Sean Lemass

Democratic Dictator

Bryce Evans

• Publisher: The Collins Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781848899414
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Biografie in ambito politico

Seán Lemass enjoys unrivalled acclaim as the 'Architect of Modern Ireland'. Yet there remain great gaps in our knowledge of this mythic figure and his golden age. Up to now Lemass, a colossus of twentieth-century Irish history, was airbrushed to fit a narrative of national progress. Today, this narrative is undergoing an agonising reappraisal. This groundbreaking study reveals the man behind the myth and asks questions previously skirted around. What emerges is an authoritarian, cunning, workaholic patriot; a shrewd political tactician whose impatience lay not just with the old Ireland, but with democracy itself. This is the untold story of a great man and his lasting impact on a nation's imagination.

1

The Shadow of a Gunman

Capel Street, the Christian Brothers and the Rising

In the summer of 1899 the heavily pregnant Frances Lemass travelled with her husband, John, and her midwife to Dun Laoghaire, south County Dublin. John and Frances were sufficiently well off to be able to regularly hire a large cottage belonging to a dairy farmer in nearby Ballybrack which they used as the family’s summer house. It was here that Frances gave birth to Seán Lemass on 15 July 1899. After two months the baby was christened and John and Frances returned to their home on Capel Street, in the heart of middle-class commercial Dublin.

Twelve years later a census was conducted across Ireland. The return for number 2 Capel Street, the family business and home, provides a snapshot of Seán Lemass’s early life. Seán had three sisters and four brothers in total; another sibling had been lost in infancy. John, a hatter by trade, was forty-three years old in 1911. Frances was thirty-nine. The oldest of the children was the sturdy Noel (thirteen). Next there was Seán, aged eleven and listed as ‘John’. Then there was Alice (ten), Clare (seven), Patrick (four), and Mary (one).¹

This early glimpse of Seán Lemass’s life is indicative of his relatively comfortable upbringing. At the time Dublin contained some of the most unsanitary slum housing in Europe. By contrast Seán Lemass’s background was affluent. His father, John, ran a gentleman’s outfitters in a prosperous area of the city, and was listed in Thom’s commercial directory.² When Frances gave birth it was in the country retreat and in the company of her own nurse.³ The Lemasses were also wealthy enough to have a domestic servant, a young woman called Elizabeth Kelly, who was aged nineteen in 1911.⁴

The eleven-year-old Seán Lemass was a pupil at the nearby Christian Brothers school in North Richmond Street, Dublin. He had followed his older brother there from convent school; Seán and Noel had enrolled together two years previously.⁵ Seán was a well-behaved, rather introverted and nervous child. Mathematics was his favourite subject. Outside of school he loved to play in the workshops in his father’s business.⁶ His older brother, Noel, by contrast, was taller and more outgoing.

A fellow student of the Lemass brothers in North Richmond Street was Ernie O’Malley. In later life he achieved fame as a republican militant and writer; he and Seán Lemass were to take up arms together in the Civil War a decade later. A slightly younger colleague was Brendan Bracken, later Viscount Bracken, and Minister for Information in the British cabinet during the Second World War.⁷ As an adult Bracken discarded his Irish roots for the altogether more advantageous identity of an English public school boy and became a sycophantic favourite of Winston Churchill. In London in the 1920s Bracken was approached in the street by another former Christian Brothers pupil who claimed to remember him, recalling from his face an odd childhood memory – the smell of his corduroy trousers at school. Characteristically, Bracken feigned ignorance and walked away.⁸ The man left standing in the street was Emmet Dalton. Dalton, a pupil in the same North Richmond Street school, played and studied alongside Seán and Noel.⁹ As they sat at their school desks none of these boys could have foreseen the different directions their lives would take, nor that the name Emmet Dalton would become linked with the untimely death of Noel Lemass.

In the Dublin of these boys’ youth, history and politics were fields of lively contention. In the year of Lemass’s birth Britain went to war with the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boer War, as it became known, elicited much anti-imperial feeling in Ireland. The concentration camps Britain erected for women and children in South Africa contrasted with a spirit of constructive unionism in Ireland and the passing of the land acts. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which Seán’s father supported, was undergoing a revival in fortunes. So too were the forces of cultural and revolutionary nationalism, the latter an underground tradition which Lemass’s mother held dear. His transition from innocent childhood to an awareness of civic nationalism in adolescence was punctuated most obviously by a major labour dispute: the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913. A strike by tram workers led to strikes in solidarity by workers across the city. In retaliation over 20,000 workers in Dublin were locked out by the city’s capitalists, who enjoyed the support of the state, the Church and the media.

The Lemass brothers grew up in the midst of such pivotal events in the Ireland of the Edwardian twilight. Because their father was a fairly prosperous businessman, their class allegiance was not as straightforward as many of their less well-off contemporaries. As products of a nationalistic Christian Brothers education, however, class and national issues intertwined, and their reaction to anti-nationalist outrages was hostile. One such event occurred very close to the family home. In July 1914 several unarmed civilians were massacred by British troops on Bachelor’s Walk, just yards from the Lemasses’ front door. In the same month, and just before the outbreak of the First World War, Noel left school. The timing of Noel’s school-leaving was no coincidence: great events were unfolding which made the classroom seem a small world indeed. For the eldest boy the pressure to work was also greater than for Seán, who did not enter the world of work with the same alacrity as his brother. Whereas Seán was educated to ‘seventh standard’ at school, Noel reached just ‘fourth standard’.¹⁰

Large numbers of young Irish men were joining the British Army around this time. Emmet Dalton enlisted in 1915 and at the age of seventeen was appointed to the rank of second lieutenant. He was to serve in nearly every theatre of war from France to Palestine.¹¹ Seán Lemass’s path was different. After leaving school he briefly enrolled at a commercial training college, but when Noel joined the Irish Volunteers Seán followed him, still a schoolboy and aged just fifteen.

The body Noel introduced Seán to was a rump organisation, the smaller faction to emerge after the split in 1914 over whether or not the cause of Irish nationalism would be advanced by joining the British war effort. The adjutant of the battalion the Lemass brothers joined was a 32-year-old schoolteacher, Éamon de Valera. Lemass’s recollection of his first glimpse of de Valera has been repeated with relish by his biographers.‘My impression of him was of a long, thin fellow with knee breeches and a tweed hat. But he had, of course, enormous personal magnetism . . . it impressed me enormously, notwithstanding what I thought was his rather queer-looking appearance.’¹² Lemass’s description of de Valera’s eccentric appearance squares with one witness’s recollection of de Valera when commandant at Boland’s Mills during the Easter Rising in 1916:‘a tall, gangling figure in green Volunteer uniform and red socks, running around day and night, without sleep, getting trenches dug, giving contradictory orders and forgetting the password so that he nearly got himself shot’.¹³ The immaculately attired Lemass never possessed the same peculiar charisma as de Valera, but was to remain at his side for the rest of his life.

As rank-and-file recruits in 1915 the Lemass boys had little idea that the organisation they joined had been infiltrated by a radical clique within the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) which was planning a heroic gesture. Eoin MacNeill, Professor of Early and Medieval History at University College Dublin and titular head of the Irish Volunteers, found himself outmanoeuvred by the radicals, who were plotting a symbolic armed insurrection against British rule in Ireland. When MacNeill learned of these preparations he cancelled manoeuvres due to take place on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916. Despite MacNeill’s countermanding order the insurrection went ahead the following day with the rebels seizing strategic buildings in Dublin, most prominently the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street.

The decision of the young Lemass brothers to join what became the Easter Rising was, as Michael Laffan has described much of the conduct of that week,‘engagingly casual’.¹⁴ Neither Noel nor Seán were close to the inner sanctum of the movement and, unaware that the Rising was taking place under the leadership of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, they decided to head for a walk in the hills with their friends and neighbours, the O’Dea brothers. There they met Eoin MacNeill, out walking with his sons. There is something almost Olympian about this mountain-top meeting. MacNeill regretfully informed the boys that an insurrection had gone ahead.¹⁵ Noel and Seán listened sympathetically, then, hubristically, jumped on the next tram to the city centre to take part in the fight.

That the Lemass brothers were unaware of what was taking place was not unusual – the Rising was planned in secrecy – though their ignorance does indicate that they were not close to the leadership in any way. For this reason they did not fight with their own battalion under de Valera at Boland’s Mills. Instead they reported for duty at the GPO, were armed and then separated. Noel was stationed to the Imperial Hotel on the opposite side of the road while Seán was posted to the roof of the GPO.¹⁶

This posting was, as Lemass’s grandson Seán Haughey concedes, ‘very lucky’ from the point of view of his later political career.¹⁷ For young Seán the experience must have been a heady mix of terror and exhilaration, though hardly the gung-ho adventure some describe.¹⁸ Tom Garvin claims he ‘got up on top of the GPO with a shotgun and started blazing away’, a statement which rather creates the impression of a strident Lemass clambering madly to the building’s summit to take on the British.¹⁹ Lemass in fact said: ‘I fired a few shots from the GPO, but whether they hit anybody I don’t know.’²⁰

According to others who were on the roof during Easter week, the most trying experience was not the fighting but the discomfort from the heat of the burning buildings on the opposite side of the street.²¹ There, among the flames, Noel was shot in the hand. Seán escaped the entire experience without...