The Irish correspondent of the Round Table claimed that the outcome was ‘fair to the lady, soothing to the Mayo bigots and good for the government.’1 This was not a view shared by all. The Catholic Bulletin was disapproving of the government’s actions. Under the headline ‘The Mayo Collapse and its Sequels’, it argued, using an extended martial metaphor; ‘With his usual ineptitude and even more than his usual clumsiness of procedure, the politico-military bully has evacuated the Mayo front … So a new post was created: that eminent literary man, Minister Fitzgerald, had to develop a need for a librarian. The pretence of unbending firmness was kept up to the last moment, for with the usual tenacity of the politico-military bully, it was denied and delayed until it was clearly a rout, not a retreat.’2
The Catholic Mind adopted a slightly different tack. ‘It is not putting it too bluntly,’ it wrote, ‘to state that Miss Dunbar Harrison was ruthlessly sacrificed to the interests of the Cumann na nGaedheal candidates in County Mayo … it was an act of political corruption, so clumsily performed that no one with any intelligence was fooled by it.’3 This new-found compassion for Miss Dunbar Harrison was used as a stick with which to beat the government. ‘Nobody has apologised yet to Miss Harrison for the indignities to which she has been subjected,’ continued the Catholic Mind. ‘On behalf not only of ourselves but of the Catholics of Mayo whose mind in the matter has been made clear to us by several of the most influential of the clergy of Tuam, we offer her our sympathy … may Miss Harrison’s days be long and happy.’4 Given all that had gone before one can only wonder at the sincerity of these best wishes.
It is possible to exaggerate the sectarian element to the opposition but, as previously mentioned, a dislike of outsiders was not confined to Mayo. Kathleen White faced similar resistance in Leitrim, if on a lesser scale.
In Clare, Dermot Foley had substantial difficulties when he was appointed county librarian. ‘In March 1931, at the tender age of twenty-three, he was recommended for the post of librarian. Initially the council refused to appoint Mr Foley, and proposed to delay his appointment for six months pending the improvement of his knowledge of the Irish language. However, under the threat of legal action from the Department of Local Government, a special meeting was called on 9 July 1931 and it was agreed to appoint Mr Foley.’5 A Dubliner, he was not exactly welcomed with open arms.6 As he described it himself, ‘An hour or so before the first meeting of the library committee, a small packet was delivered to me by post. It was a tin box marked Oxo, but when I unwrapped the rolled up piece of paper, there were no soup cubes. Instead, out fell two .45 bullets. There was a short message, headed with a skull and cross-bones. “Get out of the county,” it said, “you have a Clareman’s job.”’7
The main reason the locals took an instant dislike to Dermot Foley seemed to be that he was taking the job of a good Clareman. This was akin to the argument used against Kathleen White in Leitrim, that by being selected as county librarian, and coming all the way from Laois, she had caused one more poor local to emigrate. This excessive regionalism was essentially a form of xenophobia. The difference in these cases from that of Letitia Dunbar Harrison, was that religion was not an exacerbating factor, fanning the flames. Miss Dunbar Harrison was seen as even more of an outsider, on the grounds of education and class as well as religion. The Irish language, the pretext for her rejection, seemed hardly relevant at all.
Kathleen White survived in Leitrim, as did Dermot Foley, after a fashion, in Clare. He lasted the best part of twenty-three years as county librarian so he was presumably not particularly perturbed by his initial reception. Dermot Foley later moved on to Cork and eventually became director of An Comhairle Leabharlanna, the state’s library authority, which was formed in 1947. He had survived in Clare though he did not exactly thrive there, having entered into many a battle with the library committee, the County Council and a specially constituted fifty-strong censorship board.8
Letitia Dunbar Harrison on the other hand was never going to last in Mayo. The forces arrayed against her were too strong. While maintaining a strong front publicly, the Cumann na nGaedheal government had tacitly accepted at an early stage of their private meetings with members of the Catholic hierarchy that she would have to be moved. In the transcribed memorandum of the meeting between President Cosgrave and Archbishop Gilmartin on 15 April 1931, it was stated ‘that while no promise in writing could be made, and nothing done immediately, if it were possible to do so, the government at a suitable time, would see whether a position elsewhere could be found for Miss Dunbar.’9 In other words the government was waiting for the opportune moment, when the hubbub had died down, to quietly move her on. With this strategy, as with many of their actions throughout the affair, the government proved unsuccessful. Almost every newspaper pointed out the proximity of a general election as the impetus for Miss Dunbar Harrison’s ‘promotion’ to the Department of Defence in January 1932. In fact the Catholic Bulletin insisted on taking things a step further. It accused the government of the Machiavellian policy of backing her while at the same time hoping and indeed encouraging her to resign of her own volition. This would have got them off the hook. It was only when she showed admirable stubbornness that they were forced to act themselves. The outcome of the whole affair could hardly be labelled a victory for central government.
While many people linked the government’s movement on the stalemate with the imminent announcement of a general election, it is difficult to gauge the electoral impact of the dispute. The Dáil was dissolved shortly afterwards, on 29 January 1932. The election was held on Tuesday, 16 February. The successful candidates in Mayo received the following first-preference votes.
|
Mayo North – four seats |
|
|
P.J. Ruttledge, F.F. |
8,690 |
|
P. O’Hara, C. na nG. |
5,853 |
|
M. Davis, C. na nG. |
5,809 |
|
M. Clery, F.F. |
5,443 |
|
Mayo South – five seats |
|
|
J. Fitzgerald-Kenney, C. na nG. |
7,041 |
|
R. Walsh, F.F. |
6,945 |
|
M. Kilroy, F.F. |
5,589 |
|
E. Moane, F.F. |
4,711 |
|
M. Nally, C. na nG. |
3,414 |
Fianna Fáil gained one seat in Mayo but at the expense, not of Cumann na nGaedheal, but of the Labour Party, whose leader T.J. O’Connell lost his seat in Mayo South. Thomas O’Connell, who was also general secretary of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, had opposed the appointment of Letitia Dunbar Harrison on the basis that his party had not agreed with the setting up of the Local Appointments Commission in the first place. He had also questioned the dissolution of Mayo County Council. There is no record of him speaking out against the sectarian element of the antagonism towards Miss Dunbar Harrison as might have been expected of the leader of the Labour Party.
Prior to the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins, the Labour Party had led the parliamentary resistance to the incumbent government, but once Fianna Fáil had changed their abstentionist policy and taken their seats, the Labour Party found itself vying with the numerically superior Fianna Fáil to make an impact. The Watchword of Labour, the party’s weekly newspaper had, on the other hand, been broadly supportive of the government’s actions. It is more likely that Thomas O’Connell’s silence on the sectarian component of the disagreement was for purely local reasons, and that realising what a contentious issue it was, he had tried not to antagonise anybody. Overall, Labour’s nationwide performance in the election was atrocious. Of the party’s thirty-three candidates, just under half lost their deposits.10
Moreover, it cannot be said that Mr O’Connell lost his seat in Mayo due to his actions or his inaction with regard to the Miss Dunbar Harrison affair. In fact it is difficult to see what effect, if any, the affair had on the voting patterns in Mayo. The librarian issue cannot be said to have had a drastic effect on the Cumann na nGaedheal Party vote but as most of their public representatives had taken an anti-government stance on the controversy that hardly proves anything one way or the other. Mr Fitzgerald-Kenney, the outgoing Minister for Justice and the only Mayo TD to vote with the government in the Dáil debate on 17 June 1931, actually topped the poll in Mayo South.
Nationwide Fianna Fáil won seventy-two seats compared to fifty-six seats for Cumann na nGaedheal. The Labour Party lost six seats. On 9 March Eamon de Valera was elected President of the Executive Council by eighty-one votes to sixty-eight. Mayo TD P.J. Ruttledge was appointed Minister for Agriculture in the new administration.
It was a number of years before the new government eventually restored Mayo County Council. Commissioner P.J. Bartley maintained a good working relationship with Fianna Fáil, and at a later date he was appointed commissioner to Westmeath and to Laois. In 1942, following the Local Government (County Management) Act of 1940, he became one of the first newly created county managers for Laois where he had previously acted as Commissioner. One could argue that county managers were given many of the executive functions that commissioners had exercised in the past, so P.J. Bartley was well suited to his new role.
One other civil servant was not quite so fortunate. Fianna Fáil’s antipathy to E.P. McCarron had not abated. In 1935 he was dismissed after falling out with his new minister, Seán T. O’Kelly. He was one of the few secretaries of departments in the history of the state to be clearly forced out of office due to a dispute with his minister. The immediate cause of his removal was that he was accused of exceeding his authority in sanctioning an appointment to a medical post in Grangegorman and Portrane mental hospitals.11 The government could at least take some satisfaction in their stout defence of the Local Appointments Commission. If they had allowed Mayo County Council to overrule its recommendation it is doubtful that the LAC could have survived. The LAC together with the Civil Service Commission are generally regarded as examples of the successes of the Cumann na nGaedheal government’s decade in office. The merit-based central recruitment agency is still in existence today. In 2004 the civil service and Local Appointments Commission were merged into one body, becoming the Public Appointments Service. As regards recruitment, librarians are still required to have a working knowledge of Irish.
Mayo County Council was not restored until May 1932, following a prolonged eight-hour meeting. Canon McHugh, who was a supporter of Commissioner Bartley, was removed from all committees. Rev. Jackson and Dr McBride were also voted off the library committee.12 The post of county librarian in Mayo was eventually filled in October 1932 by Kathleen Ronaldson, who had been an assistant librarian in Galway. Incidentally, she was a Catholic.
Notes
1.Quoted by Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland, p.58.
2. Catholic Bulletin, vol. xxii, no. 2, February 1932, p.60.
3.Catholic Mind, vol. iii, no. 2, February 1932, p.31.
4. Ibid.
5.www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/library/history/colibser.htm.
6.Clare Champion, 25 September 1998, p.13.
7. Dermot Foley, op. cit., p.208.
8.Ibid.
9.NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.
10.Niamh Puirseil, The Irish Labour Party 1922-73, p. 37.
11. Mary E. Daly, op. cit., p.163.
12.Connacht Sentinel, 3 May 1932, p.4.