The paramilitary professor: Reassessing Eoin MacNeill

The story of the Irish revolution cannot be told without Eoin MacNeill. From its long gestation through its protracted denouement to its muffled cadence with the collapse of the Irish Boundary Commission, Eoin MacNeill played a central role in shaping the cultural, political, military and even geographical development of the island of Ireland in the early 20th century.

MacNeill was a founding figures of the Gaelic revival, one of the leading medieval Irish historians of his generation, and a prolific journalist before he threw himself into politics. He was professor of Irish (including medieval) history at UCD, he was the founder and first chief of staff of the Irish Volunteers, the man who tried to cancel the 1916 Rising, a convict, and an unlikely revolutionary. He was an elected MP and TD on both sides of a border he would later be tasked with redefining – a process whose collapse would ultimately bring down MacNeill’s political career with it. He was a revolutionary minister, a state builder, and through all of this he remained an active and influential scholar.

Scholarship and activism were entirely intertwined in MacNeill’s life. His writings on Irish history convinced him of the righteousness of Ireland’s claim to nationhood in his own time and his writings on his own times are deeply infused with references to Ireland’s medieval and pre-invasion past.

MacNeill is regarded as the founding father of the discipline of early medieval Irish history. He had a wide-ranging knowledge of early medieval Irish source material in all forms: law tracts, genealogies, annals, literary texts and onomastics. And most importantly, as Kevin Murray discusses, he had the ability to read the primary sources in Latin, Old, Middle and Modern Irish. From this basis, MacNeill set out the framework for our understanding of the political, social and economic organisation of early medieval Ireland.

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His examination of the Irish past was not without its faults and prejudices, but it was not the romanticised past of Cú Chulainn and a heroic Ireland that others of his generation fostered. His was a researched past, based on detailed historical enquiry and forensic analysis of primary sources. As Diarmaid Ferriter’s essay shows, he was critical of those who were preoccupied with the drama of heroism.

At the end of October 1913, MacNeill wrote his most famous piece of journalism, The North Began, which called for the formation of a volunteer force which would be pledged to the defence of Home Rule more in emulation than opposition to the Ulster Volunteer Force. In the days following its publication in An Claidheamh Soluis, MacNeill received a visit from two men, the O’Rahilly and Bulmer Hobson, who he took to be emissaries of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. They asked him if he was willing to work towards the realisation of the ideas he had outlined in his article. MacNeill saw this as a Rubicon between the world of words and the world of action. Before he said yes, he consulted with his wife Agnes – or Taddie as he always called her.

He told her what was proposed and said that his participation would inevitably involve her and the children. It might mean complete loss of security for them all and for himself the danger of imprisonment and even death. He would not go on, he said, without her consent. She said ‘Well, John, do you think it is the right thing to do?’ He replied, ‘Yes’, and she said, ‘Then do it.’

This fateful decision cast the entire MacNeill family into the highs, lows and turmoil of a revolutionary life. Within three years, MacNeill would be serving a life sentence in prison – ironically for his role in trying to stop the 1916 Rising. His sentencing resulted in the loss of his professorial income and his ejection from the Royal Irish Academy. By 1920, the couple’s three eldest sons were embroiled in the conflict as the leading members of the South Dublin IRA. Successive family homes were raided. The MacNeills harboured fugitives and the family was a prominent target for any crackdown. Every scrap of paper in the house was carted away in a raid by the authorities following Bloody Sunday but the IRA arms dump the boys operated out of the house, which was built into the wall of the kitchen, remained undiscovered.

Amid the turmoil of revolutionary action, MacNeill became one of the most important theorists in the use and legitimacy of force both before and after the Rising. He also wrote on language, culture, taxation and provided carefully reasoned arguments both for Ireland’s nationality and for the legitimacy of her claim to independence. Some of MacNeill’s most important scholarship was written out of necessity. Recently released from prison and without regular income, in 1918 MacNeill delivered a series of lectures on Irish history at the Rotunda, the site where he had founded the Irish Volunteers five years previously. This was published the following years as Phases in Irish History.

It was during this stay in Mountjoy in 1920 that MacNeill wrote his celebrated paper, Ancient Irish Laws: The law of status or franchis, subsequently published in the Proceedings of the Royal Irish Academy in 1923. It was this piece of prison scholarship which led the famous Celticist, Prof Rudolph Thurneysen, to propagate an aphorism (first coined by one of Thurneysen’s students) that ‘any really patriotic government would keep MacNeill in gaol for nine months each year’ so that he could continue to produce scholarship of such quality. As Elva Johnston observes: ‘Far from being an accidental activist or a disappointed scholar, MacNeill was both intensely political and intensely academic. The two went hand-in-hand.’

MacNeill played a key role as chair of the Dáil debates on the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Far from passive, he warned against a form of civil war that he feared more than any war of green against green:

“It will be civil war in the other form with practically the entire I don’t know how to describe them but the entire Orange population in Northern Ireland at present armed to the teeth, supplied with arms by the British Government during the time when it was negotiating with our representatives. That is what you will have to face and you will give the best of all excuses for the war. Whereas if you go ahead and accept this Treaty it is just as unpalatable to me as it is to the most uncompromising men here. I don’t like a single item of it.”

In spite of his misgivings about the document, MacNeill proved an enthusiastic advocate of the Irish Free State and an equally enthusiastic opponent of the anti-Treaty IRA. Although his son Brian was killed fighting on the other side of the treaty split from his father and brothers, MacNeill still willingly gave his assent at cabinet to the Free State’s executions policy.

MacNeill’s involvement in the Irish Boundary Commission would ultimately extinguish his political career. In the boundary commission, we find a less decisive MacNeill who foundered in the chaos following the leak of the Commission’s report by the Morning Post in November 1925. His legal background may have been one factor which led him to adopt, mistakenly, a judicial rather than a political stance in his approach to the work of the commission.

While his Northern Ireland counterpart JR Fisher embroiled himself in machinations to ensure the preservation of the status quo and the collapse of the commission in favour of Northern Ireland, MacNeill maintained the strict confidentiality which had been asked of him to the point that his cabinet colleagues were aghast when they read of the commission’s proposals through a media leak. The entire affair would have profound consequences for MacNeill as it would for the people of Ireland, especially those who lived along the Border and felt themselves to have been left, as they saw it, on the wrong side of an unkind cut.

MacNeill’s relationship with the National University of Ireland is explored by Ruairí Cullen in his examination of the Irish university question, and by Liam Mac Mathúna who demonstrates that MacNeill played a pivotal role in the success of 1908–9 campaign to have Irish recognised as an essential matriculation requirement for the NUI. This was a significant achievement for the Irish language movement and shows how MacNeill helped shape higher education in Ireland.

MacNeill was also a member of the first NUI Senate (1908–14). He was elected to the first Dáil from the NUI constituency in 1918. Unseated in the 1927 general election, MacNeill used his political contacts to realise his vision for an Irish Manuscripts Commission, the body which to this day publishes and promotes scholarly editions of manuscripts and archives from or about Ireland. The otherwise parsimonious minister for finance, Ernest Blythe, loosened his purse strings at a time of deep austerity to fund MacNeill’s grand project for the preservation of Irish historical records.

The main impetus to establish the IMC arose out of necessity following the destruction of Ireland’s archival heritage in the opening salvoes of the Civil War in June 1922. However, Michael Kennedy traces MacNeill’s ideas for the IMC back even further to the preface of MacNeill’s Celtic Ireland in 1921 showing that the project had a deeper intellectual basis than the reactive necessity to preserve and publish manuscript sources after the archival cataclysm of 1922.

One major reassessment of MacNeill which this book has undertaken has been on the subject of how MacNeill’s own scholarship was produced. MacNeill’s family, especially his daughters, played a significant role in producing scholarship by and about their father. The historian Bonnie G Smith has written about how, in the periods of both nascent and mature professionalization of the discipline of history, author-teams worked in household workshops. Where family members became ‘researchers, copyists, collaborators, editors, proofreaders, and ghostwriters’.

Around this complexity arose conventions that formulated authorship as singular and male, as a public and extrafamilial undertaking. In MacNeill’s case, his daughters, notably Máire (Sweeny) and Eibhlín (Tierney) became researchers, typists, and assistants to some of MacNeill’s most significant later works. On his celebrated lecture tour of the United States in 1930, MacNeill wrote home to say he would need his daughter on standby if his schedule became more hectic. Ultimately, in 1933, the 29-year-old Máire MacNeill quit her job as a budding journalist at the pro-Cumann na nGaedheal United Ireland newspaper to become her father’s full-time assistant. She typed both St Patrick, Apostle of Ireland (1934) and Early Irish Laws and Institutions (1935) from her father’s dictations.

Eoin MacNeill remained active right up until the end of his life. He was elected president of the Royal Irish Academy in 1940, signalling his full rehabilitation into the body which had ejected him after the Rising. In 1944, with the abdominal cancer that would ultimately take him likely already present, he took a family holiday to the Aran Islands where he had first learned spoken Irish in his younger days.

When he died in October 1945, MacNeill was honoured as a historian and thinker who shaped in equal measure Ireland’s past and its present. His legacy left much to fuel his detractors and the reinterpretations of the 1916 Rising from the 1960s onward would suck MacNeill inexorably into their orbit. Amid the popular and academic arguments over MacNeill the politician and MacNeill the volunteer, discussion of his scholarship and his language activism were firmly relegated to second tier. Assessing MacNeill’s life in the round allows for his contributions as a revivalist, a historian, an academic and a paramilitary turned politician to be viewed as they were lived: layered, simultaneous, and intertwined.

Eoin MacNeill: The Pen and the Sword is published by Cork University Press. The book is the second in a series of publications by the National University of Ireland to mark the Decade of Centenaries