25

C.S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me, (1979)

The genre of Old IRA autobiography is now just about extinct, for obvious reasons. However, for fifty years after the events of 1913–23, such reminiscences of veterans of the ‘War of Independence’ and the nasty little Civil War that followed it featured conspicuously in the reading matter of Irish people, and perhaps in particular in the reading matter of hero-worshipping young people. Books such as Dan Breen’s My Fight for Irish Freedom (1924) or Ernie O’Malley’s classic On Another Man’s Wound (1936) and its more pedestrian sequel The Singing Flame (1978) belong to the genre. Logically, however, the oeuvre should be seen to include P.S. O’Hegarty’s Victory of Sinn Fein (1924) or W. Alison Phillip’s The Revolution in Ireland (1923), both of them critical, if in very different ways, of the deeds and motivations of the revolutionaries.

Dublin Made Me and its sequel Man of No Property (1982) are among the most unvarnished and matter-of-fact memoirs of those years. They are notable for their honesty and directness of opinion, and are quite self-revealing. Unlike many other memoirs, they were written two generations after the events, which makes for memory lapses but also permits calmer reflection. They are in part essays in an undiscovered subject which might be described as the History of Emotions. As Andrews (known to his friends as Todd) puts it himself in the introduction to Dublin Made Me:

Writing in my old age of the happenings of my early years I am conscious that my reactions to these happenings were based mainly on emotionalism and enthusiasm. I rarely thought; I felt. But I am not too critical of what I felt or did. Most of my feelings seem to me in my maturity to have been justified by events.

Despite the tribulations which affected the nation over the years, especially in the years of my youth, I reckon myself lucky to have been one of that fortunate generation which lived to see Irishmen in control of the greater part of the country.1

This statement of purpose was typical of Todd’s in-your-face approach: unapologetic and ‘this is how it seems to me, whatever you might say’. He underestimated, I suspect, the enormous value that emotional history has, as it rapidly becomes difficult, if not impossible, to reconstruct the emotional climate of a time. The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there, as L.P. Hartley famously wrote. I would rather say they feel things differently there, and Irish historians and social scientists badly need, what I can only term rather clumsily as, an historical sociology of the emotions. The two books abound with descriptions of republican mentality and with anecdotes which illustrate such mentality. There are entertaining descriptions of O’Malley, Seán Lemass, de Valera and Liam Mellows among many others, all of them as young people. Ernie O’Malley is seen as a soldier, perhaps misplaced from a professional context into the very amateur warfare of Ireland. Incidentally, Todd was privately convinced that O’Malley’s American wife had a hand in creating the ‘literary’ flourishes in On Another Man’s Wound. Certainly O’Malley’s later writing lacks such flourishes.

There are intriguing illustrations of how individuals who had been on opposite sides in the Civil War sometimes managed to form friendships and sidestep the dreadful bitterness which atrocities committed in that fateful year had generated, often to last for generations as is commonplace in the wake of civil wars. Todd used to say that he would never tolerate the presence of a ‘Stater’ in his house. It is significant that the conflict was commonly termed Cogadh na mBráthair (The War of the Brothers) in Gaelteacht areas for years afterward.

Andrews makes an interesting comment on his own political education. Gulliver’s Travels was one of his primers on the motivations and viciousness that is often involved in political leadership. He first read the book while on the run from Free State forces in 1922–23, and reread it often over the following decades. His nascent anti-clericalism, fanned into flame by the Catholic bishops’ condemnation of the Anti-Treaty forces, was given extra shape by Frank Hugh O’Donnell’s wonderful 1902 rant, The Ruin of Education in Ireland, which represented the Catholic Church and its control of Irish education as a British government plot to keep the Irish people enslaved mentally.

After the conflict ended, Todd went through the usual cycle of political purism, disappointment and eventual sullen acquiescence:

The defeat of the Republic had been a matter of great disappointment to me. As the climax of the Civil War was reached I had been close to the events associated with it. I saw all the devotion to the ideal of the republic, supported by bravery, endurance and an indifference to self-interest, crumble through lack of political expertise. The leadership of the IRA (and of course its enthusiastic members like me) had become largely the victims of shibboleths of their own creation. They turned too late to de Valera, the one man who could have led them out of the political morass where they had got bogged down at the time of the 1922 Army Convention. Eventually he did succeed in using the stepping stones embedded in the Treaty settlement to open up the way to re-establish the Republic. But from the time of his release in July 1924 until he came to power in the Twenty-six counties there was a lapse of eight years. It seemed to me and my like an interminable period. Eaten up by bitterness and adherence to ‘principle’ – that fatuous word so all-pervasive and such a darkener of counsel in story of the Republic – we wasted valuable years giving allegiance to an ineffective, and largely imaginary, underground government and army before de Valera and Seán Lemass broke with Sinn Fein and the Second Dail to form Fianna Fail.2

Man of No Property deals with Todd’s years in various governmental jobs, where he was close to Seán Lemass and developed a reputation as a ‘can-do’ man, working in nascent organisations dealing with tourism, the development of peat bogs as sources of fuel, the rail transport network and finally, chairman of the national broadcasting network, RTE. Again, anecdote and character sketches of various historical figures abound. The book is a kind of informal gazetteer of the great and the good in the first generation after the revolution. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels continued to inform Todd in later life in unexpected ways. Many American ambassadors were appointed to Ireland because of their political allegiances or accidental ethnic connection with the Ould Sod.

Some of the [American] political appointees were very wealthy men and had elected to come here for the horses in which they were more interested than in the people. One in particular, whom I met a few times, might well have been high among the Houyhnhnms. To communicate with him satisfactorily one felt it was necessary to whinny or to neigh. For his part he regarded the Irish as yahoos.3

The two books make it clear that many of the young men and women who were swept up in the revolutionary movement were pre-political in their mentality. In many cases their noisy allegiance to the Republic was derived from religious affect rather than political conviction. They knew little of liberalism, conservatism or socialism as philosophical systems and used the vocabulary of politics commonly without knowing the real and often arguable meanings of such words and phrases as parliamentary democracy, representative government, the rule of law or responsible government. As Andrews put it, in the fateful year of 1922 democracy had not yet been made into a semi-sacred idea, and Mussolini had yet to make his march on Rome. Bolshevism was a faraway thing, vaguely admired and not understood.

I first met Christopher Andrews when I was an undergraduate at University College Dublin in the early 1960s. He used to call over to our parents’ house in Dartry to drink whiskey with our father and reminisce about their youth and their working lives; John Garvin and Todd Andrews were of an age and had both been senior public officials during the first forty years of the Irish state’s existence. They also shared a certain bookishness. I was merely the child among them taking notes, so to speak, and was continually struck by the wild and woolly things these respectable older men had been up to in their youth.

Todd was a tall man with a long and weather-beaten face, a large nose and occasionally menacing blue eyes. He had a powerful personality, which he could use as a weapon. He ignored me for about twenty minutes, except for the odd cold-eyed stare, and chatted with John. Then suddenly his manner changed, and he started to cross-examine me on the de Valera Constitution of 1937 which was, even then, beginning to be criticised for its conservatism, anti-feminism and concessions to the Catholic Church. I have no idea how I passed this informal and unexpected oral examination. For the rest of the evening he was a charming and talkative companion, with a curious mixture of attitudes: strong pro-Soviet views, a rather naive admirer of Lenin, very anti-partitionist and rather fond of America and Americans. He was a firm supporter of state action in directing the economy and public information; in this he saw eye to eye with his boss and ideological ally, Seán Lemass.

He seemed to me to be a man of violently-held opinion, rather unused to debate and determined to get his way. A type of decisive and rather authoritarian personality much admired and looked up to in that generation, when Irish social and political culture were rather different than they are now, half a century on. He was also unusual in that he spoke his mind without too much concern for the wounded feelings of others. There was a joke in Bord na Móna that they had a special officer travelling around the country after Todd, heading off the strikes that the boss was provoking by his straight talking. In a rather thin-skinned culture the thick-skinned man could be king.

Andrews was born in Summerhill in Dublin in 1901, but spent most of his youth in Terenure, where his father had a grocery shop. The memoirs sketch a typical Dublin boyhood of the early twentieth century: football in the street, long summer holidays and excursions to the Dodder River nearby. His years at Synge Street Christian Brothers School were, contrary to stereotype, happy and free from clerical violence, although such violence did occur elsewhere in the school. The nickname ‘Todd’ was derived from a fancied resemblance to a character (‘Alonzo Todd’) in the Magnet, a popular English boys’ paper of the time. Dublin schoolboys generally honour very popular or otherwise prominent members of their group with Runyonesque nicknames. In Todd’s case, the name stuck, and he seems to have been something of a leader of boys before he was a leader of men.

From conversations with him and from the memoirs, I sensed the anger and frustration that were experienced by many young men and women in the last days of British Ireland and the early years of the new state; also a certain lack of irony and humour, coupled with a wish to appear rather surer of oneself than one really was. Above all, there was a passionate wish to be respected and not to be looked down on, on the basis of religion, caste or social position; a wish often unadmitted, which appears to have lain behind much Irish revolutionary passion.

I once asked Todd, in the late 1970s, why he had closed down the Bray–Harcourt Street railway line in 1959, just when suburban Dublin was about to double in population over the next few years. This had been easily the most continuously criticised decision he ever took as a public figure; de Valera used to remark doubtfully, ‘All those nice little railway stations, Todd.’ Todd glared at me and growled, ‘I got fed up sitting here in Dundrum watching those Freemasons going into Trinity [College] from Foxrock to their meetings at the taxpayer’s expense.’ There was, of course, more to it than that; Todd was that unusual thing at that time, a believer in the motor car. However, the old emotions were working away there as well.

TG

Notes

1C.S. Andrews, Dublin Made Me (Dublin: Mercier Press, 1979), p.7.

2Ibid., p.11.

3Ibid., p.289.