A collection of potentially fascinating material from the archive of Archbishop McQuaid should have been far more rigorous...
His
Grace is Displeased: Selected Correspondence of John Charles McQuaid,
Edited by Clara Cullen and Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, Merrion/Irish Academic
Press, 273pp, €60 (hardback), €19.95 (paperback)
This
book is an almighty mess and should not have been published in its
current format.
It is ironic that the editors of a publication dealing
with the archive of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, someone who set
such store by the meticulous organisation and preservation of his
voluminous collection of correspondence, should display such tardiness
and basic failings in their compilation and explanation of his archival
material. His Grace was indeed, often displeased, as will be the reader
of this book.
Collections of correspondence can be highly valuable
and illuminating, but the letters need to be properly introduced,
contextualised and mediated. The rationale for the selection, the
details of those referred to in the correspondence and the background to
the themes they deal with need to be elucidated with confidence, nuance
and an awareness of the wider picture.
None of this happens here; what
is offered, instead, appears hastily assembled, badly edited, shabbily
presented and lacking any substantial introduction.
This is a particular
pity because the archive of McQuaid, Catholic archbishop of Dublin from
1940 to 1972, and one of the towering and most influential characters
in 20th-century Ireland, is an extraordinary treasure. Justice is not
done to it here, and this book represents a considerable missed
opportunity.
There is a three-and-ahalf-page introduction to
McQuaid’s career, which spanned six decades, with no attempt to explain
him or the Ireland in which he operated, and no reflection on or
critical analysis what has been written about him to date. The editors
appear to believe that the following clumsily expressed observation –
“McQuaid’s attention to detail of all aspects of pastoral and public
life in his diocese was all embracing” – will suffice.
The six
chapters deal with fascinating aspects of McQuaid’s interests and the
political, social and cultural priorities of his era: the 1937
Constitution, education, medicine, republicans, ecumenism and
censorship. But they are not linked in any meaningful way by the editors
or put in their proper context. All of these themes have produced a
significant corpus of historical analysis by a multitude of authors,
which is almost completely ignored.
There are countless examples
of these omissions that could be highlighted, but to give just one
example: how could correspondence around the Constitution be
meaningfully introduced or understood without any reference to Dermot
Keogh and Andrew McCarthy’s 2007 book The Making of the Irish
Constitution?
This kind of absence is particularly galling given that
the editors acknowledge that McQuaid’s role in the writing of the
Constitution “has frequently been debated by historians”. Why ignore
that debate and all the other debates regarding the specific areas the
chapters address?
The only relief is that some of the letters to
and from McQuaid are very revealing, often spiky, occasionally sinister
and sometimes funny, and expose much about his modus operandi and
mindset. Anyone who wants to understand the nature of aspects of his and
the church’s power from the 1930s to the 1960s will, if they are able
to ignore the many failings outlined above, find material of interest.
In relation to the Constitution, McQuaid’s draft memorandum on religion
declared: “The State has the duty of professing and protecting not any
sort of religion but only the true religion.”
This assertion,
which sums up so much of McQuaid’s mission in life, was not a directive
Éamon de Valera was prepared to countenance. But in relation to
McQuaid’s draft memorandum on authority, his passage on the repudiation
of the IRA in its violent quest for Irish unity, including the assertion
that “the claim to choose such means can never be substantiated by an
appeal to the fact or conditions of Easter Week 1916” was later used,
verbatim, by de Valera in a radio broadcast condemning the IRA in 1940.
Explanations
Far
too much of the chapter on education is taken up with repetitive and
tedious correspondence – much of it not from McQuaid – about his
assertion that mixed-gender athletics was a social and moral abuse, and
is followed by a completely unrelated section on the Irish Committee of
Historical Sciences.
In the chapter on medicine, his correspondence with
the archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne, when McQuaid was headmaster at
Blackrock College, reveals his opposition to a proposal to merge St
Ultan’s infants’ hospital with Harcourt Street hospital to become a
large children’s hospital. (St Ultan’s was established in 1919 by the
doctor and political activist Kathleen Lynn, the daughter of a Church of
Ireland clergyman, though the reader is not told this.)
He referred to
Thomas Moorhead as “the venomous spearhead of the masonic opposition”, a
typical, viciously expressed McQuaid smear. There is no explanation
from the editors of who Moorhead was (a Trinity College Dublin
physician), and unfortunately this is the case in relation to most of
the characters the correspondence relates to.
McQuaid’s fawning
attitude to the judiciary is apparent; he wrote in 1953 about “a
Catholic member of the judiciary, very highly placed, of the highest
integrity and gifted with vision that has often amazed me”.
Regarding
the republican movement, in 1951 McQuaid poured cold water on the
suggestion from an IRA veteran that copies of the 1916 Proclamation
should be presented to schools in Dublin. He noted with satisfaction, in
another typical McQuaidism, that the initiator of this proposal, when
rebuked, “received the reply very submissively”.
There was,
however, another McQuaid apparent in the 1960s, a man somewhat under
siege and furious with the growing interest in ecumenical gestures in light of Vatican II reforms. (There is no reference, of course, to
Francis Carty’s 2007 book, Hold Firm: John Charles McQuaid and the
Second Vatican Council.)
His correspondence with the Jesuit Roland Burke
Savage is delightful and nearly playful as Savage provoked his ire by
trying to stitch him into ecumenical meetings against his will: “I take
Your Grace’s thunderbolt in my stride . . . I know that you are at your
best in dealing with people who have put a foot astray.”
McQuaid
eventually forgave him: “I have long since forgotten. Have a proper
holiday.” But he was not prepared in 1968 to forgive what he called “the
confusion here among upper-class Catholics”. This was in relation to
the notion, as the bishop of Cork, Cornelius Lucey, expressed it in a
letter to him, that “any one religion is as good as another”.
In
the last few pages the editors offer what they maintain is a conclusion,
but it is nothing of the sort; it is a six-page regurgitation of Lenten
regulations from the diocese of Dublin in 1949 and 1971.
What it
amounts to is a lazy end to a woefully inadequate book.