From my billet in McKee Barracks half-a-century ago, I had a close view of the guardroom where the Tricolour floated in the breeze, an inspiration at reveille every morning. A debate at the time in The Irish Press on the history of the flag prompted me to call at the National Library in search of a story.
I had appeared in print in Irish Travel and the Father Matthew Record, and that was about all. Without rite of passage, I now crossed the threshold of an exciting new world. I hardly noticed the windows circling the rotunda, celebrating luminaries of the world's literature from Virgil and Homer and down the ages: Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton, Goethe, Schiller and the others. When the library was opened in 1890, the national bard, Tom Moore, was chosen to represent achievement in Irish letters in the last of the commemorative windows.
Library assistant
In my hobnailed Army boots, I ascended the marble stairs to the counter in the reading room. It was my good fortune to be taken in hand by Patrick O'Connor, the library assistant on duty, author of the more substantial letters in the newspaper debate. Under his watchful eye I wrote my name in the readers' daybook, glancing at the signatures of the visitors already at work with "bowed heads and busy eyes", as W.B. Yeats described the scene. The great man was accorded the privilege of a table in a private passage, away from "draughts and noise", as he wrote to Lady Gregory in 1898. Having studied for decades in the respectful silence of the National Library, I can't imagine what Yeats was talking about.
Years later, enquiring at the library about my old mentor, I was referred by Donal O Luanaigh to T.P. O'Neill, who recalled for me his own impressions of the senior library assistant, whom he admired for his kindness and prodigious memory. O'Connor began his career as a bookboy, an archaic and long-since discarded job description for the friendly attendants who bring the books to you at your desk.
He was on duty when Patrick Pearse, on the eye of the 1916 Rising, called in to read James Fintan Lawlor's revolutionary essays. Returning the book, Pearse left it open at "Clearing the Decks", taken to be a signal that the Rising was imminent.
Belonging to the generation schooled in the glories of the Easter Rising and the heroism of Patrick Pearse, I had written out in my copybook the leader's panegyric for O'Donovan Rossa: "Here by the grave of this unrepentant Fenian, we renew our baptismal vows. . .Ireland unfree shall never be at peace."
Though the content of my library was to change radically as the years passed, my book collection was founded on the five-volume Complete Works of P.H. Pearse, bequeathed by my Cumann na mBan mother.
Fought in GPO
In my green uniform as a member of Oglaigh na hEireann, I was proud to meet a man who had seen the Tricolour hoisted over the erstwhile second city of the Empire. Nations have their Bastilles and their GPOs, and live to build anew with the binding cement of justice and peace.
As a Volunteer himself, O'Connor the bookboy fought in the GPO. Threatened with dismissal, he was urged by the librarian, Thomas Lyster, to say he had been misled; he refused to take the easy way out and lost his job, but was reinstated on the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922.
Showing me to a vacant desk, my new friend revealed the mysteries of historical research, and to start me off listed references to my subject among 19th-century sources; then he left me to make my own way in the world of scholarship.
Radio script
My article on the history of the Flag was published in the Garda Review, which became my first literary nursery under P.A. O Siochain as editor. The piece was afterwards reprinted by The Irish Digest and Ireland of the Welcomes. Revised as a radio talk, my script was accepted by Radio Eireann. On August 26th, 1950, in the old Henry Street studios, I sat for the first time in front of a microphone to record a broadcast, with Mervyn Wall as producer.
I was stationed at the time in Oylegate, Co Wexford. The programme was noticed in the local newspapers, the word going out that the young garda was to talk on the wireless. For a week afterwards, I basked in the friendly attentions of my neighbours.
In Dr G.A. Hayes McCoy's History of Irish Flags, published posthumously in 1979, I read with satisfaction and echoed the author's acknowledgement of "a debt of gratitude to that unique enthusiast, the late Patrick O'Connor of the National Library of Ireland".