I first heard the name Douglas Hyde in the place where he is still remembered best – his home county of Roscommon. My maternal grandparents lived almost across the road from the Dr Hyde Park, the county’s premier GAA ground, which officially opened in 1971.
As a child, I often kicked a ball in “the Hyde” and if, at first, I imagined that the stadium was named in honour of a great Roscommon footballer of yesteryear, this misunderstanding was quickly corrected. My late grandfather, Jimmy Moran, was one of the brave generation who had fought for our national freedom and he had been an active member of the South Roscommon Brigade of the IRA during the War of Independence. He was also someone who had a deep affection for the Irish language and an enduring respect for the Irish-Ireland ideals of the Gaelic League. My grandfather spoke reverentially about Douglas Hyde, the first President of Ireland.
My initial interest in the presidency also had a Roscommon connection. The first presidential election in my lifetime took place in 1990. I was a teenager and I found it an enthralling contest. Brian P Lenihan, the Fianna Fáil candidate, was our local TD in Dublin West and he had formerly represented Roscommon. Instinctively, he had our support. As my interest in the presidency deepened, I became aware that the office was a hugely under-researched area in Irish historiography. It is also one of the most misunderstood.
0 of 3
As far back as 1997, Prof Dermot Keogh bemoaned the fact that there is no published history of the presidency. In the intervening years, there have been two biographical studies of former presidents, but both of these studies are largely weighted towards the portion of their respective lives preceding their tenures in Áras an Uachtaráin.
The lack of historical research into the presidency, especially in regard to the office’s early years, has allowed a number of misconceptions to take root. The most significant of these is that the formative presidencies were politically irrelevant. This train of thinking wrongly dismisses the presidency prior to 1990 as “a retirement home”, a largely ceremonial office, and a role far removed from the cut and thrust of political life.
My “search for Hyde”, which I dubbed my long-standing effort to tell the story of Ireland’s first President, was given added impetus by the centenary this year of the Easter Rising.
In the run-up to this significant anniversary, historians were prolific in assessing the momentous actions and the major personalities at the forefront of Ireland’s struggle for nationhood. One figure, however, was largely conspicuous by his absence – Douglas Hyde.
Though Hyde was one of the most consequential of Irishmen, his public career is today given scant attention. This is despite the fact that Hyde had arguably done more than any other individual to shape a distinct Irish identity and to encourage Irish people to regard themselves, in his own words, as a “separate nationality”.
Douglas Hyde railed against any notion that Irish people “ought to be content as an integral part of the United Kingdom because we have lost the notes of nationality, our language and customs” and he sought to “create a strong feeling against West-Britonism”. His cultural proselytising precipitated the political revolution from which Irish sovereignty flowed.
If apathy is, to paraphrase the Nobel laureate, Elie Wiesel, a vice worse than anger, then Douglas Hyde’s legacy has been particularly ill-served by Irish historians. In the 67 years since Hyde’s death, only two full-scale biographies of Ireland’s first President have been written. The first biography, written by Janet and Gareth Dunleavy, two American professors of English and comparative literature, was published in 1991. Two years later, a two-volume Irish language biography by Risteárd Ó Glaisne, a teacher and journalist, was launched. In more recent times, Cormac Moore, a leading Irish sports historian, produced a commendable book focusing on the GAA’s scandalous decision to expel Hyde from its ranks. However, the general indifference that Irish historians as a class have shown to Hyde’s career belies the significance of his contribution.
Patrick Pearse, the titular head of the Easter Rising, seemed to intuitively understand the seismic impact that Hyde and the establishment of the Gaelic League would have on the course of Irish separatism. In 1914, Pearse wrote “the Gaelic League will be recognised in history as the most revolutionary influence that has ever come into Ireland. The Irish Revolution really began when the seven proto-Gaelic Leaguers met in O’Connell St….The germ of all future Irish history was in that back room.” Ultimately, however, Pearse and Hyde would fall out, as the former embraced militant separatism at the expense, in Hyde’s view, of cultural inclusiveness.
In post-independence Ireland, the writing of Irish history has tended to focus predominantly on those who opted for the militant path in the formative years of 1914 to 1923. Our process of commemoration also seems to have developed almost a hierarchy in the national pantheon with more attention being given to those who took up arms in the cause of Irish freedom than to those who provided the intellectual basis for a separate state. This is not a new phenomenon born out of the understandable emotion generated by the centenary of the Easter Rising.
Official Ireland’s non-recognition of Douglas Hyde’s legacy was an issue that long rankled with his family. As far back as 1972, Hyde’s daughter, Una Sealy remarked in an interview with The Irish Times that “I have often thought if he had killed people he would have been considered great, but because he was such a gentle, refined person, no one bothered about him. He has been ignored for a long time. They left his grave twenty-three years without attending to it.”
Douglas Hyde is an underrated but outstanding figure who was central to Ireland’s emergence from centuries of colonialism. Even today, Hyde’s achievements remain relevant to the life of our independent nation. He preserved for us our vibrant culture and, through his benign presidency, he progressed stability and constitutional order. He deserves more from history than to be a forgotten patriot.
