Kevin O’Higgins, vice-president of the government of the Irish Free State and its first minister for justice, was shot to death as he walked to Mass from his home at Booterstown, Dublin on July 10th, 1927. Eighty-five years later – in 2012 – a small plaque to his memory was set into the wall at the spot where the assassination occurred. It was a measure of the controversy and hatred that have surrounded Kevin O’Higgins, in death as in life, that it was almost immediately defaced and vandalised. It has not been replaced.
O’Higgins was 37 when he died. Demonised by many who opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty that established the State, he was inaccurately pilloried as the executioner of up to 88 anti-treaty activists. He died leaving a wife and two young daughters. His murderers, who chanced upon him and seized the moment for vengeance, were three IRA men on their way to a GAA match in Wexford in a stolen car. Later, one proudly claimed to have danced on his grave in Glasnevin cemetery.
O’Higgins has been the subject of two big biographies, by Terence de Vere White (1948) and John P McCarthy (2006). His various roles from Sinn Féin organiser to vice-president, are woven into every account of modern Irish history. And his relationship with American socialite Hazel Lavery has been chronicled in Sinéad McCoole’s Hazel (1996). There is perhaps little to tell about O’Higgins’s political career – or indeed his personal life – that has not been known heretofore. But what Arthur Mathews does, with balance, honesty and humanity, is to place O’Higgins in the context of an extraordinary generation that fought for the freedom to establish an Irish State.
This is a narrative of loyalties and betrayal, hatred and love, principle and opportunism, with a cast of characters from Collins to de Valera, from Brugha to Childers, from psychopaths to idealists, from zealots to opportunists.
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It has a particular authenticity because the author comes at his subject from a family perspective. His grandfather, also Arthur Mathews, was a Cumann na nGaedheal TD for Meath. His maternal grandfather was a member of the Royal Irish Constabulary. But this book is neither an apologia for the execution policy of the State’s first government nor an indictment of those who followed Éamon de Valera to take up arms against it. He rehearses the moral arguments with clarity and even-handedness. Those who reject the Treaty will not accept the Dáil vote to ratify it on the grounds that a majority has no right to do wrong. Those who support it insist that democracy must prevail, even if it is to cost thousands of lives, as WT Cosgrave argued.
The author’s grandfather died before he was born but Mathews skilfully and sensitively connects his own generation to the children and grandchildren of those who took the opposite side to his namesake. He describes with warmth how Sister Nancy Hilliard, a Medical Missionary of Mary, based in Drogheda, would visit his mother’s house in Navan to reminisce “about old times over tea and biscuits”. Sister Nancy’s father, Michael Hilliard, was an anti-treatyite, later a Fianna Fáil minister, who at 17 executed a suspected spy in a field outside the town. He was, in the author’s words, a sworn enemy of O’Higgins.
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“It was hard to believe that such a ruthless and savage killing had been carried out by the father of the gentle nun quietly chatting to my mother in our livingroom,” Mathews writes.
The author is not an academic historian (he co-scripted Father Ted). He draws on his family legacy to revisit and review the tumultuous years of Ireland’s struggle and to tease out the moral choices that faced participants in that process. Thus, unlike the professional historian, he is not required to footnote and source every point he wishes to make. Very few, if any of the children or grandchildren of the revolutionary cohort that shaped today’s Ireland have actually done what he does here.
Mathews’ subject is “no plaster saint”, to borrow a phrase O’Higgins used himself in describing the gunmen of the Free State’s Oriel House CID. But he is principled, courageous, a patriot and a passionate believer that the democratic will of the Irish people had to be vindicated. Mathews reverences a man with human weaknesses but a hero, nonetheless.
