When a teacher was engulfed by 'The Dark', and his union failed

Novelist John McGahern was sacked from his teaching job in Clontarf, Dublin, in 1965. Noel Ward reflects on a different age for Ireland - andfor the INTO

Some years ago, John McGahern was invited to read at the Teachers' Club in Dublin. The INTO president said welcoming the author was both "pleasurable and penitential" and acknowledged that the union's role in the McGahern dismissal case had "not been heroic".

The McGahern case and the INTO's reluctance to become involved can only be understood in the context of the mid-1960s. The denominational schools had one-person, clerical management, the Catholic bishops demanded State conformity to Church social teaching and Archbishop McQuaid dominated his Dublin archdiocese. Within the previous decade, the Minister for Education had likened his limited role to that of a maintenance man, to "take the knock out of the pipes" of the system. And the INTO had dropped its demand for full State funding of schools, deferring to the hierarchy. The bishops had a particular horror of obscene literature, and the State's Censorship Board banned 361 books in 1964.

John McGahern had taught for seven years at his Clontarf school when he was granted a year's leave of absence from autumn 1964, to avail of a Macauley Fellowship that had followed publication of his first novel, The Barracks. During McGahern's period of leave his second novel, The Dark, was banned. When he reported back for work in 1965, the manager (Fr Patrick Carton) had gone on holiday leaving a letter to be read to McGahern informing him that his services were not required. No reason was proffered.

McGahern returned to Dublin in November to meet the priest. Carton later claimed that, after their long discussion, McGahern had gone away "perfectly satisfied". McGahern's own account tells of the priest's declaration that he couldn't take him back after he wrote such a book - "there would be uproar if I did". He also reproached McGahern for having married in a registry office.

McGahern met with INTO representatives and the union wrote to Carton. INTO treasurer Seán Brosnahan told his executive in January 1966 of the reply. The school manager had written that McGahern "was well aware of the valid reasons which rendered his resumption of duties in Clontarf Boys' NS inadvisable". The final sentence in the INTO January minutes says: "No action was taken."

The affair became public only in February 1966. The Irish Times ran the story on its front page. Two days later, the INTO washed its hands of the matter, claiming the novelist's membership no longer existed "within union rules".

John McGahern looks back on the position of the INTO more in sorrow than in anger, believing the membership issue was simply a subterfuge for the INTO to escape from what was for them "an impossible situation" in view of the issues involved and the archbishop's interest.

Two standard defensive contentions about this affair - that there was no dismissal and that the author was not an INTO member - can now be laid to rest. First, it is clear that McGahern was sacked. He had been in a permanent post in Clontarf from which he took approved leave of absence. Second, McGahern was an INTO member of long standing. His INTO card, seen by this writer, records his membership successively of Athboy-Trim, Drogheda and Dublin City branches. His service as a teacher in London for a number of years afterwards indicates that he had no desire to leave the profession.

His experiences in teaching have been reflected in John McGahern's work. His short story Crossing the Line concerns a teacher shunned by colleagues after his failure to support the 1946 salary strike, while the novel The Leavetaking (1974) is built around a teacher forced from his job after clerical disapproval.

The ban on The Dark has long been lifted. The INTO's penitence has been expressed. Those who dismissed McGahern operated within a frame too narrow to accommodate him. Teaching's loss has been literature's gain.

Noel Ward teaches in Tallaght and is a former INTO executive member