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You are > Home > The legacies of Davitt and MacBride
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Wednesday, December 29, 2004
The legacies of Davitt and MacBride
By: John Cooney
For this last column of 2004 I want to leave behind the topsy turvy world of Bertie Ahern and Mary Harney to reflect on two Mayo men of past times, Michael Davitt and Sean MacBride, whose achievements were largely forgotten in political discourse throughout the year.
It was exactly 100 years ago that Michael Davitt wrote his most famous book, ‘The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland; or The Story of the Land League Revolution’, and it was on January 26th, 1904, that Sean MacBride was born in Paris as the son of Major John MacBride of Westport and Maud Gonne.
For several years I had been unsuccessful in securing a copy of Davitt’s ‘Fall of Feudalism’ through the second-hand book trade. But earlier this year I discovered on the Internet that a Japanese publisher, Edition Synapse, had reprinted Davitt’s ‘Collected Writings, 1868-1906’, edited by Carla King, a lecturer at St Patrick’s College in Dublin.
During the Humbert Summer School in July when we visited the Davitt Museum in Straide, I mentioned the discovery to the antiquarian book-seller, Stephen Stokes, and to Sean Boyd, an annual participant in the School. To my surprise, Sean colluded with Stephen to purchase the eight volumes and gave them to me as a present.
Sean did so on one condition: that I should follow through with an idea which I had been floating, namely that the Humbert Summer School, now that the bicentenary of the 1798 Rebellion had passed, should expand its scope to embrace the next important phase in nineteenth century Irish history – Michael Davitt’s Land League.One of the Humbert School’s advisors, Noel Coghlan, has encouraged this idea as “a natural historical transition”. As a result of these and further discussions I hope to have with Mayo County Council and other bodies, I am planning to hold a “Michael Davitt-General Humbert School” next summer. Its provisional theme is “How Mayo radicalised Ireland”.
Amazingly, however, no mention is made in the history books as to how Davitt perceived Humbert’s landing in Mayo with the aim of establishing an Irish Republic on the French Revolutionary model. So I asked Nancy Smyth, of the Davitt Memorial Association, to give a paper on Davitt’s attitude to General Humbert.
What I also want the School to explore is why Davitt is not revered by the present day Republican leaders such as Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness. Long before the current peace process, the late Michael McInerney wrote: “Davitt has never been accepted by ‘Republican’ Ireland as among the ‘greats’. He was not one of Pearse’s famous pantheon of Tone, Mitchel, Lalor and Parnell. But then Davitt while remaining a revolutionary transgressed the Republican code. He ‘broke’ his Fenian oath firstly by founding and leading a constitutional movement against IRB orders, secondly by entering the British Parliament, and thirdly by strictly excluding violence as a means of advance.”
Written in 1979 on the centenary of the founding of the Land League, McInerney’s assessment needs to be reviewed in light of the commitment of Adams and McGuinness to the political process. With the centenary of Davitt’s death due in 2006, next year’s ‘Michael Davitt-General Humbert School’ will begin an examination of these issues which have direct relevance to the current quest for a Northern deal.
If Davitt’s reputation is secure, Sean MacBride’s has been revised downwards since his death in 1988. This follows disclosures from the archive of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid that MacBride breached the Irish Republican code of taking “our religion from Rome and our politics from home”. This code took root in the late nineteenth century when patriotic prelates such as Archbishops Walsh of Dublin and Croke of Cashel sided with Charles Stewart Parnell and Davitt in defying Rome after Pope Leo XIII condemned the Land League.
It was well known that MacBride, as leader of the republican political party, Clann na Poblachta, and the Minister for External Affairs in the first Inter-Party Government of 1948-51, capitulated to McQuaid by abandoning his support for Dr Noel Browne’s free Mother and Child welfare scheme.
What has further undermined MacBride’s republican credentials is the discovery in the McQuaid archive by a letter which he delivered personally to the Archbishop in October 1947 on the very day in which he was first elected to the Dáil. “I hasten as my first act, to pay my humble respects to Your Grace and to place myself at Your Grace’s disposal,” he wrote. “Both as a Catholic and as a public representative I shall always welcome any advice Your Grace may be good enough to give me and shall be at Your Grace’s disposal should there by any matters upon which Your Grace feels I could be of assistance.
“It is my sincere hope that Your Grace will not hesitate to avail of my services.”
McQuaid was deeply suspicious of MacBride on account of his membership of the IRA, and he regarded him as dishonest, an opinion shared by Charles J. Haughey who once famously described him to the journalist Tim Pat Coogan as being “as crooked as a ram’s horn”.
In her recently published memoir, ‘As Old As the State’, the poet and former diplomat, Maire Cruise O’Brien, recalls the story told to her by a Fine Gael Senator, Sir Thomas Esmonde, who was an Irish delegate to the Council of Europe in Strasbourg when MacBride was a Minister.
“In those days,” she writes, “the Irish delegation went to Sunday Mass, but rarely received Holy Communion, conscious, as they were of the fairly worldly fashion in which their evenings were spent in that gastronomically celebrated city. MacBride, however, always made a point of communicating; he also carried an ostentatious, black missal. It all became too much for Senator Esmonde. ‘When I saw that bastard approaching the rails, I said to myself, Tommy you may be no saint, but you’re a damn sight better than he is – and up I got and followed him.’”
In fairness to MacBride, it can be argued that other politicians of his time such as Eamon de Valera and John A. Costello saw themselves as Catholic statesmen. After all, it was de Valera, with assistance from McQuaid, who drafted the Constitution in 1937 that owes more of its inspiration to the social teaching of the Roman Pontiffs that it does to the French Revolution’s Republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity – or, for that matter, to the all-inclusive vision of uniting Catholics, Protestants and Dissenters held by the founding fathers of Irish Republicanism, Wolfe Tone and Thomas Davis.
When MacBride died, he was mourned as a Republican icon. His funeral Mass was celebrated by Cardinal Tomas O Fiaich, and was attended by the Sinn Féin President, Gerry Adams, honouring a life devoted to achieving a 32 county independent Ireland.
This acclaim was largely due to his work as an international civil rights lawyer who championed hunger strikers and prisoners of conscience. For this he was awarded both the Nobel and Lenin Peace prizes. Not only was MacBride a signatory of the European Convention on Human Rights, he was a founder member of Amnesty International.
On the centenary of his birth, he has fallen from the republican plinth. Only when his papers are open to historians will we reach a more balanced assessment of his place in history. An important contribution towards this should come next year when Catriona Lawlor, to whom MacBride entrusted his papers, publishes his autobiographical writings. Hopefully, she will defend Sean at the ‘Michael Davitt-Humbert School’.
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