The publication of Thomas Morrissey's William Martin Murphy by the Historical Association of Ireland in its invaluable Life and Times series reminds us that no man has been more traduced in Irish nationalist mythology than William Martin Murphy. The myth of William Martin Murphy is that he was a gombeen capitalist who merely abstracted wealth and did not create it; that he was a philistine; that he was ruthless with his workforce; that he betrayed Parnell, opposed Home Rule, refused to accept a knighthood out of vanity, supported conscription and ardently backed the executions in 1916, and most foully of all, demanded - and got - the execution of the wounded James Connolly.
Murphy's reputation comes from two distinct sources: one is the general socialist-syndicalist group, roughly the Larkinite-Connolly Marxists who favoured the use of strikes and insurrection to overthrow capitalism, and the other is the old Protestant ascendancy class which looked at this Catholic upstart bursting into the unionist and Protestant monopoly of the chamber of commerce with amused disdain. And none expressed this latter condescension better than W. B. Yeats.
Grubby world of pelf
Yeats was the greatest poet in English this century, and perhaps the greatest snob. How appalled he must have been to see this Catholic skyrocket from West Cork making such a mark on a Protestant-dominated world, and not in the gloriously incandescent way of O'Donovan Rossa, incendiarism, dynamite and the prison cell being the proper order of things for such papists, but in the grubby world of pelf.
Yeats has eternally damned Murphy for asking who would want an art gallery in which to see a few pictures; yet in the social catastrophe that was Dublin at the time, with the worst slums in Europe, was Murphy wrong to deplore money for an art gallery, the vainglorious grandeur of the proposal for which - a huge Rialto-type structure over the Liffey - appalled more than him? What moral justification could there have been in the creation of such a Taj Mahal amid such abominable squalor?
There was none. And had the objector to such expenditure been a Connolly or a Larkin, he would be fondly remembered for his opposition to the pastimes of nobs, snobs and nabobs. William Martin Murphy was different.
Indeed he was, genuinely different. Firstly, he was not without interest in artistic matters - the Grattan statue in College Green owes its erection to him. More substantially, he was the greatest Irish entrepreneur of the 19th century, and contrary to the assertion that his was merely a service capitalism which extracted wealth but did not create it, he was the pioneer of engineering works not merely in Dublin, but in Britain and Africa.
Trams and railways
Murphy was responsible for the creation in Dublin of what was said to be the most efficient and the most economical tram service in the entire UK. Additionally, he built railways throughout Ireland, and had tram and rail workshops in Inchicore. He was a man of tremendous vision and energy, with a justified reputation as a good employer - he rented cheap accommodation to his workforce and, in 1890, he wrote to the Freeman's Journal condemning builders for not giving their labourers 18 shillings a week, which he had been paying 10 years previously.
Far from being opposed to organisation, he once remarked: "The only rights our people possess were won by agitation." And far from trying to reduce employment for profit, he thought any creditable employer should employ two where one had been employed before.
He did not like Parnell; and history is now, a century later, bearing him out, for he disdained the autocracy and arrogance of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader. His enmity towards Parnell translated into an enmity for the IPP, which he opposed for the moderate terms for Home Rule it was prepared to accept from Westminster.
Much of that opposition might have stemmed from his personal antagonistic attitude towards IPP leaders, but whatever could be said about him, he was no craw-thumping sleveen. History pitted him against Larkin, and in popularity terms, Larkin won. Had Murphy been as fast and loose with the money of the poor as Larkin was with union funds (for which Larkin was infamously jailed for a year for embezzlement), Murphy's reputation would have been worse than it actually is. The truth is that Larkin won the propaganda war by lies and invective; and those lies and that invective have endured in popular memory. The truth is more subtle, more complex.
Peaceful picketers
When (the largely unionist) employers in Dublin reproved the British Government for not deploying troops against railway strikers in Dublin as it had done in Britain, Murphy replied: "To suggest that the Government should have brought out an army to mow down peaceful picketers was neither possible nor thinkable."
The lock-out of 1913 has entered legend, from where it is probably impossible to remove it. Murphy does not emerge with a great deal of credit - but none of the protagonists do so. Maybe such a dispute and the establishment of lines of confrontation amid so much astonishing immiseration, can have no heroes.
The final and unjustified nail in the coffin of Murphy's reputation is that through his ownership of the Irish Independent, he secured the execution of James Connolly. Quite the reverse. Though he was appalled at the loss of life and property in Dublin, finding the Tories gloating over the executions, he said: "Every drop of Catholic blood in my veins surged up", and he sympathised with the doomed men.
No full length biography of this extraordinary man exists. He is the origin of that clicheed species, the Celtic Tiger - a hotelier, a transport magnate, and the founder of the mightiest newspaper group in the country, which has since spread wing on every tide. Thank you, Thomas Morrissey, for this beginning; but a beginning it merely is. And when the statue?