Eight well-chosen words were all it took to finish off Charles Stewart Parnell the uncrowned king of Ireland. So persuasively had he dissembled his relationship with Mrs Katherine O'Shea that some of his Irish Party MPs at Westminster were actually beginning to wonder whether the relationship might, in fact, be innocent. But Tim Healy changed all that.
"Who is to be mistress of the party?" he thundered, his venom so malignant that Healy entered history on the strength of that one phrase alone. One more shove and Parnell's glorious dream of Irish Home Rule was over.
Frank Callanan was so fascinated by the power of that rhetoric that he began a study of Tim Healy's political life some 16 years ago, checking out sources while developing his law practice and writing a study of Parnell which was published in 1992. He had already taken a pure history degree at University College Dublin, along with an MA in economics from the University of Bruges. After six years, during which he was also called to the Bar, he started to devil for Peter Kelly recently appointed a judge of the High Court. Callanan is now a very busy barrister.
How did he find the time? "While other people played golf I wrote history," he explains. Ask him why, and you realise that Callanan saw Healy as a figure through which to interrogate the rise of Catholic nationalist supremacism, from Healy's early days as a journalist on The Nation through his career as a Westminster MP, and thence as the only Irish Party deputy to accommodate himself to the new order, sprung from the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Healy became first Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
Tim Healy was not so easily pinned down, however. True, he was a master of rhetoric, a parliamentary street-fighter who took no hostages and never gave his opponents the benefit of the doubt. Yet this man was heartbroken when he saw the McGrath family living under an upturned boat at Kealkill, near Bantry, because they had been evicted - Michael McGrath died from fever four years later, without reclaiming his farm. Even in 1907, Healy "still remembered the state in which the husband was buried, the corpse taken out of the boat, the rain pouring down as the priest said the last absolution and that was a decent, substantial tenant before his cruel eviction"
Healy's intimidation of the tenant who usurped the McGrath family farm led to his arrest, his instant notoriety and thence to a whopping victory as the Honourable Member for Wexford in October 1880. He was 25 years old. That capacity for mixing genuine passion with sublime opportunism offered Callanan a quirkier character than he had anticipated.
Healy was a right-wing, sectarian nationalist who always kept the Catholic clergy on his side; he mixed the politics of land purchase and Home Rule as if Cromwell still rode over the nation's green fields, defying the strategies of both Parnell and labour activist Michael Davitt.
But he was "a thwarted idealist" too, unable to distinguish the world of high politics, so stylishly practised by Parnell, from the often empty rhetoric of Westminster.
Parnell's realpolitik seemed to Healy "a susceptibility to passing influences" and when the chance came to strike against his former hero, he grabbed it with both hands. Parnell had been living with Katherine O'Shea, whose husband was also an Irish Party MP, albeit one for whom good claret beat parliamentary distinction most days of the week. Katherine and her husband were effectively separated: such arrangements were not uncommon, though generally unspoken. But Healy made an exception of this case. The O'Shea's divorce case split the Irish Party and, with Parnell's credibility at stake, threatened to destroy the real advances he had achieved at Westminster.
ACCORDING to Callanan, Healy exacted "a harlequin's revenge". Parnell's own myth against him and recast the case against Parnell in nationalist, even ethnic, terms. Parnell's aura of kingship now assumed the mantle of the planter-traitor, with the Chief portrayed as a landlord stereotype who would betray his people, the better to feed his own selfish needs.
Callanan believes that Healy's arguments against Parnell stand as one of the most significant texts of the Irish nationalist sensibility". The rot set in.
That analogy was not lost on writers like W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, for whom Healy came to symbolise the cute Celt on the make. Healy might have liked to think of himself as a polemicist par excellence - and what more potentially lethal combination is there than that of journalist-turned-barrister-turned-politician - but Edmund Burke he was not. "Tim Healy is only divided from Swift by an abyss of genius," wrote Yeats in 1897. Joyce, as usual, cut deeper. Taking Yeats that one step further, he transformed Swift's Lilliput into the image of Dublin as Heliotropolis, offering a hymn to the dead Parnell, in the closing lines of Finnegans Wake.
Healy's nationalist narrative ranted on into the 20th century, carving in stone that equation between good citizen and good Catholic which lasted well past the days of Eamon de Valera. Yet again, however, that wasn't the full story. Healy defended a range of rogue causes, from that of suffragettes in London and Dublin, to the 1917 inquest of Thomas Ashe, who died on hunger strike. Ashe's inquest gave Healy the chance to harass the British government - while introducing his skills to the fast-rising political movement of Sinn Fein.
"Healy hoped Sinn Fein would derogate its policy of abstention, at least to the point of letting himself and other allies return to Westminster, mainly to block Partition," believes Callanan. "He argued incessantly that abstention allowed the Unionists to have free rein at Westminster."
Could Partition have been avoided? Most probably not: for Healy, the exercise was one of damage limitation. Later, Healy tried to insert himself behind the scenes during the Treaty talks, dining for Ireland with Lloyd George and Churchill, arguing subsequently for a fast convening of the Boundary Commission on the basis of their alleged promises. He blamed de Valera for allowing the Civil War to delay the process. Healy liked blaming people.
But even without the 1916 Rising, had parliamentary nationalism passed its sell-by date "Nationalist voters felt they had been cheated and hum-bugged, ignored in having supported the war effort and then treated unfairly in relation to Ulster Unionists." Callanan believes that one way or another, a backlash against the Irish Party was inevitable.
He argues strongly against "the new polarisation in the way this period is being written about", a trend which identifies historical discontinuity between the politics of Parnell and those of Sinn Fein, as exemplified by Griffith, Collins and de Valera - Patrick Pearse's blood sacrifice concept is another matter. If pursued, that polarisation opens up a vista from the 1918 Sinn Fein abstentionists to the same-name party now led by Gerry Adams, a parallel he considers both inappropriate and misplaced. "Only 30 years separates the Treaty from the Parnell split - less than a lifetime for one nationalist voter to have supported Parnell, then Redmond and Dillon, and finally Sinn Fein in 1918," says Callanan.
Unique among Irish Party deputies, Healy adapted to the changed political order, becoming Governor-General of the new Free State and watching the rise to office of his nephew, Kevin O'Higgins - the clan was always central to his way of operating. As Governor-General, his contacts ranged from media magnate Max Beaverbrook to the still pretty-in-pink Barbara Cartland. When he died in 1931, The Irish Times observed, perhaps optimistically, that "if we have lost something of the old genius, we have lost much of the old violence, the old prejudices and the old suspicions".
