John Charles McQuaid

Ruler of Catholic Ireland

John Cooney

• Publisher: The O'Brien Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780862788117
• eBook ISBN: 9781847175038
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

An in-depth study of the most significant Irish clergyman in the history of the state

For three decades, 1940-72, as Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, John Charles McQuaid imposed his iron will on Irish politicians and instilled fear among his clergy and laity. No other churchman amassed the religious, political and social power which he exercised with unscrupulous severity.

An admirer of the FBI's J. Edgar Hoover, Archbishop McQuaid built up a vigilante system that spied on politicians and priests, workers and students, doctors and lawyers, nuns and nurses, soldiers and trade unionists.

There was no room for dissent when John Charles spoke in the name of Jesus Christ. This power was used to build up a Catholic-dominated state in which Protestants, Jews and feminists were not welcome.

PART I

MAKING OF A MILITANT – EDUCATION TO PRIESTHOOD 1895–1925

1

Faith of his Fathers

1895–1910

‘McQuaid was a native of Cootehill in Co. Cavan and carried to Dublin with him the antagonisms of that border area.’

León Ó Broin, in All our Yesterdays.

John Charles Joseph McQuaid was born in the Co. Cavan market town of Cootehill on July 28, 1895. On the following day he was brought to the church of St Michael the Archangel, where he was christened at the large stone baptismal font. A hand-written entry in the Kilmore diocesan registry records that the witnesses were his uncle, Patrick McQuaid, a farmer, and his grandmother, Mary McQuaid.1 He was named John after his grandfather, a leather salesman who had died in 1893.2 The notifier of birth both as father and as registrar was Dr Eugene McQuaid J.P. A week after the joyous signing of his first son’s birth certificate, Dr Eugene, acting in his position as Coroner for East Cavan, signed the death certificate of his 22-year-old wife, Jennie.

The marriage, only 20 months earlier, of the highly eligible doctor to the granddaughter of the town’s popular postmistress, Jane Corry, had been the talk of Cootehill. The local newspaper, the Anglo-Celt, reported that Dr Eugene and his ‘fascinating’ bride, newly returned from their honeymoon, were ‘the cynosure of many eyes’ at the Christmas 1893 charity concert as they were ‘highly esteemed and respected members of the community.’3 Their first child, Helena Maria Josephine, was born in August 1894. Soon afterwards Jennie was pregnant again, and made her last public appearance with her husband at a Percy French concert in April 1895. Her death on August 5 stunned the people of the town and surrounding countryside, who came in large numbers to her wake in the modest two-storey McQuaid house in Market St. At the funeral Mass in St Michael’s Church the parish priest, Fr Thomas Brady, described Jennie’s life as ‘saintly’, and as the coffin was carried to Middle Chapel graveyard a few miles outside the town, all the shops and homes in Cootehill closed their shutters and the townspeople filed behind the hearse. Dr Eugene was consoled by his older brother, Dr Matthew McQuaid, the medical officer of Ballyjamesduff, as Jennie was laid in the grave.

Notably, only the sparsest details of the life of Jennie Corry, for whom a town of 1200 residents turned out to pay their last respects, were given in the newspaper coverage of her funeral.4 On the Corry side, the chief mourners were her grandmother, Jane, a sister, Mabel, and an uncle, James Corry, who was the manager of the Ulster Bank in Tuam, Co. Galway. Widowed early in life, Jane was successful in business, firstly as a grocer and later as postmistress. Her outgoing personality made her friends in every social rank and she was a great benefactress to the church, having endowed St Michael’s. Missing from the list of mourners was any mention of Jennie’s mother and father.5

The world into which John McQuaid was born was one in which Queen Victoria’s Empire dominated a globe that even included the whole of Ireland. The Conservative and Unionist party, led by Lord Salisbury, had just been returned to power on a wave of imperialist jingoism in England, and though these sentiments were not shared in Ireland, Scotland and Wales, the Government enjoyed a sufficiently commanding majority in the House of Commons to re-launch its policy of ‘killing Home Rule by kindness’.

As the century drew to a close, the people of Ulster were anchored in ancient sectarian feuds. The year 1895 was one of competing centennial celebrations. For Protestants it was the 100th anniversary of the Orange Order, whose Lodges restricted membership to ‘those born and brought up in the Reformed Religion’. Only a few weeks before John’s birth, Cootehill’s Orangemen were especially vigorous practising at their headquarters in Dawson Hall for their annual parade on ‘the Twelfth’, to commemorate the victory of the Dutch Protestant, King William of Orange, over the Catholic Englishman, King James II, at the Battle of the Boyne in 1690. The beating of their Lambeg drums was particularly loud that year: Ulster Protestants feared the growing power of the Catholic Church, which, since its emancipation from centuries of penal laws in 1829, was building churches, convents and schools at an unprecedented rate throughout the land.

For Catholics, 1895 was the centenary of St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, a national seminary set up to train young men for the priesthood. In June, what writer Michael McCarthy described as ‘a clerical army’, consisting of a cardinal, three Archbishops, 25 bishops, two mitred abbots and some 3,000 priests and 600 students, assembled at Maynooth. Articulating the new triumphalist mood of the Catholic Church, the Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh, Michael Logue, declared: ‘We shall never be satisfied until every tower and turret is built and every chair is established that will make the Irish Church what it should be, and what it will be, please God, in our own times.’6

If Cootehill, the second largest town on the north-east tip of Co. Cavan, belonged to the Orange Order on July 12, it was taken over on August 15 by the Ancient Order of Hibernians. Founded as a Catholic Friendly Society in 1884, the AOH effectively formed the socio-religious wing of the Irish Parliamentary Party, which had split in 1890 after Parnell’s mistress, Kitty O’Shea, divorced her husband, a member of the Home Rule Party.7 Apart from these two marching days, relations between Protestants and Catholics in Cootehill were marked by a spirit of neighbourliness, outwardly at any rate. Beneath the surface, the Protestant gentry and commercial elite feared an erosion of the social supremacy which they had enjoyed since Cromwellian times. On the authority of the Lord Protector, Oliver Cromwell, the estate of the local Gaelic and Catholic chieftain, an O’Reilly, was transferred to Thomas Coote, who married Frances Hill of Hillsborough, Co. Down. Muinchille – literally ‘the sleeve of the O’Reillys’ – became Cootehill, which later generations of the family, ennobled as the Earls of Bellamont, developed into a prosperous market town under Royal Charter.

A prominent member of the town’s rising Catholic middle class, Dr Eugene McQuaid was the assistant to the Medical Officer for the Cootehill Union, Dr Thomas Hamilton Moorehead. Educated at Trinity College, Dublin, and listed in Slater’s Directory as a member of the gentry, Moorehead’s father had owned the property rented by Dr Eugene’s father, ‘Honest John’ McQuaid. Working with a Protestant posed no religious scruples for Dr Eugene, who had trained at the Royal College of Surgeons in Dublin. Interested in astronomy, politics and horse-racing – he owned a horse, Scarlet Runner – Dr Eugene enjoyed socialising with the Protestant upper class.8

A widower at 35, Dr Eugene was forced to take stock. He turned to his mother and his sister, Annie, for help in rearing his two children. ‘The tall and stately’ Mary McQuaid was too old to take on this responsibility and Annie was planning to emigrate to America, so a local girl, Bridget Foy, was employed as a domestic to rear Helen and John.9 The McQuaid and Corry families urged Dr Eugene to remarry.

Fourteen months after Jennie’s death, a notice appeared in the columns of the Dublin and Cavan press. ‘September 30, 1896, at St Joseph’s Church, Terenure, Dublin … Dr Eugene McQuaid, J.P., Cootehill, to Agnes, daughter of Thomas Mayne, Esq, Cremorne, Terenure, Co. Dublin.’ A discreet trailer requested ‘no cards’. While this diffidence might have been a social courtesy to the Corry family, there was a further complication. The wedding certificate carries the addendum: ‘Dispensation received from Monsignor FitzPatrick, Vicar General.’ Normally, this was indicative of a mixed marriage, but as Agnes was a Catholic, there may have been an impediment on Eugene’s side which needed to be waived by the Church authorities.10

Agnes was a sophisticated and well-travelled woman. Her parents, Thomas and Susanna Mayne, owned Cremorne House, a stylish residence in Dublin’s Terenure. Her father was an Alderman of Dublin Corporation and a confirmed Parnellite who had sat, in Westminster, as an Irish Party M.P. for Tipperary. Agnes lived in Chicago for a time, where she helped her sister, Annie, organise the 1893 Irish Pavilion at the World Fair. An accomplished musician, she played piano at the recitals given there by Miss Josephine Sullivan, the celebrated harpist and daughter of A.M. Sullivan, whose book The Story of Ireland was the bible of patriotism for that generation. Interested in literature, Agnes had become friendly in Chicago with the writer, Carmel Snow, and she loved to reminisce about the time she met the famous Bill Cody, ‘Buffalo Bill’.11

A few years after her return to Dublin, Agnes was introduced to Eugene McQuaid at a doctors’ party by a cousin who was on the staff of the Mater Hospital.12 Adjusting to provincial life was not easy for her at first. She attended the Christmas Coal Concert for the poor, at which she played the piano and sang, as did Jennie’s sister, Mabel, while Dr Eugene took part in the Percy French farce, Borrowed Plumes. According to local tradition, Agnes came with a sizable dowry which enabled Dr Eugene to buy the parochial house at Court View, after Fr Brady’s death in March 1897. This purchase enabled Dr Eugene to take a considerable leap up the social ladder. Court View, which now forms part of the White Horse Hotel, was one of the finest buildings in the town, deriving its name from the court house directly across the street. The McQuaids’ neighbour to the rear was owner of the Bellamont Estate, the Ampleforth College-educated, Captain Edward Smith, who had inherited a family fortune from coal mines in England. Their neighbour to the left was the Church of Ireland Rector, Mr Plummer, whose Tudor-style church stood guard at the foot of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• CHRONOLOGY
• INTRODUCTION : The McQuaid Shadow
• PART I : MAKING OF A MILITANT – EDUCATION TO PRIESTHOOD 1895–1925
• PART II : BUILDING A POWERBASE 1925–40
• PART III : USING POWER – RULER OF CATHOLIC IRELAND 1940–62
• PART IV : VATICAN II – CHANGE & DOWNFALL OF JOHN CHARLES MCQUAID 1962–73
• Notes
• SOURCES
• Index
• Plates
• Copyright