`I received the news of the shooting of four, amongst which was my dear friend Liam (Mellows) . . . I knew these fellows (the Free State authorities) were contemptible curs, but it never occurred to me that they were such vampires, drunk with their sudden greatness. Their one idea is to revel in human blood." I read these chilling words in the archives of the Irish College in Rome over twenty years ago and quoted them in my book, The Vatican, the Bishops and Irish Politics.
Here was an immediate contemporary reaction to the executions as a reprisal on 8th December 1922 in Mountjoy Prison of Liam Mellows, Rory O'Connor, Dick Barrett and Joseph McKelvey. The author of those words was the Superior General of the Calced Carmelites, Peter Magennis; he was writing to his close friend, the Rector of the Irish College, Mgr John Hagan, a fellow supporter of Eamon de Valera and the anti-Treatyites. Despite the antagonism of the Catholic hierarchy at the time to anti-Treatyites, de Valera was never deserted by many of the clergy and among their ranks were the Rome-based Hagan and Magennis. Dr Patrick Murray, in this fine book with its Miltonian-sounding title, sets the Magennis text in its wider historical context and makes a convincing argument about the extent to which the civil war divided the Irish Catholic church - church here being taken to read something far wider than the hierarchy. The book contains a very interesting appendix of pro-and-anti diocesan and regular clergy. Such an exercise is not without its historical pitfalls, as the author would be the first to admit. But it is a worthy exercise which certainly makes the case that the clerical Church was not uniformly pro-Treaty in 1922/3. The great strength of this study is it rootedness in a scholarship which is based on extensive work in ecclesiastical and lay archives. The regret is that the author - like so many others working in twentieth-century Irish history - is denied access to relevant archives in the Eamon de Valera papers for the civil war period, the 1920s and early 1930s. His work would have been so much more complete if the sorry saga of access to these archives was finally at an end. But this ought not to detract from the magisterial nature of this study. It reveals the complexities of church-state relations during the 1920s and 1930s. But it also traces the role of the priest in Irish politics. Dr Murray's findings will challenge those who complacently thought that all priests in that period reflexively followed the political lead of their episcopal superiors.
De Valera's refusal to be alienated from the Church at the height of civil war in 1922 is partially explained by the strength of his clerical advisers and supporters - Magennis and Hagan among them. The latter has not received from historians the attention he deserved. This book goes a long way to redress that scholarly imbalance. The correspondence of Sean T O'Kelly and other supporters of de Valera - to be found in the Hagan papers - provides a new insight into the orthodox Catholic world of "excommunicated" anti-Treatyites. It meant very much to those like O'Kelly and other Catholics around de Valera that they had their own personal theologian in Mgr Hagan, whose role in the foundation of Fianna Fail I have brought out in my own work. De Valera tended to keep his friendship with Mgr Hagan a closely guarded secret in the 1920s. When the former visited Rome prior to the establishment of Fianna Fail in 1926 he was secretly housed in the rector's rooms in the Irish College and convinced by Hagan of the need to found a new party. Hagan, who was a regular visitor to the de Valera household when he was home on annual holidays, was also a substantial contributor to the coffers of the Fianna Fail party upon its foundation. He was a prelate who saw no contradiction in rendering to God and to Caesar.
Hagan died in 1930. He was mourned by de Valera and those of his followers, like O'Kelly, who knew of his work on behalf of the anti-Treatyite cause. That takes me back to the quotation at the beginning of the review - words penned by Hagan's closest friend, Rev Peter Magennis. They capture a moment frozen in time and bear eloquent testimony to the depth of feeling stirred by the policy of executions - and a policy of reprisal in the case of the four. For President W.T. Cosgrave, that policy was a necessity and the civil war was a time to draw the sword. For Magennis, the government ministers were "vampires" and "contemptible curs" revelling in "human blood". This book helps explain what divided a church, a society and a new state. It also has a very solid chapter on the Catholic Church in Northern Ireland. Dr Murray has spent years working in ecclesiastical archives both in Ireland and abroad. The result is an outstanding piece of scholarship which, despite the awkwardness of structure in places, must be required reading for all interested in the history of twentieth-century Ireland.
Dr Dermot Keogh is Professor of History, University College Cork