Anyone wishing to understand the history of Ireland over the past 150 years should read Father Tom Morrissey's fine biography of William Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin from 1885 to 1921.* Walsh was the last of the great clerical potentates who laid the foundation stones of the modern Irish State.

Long before the British departed, these men built a social, educational, and cultural infrastructure that ensured that whatever form of government emerged, it would merely mediate between different Catholic constituencies.

Figures such as John Redmond, Padraig Pearse, and James Connolly provided the rhetorical froth for the struggle. If Eamon de Valera struck a deeper chord, it was because he had communed with the world of Walsh.

If the Vatican was more sympathetic towards the Irish revolution than contemporaneous upheavals elsewhere, it was in large part because of the impeccable Catholic credentials of leaders such as de Valera. Walsh played an important part in reassuring the Pope and prelates around the world that the Irish revolution was different.

The Irish hierarchy had the happy knack of leading the mob, and whenever the mob took off on a tack of its own, the bishops followed closely behind, ready to resume their rightful place.

Today the bishops are frequently regarded as a conspiracy of old men trying to turn the clock back. It is a strategy for which Walsh would have had little patience. His gaze was always firmly on the future.

For instance, when he perceived the Parnell divorce case as a threat to Home Rule, he moved quickly to confront the fallen leader. Similarly, when he withdrew support from Redmond and the constitutional nationalists during the first World War, it was because he despaired of their increasing political ineptness.

In fairness to Walsh, his agenda was broader than the national question. He pioneered land reform, built orphanages and hostels for the homeless in Dublin, and worked tirelessly to build a good education system at all levels. The National University of Ireland was in large part his creation.

He attempted, with varying success, to resolve major industrial disputes. The Labour Court, set up in 1946 to foster a conciliation system for industrial relations in this State, was in large part his legacy.

It is unfortunate that he is chiefly remembered today, in so far as he is remembered at all, for his role in the fall of Parnell and his opposition to attempts during the Dublin lockout to send strikers' children to England. Unlike many of his co-religionists, Walsh felt no personal animosity towards Parnell and saw his destruction as a political necessity in the higher interest of securing Home Rule.

His attitude towards the Dublin "kiddies" scheme in 1913 was more complex. He probably would have agreed with the strikers' leader, Jim Larkin, that "the religion which could not stand a fortnight's holiday in England had not very much bottom".

Walsh's objection was more fundamental. As the archbishop explained, a holiday in England for starving strikers' children "will make them discontented with the poor homes to which they will sooner or later return."

Like many middle-class Catholics, he was more alarmed at the threat from socialism and other secular ideologies to the moral well-being of working-class children than the threat of starvation to their physical health.

Unlike many middle-class Catholics, he saw self-government for the Irish as a necessity to assert equal rights for his church with those of other denominations, rather than as an opportunity to replace the Protestant ascendancy with a Catholic one. As Father Morrissey says, Walsh's policy of keeping the Catholic Church "in tune with the popular struggle . . . helped preserve the loyalty of the people".

* William J Walsh Archbishop of Dublin, 1841-1921, by Thomas J Morrissey SJ. Four Courts Press

Padraig Yeates is The Irish Times Industrial and Employment Correspondent. His book, Lockout Dublin 1913, was published last autumn by Gill and Macmillan