NOW that the Ireland of a hundred years ago and more falls into the perspective of history, we can notice more clearly perhaps one striking feature of the time: shame; self loathing; a revulsion from the shoddiness of this second rate province of the British Empire. It shows in the writing of Joyce, of Yeats, of Pearse, of lesser people like D.P. Moran. Its epitome was T.M. Healy, so much so that his current political biographer Frank Callanan, at the end of his Acknowledgements, half hints that there is some shame attached to devoting "close on two decades" of his own life and work to that witty, vituperative, hate filled Catholic conservative nationalist.
Frank Callanan has nothing to be ashamed of. He has given us a work that illuminates both our past and our present.
It is a densely written book, based on original and scrupulous research, which makes few concessions to the reader - who is assumed to have some grasp of the intricate Anglo Irish politics of the time - but yet carries its narrative and analysis on a sustained irony, compelling the turning of the next page.
Frank Callanan has already written on The Parnell Split, and the new work is, chronologically, bottom heavy, concentrating on the Parnellite and anti Parnellite years. This is appropriate to its subject, although the narrative in the later chapters on Healy as Governor General of the Irish Free State - peters out somewhat disappointingly.
Tim Healy hated Parnell, and this shaped his life. He hated Parnell when he, like his fellows, was the obedient acolyte of that strange and driven soul, the Chief, the leader of men; he hated Parnell in the misery of his downfall; he hated Parnell in the scattered loyalty of those who clung to the Chief or to his memory; he hated Parnell in the bitter memories and frustrations of his own old age, when the Chief was long, long dead. He hated many others too - John Dillon, for example - but his inner life had a simple, unifying theme.
Healy was a clever man, a lawyer with a gift of (often bitter) words. He was, in Irish nationalist terms, a revanchist, wishing, like Lalor, to "undo the conquest", but, unlike Lalor, aiming at a conservative revolution by transferring the land of Ireland from the landlords to the tenants. This, as Callanan shows, was the social side of his Home Rule programme. He entered the House of Commons with a chip, on his shoulder and an aggressive challenge to its ways and its traditions and was, like other eccentrics, effortlessly absorbed by that institution, which quickly made him its own. He was flattered by the attentions of the great and thought himself their intimate, or at least a well placed go between. It may well be because Katharine O'Shea was much more successful in that capacity that he directed such particular venom at her. To the end of his career he hovered around negotiations on matters of great moment - the Anglo Irish treaty, for example - deluding himself that English statesmen regarded him and his efforts as highly as he would wish. In fact, many of them enjoyed his style much as they would be entertained by an organ grinder's monkey while the organ grinder, whether Parnell or Redmond or Collins or de Valera, played the tune.
Throughout his early years he distrusted, and often despised as riff raff, radicals, fenians and republicans. But he carried his hatred of Parnell over to the remnants of, Parnell's party, whose destruction in 1917-18 pleased him; he admired power, hence his somewhat surprisingly ready acceptance of Sinn Fein and the IRA. It was an acceptance tempered by a wary caution, a justified fear of the resources of governmental force; but the cutting of the Gordian knot excited him. As he put, it in a letter to his, brother Maurice (his correspondence with whom is a rich resource drawn on by Callanan):
but the main fact stares you in the face that the Sinns won in three years what we did not win in forty. You cannot make revolutions with rosewater, or omelettes without breaking eggs.
Clever as he was, he had little wisdom to pass on, to us. This biography, however, by taking Healy as the centre from which to view events, provides us with the dense, complex texture of the historical reality out of which there ultimately emerged the Ireland we know today. There is much in, throughout of Anglo Irish negotiations, with all the mistrust, misunderstanding, good will and bad will involved as Irish deviousness encountered English humbug - much of it reminiscent of our own dear "peace process". As he wrote to Beaverbrook in November 1920, "The point I gather, taken by the blessed Cabinet donkies was that the Shins should surrender arms before a truce. This is worthy of Gallipoli, Antwerp, Deniken, Wrangel and the cohort of cods. I am for doing business and making peace.