Who was the real Seán MacBride?

BIOGRAPHY: Seán MacBride: A Republican Life 1904-1946By Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid Liverpool University Press 245pp. £65

'WHEN HE LAUGHS, which he does often, his skin, of very good quality parchment, crackles into a complex system of fine folds; the remarkable eyes, prominent and yet recessed, like those of some mad monk of romance, flicker with the persuasions of gaiety; the chuckle of that exotic uvula conspires, with the bandit eyebrows, giving a touch of diablerieto what you may be very sure is a most harmless witticism.

“The total effect is rather impressive and not at all amusing . . .”. So begins Conor Cruise O’Brien’s anonymously-published 1952 portrait of Seán MacBride, a bravura piece invoking Charlie Chaplin, Nero, Jan Masaryk and Don Quixote. O’Brien remained fascinated by MacBride all his life but, as this gallery of comparisons suggests, found it hard to nail him down. Many people felt the same.

MacBride inhabited many conflicting worlds. His mismatched parents, Maud Gonne and John MacBride, were key figures in the Irish revolutionary pantheon; his early childhood was lived out against the background of their deeply antagonistic separation, and his mother’s immense and charismatic personality remained a powerful influence upon him – along with her tendency to conspiracy theories and dictatorial politics. Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid’s elegantly written and penetrating study of MacBride’s early career suggests that he was touched with “otherness” all his life. Growing up in his mother’s “bohemian Parisian apartment, its artistically and politically diverse visitors, the menageries of exotic pets, the insistent occultist slant”, he was pitchforked into the Irish revolution from 1917; with Gonne’s imprisonment in 1918 he was left in the charge of his erratic half-sister Iseult, and family friends such as WB Yeats and sundry republican women. Little wonder that he grew up self-contained, watchful and enigmatic.

But he was also his mother’s son. Reading her autobiography shortly before he died, Yeats reflected, “remarkable intellect at the service of the will, no will at the service of the intellect”, and something of the same was true of MacBride; this study exposes and clarifies some basic inconsistencies that would bedevil his domestic political career.

Nic Dháibhéid’s book charts his life up to the formation of Clann na Poblachta, in 1946, tracing with a fine, forensic touch his precocious involvement in the republican struggle. He played a violent part in operations from the age of 17, accompanied the Collins team to the Treaty negotiations and fought in the Four Courts on the side of Rory O’Connor and Ernie O’Malley: years of clandestine activity and imprisonment followed, as well as obscure gunrunning enterprises and alleged involvement in assassinations.

What emerges is distinctly new. The most recent biographical treatments have taken a credulous view of MacBride’s own patchy memoir, and have been stymied by MacBride’s secretive approach to his own archives; Nic Dhábhéid has amplified the picture by dedicated sleuthing in the Bureau of Military History witness statements and various government papers, as well as by an approach that is fair-minded if on occasion astringent.

She contradicts several of his own claims, and affirms MacBride’s close connection with the IRA during the mid-1930s, when a series of murders and the infighting over the Republican Congress alienated much potential support; here as elsewhere, an illuminating contrast is drawn between MacBride and his one-time comrade-in-arms Peadar O’Donnell, whose ebullient and charismatic personality ensured him the kind of popularity always denied to his colleague with the death-mask face.

MacBride’s embrace of socialist rhetoric wavered in these years, and was later quietly abandoned; what remained was a powerful ambition and a firm belief that the British secret service was behind everything undesirable in Irish life from Partition to revisionist historiography.

Nic Dháibhéid pays particular attention to MacBride’s chequered course during the “Emergency”, where she contests his claim (trustingly accepted by a previous biographer) that he was consistently in favour of neutrality and “democratic politics” throughout. Though he was untainted by the anti-Semitism embraced by his mother and sister, and less openly favourable to Nazi policies than his brother-in-law, Francis Stuart, Nic Dháibhéid argues that a network of contacts and overtures indicate that MacBride favoured the Axis cause until the tide turned against them in 1942, and anticipated future rewards in a New Order Europe after the Allies lost. While this is hard to prove incontrovertibly, especially given the inaccessibility of his personal papers, the case is suggestive.

It would partly fit Cruise O’Brien’s analysis, or Noel Browne’s later denunciation of his ex-colleague as “cruel and authoritarian” – though O’Brien judged that MacBride was in the end not like Hitler but more resembled “one of those through whom dictatorships occur”. Whatever the truth of this, one should note – as Nic Dháibhéid fairly does – the time, ingenuity and commitment that MacBride put into his legal work, as defender of republican cases throughout his life, and the principled stand he took on behalf of civil liberties threatened by special legislation, from the 1940s on. This was the foundation for his distinguished international career as defender of juridical liberties and human rights in the postwar years, bringing many prizes and honours.

Pausing the narrative in 1946 leaves this out, along with the brief experience of coalition government and the debacle of the Mother and Child scheme. But turning the searchlight on his early career has the great merit of emphasising the influence of MacBride’s extraordinary background, the precociousness of his revolutionary career, the overpowering shadow of his iconographic family, and the identification with prewar Europe rather than an Ireland growing into compromise. It might all belong in a novel by Thomas Mann, though indications in Nic Dháibhéid’s quietly subversive study suggest that MacBride’s personality could also be seen in the flawed mould of Klaus Mann’s Mephisto.

Roy Foster is Carroll professor of Irish history at Oxford University; earlier this year he published Words Alone: Yeats and His Inheritances(Oxford University Press)