On Sunday morning, July 10th, 1927, before leaving his home in Cross Avenue, Booterstown, Co Dublin to walk unaccompanied to 12 o'clock Mass, Kevin O'Higgins kissed his wife, his two little girls and some dolls goodbye. Within minutes of his departure three gunmen ambushed him. He tried to run for cover but six bullets lodged in his body and one in his head ensured that he was doomed.
The first person to find the stricken, blood-soaked victim, still conscious as he lay on the roadside, was an old comrade, Eoin MacNeill. After five hours of horrible pain, during which he repeatedly forgave his murderers, he died in his home at the early age of 35. Although a book published in the mid-1980s revealed the names of the three killers, his daughter, Una O'Higgins-O'Malley said that his family never wanted to know their identities or have them punished.
Kevin O'Higgins was born in Stradbally, Co Laois in 1892 and attended four schools before entering St Patrick's College, Maynooth. On deciding that the priesthood was not for him, he took degrees in arts and law. While still a student in UCD, he joined the Irish Volunteers and was imprisoned in 1918 on grounds of complicity in the "German plot". Elected MP for Laois in the November 1918 general election, he became assistant to the Minister for Local Government, W.T. Cosgrave, in the first Dáil. Thus began a close working relationship that was to endure through eight turbulent and eventful years for Ireland.
Political realist
Like his senior colleague, O'Higgins was a political realist. His Dáil speech in support of the Treaty, which reflected intense powers of concentration and a capacity for logic remarkable in a man not yet 30, was one of the most thorough and lucid treatments of the case for the agreement. His plea that the lives of people should not be sacrificed to the dictates of doctrine displayed his deep-seated pragmatism: "The welfare and happiness of the men and women and little children of this nation must, after all, take precedence of political creeds and theories."
In the Provisional Government that had the task of taking over the running of Irish affairs from the Dublin Castle authorities, O'Higgins was appointed Minister for Economic Affairs. He captured the precarious nature of that government's existence memorably: "The Provisional Government was simply eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole."
During the Civil War he accepted his full share of responsibility for the extremely harsh measures to which the government resorted, even when these involved the execution by way of reprisal of Rory O'Connor who, a year before, had been groomsman at his wedding. His own father, a dispensary doctor, was murdered in February 1923 by a party of Irregulars while at home with his wife and two daughters.
Law and order
In Ireland's first independent government, O'Higgins was Minister for Home Affairs (later Justice) and deputy prime minister. Because the restoration of law and order was of such primary importance, it was understandable that he appeared to dominate the political scene. He was endowed with great courage, intelligence and self-control and his work-rate astonished his contemporaries. So great was the impression he made on people that he was soon being referred to as "the Irish Mussolini". This was misleading because, although he could be authoritarian at times with his colleagues and the Dáil, he was an unqualified believer in the democratic process.
It is said that he fainted when he learned that the Boundary Commission would not bring an end to partition. Believing that the price of Irish unity meant recognising unionist devotion to the British Crown, he resurrected Arthur Griffith's idea of a dual monarchy between the two islands. He broached the idea first with Edward Carson and then with Leo Amery, Secretary of State for the Dominions, who proceeded to outline proposals to his cabinet at Westminster. The British were unenthusiastic and James Craig, prime minister of Northern Ireland, was hostile. O'Higgins's untimely death meant that nothing came of his initiative. In the light of the suffering and death since 1969, it must be strongly regretted that the British did not pay more attention at the time to one of the most constructive attempts to solve the Irish question for once and for all.
He led the Irish team at the 1926 Imperial Conference presided over by the elderly Lord Balfour with, in O'Higgins's words, "a smile like moonlight on a gravestone". The conference was important for its declaration that members of the Commonwealth were free and co-equal partners. This was incorporated into law in the 1931 Statute of Westminster, a development to which O'Higgins contributed so much but which he did not live to see.
Deeply pessimistic
The historian J.J. Lee has described his view of human nature, especially in its Irish embodiment, as deeply pessimistic: "Few men in Irish public life have cherished so exalted a sense of the mission of the statesman to reform public morality and improve the quality of the civic culture." Lee saw him as seeking to "cram the task of a century or more, forging a national character cleansed from the mark of the serf, into a few years," for which he "naturally roused fierce resentment among the intended beneficiaries".
What might have been his role had he lived is difficult to assess. But he was one of the most brilliant and fearless of the politicians who came to power since the Civil War and the pattern of Irish politics might well have been very different had Kevin O'Higgins not been cut off in his prime 75 years ago this week.