I used to cringe whenever his name came up in history class. Not that he was any relative of mine, so far as I knew. But life has enough embarrassments for a self-conscious schoolboy without a near namesake being a byword for treachery. So it was that I always shifted in my seat whenever the teacher mentioned Leonard MacNally.
The experience may also explain why I never learned much about him - apart from bare details - until a slim volume called Speaking Ill of the Dead landed on my desk over Christmas. Edited by Myles Dungan, the book is drawn from a series of lectures on RTÉ radio in which certain well-known people were invited to put the boot into other well-known people, the only common characteristic of the second group being that none of them was still alive.
Martin Mansergh tackled Sir Edward Carson, for example. David Norris did the honours for Sean MacBride. Terry Dolan discussed the demerits of St Richard of Dundalk (whose existence had hitherto escaped me). And it fell to Prof Tom Bartlett of UCD to deal with the man who always made me squirm in history class.
Leonard MacNally died in 1820, a hero of Irish republicanism. "MacNally the incorruptible", he was known in nationalist circles, where he had distinguished himself with his radical politics and his legal advocacy for a succession of doomed revolutionaries, including Robert Emmet.
One of his many illustrious friends, John Philpot Curran, had praised his "uncompromising and romantic fidelity" to Ireland. And in a small but impressive token of that fidelity, MacNally had spent his last 27 years in possession of only one thumb: the other was lost in a duel with fellow barrister Jonah Barrington, after the latter had spoken ill of the United Irishmen.
But MacNally's reputation underwent a dramatic process of what we would now call revisionism after his death, when his dependants - suddenly penniless - sought the continuation of his secret service pension. It emerged that he had been in the pay of Dublin Castle since the mid-1790s - sporadically at first and at a regular £300 a year since 1801. In a memo recommending his annual remuneration, a handler noted that MacNally had been "useful".
Going above and beyond the terms of reference contained in the book's title, Prof Bartlett does his best to be fair. He even raises the possibility that MacNally the spy was acting on principle: that after his initial enthusiasm for the United Irishmen project, he became uneasy at its growing militancy and considered it a patriotic duty to prevent an uprising.
But noting how he routinely disclosed to the prosecution the defence strategies of his clients, including Emmet, Bartlett finally concedes defeat in squaring such betrayal "with any recognised definition of principle".
The best that can be said for MacNally was that he was a complex character. Born in Dublin in 1752, the son of a Catholic grocer, he converted to Anglicanism early in life and was self-educated until he studied law in London. Struggling to earn a living at the bar, he turned to (gulp!) journalism and play-writing, and had a big success with a musical comedy in 1784, before quitting both London and the stage.
He returned to a legal career in Dublin around 1790. And at least initially, Bartlett agrees, his reformist politics were genuine. Even later, as a spy, he used his influence with the castle to argue against the ill-treatment of prisoners and the barbaric practice of displaying rebel heads on spikes.
It may have been the old-fashioned urge for self-preservation that motivated his conversion to state service. He was probably "turned" after being implicated in negotiations with a French agent in 1794, at which time he risked imprisonment, or at least the loss of his career. Thereafter, money was a factor too: it is frequently mentioned in communications with handlers.
On the other hand, the paradox of MacNally's life is that had he simply given up radicalism, as others did, he might have enjoyed a more lucrative legal career. One commentator argued that he had the talent to become a judge, and that he "lost much more by his politics than he ever gained from the government".
Bartlett suggests danger may have been part of the attraction. The thumb incident apart, MacNally was an enthusiastic duellist: he had a permanent limp from one encounter. And his double life was certainly risky, leaving him vulnerable both to the authorities - the ones who didn't know which side he was really on - and the revolutionaries. He knew better than most that the castle was well infiltrated and that information flowed both ways.
Bartlett looks to the plays for clues too. They were full of intrigue - not unusual in drama then or now, admittedly - and of characters who are not what they seem. At some level MacNally, whose performances as a barrister bordered on theatrical, may have enjoyed playing such a complicated real-life role.
But against any attempts to explain his actions, as Bartlett concludes, must be set a grim reality of the informer's life: "that it always involves betraying your friends, or the people you have caused to believe are your friends". Several of those MacNally betrayed paid with their lives.
There was one last twist in his personal melodrama, even before the spying was posthumously exposed. A professed Protestant all his adult life, MacNally called for a Catholic priest on his deathbed. Whether this final conversion did him any good is debatable, but it is in any case a matter for a higher court.