time had chosen electorally to pursue their goal of self-government by constitutional means. The support for those who advocated other means – for example, Young Ireland in 1848 and the Fenians in 1866 – had been derisory. The leaders of 1916 thus flouted the clear will of the Irish people as regards the means by which they wished to pursue the goal of self-government. And we must acknowledge that, in 1916, Ireland sent its freely-elected representatives to the Westminster parliament and they participated fully in its deliberations – not exactly the oppressive, tyrannical regime that some apologists for the Rising would argue existed in Ireland in 1916.

As regards proportionality, let me say this: there were 3,000 civilian casualties in New York on 9/11. That represented 0.037 per cent of the city’s population in 2001. In 1916 the innocent civilian victims numbered in excess of 250, which represents a casualty rate of 0.08 per cent – twice that of the 9/11 atrocity. When one factors in the casualties among the rebels, army and police, the dead of 1916 rises to about 0.16 per cent of Dublin’s population. That, I think, puts Easter Week 1916 into its proper perspective – relatively speaking, in terms of the loss of life, far more calamitous than 9/11. Accordingly, I regard 1916 as an example of what Jonathan Sacks, the former British chief rabbi, has called ‘altruistic evil’ – by which he means evil committed in a sacred cause, in the name of high ideals.

Now some will say that, in the general election of December 1918, the Irish people gave its approval in retrospect to the Easter Rising. But I’m afraid history isn’t as simple as that. The 1918 election was won in Ireland by the Sinn Féin party which had no hand, act or part in the 1916 Rising and was after 1917 a much broader coalition of advanced nationalists than the IRB cabal that had brought about the Rising. Moreover, the Sinn Féin triumph in December 1918 was boosted by the anti-conscription campaign earlier in 1918. So there was not a clear line of descent from 1916 to 1918.

Nevertheless, the claim of ‘retrospective endorsement’ of the Rising by the people of Ireland in 1918 is now the standard defence of the Rising against those who would query its democratic or moral credentials, or both. Apart altogether from its dubious validity from a historical viewpoint, this argument brings us into dangerous political territory. The sophistry of thus attempting to justify the Rising leaves the way open to any crackpot movement to claim that its actions are justified by an imagined or hoped-for retrospective vindication. That is precisely what successive generations of republicans have argued in defence of their armed campaigns since 1922 – campaigns that have repeatedly threatened to undermine the democratic and truly republican character of the independent Irish state. This legacy of political violence bequeathed to us by the men and women of 1916 is another reason why we should not, and I cannot, regard them as heroes.

OTHER GUEST SPEAKERS: Patsy McGarry, Liz Gillis & Professor Liam Kennedy

I should perhaps begin by stating that, despite my surname, I am not related to ‘Big Jim’ Larkin. I was, however, tempted to entitle this paper ‘Larkin on Murphy’ – but, on mature consideration, I felt that might be too frivolous and would give rise to some misunderstanding about the content of my paper.

On 14 October 1917, William Martin Murphy wrote to his son, Dr Lombard Murphy, as follows:

I have just returned from lunching at Kilteragh [Sir Horace Plunkett’s house at Foxrock, Co. Dublin]. Bernard Shaw and his wife were staying there ... When I was introduced to Shaw, he said you are the man in all Ireland I was most anxious to meet for the last five years. He has pleasant manners and is not at all the kind of man his books and writings would lead you to believe. For the public he poses and advertises himself, but he does not find this necessary in private life. I expect his anticipation of what I was like was equally unlike the reality. I have no doubt that he expected to find in me a man with an aggressive attitude.

There are many reasons why Shaw should have wished to meet William Martin Murphy. Murphy himself thought it was because of his role as the stern and unbending leader of the employers in the Dublin Lockout of 1913. However, he had had a long and varied career, any one aspect of which might have been of interest to Shaw. He was then aged 72 – born in 1845, near Castletownbere, Co. Cork, the son of a building contractor. His record in Irish public life encompassed a wide spectrum of politics and commerce. On the political side, he had been an Irish nationalist MP at Westminster and one of the leaders of the campaign against Parnell after the ‘split’; he later became disillusioned with the Irish party, opposed its leadership from 1896 onwards and eventually gave tentative support to Sinn Fein post-1916; and he was a member of the Irish Convention of 1917-1918. His extensive commercial interests included building and contracting, newspapers, retailing, the Imperial hotel in Dublin, and railways and tramways; and he was the prime mover behind the Industrial Exhibition of 1907, as well as the principal opponent of Larkin and Connolly and their trade union. He gained W.B. Yeats’ disdain for his refusal to support the proposed gallery in Dublin for the Hugh Lane pictures.

His role in 1913 was, therefore, only one part of a multifarious life – certainly the part for which he is mostly remembered, but for him it was probably not the most important part. Since our theme in this conference is hidden histories of the 1913 era, what I would like to do now is briefly to consider two aspects of the life of William Martin Murphy not normally referred to in studies of the Lockout.

The first is his involvement with newspapers. This began as a result of the bitter newspaper war in Dublin unleashed by the Parnell ‘split’ in 1890-91. The divisions in the Irish party precipitated by the ‘split’ were replicated in the newspaper market. It is a complicated story, and I will try to explain it as simply as I can. The Freeman’s Journal had been the leading nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin since the 1860s and would remain so until the early years of the twentieth century. It was the semi-official organ of the Irish party from about 1880 onwards. Its relationship with Parnell had been difficult initially, but Parnell had brought it to heel by launching a weekly newspaper, called United Ireland, in 1881. The threat that United Ireland might be turned into a daily publication to rival the Freeman copper-fastened the latter’s loyalty to Parnell. That loyalty persisted for many months after the ‘split’ – despite the fact that the majority of the party’s MPs had taken the anti-Parnell side and public opinion, at least outside Dublin, was overwhelmingly anti-Parnell.

To counter the Freeman’s influence, the anti-Parnellites started their own daily paper, the National Press. This was established mainly through the efforts of T.M. Healy – but William Martin Murphy was its principal financial backer. Murphy was a close associate of Healy’s, a fellow Corkman. He was one of the so-called ‘Bantry band’ of MPs who had roots in West Cork or were otherwise linked to Healy and his influential uncles, A.M and T.D. Sullivan, owners of the Nation newspaper, another weekly publication – formerly the organ of the Young Ireland movement in the 1840s. Murphy had an association with the Sullivans, stretching back to his schooldays. A.M. Sullivan had persuaded Murphy’s father to send his son to Dublin to attend Belvedere College for his secondary education, and Sullivan had taken the boy under his wing when he arrived in Dublin. Murphy, while still a schoolboy, often visited the Nation’s offices in Middle Abbey Street and helped out with copy-editing, proof-reading and other work – and no doubt picked up there his love of the newspaper industry in which he was to play such an important part.

The Freeman responded to the unwelcome competition from the National Press by switching to the anti-Parnellite side, and soon the Freeman was merged with the National Press – under the Freeman’s more venerable title. The merger was followed by a long and bitter struggle for control of the Freeman between warring anti-Parnell factions, led respectively by Healy and by John Dillon. This struggle rumbled on until 1896, when the matter was resolved largely in Dillon’s favour. The Healyites – thus deprived of a newspaper outlet – then revived the weekly Nation, which had ceased publication some years before. It continued as a daily newspaper from June 1897 until 1901 – funded, like the earlier National Press, by Murphy.

After the Freeman had switched sides in the ‘split’, Parnell found himself without the support of a daily newspaper. Few politicians of his era had a greater appreciation of the power of the press – and accordingly, in the months before his death, he spent much time and effort in arranging for the establishment of another newspaper. This would eventually become the Irish Independent. Originally known as the Irish Daily Independent, it first appeared on 18 December 1891 – two months after Parnell’s death. It survived as the organ of the Parnellite wing of the Irish party until the party’s reunification under John Redmond in 1900, when it was purchased by William Martin Murphy. Murphy then merged the Independent and the Daily Nation, and for the next five years the Independent was run as the personal mouthpiece of T.M. Healy. In 1905, it was transformed by Murphy into the modern Irish Independent.

The restructuring and modernization of the Independent in 1905 precipitated a major change in Irish journalism. The Daily Nation had incurred heavy financial losses – and so too did the Independent after its merger with the Nation. Murphy sought to address this problem, and concluded that a radical transformation was required. As he explained in an article published in 1909:

I had proved by experience ... that newspapers as a side show to politics were never known to result in anything but a loss. In 1904, I was getting tired of running political side shows on such terms and my personal interest in the issues which had given rise to my journalistic essays had considerably abated. I looked about for a buyer for the Independent papers as a going concern and, strange to say, I found a very probable purchaser who employed experts to report on it. The advice these experts gave was to issue the Independent as a halfpenny paper and to conduct the undertaking as a business proposition.

Instead of selling up, Murphy decided to revamp the Independent along the lines which the potential purchaser of the paper had proposed, and to try to make a success of it himself. In effect, Murphy copied in Ireland what Lord Northcliffe had done in London in 1896 when he launched the Daily Mail, the first mass circulation newspaper in these islands. The new Independent, selling for a halfpenny, cost half the price of its competitors – and it had a more popular, less partisan style. The first edition appeared on 2 January 1905. It was an immediate resounding success, and by 1909 Murphy could proclaim that (and I quote) ‘the commercial success of the Independent papers, as a profit earning property, is now absolutely secured’. Annual profits by 1915 amounted to £15,000, with circulation rising from an initial 25,000 to 100,000 in 1915.

Profits and circulation continued to grow thereafter, boosted by the closure of the Independent’s main rival, the Freeman’s Journal, in 1924 – and checked only by the establishment of the Irish Press in 1931.

Murphy was thus responsible for a seismic revolution in Irish journalism, and there is a contemporary cartoon celebrating his success in all its manifestations – in newspapers, but also in retail, trams, the Imperial hotel and railways. It claims that the Independent has the ‘largest circulation of any paper the world has ever seen’ – reflecting the fact that, whatever else he was, Murphy was not a modest man. Murphy’s achievement in the world of newspapers – the triumph of the new Irish Independent – enabled him to exercise a very significant behind-the-scenes influence on the wider revolution which would convulse Irish politics in 1916 and the following years. This is the second hidden aspect of his life that I want to discuss this morning.

Long before the 1916 Rising, the Independent under Murphy had been critical of the Irish parliamentary party at Westminster – accusing it repeatedly of jobbery (particularly in local government) and differing with it on, for example, Lloyd George’s 1909 budget and the financial provisions of the third home rule bill. William O’Brien, the dissident Irish party MP, characterised its editorial stance as ‘giving voice to the suppressed wrath of the country’ against the party. T.P. O’Connor, another Irish party MP, wrote that ‘of all the many agencies that finally broke down the Irish party, and led to the regime of Sinn Féin and its accompaniments, the Independent and William [Martin] Murphy behind it must be regarded as perhaps the most potent’. The constant snipping of Murphy and the Independent had a huge impact in undermining the Irish party’s authority even before the outbreak of the Rising. After the Rising, Murphy gave cautious support to Sinn Féin – telling his editor to give Sinn Féin ‘a fair show’ in the Independent, though not to identify the paper too much with Sinn Féin. This was in keeping with the Independent’s broadly non-partisan editorial policy. Murphy lived long enough to see the victory of Sinn Féin in the 1918 general election, but died shortly afterwards – on 26 June 1919.

In popular memory, Murphy’s role as a midwife to the new Ireland that emerged after 1916 is compromised by two notorious editorials published in the Independent after the Rising. Like the other mainstream Irish newspapers, the Independent at first condemned the Rising unreservedly. Then, when the number of executions started to mount and there arose a widespread demand for clemency, it dissented from that demand and on two occasions – on 10 and 12 May 1916 – it called unequivocally for the execution of those leaders ‘not yet dealt with’. That was the exact phrase used. The leaders in question, James Connolly and Seán McDermott, were shot early on the morning of 12 May. Why did the Independent publish these bloodthirsty pieces? Many thought Murphy was seeking to avenge Connolly’s role in the 1913 Lockout and completing the task of wiping out his enemies in the labour movement, but it appears that the articles were written without his knowledge. He was in London lobbying the government for compensation for property destroyed in the Rising when the articles appeared, and was not therefore in a position to dictate the newspaper’s editorial line. He afterwards repudiated the articles in private – though never in public, apparently out of loyalty to the Independent’s staff. The most likely explanation for what happened is that the Independent’s staff – and specifically its editor, T.R. Harrington – simply misread the shifting mood in Ireland and were reflecting public opinion that was already out of date. The evidence for this is that Harrington was quoted soon afterwards as saying – somewhat ruefully – that ‘the people cried out for vengeance and when they got it, they howled for clemency’. Whatever the explanation, the charge of having sought the deaths of Connolly and MacDermott haunted William Martin Murphy until his death, and would haunt his newspaper for much longer.

Shakespeare wrote: ‘The evil that men do lives after them, / The good is oft interred with their bones’. So it is with William Martin Murphy: he is remembered chiefly as the implacable foe of the labour movement in 1913, and his reputation is further besmirched by the memory of those editorials in 1916. To get a true picture of the man, however, we need to look beyond these negative perceptions and consider also other, more positive aspects of his career – such as those I have examined in this paper. He was undoubtedly a shaper of modern Ireland, in good ways as well as bad – and I think Patrick Maume is quite correct when he writes in his DIB entry on Murphy that ‘it is hard to like Murphy, but difficult not to respect him’.