The Reluctant Taoiseach

by David McCullagh

  This modesty, as well as his personal kindness, had major political implications, as it played a role in his selection as the inter-party group’s candidate for Taoiseach. Noel Hartnett was a leading figure in Clann na Poblachta who fell out with Seán MacBride—and, by extension, with Costello—over the Mother and Child Scheme and the Battle of Baltinglass (a controversy over political influence in the filling of a post office appointment). In 1959 he wrote that Costello’s faults as a politician sprang “almost exclusively from excessive loyalty to his colleagues”. This loyalty, Hartnett said, “led him occasionally to defend actions and policies which would better have been condemned”. Hartnett pointed to another of Costello’s characteristics—his avoidance of bitterness—as the reason for his choice as Taoiseach, and pointed out that the members of all the parties in the Inter-party Governments “trusted and respected him”.42

  This judgment had been borne out at the time of his election by others, including High Court judge T.C. Kingsmill Moore, a former Independent senator who told Costello, “you were almost unique in the Dáil in that all parties liked and trusted you, no matter how bitterly opposed to you”.43 Similarly, The O’Mahony, a former Fine Gael TD (who was also to fall out with Costello over the Baltinglass issue), wrote to him in 1948, “If you are able to keep that varied coalition of parties together I think you will have brought about a miracle, but from what I saw of you during the eleven years I was in the Dáil I don’t believe anyone else would ever have a chance.”44

  Reluctant he may have been. But John A. Costello, thanks to his background, his career, and most importantly his personality, was in 1948 in a pivotal position to make history.

  Chapter 1

  THE VALUE OF PRACTICE

  “… fluency of speech in public is as much an acquired talent as a natural gift.”1

  JOHN A. COSTELLO, JULY 1911

  “Mr Jack Costello is an example of the value of practice. He improves every meeting and is now really worth listening to …”2

  UCD MAGAZINE THE NATIONAL STUDENT, MARCH 1912

  After John A. Costello’s election as Taoiseach, one of his former schoolmates, John Keane, produced a photograph of a group of pupils at O’Connell School, and asked his children to guess which one grew up to be the leader of the Government. The clue, it turned out, was that Costello was the only boy in the photograph wearing a watch chain3—a suitable symbol of the future wealth and upper middle class status of one of the leading barristers of his day. The watch chain also fits neatly into the widespread perception that Costello, like some of his colleagues in Cumann na nGaedheal and later Fine Gael, was the product of a privileged background.

  But in fact, unlike other members of the pro-Treaty leadership such as Kevin O’Higgins, Patrick Hogan and Patrick McGilligan, the future Taoiseach was not a past pupil of the elite private school Clongowes. He was a Christian Brothers boy, his father a mid-ranking civil servant, and his upbringing modest, though comfortable.4 If the watch chain was symbolic, it was symbolic of an aspiration rather than a status achieved. And the story of Jack Costello’s early years is the story of how hard work and natural ability allowed him to make good on that aspiration.

  John Aloysius Costello was born on 20 June 1891, at the home of his parents at 13 Charleville Road5 on the northside of Dublin, not far from the city centre. The house is a pleasant mid-terrace redbrick with a bay window. Charleville Road, quiet and tree-lined, runs from Cabra Road down to the North Circular Road. Although Costello’s birth certificate describes it as being in Cabra, it’s actually closer to Phibsborough, just down from the massive gothic St Peter’s Church (begun in 1862, but only finished in 1911).

  Costello was part of the last generation to grow to adulthood in an Ireland that was part of the British Empire. His birth came in the middle of political crisis—the Home Rule Party had split in December 1890 over the continued leadership of Charles Stuart Parnell, who was to die the following October. Costello’s year of birth also put him, in terms of age, almost exactly halfway between two of his great political rivals—Eamon de Valera, born in 1882, and Seán Lemass, born in 1899.

  His father, John Costello senior, was born in Barefield in Clare on 25 May 1862,6 while his mother, Rose Callaghan, was three years younger and a native of Westmeath. The couple married in 1888.7 When he became Taoiseach, Jack Costello was asked if he was related to various branches of the Costello clan, but had to reply that he had “made only very little study of his genealogical tree”.8 However, he apparently spent boyhood summers in Barefield, playing with the local children and eating apples from the local orchard—whether with permission or not is not clear.9 In later years, he enjoyed telling his family stories about Clare, particularly the West Clare Railway immortalised by Percy French in the song “Are You Right There Michael”. Costello claimed a printed notice in one station outlined a revised timetable and ended with the warning that “there will be no last train”.10

  Just four miles from Ennis, Barefield was less a village than a “small cluster of houses”, although it was significant enough to have an RIC hut under the command of a sergeant. It was described in the mid-1940s as “a very undulating parish, and its good and bad land is just as much mixed as its contour”. At that time, it had two pubs, a Catholic church, a post office, a dispensary, and a national school.11 The latter, described in 1943 as a “fairly new, substantial four teacher school” was built on Costello family land.12

  John Costello senior began working in the Registry of Deeds in Dublin in 1881, shortly before his nineteenth birthday.13 His progress through the ranks of the organisation was steady if unspectacular—by 1898 he was a Second Division Clerk,14 in 1903 he became one of three Higher Grade clerks,15 and a decade later he became a Staff Officer—a senior position but still quite a bit down the pecking order, behind the Registrar, First and Second Assistant Registrars and the Chief Clerk.16 He was in the same position when he retired.17 His brother Jim also went into the Civil Service, in his case the post office, but appears to have had a more successful career, as in later life he had a house on the fashionable Alma Road in Monkstown.18

  Outside work, John Costello was a prominent temperance activist in Father Mathew Hall in Church Street for over 40 years.19 He gave lectures in the Hall on diverse subjects, ranging from “Some Incidents in the Land War of the Last Century”20 to “The Rise of the Peasant in Ireland”21 and even “A holiday by the Cliffs of Moher”, which was to be “illustrated by limelight view”.22 Of more significance, he served as chairman of the Father Matthew Health Insurance Society, which among other things campaigned for the extension of medical benefits to Ireland.23 He was also active in trade unionism, being involved in the formation of the Civil Service Guild24 and serving on its Executive.25 As an active politician, his son was to champion the cause of civil servants, helping to bring about an arbitration system to resolve disputes over pay.26

  Jack Costello recalled in later years that his father was “a great Parnellite”.27 This was a common position in the capital, as Tom Garvin has pointed out: “bourgeois and working-class Dublin became Parnellite in contrast to the mainly anti-Parnellite countryside.”28 Of course, the son was also a supporter of Home Rule, and of John Redmond, in the years leading up to the First World War—as he said later, “everyone in Ireland was a Home Ruler with the exception of a very small minority who were in the IRB …”29 As we shall see in Chapter 5, Costello senior was to become a Fine Gael Councillor on Dublin Corporation after his retirement.

  John and Rose Costello had three children. Mary, known as May in the family, was born the year after their marriage. She was to live on in the family home, caring for her parents, and never married. Thomas Joseph, who was a year younger, became a doctor and emigrated to England—as we shall see, he was a larger-than-life character, and in their university days overshadowed Jack, who was two years younger than him. Their father was keen on walks—perhaps in the nearby Phoenix Park—so keen, in fact, that Jack was put off organised
walks for life.30

  By the time of the 1911 Census, the Costello family was living at 32 Rathdown Road, in the parish of Grangegorman. Rathdown Road is just across the North Circular from Charleville Road, and runs down towards what was then Grangegorman mental hospital. Number 32 is part of a long terrace of red brick houses, and is similar in appearance to Costello’s birthplace on Charleville Road, with a bay window on the ground floor and two windows upstairs.

  Rose Costello’s family may have helped with the purchase of both these houses, which could have been slightly beyond John Costello’s salary as a relatively junior civil servant. Just three months after buying the house at Charleville Road, he signed an indenture of assignment with his brother-in-law, James Callaghan, a grocer in North King Street, and with John McKeever, a draper from Navan married to one of the Callaghan sisters.31 This suggests they had some financial interest in the house, perhaps after lending their brother-in-law some money. Another of the Callaghan sisters, Bridget, had an interest in the house in Rathdown Road, and in her will, made in November 1921, she left that interest to Rose, stipulating that after Rose’s death it should pass to May. In a codicil to the will made in 1930, after Rose’s death, the interest in 32 Rathdown Road was left to John senior and May.32

  John Aloysius became a pupil at St Joseph’s, Marino, in the autumn of 1903, when he was 12. The school (later better known as “Joey’s”) was run by the Christian Brothers. One of its three rooms was devoted to the 43 pupils in the intermediate (secondary) class. The 300 primary pupils were divided between the other two rooms.33 Among his classmates was Dick Browne,34 later Chairman of the Electricity Supply Board, who was Costello’s greatest friend, godfather to his son Declan, and one of his golfing partners on Sunday mornings in Portmarnock for many years.35

  As Marino had no senior classes at the time, the two friends transferred to the O’Connell School in North Richmond Street,36 also run by the Christian Brothers. The school was named after Daniel O’Connell, who laid the foundation stone in 1828.37 It prided itself on its success in the Intermediate Examinations, frequently boasting the highest number of passes and distinctions in the country.38 The school’s centenary book in 1928 noted the number of senior Government officials it had produced, including Costello, who was then Attorney General, Dick Browne, who was a Senior Inspector of Taxes, and the Secretary of the Department of Local Government, E.P. McCarron. With some self-satisfaction, R.C. Geary (later Director of the Central Statistics Office) wrote, “Your ‘Richmond Street’ boy makes a good official. In the first place he possesses the necessary academic qualifications to place him high on the examination lists. He has, in addition, certain qualities which make him a good colleague. This is an essential point. However clever an official he may be, he has to pull with the team …”39

  As well as civil servants, the school produced a great many rebels, with more than 120 pupils or former students believed to have taken part in the 1916 Rising, including three of the 16 leaders who were executed—Eamonn Ceannt, Con Colbert, and Seán Heuston.40 The latter, in fact, was among John A. Costello’s classmates.41 Other past pupils included President Seán T. O’Kelly, Taoiseach Seán Lemass, and Judge Cahir Davitt, a son of Land League founder Michael Davitt, who became President of the High Court in 1951.42 Other notable legal figures who attended the school were Ireland’s last Lord Chief Justice, Sir Thomas Molony, and Aindrias Ó Caoimh and Charles Casey, both of whom became High Court judges after serving as Attorney General (Casey having been appointed to that position by Costello).43

  At O’Connell School, in a pattern that would be repeated throughout his education, the young Costello performed well academically, winning prizes and distinctions. He also improved as he went along—another pattern that would be repeated in college, at the Bar and in politics.

  At the time, the State examination, the Intermediate, was divided into Junior, Middle and Senior Grades, the latter corresponding to the Leaving Certificate, which was introduced in 1924 (along with, confusingly, another examination known as the Intermediate Certificate, the equivalent of the old Junior Grade).44 In the Middle Grade, in 1907, Costello received Honours results in English, French, Irish, Algebra, Trigonometry and Science, with passing grades in Arithmetic, Shorthand, Geometry and Latin. The results were good enough to win him a £3 book prize.45 In his final year, 1908, he took honours in English, French, Irish, Arithmetic and Algebra, Trigonometry and Physics, and passed Geometry, winning £3 prizes for modern literature and experimental science, as well as a £1 prize in mathematics. It was a fairly broad education. Costello appears to have been keen on Science—he had the joint highest (in 1907) or highest (1908) hours spent at Science according to the school records.46 More importantly, he won the Fanning Scholarship, worth a substantial £50 a year for three years,47 which was to pay his college fees.

  It had been a successful school career, and while Costello didn’t speak much of his time at the school in later life, he didn’t complain about it either.48 The link with the school was played on by an enterprising 11-year-old when Costello was elected Taoiseach. Tom Fahy of Vernon Park in Clontarf wrote to congratulate him on his election—which he felt could best be marked by a free day. Unfortunately, there is no record of whether the new Taoiseach did, as suggested by Master Fahy, contact the school authorities to let his successors off for the day.49

  When Costello won the Fanning Scholarship in 1908, he was one of its first recipients. The scholarship, set up two years previously, aimed to pay the college fees of the son of a civil servant receiving the highest marks in the Senior Grade of the Intermediate. It stipulated that the person holding the scholarship should carry out his studies at UCD. According to Costello, who paid a visit to the founder of the Trust after receiving the scholarship, Francis A. Fanning was “a very strong Catholic” who wanted to encourage Irish students to go to the new National University rather than Trinity College, which “in those days was regarded as the bastion of the then Protestant Ascendancy”.50

  The institution which he joined was in a state of flux, to put it at its mildest. He was in the last group of students who attended 86 Stephen’s Green under the old Royal University—the next year the new National University was established under the 1908 Irish Universities Act (introduced by Irish Secretary Augustine Birrell to placate Catholic opinion). The Act joined UCD with the former Queen’s Colleges in Cork and Galway to form the NUI. In a foretaste of partition, the other Queen’s College, in Belfast, became a separate university.

  Costello claimed in later life that the authorities dithered so much about faculty positions that they ended up appointing a number of professors to the wrong chairs. “There was general confusion and we had not merely … no Professors to lecture us, we had not even a chair to sit on, we were walking around Stephen’s Green wasting our time until the National University authorities made up their minds to give us some Professors to lecture us.”51 The complaint was an echo of that made at the time, in an editorial in the first edition of a student newspaper, the National Student: “… there has been little academic work done this year. The Professors have been occupied busily in securing their positions, in making boards and committees on which to sit, and then in sitting on them … There is a vague but general feeling that no attention is being paid to the students, that they are regarded as necessary evils, whose sole duty is to pay fees and keep quiet …”52

  The new college was small, with only 530 students in its first academic year, 1909–10, although numbers grew quickly, almost doubling (reaching 1,017) by 1916.53 As George O’Brien, a future senator and professor of economics, noted, “We were few enough to get to know each other very well, even if some of us did not like each other very much. Indeed, some of the developments in the political history of Ireland in the years since the Treaty grew out of the affinities and dislikes of my contemporaries. Old alliances and old quarrels reappeared in the wider field of public life.”54 Among Costello’s contemporaries in UCD were future ministers
Kevin O’Higgins, Patrick McGilligan and Patrick Hogan; his successor as Attorney General after the change of government in 1932, Conor Maguire; and the leading solicitor Arthur Cox.

  These young men and their fellow NUI graduates were to provide much of the leadership of the new Irish Free State, in politics, the Civil Service and the professions. Of course, they could not have foreseen that the then dominant Irish Parliamentary Party would be destroyed within a decade by Sinn Féin. According to O’Brien, “we took it for granted that, if Home Rule was achieved, we would be among the politicians of the new Ireland … So certain were we of the approach of Home Rule that some of our students neglected to prepare for a profession, believing that they would get a good job when self-government came …”55 While Arthur Cox could not be accused of neglecting his studies, his enthusiasm for imminent Home Rule is clear from his diary for 1913, in which he counted down the days to the Bill coming into force.56

  Academically, Costello progressed in much the same way he had in school, starting off with mediocre results but quickly improving. He received a pass mark in his First Arts exam in 1909;57 first class honours in Irish and French, as well as a pass in Biology, in 1910;58 and graduated with a First in Irish and French in 1911.59 His interest in Irish was later demonstrated in government when he established the Department of the Gaeltacht. He had travelled to the Aran Islands to learn Irish while still at school,60 although the experiment was not an unqualified success. He later complained that the islanders were “much more concerned with picking up little scraps of English and getting me to talk English to them than they were about speaking Irish to me”.61 This perhaps explains why, despite his exam results, there was some doubt about his fluency. At a meeting of the Literary and Historical Society in March 1912 a motion was proposed criticising the Records and Correspondence Secretaries, Tom and Jack Costello, for “incompetence … in not being able to answer questions in Irish”. The motion was only defeated by 20 votes to 18.62