The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian

by Pat Walsh

  13.Ibid.

  14.Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  15.Western People, 3 January 1931, p.7.

  16.Ibid. This is a line from Walter Scott’s The Lady in the Lake.

  17.Ibid. This lengthy quotation is from A.M. Sullivan’s verses on Brian Boru’s address to his army before the Battle of Clontarf.

  18.Western People, 3 January 1931, p.9.

  19.Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  20Western People, 3 January 1931, p.9.

  21. Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  22. Western People, 3 January 1931, p.9.

  23. Ibid.

  24. Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Western People, 3 January 1931, p.9.

  27. Ibid.

  28. Ibid.

  29. Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  30. Ibid.

  31. Ibid.

  32. Western People, 3 January 1931, p.9.

  33. Roscommon Herald, 3 January 1931, p.4.

  34. Ibid.

  Chapter 7

  ‘The recent unpleasantness’

  Mayo County Council was abolished by ministerial order at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1930. Mr P.J. Bartley took over as Commissioner in charge of County Mayo on 1 January 1931. An experienced local government official, he was well known in County Meath where he had had formerly been clerk of Oldcastle Union from 1908 to 1922. In 1922, after Independence, he was appointed inspector of registration at the Registrar-General. He left this position in 1931 to take up his new post in Mayo.

  In 1904, according to the Irish Independent, P.J. Bartley had acted as honorary secretary of the ‘first public open-air meeting held in Ireland at Finea to commemorate Myles the Slasher’. He was prominent in republican circles and was known to be a personal friend of Arthur Griffith. From 1901 to 1912 he was editor of a monthly magazine called Sinn Féin. It was rumoured that this was where the political party got the inspiration for its name: Sinn Féin – Ourselves Alone. What is undisputed is that he was a leading member of the new party. In 1905 he was elected as one of the five vice-presidents of Sinn Féin. Like many republicans he had been interred in Ballykinlar Camp from 1920 to 1921. The Irish Independent reported that he was proud of his time spent as clerk of Oldcastle Union. ‘During his period of office he had the satisfaction of never having had a single surcharge against the guardians.’1

  The Cork Examiner headlined their report, ‘Minister Defied – Mayo Will Not Have Librarian – Council’s Decision Not to be Browbeaten by Threats.’2 The Western People informed its readership that the commissioner had taken up residence in McEllin’s Hotel, Balla, perhaps implying that P.J. Bartley did not expect it to be a long-term engagement in Mayo. Dissolution of councils was neither unusual nor unprecedented at the time. In the 1920s it had been a commonly used tool of central government. The Civil War had in some areas led to widespread administrative disorder in the local authorities. Some ‘local bodies had ceased to hold meetings and rate collection lapsed.’3 Both Kerry and Leitrim County Councils had been dissolved in 1923. Dublin and Cork corporations followed in 1924. ‘A total of twenty bodies were replaced by commissioners in the first three years of the new state.’4

  P.J. Bartley was all business at the commissioner’s first meeting. The proceedings lasted all of twenty-five minutes. Only the clerical and survey staff of the council attended, together with four members of the general public and one former councillor. Commissioner Bartley administered £75,000 worth of public works, which one local newspaper accurately calculated to be a spending rate of £3,000 a minute. He heard a deputation from Lahardan in regard to a road and he appointed a caretaker for Hollymount courthouse. He then formally appointed Miss Dunbar Harrison as Mayo county librarian.

  The Leitrim Observer seemed impressed by this speedy work. ‘The roads meeting last year,’ it wrote, ‘lasted from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the matter was further discussed at three subsequent meetings.’5 The Connaught Telegraph was equally taken with him. According to its reporter, ‘Even the very air of the chamber was inspired with a commissioner-like spirit of business.’ The meeting began at 11 a.m. and was over before 11.30 a.m.

  ‘That completes the business,’ Mr M.J. Egan remarked.

  ‘It will be a half-holiday for the press today,’ Bartley jokingly announced as he was leaving the council chamber. Perhaps it was this that impressed them.6

  ‘The nabobs at Dublin’

  Not all the local papers were as welcoming towards Commissioner Bartley. The Mayo News argued ‘better this open and unabashed tyranny – taxation without representation – than the so-called local government which, hamstrung and powerless, has been in existence since the nabobs at Dublin robbed local representatives of all power to manage local affairs.’7 A week later the Mayo News was no more reconciled to the newly installed librarian. ‘Who can stop Mr Mulcahy from appointing the Trinity College shoneen?’8 It was this level of hostility that Miss Dunbar Harrison was about to confront.

  Resentment of Trinity College was widespread and blatant within nationalist and republican circles in the Free State. Trinity served as a handy shorthand for the West-British, loyalist, unionist, royalist and Freemason ascendancy; it was a remnant of the recently defeated enemy that remained a potent bogeyman to be evoked as required. There was also an element of class envy in the enmity displayed. For some, the equation of Catholicism with Irishness was so obvious it hardly needed stating. The two were virtually interchangeable. As was Protestantism with Englishness, and Trinity was a badge of Protestantism.

  The hostility to Trinity and all it represented was a feature of ‘respectable’ Catholic opinion in the 1920s and 1930s. As one hist-orian put it: ‘In 1927 the Catholic hierarchy reaffirmed its opposition to Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin. Interestingly, there was no such antipathy towards Catholics attending Queen’s University Belfast.’9 Some Catholic priests did speak out against attendance at Queen’s, but the hostility shown towards this university was much less than that aimed at Trinity. Perhaps the Catholic clergy were showing their pragmatic side, realising that Queen’s was the only real third-level outlet for Catholics in the North and that any ban they put on it would be largely ignored.

  As ever the Catholic Bulletin could be relied upon to take an extreme view. It questioned whether a Catholic graduate of Trinity could be trusted. ‘Is not the title of Catholic, assumed and used by a Catholic medical graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, simply an added danger for our Catholic population, rich and poor?’10

  The new county librarian was quoted in the Irish Independent on 5 January 1931, as intending to travel to Mayo at the earliest opportunity. She hoped that the recent unpleasantness would be forgotten. ‘I shall do my utmost,’ she remarked, ‘to make a success of my job, and I hope I shall have the good will and co-operation of everybody interested in the library scheme. I shall always have the best interests of Mayo at heart, and its people I will endeavour to serve faithfully and well.’11

  Letitia Dunbar was born in Dundrum, Dublin, on 4 February 1906. Her parents emigrated to the United States with the rest of her immediate family but she remained in Ireland.12 As was not that unusual at the time, she was given into the care of her mother’s sister, Edith Elizabeth Harrison, and Edith’s husband, John Walter Harrison of 72 Palmerston Road, Dublin. In later life she took their name.

  The 1911 census lists the Harrison family address as 60 Clondalkin. John Harrison’s occupation was recorded as warehouseman. The family was prosperous enough to have a live-in cook/domestic servant. Their religion was Church of Ireland. The then five-year-old Aileen Letitia was recorded on the form as the niece of Edith and John Harrison and given their surname. She was educated at Alexandra School in Dublin from 1918 to 1922, where she received honours in the Junior Grade, Intermediate, and won the Jeannie Turpin Essay Prize and the Helen Prenter Prize in English Literature. In 1922 she attended Alexandra College where
she secured the Lady Ardilaun Entrance Scholarship in French. Having passed the Middle and Senior Grade Intermediate in 1924 she was one of only a few women at the time to enter Trinity College. In 1928 she graduated with honours in modern languages (French and Spanish). After graduation she took a course in library training in the Dublin County Library Headquarters at Kilmainham. She spent six months in the library headquarters before continuing on to Rathmines Public Library where she took charge of the children’s library and gave lectures to the children for a period of nine months. She also attended a library-training summer course at University College Dublin.

  Miss Dunbar Harrison took the name of her uncle’s family and was variously known as Letitia Dunbar, Letitia Harrison or Letitia Dunbar Harrison. She formally changed her surname to Harrison by deed poll at the time that the Mayo librarian controversy blew up.

  In an interview in the Western People, one of Miss Dunbar Harrison’s main opponents, Dean D’Alton, stated that ‘the government have fallen into a pit of their own making, and are finding themselves in an awkward as well as an unpopular position, which will probably lead to their undoing.’ Asked by the reporter if the library committee would continue to act after the advent of the commissioner, Dean D’Alton said he believed they would not. It was his expectation too, that voluntary helpers in the local library centres would also decline to continue their work and would send back the books they had in stock.

  ‘The whole affair is regrettable,’ the Dean concluded.13

  Notes

  1.Irish Independent, 31 December 1930, p.7.

  2.Cork Examiner, 29 December 1930, p.7.

  3.Desmond Roche, op. cit., p. 53.

  4.Ibid.

  5.Leitrim Observer, 10 January 1931, p.2.

  6.The Connaught Telegraph, 10 January 1931, p.6.

  7.Mayo News, 3 January 1931, p.7.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Michael Kennedy, Division and Consensus, p.25.

  10.Catholic Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 2, 1931. Quoted by Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland, p.57.

  11.Irish Independent, 5 January 1931, p.8.

  12.Methodist Newsletter, December 1994, p.4.

  13.Western People, 3 January 1931, p.3.

  Chapter 8

  ‘Low fellowship and bad habits’

  In the early years of the Free State the development of county-wide library services was still in its infancy. In the previous decades Andrew Carnegie, as a personal gift, contributed financial support to the establishment of libraries in Ireland. He offered grants to fund the library buildings and once the money had been paid over he ceased to have any connection with the library authority.1 Library growth in Ireland was a haphazard area, very much dependent on organisations or individuals with the knowledge and initiative to apply to Carnegie for funding.

  Andrew Carnegie had made vast sums of money in America as a steel manufacturer. In later years he became involved in charitable works, principally in giving financial support to the building of libraries. According to Mr Carnegie himself, he had spent a great deal of time in a library during his youth and it had both instilled in him a love of literature and ‘steered him clear of low fellowship and bad habits.’ Not only that, it had also revealed to him ‘the precious treasures of knowledge and imagination through which youth can ascend.’2

  After the Carnegie Trust was set up in 1913, an Irish committee was established and the writer Lennox Robinson was appointed organiser. As Lennox Robinson himself confessed, ‘When I was appointed manager and producer at the Abbey Theatre I knew nothing of stage work; in this case I knew nothing of library work. But the appointment was not quite insane, not as insane as the Abbey one.’3 Robinson was of the opinion that much of Andrew Carnegie’s original financial support of libraries had been in vain. ‘His benefactions were generous and well-meaning but often ill-judged … I believe Mr Jack Yeats once painted a picture of an Irish village hiding behind a hill to try to escape a library.’4 The Trust decided to change its policy. Previously it had concentrated on a library-building programme. It was decided to spend less on buildings and more on administration and also to ‘keep a certain amount of friendly control and supervision over library schemes for some years.’5 It was felt they could get better value for their money by supplying books, equipment and administration rather than just buildings. The result was the rural library movement. The aim became ‘books and buildings, books for the villages and townlands, for the schools, village clubs, the family and the individual student.’6

  Numerous small communities managed ‘to secure a small building which they boldly named a library but the “librarian” was only a badly paid caretaker and there were few or no books.’ Many of the original Carnegie libraries fell into disrepair due to a lack of funding for their maintenance and upkeep. The Trust recognised that there was a particular problem when it came to rural counties. The secretary of the United Kingdom Carnegie Trust highlighted the challenge facing large remote areas. ‘In the county,’ he said, ‘the essential fact is that no matter how much you might like to have a big central library, you can never place it near enough to all the people to make it genuinely accessible.’7 It was this problem that led to a change of emphasis in the Trust’s grants from fixed buildings, which by their nature tended to be located in urban areas, to book stock that could be moved around from library to library and region to region.

  According to a 1929 report by the Library Association of Ireland, there was still great room for improvement. ‘The shortcomings of libraries in Ireland was due to one main cause – poverty.’8 One of the problems was that ‘it was clear that in the majority of cases Mr Carnegie’s grants had been given without very complete knowledge of local conditions …’ and many of the original library buildings had fallen into disuse.

  The Local Government Act of 1925 made county councils the new unit of rural library administration. They were given the power to levy a library rate thus permitting them to become statutory library authorities. Within the next decade ‘county followed county in rapid succession’ in setting up a library scheme, and by 1935 only Longford and Westmeath were without a service.9 The Carnegie trustees continually reminded the local authorities of ‘the necessity of appointing only professionally skilled librarians and of paying salaries commensurate with the position.’10 The Trust made it a condition attached to their grants that the librarian should be paid not less than £250 a year.

  The library service that Miss Dunbar Harrison was set to inherit had only a short existence. Like most county libraries it was a recent innovation and had only been set up in 1926 by Miss Dunbar Harrison’s immediate predecessor and Mayo’s first county librarian, Miss Brigid Redmond. Mayo County Council had hesitated for eighteen months before finally deciding to accept a grant from the Carnegie Trust to establish a county-circulating library. The councillors were divided, with ‘one section eager to welcome the gift of free books for the people, another fearful lest the promised gift should mask a dangerous weapon of imperialistic propaganda.’11

  In its early formative years the Irish Free State tended to look inwards, with a pronounced protectionist attitude, especially with regard to social and moral matters. Censorship was one by-product of this desire to shelter the citizens of the new state from the baleful influence of the outside world. The Catholic church in Ireland was especially wary of external influences. Libraries could be dangerous places, and librarians could be the means by which innocent people might become infected by dangerous and subversive ideas such as Communism. The following 1931 Lenten pastoral of Rev. Dr Finnegan is a typical example of this attitude:

  It is said that thirty tons of literature, consisting principally of the scandals of the world, reach this country every week. If this literature be read in such quantities it will very soon undermine both the morals and the faith of the people. It is also stated that there are circulating, weekly, in Ireland, twenty papers of this dangerous description.

  Since my last Lenten letter, steps have be
en taken to establish a public library in the counties of Cavan and Leitrim. If carefully and cautiously managed, these may become a means of instruction, enlightenment and even of edification. They do require cautious management. The greater number of the books must necessarily come from publishers outside Ireland. It is a well-known fact that literature subversive of faith and morals issues in great quantities from the English press. Should such literature to any extent get into them, the public libraries, instead of a blessing, would become a curse.12

  ‘Dismissed I was’

  It was unfortunate that during this period of expansion, Lennox Robinson, who was the Trust’s organiser in Ireland, fell foul of the country’s moral guardians. One of his literary endeavours stirred up a controversy in 1924. Robinson contributed a short story on a religious theme, written many years previously, to a literary paper edited by Francis Stuart. ‘The Madonna of Slieve Dun’ was a mild enough tale, a slice of rural miserabilism about a young, naïve and religious country girl, Mary Creedon, who imagines herself to be another Blessed Virgin come to save the town of Liscree from the wickedness of drinking, gambling and horse-racing, but on publication it caused outrage. ‘A first-rate row blew up’ when W.B. Yeats got involved.13 As Mr Robinson himself put it, ‘On account of my story a Catholic cleric resigned from the Carnegie advisory committee. He was important and strongly backed by the provost … my resignation was demanded. I refused it. I preferred to be dismissed and after a lot of haggling and trying to save everyone’s face, dismissed I was. The whole thing was inexpressively painful to me. It alienated many of my Catholic friends and with some the breach will never be healed.’14

  To suspicious minds this incident raised yet another question mark over the motives of the Carnegie Trust; its organiser in Ireland was seen as a purveyor of blasphemous yarns. Despite these vicissitudes, the Trust continued its work in Ireland throughout the 1920s, concentrating mainly on the previously neglected country areas. Its scheme for rural library services treated a county as one unit with centralised control and a circulating book system. This type of plan had proved quite successful in England and was now being tried out in many Irish counties. As the county librarian for Dublin described it, ‘The chief characteristic of these county library schemes is a central distributing depot, from which books are sent out to small centres in schools and village halls or small town libraries and changed every three months.’15 Operating through these modest centres a negligible outlay of funding could provide a basic library service over a large area.