Soon after he helped set up the GAA in 1884, Michael Cusack was also involved in a campaign for a pan-Celtic alliance to link the cultural and sporting traditions of Ireland, Scotland, and Wales.
One of his confederates in this enterprise was a Dublin-based Scot of socialist leanings, A Morrison-Miller, whose Caledonian Games exhibitions had already been a spark for the GAA. Together, in 1887, he and Cusack founded a newspaper to promote their joint cause: The Celtic Times.
Alas, as it is in Ireland, the first item on the agenda in Scottish politics is the split. Thus in May 1887, to Cusack’s disgust, Morrison-Miller was expelled from his own Caledonian Games Society by a Presbyterian faction opposed to the Irish outreach programme.
Apart from having a stand in Croke Park named after him, Cusack went on to be immortalised by his portrayal as “the Citizen” in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Or at least by the perception that he is the Citizen.
Scotch Broth – Frank McNally on Michael Cusack’s frustrated hope for a pan-Celtic sports alliance
Voice from the Grave – Frank McNally on a debut poetry collection from Niall Montgomery, 38 years after his death.
Frank McNally on the Bloomsday fitness progamme (and why Virginia Woolf will never be as popular as Joyce)
Ray Burke on a landmark pub in Oranmore, Galway that played host to many well-known artistes
In fact, like others in the book, the character was a composite of different people. And insofar as Joyce led readers to believe that the bigoted, anti-Semitic Citizen was him alone, Cusack might have had a case for libel had he lived to see Ulysses published.
But as Luke Gibbons pointed out to me during the Bloomsday Festival, the same Cusack may also hold the key to one of the continuing mysteries of Joyce’s masterpiece: the anonymous postcard with the message, as interpreted by Mrs Breen, wife of the agitated recipient: “U.P.: Up.”
The simplest interpretation is a slang phrase of the time, equivalent to kaput. If a person or thing was “U.P.: Up”, they were finished. Which might indeed be considered offensive, but hardly the basis for the £10,000 libel suit on which Denis Breen is seeking advice.
Cusack, meanwhile, offers a different explanation, as Gibbons found out some years ago when tracking down a full set of the original Celtic Times print run. For there, in Cusack’s gossip column of 18th June 1887, is the headline: “U.P. Up”.
Underneath it, Cusack reported the “extraordinary treble-whip meeting” of the CGS that had “unceremoniously deposed” Morrison-Miller. The piece includes reference to a “United Presbyterian” faction, punning on their desire to keep up appearances, and ends by declaring: “The CGS has died a sudden and unprovided for death. R.I.P.”
Elsewhere in his newspaper, Cusack detected a part played in the coup by a shadowy organisation called The Irish Times. He suggested it was trying to wrestle control of the CGS in the same way (as he alleged) that the Freeman’s Journal had tried to do with the GAA:
“Is the staff of The Irish Times trying to grab the work of Mr Miller’s hands, much as the Freeman tried to grab the work of my hands? Answer at once, Mr James Carlyle, manager of The Irish Times. You signed the circular calling the meeting. Read Carleton’s “Rody the Rover,” and you will find that we ought to be very careful to avoid those practices which little by little qualify us to out-Judas Judas.”
We don’t know if Carlyle took up the suggestion to read William Carleton’s novel about double-dealing among Ribbonmen – a militant Catholic movement of the early 19th century. We do know that the same Irish Times manager also was later namechecked in Ulysses, perhaps with mischievous intent.
Even as he ponders the “U.P. Up” mystery, guessing that Alf Bergan or Richie Goulding “wrote it for a lark in the Scotch House”, Leopold Bloom passes The Irish Times, and admiring the success of its small ads operation, credits “James Carlisle” (sic), the “cunning old Scotch hunks”.
An effect of the internal coup in the CGS was the cancelation of the Caledonian Games planned for 1887 and their replacement by a “picnic”.
According to Cusack, this caused such an outpouring of letters to The Irish Times that the paper could carry only one tenth of them. Among those that made it in was a satirical proposal that the CGS be renamed the “Scotch Anti-Irish Bun and Lemonade Society”.
In his book Joyce’s Ghosts: Ireland, Modernism, and Memory (2015), Gibbons suggests a link between the anonymous postcard and the sectarian commercial wars being fought in Dublin in the early years of the 20th century.
Those included the setting up of an undercover Catholic Association, to counter Protestant dominance in business.
The Denis Breen of Ulysses was a proudly devout Catholic, said to be related to a senior Vatican clergyman. This is a cause for ridicule in Barney Kiernan’s pub. When Bloom sympathises with Mrs Breen’s plight, the narrator sneers:
“Begob I saw there was trouble coming. And Bloom explaining he meant on account of it being cruel for the wife having to go round after the old stuttering fool. Cruelty to animals so it is to let that bloody povertystricken Breen out on grass…And she with her nose cockahoop after she married him because a cousin of his old fellow’s was pew opener to the pope.”
If the “U.P.: Up” postcard was hinting that the pious Breen had secretly joined the United Presbyterians, that might indeed be grounds for a libel case. At the very least, it would explain why his goat was so much – as the expression puts it – up.
