Mayo County Council was abolished by ministerial order at the stroke of midnight on 31 December 1930. Mr P.J. Bartley took over as Commissioner in charge of County Mayo on 1 January 1931. An experienced local government official, he was well known in County Meath where he had had formerly been clerk of Oldcastle Union from 1908 to 1922. In 1922, after Independence, he was appointed inspector of registration at the Registrar-General. He left this position in 1931 to take up his new post in Mayo.
In 1904, according to the Irish Independent, P.J. Bartley had acted as honorary secretary of the ‘first public open-air meeting held in Ireland at Finea to commemorate Myles the Slasher’. He was prominent in republican circles and was known to be a personal friend of Arthur Griffith. From 1901 to 1912 he was editor of a monthly magazine called Sinn Féin. It was rumoured that this was where the political party got the inspiration for its name: Sinn Féin – Ourselves Alone. What is undisputed is that he was a leading member of the new party. In 1905 he was elected as one of the five vice-presidents of Sinn Féin. Like many republicans he had been interred in Ballykinlar Camp from 1920 to 1921. The Irish Independent reported that he was proud of his time spent as clerk of Oldcastle Union. ‘During his period of office he had the satisfaction of never having had a single surcharge against the guardians.’1
The Cork Examiner headlined their report, ‘Minister Defied – Mayo Will Not Have Librarian – Council’s Decision Not to be Browbeaten by Threats.’2 The Western People informed its readership that the commissioner had taken up residence in McEllin’s Hotel, Balla, perhaps implying that P.J. Bartley did not expect it to be a long-term engagement in Mayo. Dissolution of councils was neither unusual nor unprecedented at the time. In the 1920s it had been a commonly used tool of central government. The Civil War had in some areas led to widespread administrative disorder in the local authorities. Some ‘local bodies had ceased to hold meetings and rate collection lapsed.’3 Both Kerry and Leitrim County Councils had been dissolved in 1923. Dublin and Cork corporations followed in 1924. ‘A total of twenty bodies were replaced by commissioners in the first three years of the new state.’4
P.J. Bartley was all business at the commissioner’s first meeting. The proceedings lasted all of twenty-five minutes. Only the clerical and survey staff of the council attended, together with four members of the general public and one former councillor. Commissioner Bartley administered £75,000 worth of public works, which one local newspaper accurately calculated to be a spending rate of £3,000 a minute. He heard a deputation from Lahardan in regard to a road and he appointed a caretaker for Hollymount courthouse. He then formally appointed Miss Dunbar Harrison as Mayo county librarian.
The Leitrim Observer seemed impressed by this speedy work. ‘The roads meeting last year,’ it wrote, ‘lasted from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. and the matter was further discussed at three subsequent meetings.’5 The Connaught Telegraph was equally taken with him. According to its reporter, ‘Even the very air of the chamber was inspired with a commissioner-like spirit of business.’ The meeting began at 11 a.m. and was over before 11.30 a.m.
‘That completes the business,’ Mr M.J. Egan remarked.
‘It will be a half-holiday for the press today,’ Bartley jokingly announced as he was leaving the council chamber. Perhaps it was this that impressed them.6
Not all the local papers were as welcoming towards Commissioner Bartley. The Mayo News argued ‘better this open and unabashed tyranny – taxation without representation – than the so-called local government which, hamstrung and powerless, has been in existence since the nabobs at Dublin robbed local representatives of all power to manage local affairs.’7 A week later the Mayo News was no more reconciled to the newly installed librarian. ‘Who can stop Mr Mulcahy from appointing the Trinity College shoneen?’8 It was this level of hostility that Miss Dunbar Harrison was about to confront.
Resentment of Trinity College was widespread and blatant within nationalist and republican circles in the Free State. Trinity served as a handy shorthand for the West-British, loyalist, unionist, royalist and Freemason ascendancy; it was a remnant of the recently defeated enemy that remained a potent bogeyman to be evoked as required. There was also an element of class envy in the enmity displayed. For some, the equation of Catholicism with Irishness was so obvious it hardly needed stating. The two were virtually interchangeable. As was Protestantism with Englishness, and Trinity was a badge of Protestantism.
The hostility to Trinity and all it represented was a feature of ‘respectable’ Catholic opinion in the 1920s and 1930s. As one hist-orian put it: ‘In 1927 the Catholic hierarchy reaffirmed its opposition to Catholics attending Trinity College, Dublin. Interestingly, there was no such antipathy towards Catholics attending Queen’s University Belfast.’9 Some Catholic priests did speak out against attendance at Queen’s, but the hostility shown towards this university was much less than that aimed at Trinity. Perhaps the Catholic clergy were showing their pragmatic side, realising that Queen’s was the only real third-level outlet for Catholics in the North and that any ban they put on it would be largely ignored.
As ever the Catholic Bulletin could be relied upon to take an extreme view. It questioned whether a Catholic graduate of Trinity could be trusted. ‘Is not the title of Catholic, assumed and used by a Catholic medical graduate of Trinity College, Dublin, simply an added danger for our Catholic population, rich and poor?’10
The new county librarian was quoted in the Irish Independent on 5 January 1931, as intending to travel to Mayo at the earliest opportunity. She hoped that the recent unpleasantness would be forgotten. ‘I shall do my utmost,’ she remarked, ‘to make a success of my job, and I hope I shall have the good will and co-operation of everybody interested in the library scheme. I shall always have the best interests of Mayo at heart, and its people I will endeavour to serve faithfully and well.’11
Letitia Dunbar was born in Dundrum, Dublin, on 4 February 1906. Her parents emigrated to the United States with the rest of her immediate family but she remained in Ireland.12 As was not that unusual at the time, she was given into the care of her mother’s sister, Edith Elizabeth Harrison, and Edith’s husband, John Walter Harrison of 72 Palmerston Road, Dublin. In later life she took their name.
The 1911 census lists the Harrison family address as 60 Clondalkin. John Harrison’s occupation was recorded as warehouseman. The family was prosperous enough to have a live-in cook/domestic servant. Their religion was Church of Ireland. The then five-year-old Aileen Letitia was recorded on the form as the niece of Edith and John Harrison and given their surname. She was educated at Alexandra School in Dublin from 1918 to 1922, where she received honours in the Junior Grade, Intermediate, and won the Jeannie Turpin Essay Prize and the Helen Prenter Prize in English Literature. In 1922 she attended Alexandra College where she secured the Lady Ardilaun Entrance Scholarship in French. Having passed the Middle and Senior Grade Intermediate in 1924 she was one of only a few women at the time to enter Trinity College. In 1928 she graduated with honours in modern languages (French and Spanish). After graduation she took a course in library training in the Dublin County Library Headquarters at Kilmainham. She spent six months in the library headquarters before continuing on to Rathmines Public Library where she took charge of the children’s library and gave lectures to the children for a period of nine months. She also attended a library-training summer course at University College Dublin.
Miss Dunbar Harrison took the name of her uncle’s family and was variously known as Letitia Dunbar, Letitia Harrison or Letitia Dunbar Harrison. She formally changed her surname to Harrison by deed poll at the time that the Mayo librarian controversy blew up.
In an interview in the Western People, one of Miss Dunbar Harrison’s main opponents, Dean D’Alton, stated that ‘the government have fallen into a pit of their own making, and are finding themselves in an awkward as well as an unpopular position, which will probably lead to their undoing.’ Asked by the reporter if the library committee would continue to act after the advent of the commissioner, Dean D’Alton said he believed they would not. It was his expectation too, that voluntary helpers in the local library centres would also decline to continue their work and would send back the books they had in stock.
‘The whole affair is regrettable,’ the Dean concluded.13
Notes
1.Irish Independent, 31 December 1930, p.7.
2.Cork Examiner, 29 December 1930, p.7.
3.Desmond Roche, op. cit., p. 53.
4.Ibid.
5.Leitrim Observer, 10 January 1931, p.2.
6.The Connaught Telegraph, 10 January 1931, p.6.
7.Mayo News, 3 January 1931, p.7.
8.Ibid.
9.Michael Kennedy, Division and Consensus, p.25.
10.Catholic Bulletin, vol. 21, no. 2, 1931. Quoted by Dermot Keogh, Twentieth-Century Ireland, p.57.
11.Irish Independent, 5 January 1931, p.8.
12.Methodist Newsletter, December 1994, p.4.
13.Western People, 3 January 1931, p.3.