Michael McDowell (barrister)

Grandson of Eoin MacNeill

Michael McDowell

"The people in the first Dáil were remarkable, all in their twenties or thirties. The political establishment was much older than they were. The first Dáil was slightly unreal. They weren't really in charge but they aspired to be.

"Eoin MacNeill died before I was born. The more I find out about him, the more interesting a character he is. He's generally seen in terms of two events: the 1916 countermand and the Boundary Commission of 1926. The truth is his life is a lot more complicated than that.

"In my home there was a lot of feeling that MacNeill was wrongly maligned for being a weak person who countermanded the revolution. There was a sense of family resentment that he was almost like Lundy in the Unionist mythology, which was by no means the case.

"Curiously, for his troubles he was arrested in 1916 and sent to jail in Dartmoor. His letters home are interesting to see. They are very loving letters. Here's a university professor beginning a life sentence for countermanding a revolution. It was an extraordinary situation, but the one he found himself in.

"My mother was the youngest daughter. She always portrayed him to me as a kind and benevolent man but a person who kept a distance, slightly aloof from the raw details of life. She was fond of him; she thought he was a bit abstract.

Eoin MacNeill

"When his second son Brian joined the Republican side in the Civil War, and was shot by Free State soldiers on the top of Ben Bulben in Sligo in what was clearly a shoot-to-kill event, he was a minister in the Free State government. I asked my mother about it, and she said that wasn't talked about. They weren't the most demonstrative of families.

"She had a very strong memory of coming home from town with her mother, when she was eight, and her father bringing her mother into a room urgently with a grave face on him. She heard the cry of anguish from the other side of the door, but never saw raw emotion in the family after that.

To lose a son was not unusual in those days, but to have him die at the hands of government forces when your husband was in that government. . . Stiff upper lip was the order of the day in those times.

"Eoin MacNeill had a very exciting life but it all ended with the Boundary Commission and he took it in the neck for that. It was a political death sentence for whoever served on it from the Irish point of view.

"He was very tough. He took his ethics and morals very seriously. Some people portray him as an innocent dupe who was naïve and didn't know he was surrounded by IRB men. But he knew what Pearse's and Connolly's aims were. He knew they were physical force people.

"Their view was that the end justified the means. There was a moral conscience issue between himself and Pearse. Pearse thought the blood sacrifice idea was morally justifiable. He thought violence should be used only when there was a chance of succeeding.

"He would've been a devout Catholic even though I discovered recently he wrote a very, very trenchant letter to the archbishop of Tuam hammering him for condemning IRA activity in his area. He really had a go at him."” – Mary Minihan