How we love the clash of knives

Dr Patrick Geoghegan looks at an indispensable guide to Irish politics and the leaders we've loved to hate from the Act of union to the present

 

It took 162 years to finally remove the hated Act of Union from the Irish Statute Book.  Although it had been superseded by other legislation, and that critical thing in politics – events – it remained on the Irish Statute Book long after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, the 1937 Constitution, and even after the declaration of the Irish Republic in 1949. But in 1962 an enterprising young minister for justice decided that enough was enough and passed a bill which finally repealed the Act of Union, along with other long forgotten and obsolete legislation. “I am essentially a modest sort of person,” the minister revealed in the Dáil, as he noted the “somewhat casual manner” in which the house was “repealing the Act of Union of 1800”. This modesty obliged him to acknowledge “that the effective work in this regard has been carried out long ago by men better than I”. It was a short speech – one of his wittiest – and he noted the “final passing into oblivion” of the measure which had destroyed the old Irish parliament and created the focal point for parliamentary resentment and resistance for over a century. 

Charles J Haughey would go on to greater (and indeed lesser) things, but his role in the repeal of the Act of Union remains one often forgotten part of his legacy. In the years to come, historians and commentators will argue furiously about his contribution to politics, and he will surely rank as one of the three most controversial Irish figures of the 20th Century (alongside Pearse and de Valera). But while his role in the repeal of the union was, as he himself mischievously admitted, insignificant, his contribution is just one of the connections between the old Irish parliamentary tradition of the 18th and 19th centuries and the new Irish state created in the 20th, which drew upon what had gone before and which enabled it to survive, endure, and eventually flourish.   

These connections are the theme of Stephen Collins' new book, People, Politics and Power: From O'Connell to Ahern, which provides an indispensable guide for the general reader of Irish constitutional politics from the union to the present. Collins admits from the outset that “Politics in Ireland is something of a national obsession”. But he is also shrewd enough to recognise that Irish people love (which of course also means hate) the personalities which have dominated politics – and that these figures provide the key to unlocking the story of this country's political development. Thus the book is as much the story of these people – all the way from Daniel O'Connell in the 19th Century to Bertie Ahern in the present. Much of the story is a familiar one, but it is told well, and it is told with an appreciation of how the history of our leading political figures is also the history of our country. Collins's central thesis is that “the great political leaders from O'Connell to Redmond would surely feel at home in the Dáil chamber and be proud of the country's independence and economic success... On the other hand it is hard to believe that leaders of the 1916 Rising who seized control of Irish nationalism from Redmond would be quite as happy.” The other part of the thesis is that Ireland's parliamentary tradition helped preserve Irish democracy in the 1930s and the 1940s when other new states created in the aftermath of the First World War fell to fascism and disorder. 

There is nothing dramatically new or original in this retelling of the story, but Collins has an eye for a good quote and for a story which illustrates his point. That John Bruton as Taoiseach kept two pictures on his wall – one of John Redmond and one of Sean Lemass – is revealing, and even more so in the context of the book's thesis. And when looking at how Daniel O'Connell mobilised a mass movement he tells some good anecdotes about the election campaigns of Luke White in Co Longford. In one contest the wife of a tenant farmer refused to sleep with her husband unless he voted for O'Connell's candidate. In another a Mrs Prunty ordered her husband (who was being led under duress to vote for the opposing candidate) to “remember your soul and your liberty”. Mr Prunty wisely chose the option that would bring him least distress (at home in any case) and voted for the O'Connellite candidate. In a show of gratitude O'Connell called upon the Catholic Association to “testify their respectful admiration” by presenting Mrs Prunty with a shawl or some other reward.   

There is also a nice vignette about the visit of British prime minister Herbert Asquith, to Ireland in July 1912 when English suffragettes came over to disrupt it. Travelling around Dublin in an open carriage (and openly drunk to make matters worse), Asquith took the applause of the crowd at the GPO only to have a hatchet thrown at his head by one of the women, Mary Leigh. Redmond was not impressed. To make matters worse the hatchet missed Asquith and caught Redmond on the ear, cutting him badly. The chief marshal attempted to apprehend the woman, but she was not intimidated by his Robert Emmet costume and hit him in the face and pulled at his epaulettes before making her escape. Leigh and her accomplices were arrested the following day but after going on hunger strike they were eventually released. What happened after is worth noting too for its insight into the time. Mary McSwiney, later to be one of the most uncompromising of Republicans, wrote a letter as secretary of the Cork branch of the Munster Women's Franchise League expressing her “abhorrence of the wicked actions of the English suffragettes”. And Arthur Griffith, the leader of Sinn Féin, complained of the exploitation in this political matter of Irish women by English women. Five years later Redmond would be assaulted on Westmoreland Street by a group of young Sinn Féiners, but this time the attack was deliberate, and by then Sinn Féin, the Irish Parliamentary party, and the very nature of Irish politics itself had been transformed utterly by the 1916 Rising. 

After independence, the demands of the dead were often louder than the voices of the living. Insular and always looking backwards, the Irish state stagnated, even if it never succumbed to the follies of other newly-created states. Seán Lemass's role in taking Ireland forward, and forcing the country to engage economically and politically with the rest of the world, has been recognised by historians, and he receives appropriate praise in this book. This is illustrated in the book by a good story in which Lemass, after signing the Anglo-Irish Free Trade Agreement in December 1965, was accused in the Dáil of having “perpetrated an act of union with Britain more final, binding and irrevocable than the Charter of Henry II or the Act of Union”. The deputy, Sean Treacy, accused Fianna Fáil, “the soldiers of destiny” of having “reneged on those proud principles and aspirations” of Wolfe Tone, Robert Emmet, and Patrick Pearse. Treacey was speaking on 4 January 1966, just as the Irish state was getting ready to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, and he suggested that given this betrayal, “it would be more fitting for this government to let the dead men rest in peace.  To extol their ideas would be to make a mockery of their lives, their sufferings and their deaths.” But of course the 1916 Rising was commemorated, and of course Ireland continued on the road to greater European integration. The voices of the dead were not silenced, but they no were no longer allowed to dominate the political debate. 

The rise of Charles J Haughey is well charted in the book, although the compelling story of his life remains to be told (and must wait for his own archive to find a suitable biographer).  Again Collins has a good eye for a telling quote, such as when he notes James Dillon's speech of 13 April 1967 when he lost his temper in an argument with Haughey and retaliated by telling an amused House the story of Animal Farm. He ended his speech by announcing: “If it is Animal Farm they [the people] want, they should vote for Fianna Fáil, but if it is democracy and decency they want, I suggest they will have to look elsewhere. I think the acceptance of corruption as the norm in public life is shocking. Why pretend that in this island of saints and scholars there is no corruption and bias, if it has come to be accepted as the norm?” Haughey responded by saying that “The deputy has been shouting corruption for a long time now, for as long as I am in this House”, a line which can surely be read a number of different ways given what Dillon was implying. It was Dillon after all who had predicted upon the election of Jack Lynch as Taoiseach (and after naming a cabinet which included Haughey and George Colley) that it would end badly for the new leader.

For, “There is not an hour, or a day, or a week, until they break his heart, that the clash of knives will not be heard in the corridors of Fianna Fáil and that the affairs of the nation will not be made a secondary consideration.... He [Lynch] is as expendable as an old shoe; and he is too decent a man to be treated in that way.” Haughey may have had to wait until 1979 before he succeeded Lynch as leader of Fianna Fáil, but given what happened in the early-1980s, Dillon's description of men “now sharpening their knives and whirling their tomahawks, not only for their enemies but for one another” was not wrong, merely a prophesy postponed. 

On 6 November, 1962, when Haughey was removing the last traces of the Irish Act of Union from the Statute Book, he was questioned about whether these changes to outdated legislation might also allow for the Plantations to be revoked. This gave him reason to pause. After a moment's reflection he admitted that this “would be an excellent thing because I would then re-inherit, after a lapse of many centuries, by far the greater part of the Kingdom of Ulster, which once belonged to my ancestors”. With lines like this, Haughey's biographers will enjoy their work. But as this book shows, it wasn't just Haughey who did the state some service. There was an all-important parliamentary tradition, and a respect for a constitutional approach, which went back to O'Connell (and even further back). But no more of that.š

Dr Patrick Geoghegan is the presenter of Talking History on NewsTalk 106-108 on Sunday nights from 7-9pm and is a lecturer in the Department of History, Trinity College Dublin

 

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