by Pat Walsh
‘I complained that the old vocational committee had dropped the scheme of scholarships in the Gaeltacht,’ he said.
Commissioner Bartley had promised to remedy this situation. Rev. Mac Evilly concluded that ‘he is the first friend the Irish language has had on the county committee.’3
The chairman of the meeting, Seán Ó hÚadaigh, said that the reason why the Gaelic League had not intervened in the public debate about the Mayo librarianship was because they knew that the people who were taking part were not friends of the Irish language.
The dispute did not go away and later that year the annual congress of the Gaelic League passed a motion ‘that a change should be made in the methods of the Public Appointments Commissioners because by their selection of applicants for public posts, they were not doing justice to Irish’. Mr Ó Maoláin, who proposed the motion, referred specifically to the Mayo case. Mr P. O’Mulkerrin, Killaloe, said that the appointment of the librarian for County Mayo was one of the worst things done since Cromwell. The Irish Times were so taken by the phrase that they used it as the headline for their report on the congress.4
The Gaelic League was formed in 1893 to promote knowledge and interest in the Irish language. That the Mayo librarian controversy had posed problems for it is evident from another motion discussed at their 1931 congress. A motion from the Pádraig Pearse branch was moved requesting the congress to condemn the action of those who prevented discussion at the executive committee of the appointment of a non-Irish speaking librarian for a post in the Gaeltacht, as the objectives of the league were not advanced on that occasion.5 Mr O’Mulkerrin, seconding the motion, said that when the executive committee was negligent in matters affecting the language and nationality, other organisations could not be blamed. Seán Ó hÚadaigh, who had presided over the December 1930 meeting of the executive committee referred to in the motion of censure, said he had accepted a number of motions on the issue but had declined to accept another resolution because a portion of it was connected not with the Gaelic League but with political and state matters. He believed then, as he still did, that his decision was correct. There were in the Gaelic League persons of different religions. When the question of the Mayo appointment was first raised, it was based on the principle of the language, but after that the religious aspect had been raised and it had assumed a larger degree of attention than the language itself. He made no apology for his action. Mr McGinley said that he thought the congress ought to thank the executive committee for its action in the matter, and for declining to drag religion into the discussion. The motion was defeated by a large majority.6
The ructions in the Gaelic League reflect certain unease among some language enthusiasts who felt that language was being used as a pawn in a political game. As Councillor Pat O’Hara pointed out, a stricter regulation was being used in Miss Dunbar Harrison’s case. The language requirement was a law more honoured in the breach than the observance and there were numerous cases of staff in local authorities who had been allowed take up their posts while being unable to speak Irish. Many were also uncomfortable with the support Irish was getting from people who had previously shown no great interest in reviving the language. Dean D’Alton’s attitude to Irish at the library committee meeting had been somewhat resentful of its compulsory requirement for certain jobs. He had made the flippant joke with regard to blacksmiths being required to know Irish, it was a wonder the horses weren’t expected to know the language as well. As one eminent Irish historian has pointed out, Dean D’Alton was not an entirely uncritical supporter of literature in Irish. At one time he even persuaded the Mayo library committee to ban the books of Pádraig Pearse.7
This was a common thread in arguments amongst proponents of the Irish language. An Phoblacht, the Sinn Féin newspaper, had been supportive of the original rejection of Miss Dunbar Harrison. ‘Every Irish nationalist,’ the newspaper wrote, ‘was behind the Mayo County Council when it refused to accept the Staters’ Jobs Commission’s appointment of a non-Gaelic speaker to a Gaeltacht position.’8 An Phoblacht, however, deplored what they saw as the cynical opportunism of many of her critics. It condemned the introduction of the sectarian argument ‘by such anti-Irish exponents as the Very Rev. Canon D’Alton. He and his friends have been soundly trounced now by the very party which they helped to place in power. As for Canon D’Alton and his confrères – Devil mend them.’9
One of the most eloquent speeches given at the Mayo County Council meeting was by J.T. Morahan. However, ‘the indignation expressed about the appointment of a non-Irish speaker as librarian for Mayo would prove no bar to Mr Morahan successfully proposing a candidate for a post as teacher, despite her lack of Irish [in 1932].’10
Many people had an ambivalent attitude towards the Irish language; they wished to speak their native tongue yet were unable to do so. It was an aspiration rather than a reality. In general more people claimed to speak Irish and understand it than actually did. It was more alive in theory than in practice.
At the special meeting of Mayo County Council on 27 December 1930 just two speakers used Irish, Councillors Munnelly and Campbell, even though the language issue was the apparent cause of the crisis. The meeting received extensive coverage in the local papers; yet, none of them carried the text of the speeches in Irish. For instance The Connaught Telegraph merely stated that ‘Mr John Munnelly spoke in very eloquent Irish’, leading one to believe that the newspapers knew their readership would not be able to read big blocks of text in Irish or else it was simply that their reporters did not understand the language well enough to transcribe it.11
Fr Stephen J. Brown, SJ, sponsor of Ellen Burke and librarian of the Central Catholic Library, was the author of a number of books on Irish literature. In the introduction to his Guide to Books on Ireland he explained that one of the reasons why he hadn’t included books in the Irish language on his list was that his ‘own knowledge of the Irish language is not yet sufficient to enable me even to edit notes of books in Irish.’12 In Brown’s preface to Ireland in Fiction, the first edition of which was ‘destroyed by fire in the course of the Rising in Dublin at Easter 1916’, Brown repeated this explanation, adding the comment, ‘Nevertheless, the omission of books in the Irish language from a guide to Irish fiction remains an anomaly, one of the many anomalies produced by the historic causes that have all but destroyed the Irish language as the living speech of Ireland.’ 13
Canon Hegarty from Belmullet, who spoke against Miss Dunbar Harrison’s appointment at the meetings of the Mayo library committee, was no great devotee of the Irish language either. He was reported to have referred to Irish language classes in the Gaeltacht as cesspools of infamy.
To a certain extent the problem was of the government’s own making. In 1928 it had issued an order that all future appointees to local government positions in Gaeltacht areas would be required to demonstrate sufficient knowledge of Irish to enable them to conduct their business through the medium of the language. Initially only tradesmen and labourers were to be exempt but the list of exemptions was extended at a later date as the basic unreality of the measure dawned on the government.14 There were simply not enough qualified speakers of the language to fill the various positions, in particular, specialised ones like that of county librarian. In one of the many ironies that political life throws up, it was Richard Mulcahy, the minister in charge of a commission for the promotion of the Irish language, who originally came up with the proposal and who then, as Minister for Local Government, must have felt honour-bound to implement it. Yet Mayo was a Gaeltacht area, so designated. It did have a substantial Irish-speaking population around Tourmakeady and also some pockets of Irish speakers around Erris in the north of Mayo.
The Irish language had been exploited by evangelical Protestants in the past and a deep sense of distrust now pervaded. As the ever-zealous Catholic Bulletin put it, ‘Mayo knows well and remembers well the uses made of the Irish language by many emissaries of Trinity College Dublin, from Ballina to Bal
laghderreen, from Dugort to Tourmakeady in the epoch 1820 to 1870.’15
For many, language was a badge of identity and the reason that Miss Dunbar Harrison was turned down was not so much that she didn’t speak Irish but because of what that represented. She was an outsider. Language was simply just an obvious manifestation of this difference. As F.S. Lyons argued, it was a case of ‘Irish Ireland versus Anglo-Irish Ireland … Catholicism and Gaelicism, and the nationalism they nourished, were reacting primarily against England. It was English manners and morals, English influences, English Protestantism, English rule, that they sought to eradicate.’16
John O’Mahony of the Fenian movement had stated many years previously that ‘our duty is to de-Anglicise Ireland, Gaelicise Ireland and Catholicise Ireland.’ It was Letitia Dunbar Harrison’s bad fortune that she had become entangled in one of the skirmishes of that unfinished conflict.
Notes
1.Irish Independent, 8 December 1930, p.11.
2.Catholic Bulletin, vol. xiv, no. 4, April 1924, p.269.
3.Cork Examiner, 12 January 1931, p.7.
4.The Irish Times, 9 April 1931, p.8.
5.Ibid.
6.Ibid.
7.J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, p.164.
8.An Phoblacht, Xmas Number 1930, p.4.
9.An Phoblacht, 10 January 1931, p.1.
10.J.J. Lee, op. cit., p.164.
11.The Connaught Telegraph, 3 January 1931, p.8.
12.Stephen Brown, A Guide to Books on Ireland, p.x.
13.Stephen Brown, Ireland in Fiction, p.xii.
14.Mary E. Daly, The Buffer State, p.167.
15.Catholic Bulletin, vol. xxi, no. 4, April 1931, p.322.
16.F.S.L. Lyons, Culture and Anarchy in Ireland, p.82.
Chapter 15
‘I take the Ten Commandments as my code’
Up to this time the procedures of the Local Appointments Commission had been treated as confidential. However, following the legal advice of the attorney general, John A. Costello, the government compelled the Commission to pass on detailed reports of the selection procedure in the Mayo librarian case, some of which President Cosgrave revealed in his Dáil statement of 11 December 1931. During the 1928 Dáil debate on the workings of the LAC, President Cosgrave and Minister Ernest Blythe had placed great emphasis on the necessity of a guarantee of strict confidentiality in order for the LAC to do its work properly. However, due to the pressure of circumstances, the government now reversed its stance.
In his statement Cosgrave took the Dáil through the various steps the LAC had taken with regard to easing the requirement for the Irish language. He also made it known that the selection board was made up of Catholics and that the other four successful candidates at the time were also Catholics. Further details of the workings of the LAC and its interview procedure were disclosed to the Catholic hierarchy at a later date. It was also divulged that, despite protestations to the contrary in her letter, Miss Ellen Burke had failed the Irish language test. In fact, the state papers reveal that the government gathered much more detailed information from the Local Appointments Commission, including not only the procedures used and the make-up of the selection board but also the exact marks received by the candidates at interview.1
It is worthwhile to examine the recruitment procedure in more depth. On 12 February 1930, the advertisement was first issued to the press. As was customary at the time all the existing county librarian vacancies were listed together. They would be the subject of one set of interviews rather than a separate round of interviews for each vacancy. There were four vacant posts in Carlow, Kilkenny, Mayo and Cavan. On 4 May 1930 the initial interviews were held. James Montgomery, the film censor, chaired the board. The other members were W.J. Williams, lecturer, UCD, Christina Keogh, librarian, Irish Central Library for Students, Richard Hayes, senior assistant librarian, National Library and Thomas E. Gay, librarian, Capel Street Library. Nineteen candidates were called for interview and at the end of the proceedings just four were deemed to be ‘technically qualified and competent.’2 The successful candidates were all female. Taken in descending order, Iona M. McLeod, Brigid Barron, Letitia Dunbar Harrison and Kathleen M. White all passed the interview.
However, the latter two were deemed not to have competent Irish. The first two had sufficient Irish and were offered their choice of which county librarian post they wished to take. This might seem unusual but this was the practice at the time. As an Irish Independent report put it, ‘The board placed the candidates in the order of merit, and the Local Appointments Commission then, according to the custom which obtains in connection with the filling of all vacancies where more than one exists, invited the candidates first on the list to take a choice, and so on, until there was only one post to be filled.’3 Iona McLeod elected to go to Carlow and Brigid Barron to Kilkenny. As Miss Dunbar Harrison and Miss White had failed the Irish element of the selection process the Mayo and Cavan posts were left unfilled.
On 15 May 1930 the vacant posts for the two counties were re-advertised along with two more vacancies in the newly established library services of Meath and Leitrim. These counties had recently adopted the Public Libraries Act and were looking for their first librarian. Presumably, the reason for this flurry of activity was that the Carnegie Trust had set the end of 1930 as the deadline to avail of their grant scheme for rural library schemes. It was decided that those who had applied for the original vacancies did not have to re-apply and also that the same interview board would be used. The interviews were organised for 12 July 1930. However, at short notice Mr Montgomery was not available due to business commitments so the interviews went ahead without him, with Mr Williams as chair of the four-person interview board. It was also decided neither to re-interview any of the candidates from the first round of interviews nor to charge them the application fee, not unless their circumstances had changed in the meantime. In the case of one candidate, Feargus MacMurchadha, who had attained a library qualification since the first round of interviews, it was decided that he would be re-interviewed.
In all, nine candidates were called to interview on the second occasion, on 12 July 1930. By this time Waterford had adopted the Public Libraries Act so there was a post available there also. The selection board produced five successful candidates and listed them in the following order (the marks are out of a possible total of 700).
Mary McNevin – 530
Gerald Guise-Brown – 365
Feargus MacMurchadha – 360
Letitia Dunbar Harrison – 320
Kathleen White – 2804
As on the previous occasion, the successful candidates were given their choice of the vacancies in order of merit. Mary McNevin opted for Meath, Gerald Guise-Brown for Cavan and Feargus MacMurchadha went for Waterford. After the first three had exercised their choice Letitia Dunbar Harrison chose Mayo and by process of elimination Kathleen White was left with Leitrim.5 To modern eyes it might seem a somewhat unusual way of filling vacancies but it was the method commonly used by the Local Appointments Commission at the time whenever there were a
number of vacancies available. The leader of the Labour Party, Mayo TD T.J. O’Connell, was particularly critical of this procedure. It was also pointed out that if the successful candidates who were deemed to have good Irish were allocated to Gaeltacht counties the original controversy would have been averted.
While Irish was a requirement for many civil service and local authority jobs, in reality there was a shortage of people with sufficient knowledge of the language. Libraries were no exception. An Irish Independent journalist was told by a well-placed government source that ‘persons with a real training in library work and who know Irish are very few.’6 It was for this reason that the LAC relaxed the requirement between the first and second set of interviews, an action that later fuelled many conspiracy theories.
President Cosgrave indicated in his Dáil statement of 11 December 1930 that the selection board had been made up of people o
f the Catholic faith. It could in fact be said of James Montgomery, the chairman of the board that interviewed Letitia Dunbar Harrison, that he was a devout and conservative Catholic. Formerly an employee of the Dublin Gas Company, James Montgomery served as official film censor from 1923 to 1940.7 He was in many ways a deeply committed Christian. Describing his attitude to his role as censor he was not reticent about his religious motivation.
‘I take the Ten Commandments as my code,’ he declared.8
‘The Los Anglicisation of Ireland’
James Montgomery had also gone on the record to assert that he feared, not the Anglicisation of Ireland, but rather the Los Anglicisation of Ireland. In his first year as censor it was said that he had watched over ten thousand miles of film. This may have been an exaggeration, though there was no doubt that he was an avid fan of the cinema. His friends ‘chaffed him’ that he still spent a great deal of his spare time going to ‘the pictures’ as an ordinary spectator.9
The general opinion of Mr Montgomery was that he was a conservative Catholic and that his role as censor frustrated him in that he did not have the legal powers to impose a more rigid film-censorship policy. The ultra-traditionalist Catholic Mind had even awarded Mr Montgomery its seal of approval for his work. The journal said of him that ‘he has, within his powers, done everything possible to clean the cinemas. He is one of the most courageous Catholic actionists in Ireland.’10
A graduate of Queen’s College Galway, W.J. Williams obtained both a higher diploma and a masters in education from UCD. From 1914 to 1924 he was a tutor and supervisor at All Hallows College and was also on the lecturing staff of the College of Science. Following the amalgamation of the College of Science with UCD he became a lecturer in education. During the 1930s Mr Williams was the clerk of convocation with the National University of Ireland. In 1943 he was appointed as chair of education in UCD. In a curious coincidence a controversy arose over his knowledge of the Irish language. The Gaelic League protested at his lack of fluency. ‘The College made clear, however, despite the Gaelic League’s vigorous objection, that even in so crucial an appointment as the most influential chair of education in the country, academic criteria counted for more than strictly national requirements. After a brief but very ill-tempered controversy Professor Williams was confirmed in his appointment.’11