Fine Gael TD Oliver J Flanagan’s insistence on calling himself “Sir Oliver” was not accepted by the Irish government of the time.
Flanagan, a conservative Catholic TD who once noted there was “no sex in Ireland before television”, decided to style himself “Sir Oliver” after being entered into the Knighthood of St Gregory, a papal honour, in 1978.
Flanagan humbly suggested in an Evening Press interview that it was his constituents who insisted on calling him “Sir Oliver”, and he had decided to adopt the honorific by popular acclaim.
Those who are knighted in the UK usually carry the honorific “sir”, but the Catholic Church confirmed there was no precedent for papal knights to use the style.
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Under the Irish Constitution, Irish citizens cannot accept honours from foreign governments without the prior approval of the government at home.
“I was under the impression that papal decorations and honours were not regarded as coming under the scope of Article 40-2:2 of the Constitution,” one civil servant noted on December 13th, 1978.
They advised that the matter be checked with the Department of Foreign Affairs and, if it came under that section of the Constitution, the issue should then be taken up with Mr Flanagan.
The file also noted that the government granted the Earl of Rosse – who was an Irish citizen – the right to accept one of the highest honours bestowed by the British monarchy, the Knight Commander of the British Empire (KBE).
A Department of the Taoiseach file dated November 20th, 1973, noted government approval of the honour.
A memo five days earlier to then-taoiseach Liam Cosgrave noted, somewhat dryly, that the honour shouldn’t appreciably change references to the Earl of Rosse.
“This is the first time a proposal to confer the KBE has been encountered (for an Irish citizen). The honour is the equivalent of a life peerage and entitles the recipient to be called ‘Lord’ – nothing new to the Earl of Rosse,” it noted.
His wife, Anne Messel, through her first marriage to Ronald Armstrong-Jones, was mother of Anthony Armstrong-Jones, 1st Earl of Snowdon, who married Princess Margaret, sister of Queen Elisabeth II, in 1960.
Armstrong-Jones’s sister, the Viscountess de Vesci, lived in Abbeyleix House in Co Laois.
[ Hoor You To Talk? – An Irishman’s Diary about unparliamentary languageOpens in new window ]
The relationship by marriage caused a security headache to the Lemass government at the time.
During Princess Margaret’s visit in 1965 to Abbeyleix House, an electricity transformer exploded on the edge of the de Vesci estate. The IRA was blamed for having cut down an electricity pole, causing the incident.
In the recordings of former taoiseach Seán Lemass first made public in 2018, he described Princess Margaret’s visits as a “headache”. He had no intention of stopping her from coming, but neither was he going to encourage her “not for any reason other than recognition that we were going to have a security problem on our hands when she was here.
“She should have come and gone as the wife of a man who had a residence in Ireland and wanted to visit his family without any ceremony attached to the visit. There would have been no question at all in that case, that is, if she was coming as Mrs Snowdon. There was no official character in her visit and she got no official reception.”
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