The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian

by Pat Walsh

  The journal was vehemently against the Local Appointments system. ‘Any and every County Council in Ireland,’ it wrote, ‘is as intelligent and is a good deal more honest than this thoroughly unworthy monopoly system. It was devised and set up in that nest of ascendancy men and their tame toadies, the Local Government Board.’2

  The Catholic Standard was only slightly more moderate in its opinions. It asked if the dissolution of Mayo Council meant ‘that a Catholic people’s demand, expressed by its authoritative representatives, to possess a Catholic system of education, may be followed by a suppression of its liberties?’ In an editorial headlined ‘Naked Secularism’, The Catholic Standard was critical of the reasons given by Fianna Fáil for rejecting Miss Dunbar Harrison. ‘These secularists,’ it argued, ‘opposed Miss Dunbar’s appointment on the linguistic grounds.’3 They were castigated for doing the ‘right’ thing but for the ‘wrong’ reason.

  The Nation responded to criticisms in the Catholic press of the republican stance of Fianna Fáil’s Mayo TDs, Mr Ruttledge and Mr Walsh. ‘In our view,’ it wrote, ‘the issue is simply one of justice. The Fianna Fáil deputies refused to accept Miss Dunbar because she was not qualified in this essential particular but they had the manliness and courage to disassociate themselves from the prejudices which found expression at the library committee meeting.’4

  In January 1931 the other radical periodical The Catholic Mind (incorporating The Catholic Pictorial) carried an editorial headlined ‘The Mayo Library Case’. The editorial stated that ‘tolerance is not in itself a virtue … We regret exceedingly that the Mayo library committee did not take its stand boldly on the Catholic issue. There was no mention of that issue in the resolution they passed. It was a nationalist resolution.’5

  There was intense competition between the Catholic papers over which of them could be the most outspoken. This led to some inter-journal sniping. The Catholic Mind attacked The Catholic Standard for not being sufficiently strong-minded. ‘We detest hysteria; “naked secularism” and that sort of stuff,’ it wrote. ‘We do not mind good, honest slaughter. Gore-grimed tomahawks do not disturb us. In fact we delight in the profusion of scalps which adorns our wigwam.’6

  Richard Mulcahy, as Minister for Local Government, still held a firm line publicly. President Cosgrave gave him strong backing, as did the cabinet. However, in private they were attempting to reach a compromise. Informal feelers were sent out to gauge the attitude of the Catholic hierarchy. The matter was complicated somewhat in that there were already difficulties over the appointment of dispensary doctors, an issue generally perceived to be even more sensitive.

  Sir Joseph Glynn was put forward as the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s emissary to the Catholic hierarchy, a sort of semi-official ambassador. Joseph Glynn was born in 1869 and educated at Blackrock College. He studied law at UCD and was also the first chairman of the National Health Insurance Commission 1912-1940. A Dublin businessman, he was heavily involved in charitable works. For a time he was president of the St Vincent de Paul Society and the Catholic Truth Society. In 1913 he was elected president of Blackrock College’s Past Pupils’ Union. He was honoured with a papal knighthood. In later life he wrote a biography of Matt Talbot. In short he was the kind of eminently respectable Catholic that could act as a go-between for the government and the hierarchy.

  The intention was for Joseph Glynn to meet with the Archbishop of Tuam, Thomas Gilmartin, the senior member of the hierarchy in the area. The County of Mayo consisted of a number of dioceses of which Tuam was the most important. As early as 8 February, Sir Joseph met up with the vicar general of the Tuam archdiocese, Monsignor Walsh, who was also president of St Jarlaths in Tuam, for exploratory discussions. President Cosgrave had given him, ‘for transmission to His Grace the archbishop of Tuam’, the Local Appointments Commissioners’ report on the Mayo librarian appointment. He passed these details on to Monsignor Walsh.

  To modern ears there is a certain careful tone to President Cosgrave’s attitude to the bishops. President Cosgrave may have been the leader of a sovereign government, but he was very wary of offending the Catholic hierarchy in any way. At times he almost seemed to be going cap-in-hand to them, as this note from President Cosgrave to Archbishop Gilmartin shows, ‘I am very grateful for Your Grace’s help in our effort to prevent a situation arising in which the good relations happily existing between the church and state may be endangered. We are most anxious to avoid any such development.’7

  The government explored a number of possible solutions to the general librarian problem rather than the specific case. But the hierarchy was intractably adamant; they would not tolerate Miss Dunbar Harrison being left in the post in Mayo. In many ways the bishops were more relaxed about the dispute, secure in the knowledge that they held the stronger hand. Archbishop Gilmartin remarked to Sir Joseph Glynn ‘that it was inevitable in a “neutral state” that the church might put forward a case to which the government of the state would be unable to accede.’8 President Cosgrave felt that some of the criticism was unwarranted. There is a hurt tone to the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s remarks, as in this memo circulated to the Catholic hierarchy:

  In general it is unfair, and not conducive to good government, to order, or the interests of the church, for the bishops to attack the government on every occasion where they may differ from them, without first having laid their views before the government, and heard the government’s reply. The bishops may have been misinformed, they may not see that their demands are impracticable, that they are asking what the government cannot grant … Friendly co-operation between church and state will smooth away much misunderstanding and make peaceful government easier. The bishops will find the government most accommodating, willing and even anxious to meet their Lordship’s wishes as far as it is possible.9

  Evidently, Cumann na nGaedheal had been so long in power that they identified any attack on their party or their policies as an attack on the state itself, an occupational hazard of any party in power too long.

  In general we suggest that the bishops make representations to the government directly when they have cause of complaint or any suggestions to offer. It is embarrassing to the government to learn the bishops’ views through a condemnatory pastoral letter or a chance conversation between a bishop and a minister. The government feels it has a grievance here.10

  The government’s immediate short-term aim had been to persuade the local bishops not to mention the Mayo controversy in their Lenten letters. The reason they gave was that it would be more difficult to reach a compromise if the bishops went public with their opposition as they [the government] could not be seen to be buckling under clerical pressure. In this convoluted and slightly cynical argument they were not successful. Archbishop Gilmartin referred directly to the Mayo controversy in his message to his flock. ‘Such being the influence of printed matter,’ he said, ‘and the difficulty of discriminating between what is good and what is bad, it is gratifying to see how the representatives of our Catholic people are unwilling to subsidise libraries not under Catholic control. Not to speak of those who are alien to our faith, it is not every Catholic who is fit to have charge of a public library for Catholic readers. Such an onerous position should be assigned to an educated Catholic who would be as remarkable for his loyalty to his religion as for his literary and intellectual attainments.’11 By this argument public libraries were to come under Catholic control, and not any old Catholic either, only ‘educated’ Catholics, who were as loyal to religion as to literature, were to be trusted with such a fundamental job.

  This was the problem facing President William T. Cosgrave. He had invited the bishops into the debate, hoping to solve the particular Mayo problem and also to come up with a more general long-term solution while they were at it. Now that they had been consulted on their views, President Cosgrave could hardly have been surprised by their stance. Cumann na nGaedheal’s self-image was as the socially conservative ‘respectable party’ and they we
re upset to find their position as defenders of the faith usurped by the so-called Republican Party. In many ways Fianna Fáil was still seen as a ‘slightly constitutional’ organisation at this stage in its development, and it would have been regarded as much less close to the Catholic hierarchy. Fianna Fáil was also seen as much more radical, slightly revolutionary and ever-so-slightly untrustworthy. During the Civil War the Catholic hierarchy had threatened excommunication on the republican anti-Treaty side. Residual distrust lingered between them.

  President Cosgrave was, as one biographer put it, ‘a conservative Catholic, a friend of the clergy and a frequent visitor to Rome.’12 In 1925 he had been made a papal knight of the Grand Cross, First Class, of the Order of Pope Pius IX. Although he had close ties to the church, as leader of the government he felt he had to stand up for certain secular values so as not to alarm the substantial Protestant minority in the Free State.

  Eamon de Valera was at least as religiously conservative as William T. Cosgrave was. He must have seen the Mayo dispute as a great opportunity to re-position his party, to rid itself of some of the disreputable taint of anti-clerical republicanism, even if it would require some fancy political footwork to avoid the accusation of sectarianism.

  If Cumann na nGaedheal was bothered by the criticism it received from the priests of Mayo, it was even more sensitive to the onslaughts from the resurgent right-wing Catholic press, in particular the attacks by the Catholic Bulletin. President Cosgrave went so far as to raise this in a letter to Cardinal MacRory of Armagh. Cosgrave deplored ‘the attitude of certain periodicals, which by their titles, lead the general public to believe that they are authorised exponents of Catholic doctrine. Though we are aware that these papers have no official sanction, we are also aware that many pious Catholics are misled by the titles of these publications whose comments on government policy, and on government departments, often inaccurate and at times so intemperate as to be violently abusive, have done considerable damage, not merely to the political party associated with government, and have resulted in weakening the respect for authority.’13

  As one historian describes it, the Catholic Bulletin was ‘a remarkable monthly publication … in no way under official ecclesiastical supervision. It may indeed have been a standing embarrassment to the higher echelons of the church in Ireland.’14

  The Catholic Bulletin seemed to be very well connected. Its unsigned editorials often hit a nerve with the increasingly sensitive Cumann na nGaedheal leadership. It was generally believed that many of these anonymous tirades were written by Fr Timothy Corcoran, SJ, who was professor of education at UCD. He was undeniably the dominant influence on the views of the Catholic Bulletin at this time,15 and was also the unofficial leader of the Sinn Féin caucus at the university. He was close to de Valera and was a mentor of John Charles McQuaid, who would later become archbishop of Dublin.16 Like his fellow Jesuit, Fr Stephen Brown, Fr Timothy Corcoran was not an Irish speaker, despite his strong advocacy of the Irish language.17

  It would perhaps be unwise to accept the views of the more extreme of the religious journals as typical of public opinion at the time. Certainly, some of the bishops took a much more robust view of the wilder realms of the Catholic press than did the beleaguered government. The Minister for Education, Professor John Marcus O’Sullivan, reported back to Cosgrave that in conversation with Archbishop Harty of Cashel, he had been told that the archbishop ‘didn’t pay much attention to criticisms of us [the government] by the Catholic Bulletin. And that the government “ought to know enough about politics not to mind them.”’18

  It is easy to overestimate the Catholic Bulletin’s impact at the time. As one historian puts it, the Bulletin ‘which appears to have acquired an historical curiosity, perhaps because of its extremism and bombastic pedantry, far in excess of its actual significance at the time of publication, may be viewed as representing merely the most hysterical and distorted fringe of the tradition from which it came.’19

  As evidence of the independence of the bishops, His Grace Archbishop Harty was also reported to have said, ‘Stick to the Local Appointments Commissioners’, and gave instances of bribery in respect of appointments of doctors in South Tipperary during his father’s life as a ‘public man’.20

  As for the specific Miss Dunbar Harrison issue, the hierarchy did not want to get involved, letting it be known that they considered it a local matter for the local bishops to deal with. After a number of meetings with intermediaries, President Cosgrave, accompanied by his Minister for Education, Professor O’Sullivan, finally got to meet with His Grace, the archbishop of Tuam, on 14 April 1932. Archbishop Gilmartin was somewhat defensive. He emphasised that he had not instigated the crisis, rather it was his troops on the ground and he was not going to undermine them. In a signed memorandum written prior to the meeting he made the following points:

  1. I may state at the outset that the action of the library committee was taken independently of me.

  2. That action has my approval because I consider that there was a Catholic principle involved and that the library committee was justified in acting as they did in defence of that principle.

  3. I could not therefore ask those concerned to go back on the position they have taken up.21

  While he did not say it outright the impression was given that the archbishop was in a more conciliatory frame of mind than many of his priests. However, he stressed that there was no way that the crisis could be resolved while Miss Dunbar Harrison remained in the post. As he put it, ‘To acquiesce in her appointment would be a surrender of the principle involved in the protest.’22 On this point the archbishop was adamant. If the government could not concede this, they would have to look elsewhere for a solution and the church-state conflict would continue.

  Notes

  1.Catholic Bulletin, January 1931, vol. xxi, no. 1, pp.1-2.

  2.Ibid., February 1931, vol. xxi, no. 1, pp.102-103.

  3.Catholic Standard, 30 December 1930, p.10.

  4.The Nation, 30 December 1930, p.1.

  5.Catholic Mind, January 1931, pp.1-4.

  6.Ibid., February 1931, p.28.

  7.NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

  8.Ibid.

  9.Ibid.

  10.Ibid.

  11.Ibid.

  12.Anthony J. Jordan, W. T. Cosgrave 1880-1965, p.130.

  13.NAI D/Taioseach S2547A.

  14.James Meenan, George O’Brien, p.134.

  15.Brian P. Murphy, The Catholic Bulletin and Republican Ireland, pp.274-282.

  16.Bryan Fanning, The Quest for Modern Ireland: The Battle of Ideas 1912-1986, p.67.

  17.Brian P. Murphy, op. cit., pp.274-282.

  18.NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

  19.Margaret O’Callaghan, ‘Language, Nationality and Cultural Identity in the Irish Free State, 1922-1927’, p.275.

  20NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

  21. Ibid.

  22. Ibid.

  Chapter 13

  ‘Justified by stirabout and redeemed by porridge’

  In the meeting between Archbishop Gilmartin and President Cosgrave, the archbishop argued that Mayo should be treated as a special case due to its history. As the written memorandum of the meeting recorded, Archbishop Gilmartin was of the opinion that owing to Mayo’s particular experience with regard to proselytism, the issue of a Protestant librarian in Mayo was seen as an exceptionally sensitive case.

  The Catholic Bulletin yet again gave vivid expression to Mayo’s distinctive past. ‘The Catholics of Mayo,’ it wrote, ‘know well the uses made of the Irish language as an instrument of perversion by organised souperism in their county ever since the Achill mission was started by Souper Nangle and Souper Dallas and since the apostate Carleton’s servile and venal pen was hired by Caesar Otway. They were subsidised and patronised by all the leading academic personages of Trinity College Dublin for many a long year.’1

  At the Mayo County Council meeting on 27 December, John Morahan linked Miss Dunbar Harrison’s appointment to
souperism. Certainly, proselytism remained a touchy subject in Mayo due mainly to the folk memory of the Famine years. Many of the evangelical organisations had been established pre-Famine but there is little doubt that the failure of the potato crop in the 1840s led to them becoming much more active. There were few more zealous than Rev. Edward Nangle in Achill.

  During the Famine, Achill Island had been one of the most deprived districts in Mayo. It was still a living and bitter memory in Mayo. Brigid Redmond, Mayo’s first county librarian, related how she had met an old man in Achill in 1928 who spoke to her in Irish and told her ‘about Nangle and his settlement of “jumpers” at Dugort, how he had acquired some acres of moorland and built thereon his church, schools and orphanage to pervert the starving people in the Famine years.’2

  Given Miss Dunbar Harrison’s difficulties, it is ironic that there was a pro-Irish language aspect to Rev. Nangle’s activities. He had set up a printing press from which he issued a monthly paper known as the Achill Herald. He also published copies of the Bible in Irish. As Brigid Redmond put it, ‘Nangle must have spent immense energies and monies on the task, and now the work has withered, and his name is held in bitter execration on the island. An alien culture transplanted to this home of ancient sanctities was fore-doomed to blight.’3

  Private charities provided much-needed relief during the Famine years but some of them availed of the opportunity to try to convert the poorer Catholics. It was felt that zealot missionaries had used the threat of starvation to force some of most destitute Catholics to change their religion in return for food and shelter. Whatever the motivation, it was crudely seen as starving Irish Catholics being pushed into converting to Protestantism in return for bowls of soup. To be called a ‘souper’ or a ‘jumper’ was a mortal insult to a family in Mayo. Even today such a label will raise hackles in most parts of the west of Ireland. While Catholic missionaries abroad were often admired for their zeal, grave exception was taken to any form of Protestant missionary work in Ireland, particularly if it was directed at people who were starving. To have ‘taken the soup’ was considered a dreadful slur on any family’s good name. To convert to Protestantism just to survive was to betray one’s heritage. The actual number of families who ‘converted’ remains uncertain, though it would seem that long-term conversions were quite rare. However, whatever the number involved, there is little doubt that such activity created enormous bitterness. The blatant linking of famine relief and proselytising campaigns added insult and degradation to the threat of starvation. Never the quickest county to forgive and forget, this bitterness was to remain long in the memory of the Mayo people.