TG4 VIEWERS ARE in for a treat tonight (are they ever not, says you?) when a new documentary on John Charles McQuaid will be presented.
The late Archbishop of Dublin cast a long shadow on Ireland’s history during the formative years of the Republic, and any attempt to improve general understanding of this figure and what makes him so significant is worthwhile.
It’s easy to see McQuaid as a one-dimensional heel figure – if ever a man looked like a villain drawn by Quentin Blake, it was McQuaid in his robes, presenting his ring to be kissed.
And while there will always be some attention-seeking contrarian ready to point out the scale of his pastoral work as an archbishop and his personal generosity as a man, these both need to be assessed in the context of his efforts to stop people getting this help from an impartial system using rights-based criteria instead of having to be grateful to him.
As it happens, 2026 is also the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Dr Noël Browne’s autobiography “Against The Tide”, arguably the most influential and impactful book ever written by a TD.
Dr Browne’s account of his own star-crossed political career and the role of McQuaid in obstructing his plans (the Mother and Child Scheme in particular) is not challenged now, even by those groups who opposed it at the time.
The Mother and Child Scheme was not defeated in a Dáil vote, but before such a vote could happen, John A. Costello advised Browne that he and his cabinet would not support it.
However betrayed he may have felt at this, he singled out De Valera rather than Costello for special criticism.
De Valera, Browne wrote, was “the only politician whose national and international prestige could have survived a confrontation with the bishops”.
This idea that Dev could have stepped up but chose not to jump out at me because we are so used to thinking of De Valera as the most Catholic Taoiseach of all.
Competing agendas
There is reason to believe that John Charles McQuaid and Éamon De Valera did not like each other at all and wanted different things.
First and foremost, McQuaid was from a very Pro-Treaty family in Cavan and his younger half-brother Eugene was killed in the Civil War.
Eugene, a doctor in the Free State Army, was shot in an IRA ambush near Newport in Mayo while treating a wounded comrade, an act which was and still is considered a war crime.
The bishops issued a general excommunication of anti-Treaty militants at the time, which Dev took very personally, even though he refused to accept that it applied to him.
Another fundamental point of disagreement between the two men was on Partition. With hindsight, we know that the Border in Ireland has lasted over a hundred years, but in the 1930s, there was no telling how long this arrangement could last.
One person who benefited directly from it was John Charles McQuaid, who was never made a cardinal and never actually the Catholic Primate of Ireland.
However, the Border – especially during World War II when lines of communication between Armagh and the parishes to the south were broken – allowed him to behave as though he was. And who would dare say he wasn’t?
The BJ Theory
It’s easy to forget that the Catholic Church is a big organisation with its own office politics like any other workplace.
If you watched The US Office you probably wouldn’t think that BJ Novak’s character Ryan had anything in common with an Archbishop from Cootehill.
But McQuaid, like Novak’s sneaky intern, was promoted over his former managers, becoming an archbishop without ever having served as a regular bishop.
This is significant in two ways: as evidence of the scale of his ambition and as giving a clue to what the bishops who served under him must have felt about him – if they didn’t resent him overtaking them in their careers, they must have been very saintly bishops indeed.
There were no HR departments to organise paintball tournaments or table quizzes to raise team morale back then, so this resentment went unchecked and McQuaid nurtured allies from outside the hierarchy – allies like De Valera, whose son attended Blackrock, the school he had been headmaster of.
The mutual suspicion of these men gave way when their ability to advance each other’s careers became apparent, and De Valera sought McQuaid’s counsel on changes to the constitution in a private capacity long before he was an Archbishop.
Novak’s character in the office comes up with an elaborate scam where the sales figures of others are counted towards his own project, Dunder Mifflen Infinity.
McQuaid had a similar vision: even though multiple powerful organisations in Ireland opposed the Mother and Child Scheme – the Church of Ireland and the Irish Medical Association, for example – he managed to present the failure of the scheme as his own work.
And while he enjoyed his reputation as a man not to be trifled with, this may have come back to bite him.
In “His Grace Is Displeased” by Clara Cullen and Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh, there are copious examples of letters from cranks begging the Archbishop to intervene in matters as trivial as deodorant ads showing bare shoulders and/or bra straps, documentaries about the Holocaust where undressed prisoners could be seen, boys and girls playing sports at the same events and unsuitable guests on the Late Late Show.
There is some comfort in knowing he came to deeply resent the sheer volume of these tattle-tale letters as a kind of ironic punishment.
This final point – that McQuaid didn’t act alone – is critical not to exonerate the man or to perform a self-serving rhetorical balancing act, but to remind ourselves that the chilling effects on civil society and pressure on lawmakers that allowed McQuaid to advance his agenda haven’t gone away.
As I write this, a protest is being planned outside Dublin Zoo by people upset by the use of a drag queen in an advertisement.
In Canada and the US, school and library boards are removing fine books based on the persistent complaints of an engagingly small number of complainants.
And the panic about boys and girls using adjacent changing rooms when playing sports has probably gotten worse.
And McQuaid, unlike so many of today’s guardians of traditional values, petitioned the government to take in more refugees.
History is not a comfortable read, but that discomfort is preferable to reliving it.
Darach Ó Séaghdha runs @theirishfor Twitter account and the @motherfocloir podcast.
TG4′s Ceartas Crua-Mná v An Dlí documentary airs tonight at 9.30 pm.