For many years, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, the late Dr Cornelius Lucey, Bishop of Cork, had a national reputation as the terror of the confirmation classes. In many ways he fitted the stereoptype of the 1950s hierarch: imposing profile, beetling brows, and thunderous denunciation of the ills of the modern age. His addresses to confirmation classes, in particular, were noted for their eloquent - and often quite political - attention to emigration, governmental neglect of the farming community, and a wide range of other social issues. He silenced and exiled Dr James Good at the height of the contraception controversy at the end of the 1960s, and did so with clinical efficiency. Looked at more closely, however, his career provides us with yet another example of the image and the reality being slightly out of sync. Lucey - "Connie" as he was familiarly known - was certainly of a conservative disposition, but he was also, as they would have colloquially remarked up Barrack Street or in Blackpool, no daw. He was, for example, a spin doctor before his time.
Mystery talk
Somebody once asked him what all the mystified 11- and 12-year-olds made of the detailed political and sociological analyses which filled columns of the Cork Examiner on the morning after every confirmation ceremony. Connie smiled sweetly. That, he told his questioner, was just the stuff he sent to the papers; what he actually talked about to the children was the mystery of confirmation.
Another of the (many) stories told about him concerns the time, during one of the "Red Scare" elections in the 1950s, when a builder came to see him, chasing a lucrative church contract. Thinking to ingratiate himself with the bishop, the builder launched into a ferocious attack on the Communist Party, and in particular on its standard-bearer, Michael O'Riordan (happily with us today). He never got the contract. In later years he was reputed to exclaim disconsolately to acquaintances: "How was I to know that Mick O'Riordan was a cousin of the Bishop of Cork?"
Less well known is the fact that Connie Lucey had a keen and - by contemporary standards - remarkably liberal view of the press, at least in some respects. This emerged during the debate about the 1937 Constitution, and in particular its section on the freedom of the press.
Lucey, not yet a bishop, was making a name for himself with his articles in the pages of the Irish Theological Quarterly. In the July-December issue of this journal in 1937, he addressed de Valera's attempts to satisfy his critics on freedom of expression. Broadly speaking, he approved of de Valera's formula - although, true to type, he regretted the omission of any provision which would have made "anti-religious" matter illegal.
Where his article has an astonishingly contemporary ring, however, is in the attention he devoted to the law of libel, which, he said, "in practice accounts for more stifling of facts and opinion than all the other checks put together". There were, he concluded, many problems about the law of libel. One was that the defence of justification and fair comment were, in practice, almost meaningless.
Onus of proof
"You will have to prove, and prove with the same strictness of proof as in a criminal charge, that the whole statement and every part of it is true. The onus of proof is on you, and the proof must be absolutely conclusive. For instance, if you assert that a cabinet minister neglects his department, you must prove that he has neglected it, not once or a few times, but habitually". Sailing even closer to the wind, he went on: "Suppose you find that a cabinet minister is very friendly with a businessman, and that this businessman is given licences to export or import goods not given to any others, you will rightly suspect favouritism, But you can hardly voice it and escape the charge of libel.
"Or again, you may play the detective on slum landlords, and collect evidence as to their rent charges, the condition of their property etc. But you cannot publish, with names and dates, that evidence and call for an enquiry. In other words you may not voice suspicions however well-grounded. And you may not publish facts discreditable to certain public services or classes.
More latitude
"We are far from suggesting any modification of this law insofar as it protects the private citizen. But we do suggest that a little more latitude should be given in criticising public men. The life of the public politician, financier etc., should be, like that of Caesar's wife, above suspicion. He thrives on the confidence of the public in him, and accordingly the public are entitled to know all about him. Hence it seems desirable that, in addition to proven facts, even well-grounded suspicions as to his honesty etc., should be laid before them. And who can do that but the Press? "There is, admittedly, a danger in this. It may open the way to irresponsible mud-slinging in public life - where alas all too little charity is operative even as things are. But that danger must be faced if we are to escape the still greater danger of corruption and inefficiency in the management of public affairs."
In 1964, more than a quarter of a century after Lucey wrote this, the great US jurist, Herbert Wechsler, who died on April 26th last, successfully appeared in the US Supreme Court for the New York Times in a landmark case which established protection for the US media against libel suits brought by public officials, as long as their reports were not "false, scandalous or malicious". Since then, any public official suing for libel in the US has to prove malicious intent.
Sixty-three years after Lucey put pen to paper, we are still waiting.