The high esteem in which Archbishop John Charles McQuaid held J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, is one of the most revealing insights into the complex character of the Cavan-born prelate, who died 25 years ago next Tuesday. On being told by a New York monsignor of McQuaid's admiration for the FBI's espionage work against suspected Communist trade unionists, Hoover sent McQuaid a note thanking him for his "highly valued support". By separate post Hoover sent McQuaid a copy of his book, Masters Of Deceit.
McQuaid had little to learn from Hoover in regard to his home-spun intelligence system which he operated during his 32-year reign as Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, from 1940-1972. Like Hoover, McQuaid used fear as an essential instrument for achieving discipline and conformity, while receiving covert information from obsequious "holy Joes" and narrow-minded vigilantes. The sources of McQuaid's information ranged across all sectors of society - from what was being discussed in the Cabinet room in Merrion Street to the private behaviour of his clergy, nuns and laity. Across McQuaid's desks in both his palace at Drumcondra and his luxurious residence in Killiney passed confidential reports from his spies or collaborators in government departments, Dublin Corporation planning department, the medical, legal and teaching professions, the Army and the Garda. Particularly vigilant on McQuaid's behalf were his "most obedient servants" in the Knights of St Columbanus, of which he was himself a not inactive member.
McQuaid's surveillance over students at University College Dublin was ensured by the appointment of "a thought control cleric" such as Monsignor John Horgan, who, in addition to his academic duties, operated as an undercover agent, sending reports to his episcopal master about the activities of independent-minded chaplains and students. Such was the efficiency of the network system that the prudish McQuaid was often better informed than the diplomatic mandarins of Iveagh House about the private lives of resident ambassadors. On receiving a tip-off about the dubious marital status of the newly appointed US ambassador, George Garret, McQuaid wrote to Freddie Boland, the secretary of the Department of External Affairs:
"May I ask you a question which you will not think indiscreet? Is it true that Mr Garrett is divorced and has `remarried' a woman who had divorced her husband? That is my information: and if it be true, the position is not an easy one!"
While McQuaid did not disclose his source, his informant was Francis Matthews, a Supreme Knight of the Knights of Columbanus who, disappointed at being passed over in favour of Garrett, had written in pique to McQuaid informing him that the new envoy "is not a Catholic . . . he is divorced, and his present wife is divorced from a former husband, all of which makes it difficult for those of us particularly interested in this appointment to understand his selection and acceptability to the authorities of Eire."
From Rome "my dear John" was informed by his former Clongowes College friend, Father Daniel O'Connell S.J., of the machinations inside the Vatican in the latter days of Pope Pius XII in 1958, when the newspaper, L'Osservatore Romano, was misleading the public about the extent of the pontiff's illness. On September 28th, 1958 the ailing Pius rallied sufficiently to attend a concert given by Dublin's Our Lady's Choral Society, which had been founded by McQuaid. Afterwards, O'Connell had a half-hour audience alone with the Pope at which he praised "the sublime rendition" of the singing. He also commented on the ladies' dress, which he approved of very highly. "I mentioned of course that you were responsible for all that," said O'Connor. McQuaid's managerial style was that of the headmaster: he would assign good reports to those priests and laity who pleased him and he would punish or freeze-out those who disobeyed his wishes. His output shows that he was a super-workaholic, who not only kept duplicate copies of letters in his small but finely-chiselled handwriting, but also drafted many of the replies which were sent out in the names of his secretaries.
If McQuaid knew too much about his flock, Irish Catholics knew too little of their spiritual master's private life. The adolescent McQuaid's traumatic discovery in adolescence that his mother had died giving birth to him and that his father had remarried was recorded by Mary Purcell before his death. But it was not published until I wrote in The Irish Times on the anniversary of his birth about how the scars never left him, conditioning his cold public image as well as his extraordinary private charity to indigent boys. The evidence confirms that McQuaid suffered from a split-personality. On the positive side, he ranks as one of the greatest social reformers of independent Ireland. His creation of the Catholic Social Service Conference in 1941, with its food centres, its ambulances to transport the poor to hospitals and its maternity welfare unit, was a prodigious achievement which dwarfed the efforts of the State authorities. The vastness of the social agencies under his control also embraced initiatives which he took with religious orders to establish pioneering remand centres for delinquent adolescents and private homes for unmarried mothers. One of his most humanitarian schemes was to introduce screening for venereal disease. More than any other Irish bishop, he sent money and personnel to minister to the spiritual as well as the welfare needs of Irish emigrants in England. His private generosity was considerable.
The downside to his personality, however, was that he was a "control freak". Like Hoover, McQuaid was obsessed with the need to control all aspects of public and private life. He was determined to make Irish Catholics conform to his puritanical and overzealous religiosity. This tendency was identified, perceptively, in 1944 by a British diplomat: "Since his appointment Dr McQuaid has shown himself to be not merely austere but also narrow and intolerant. There is little doubt that he will follow a rigidly Ultramontane (i.e. ultra-papal) line."
Much of the dynamism which he showed in tackling Dublin's chronic social problems was undone by too many ugly instances of "narrow and intolerant" interventions: he gave dressing-downs to devout members of the Legion of Mary, even including its founder, Frank Duff, now a candidate for sainthood. St Vincent de Paul members such as Frank and Jack Nagle were also curtly humiliated by the master of the one-line put-down.
McQuaid, for instance, sent priests to spy on the proceedings of the Mercier Society, an inter-church debating society, named after Cardinal Mercier, of Brussels-Malines, who pioneered ecumenical dialogue with the Church of England. So paranoid was McQuaid that he even did not trust its chaplain, Father Edward Leen, his predecessor as president of Blackrock College. With the same lack of scruple shown by Hoover in liquidating Communists, McQuaid closed down the Mercier, which included devout Catholics such as Desmond FitzGerald, the father of the future Taoiseach, Garrett.
McQuaid was no slouch when it came to smear-tactics. There is documentary evidence that as a priest in the 1930s he shared the anti-Semitic and anti-Masonic views propagated by Father Dennis Fahey C.S.Sp, his former professor of Church history. But as a powerful member of the Hierarchy McQuaid distanced himself from Fahey, confiding to Cardinal John D'Alton of Armagh, in 1943, that "Fahey will frequently err in good judgment, and this error will take the shape of excerpts from newspapers as proof of serious statements, unwise generalisations, and, where Jews are concerned, remarks capable of rousing the ignorant or malevolent. In his own congregation, Father Fahey is not regarded as a man of balanced judgment. He is a wretched professor, obscure and laborious."
The files also provide material to find McQuaid guilty of the charge of anti-Protestantism. In the 1920s and 1930s he was active in extreme right-wing Catholic groups which aimed to check Protestant influence in the professions, especially in medicine. In the 1940s he sabotaged the Irish Anti-Tuberculosis Society and he refused to receive directly submissions from Protestants in his capacity as chairman of a government-established Commission on (continued on Weekend Page 61).
