When Kevin O'Higgins was murdered, Ireland lost not just a justice minister but a politician who had begun to accept the diverse nature of the peoples of this island, suggests John McCarthy.
Eighty years ago, on July 10th, 1927, Kevin O'Higgins, vice-president of the Executive Council and minister for justice in the Irish Free State, was assassinated walking to Sunday Mass from his home in Booterstown, Co Dublin. The proximity of that anniversary to the apparently successful completion of the Northern Irish peace process makes it worthwhile speculating if such accord might have come about decades earlier had O'Higgins not been shot and taken from the Irish political scene.
During the War of Independence O'Higgins shared the nationalist orthodoxy on the North that prevailed until the last quarter of the twentieth century.
For instance, writing in 1919, he depicted the unionists as descendants of a "ruthless confiscation and plantation", a minority "standing in the path of national unity", who were moved by the British "exploitation of the flames of religious bigotry".
Upon the achievement of Irish independence he envisioned the unionists being given the option of accepting an Irish government or else having "to leave the country" with their interests being purchased rather than confiscated.
Upon his acceptance of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921, O'Higgins's political perspective underwent substantial change and maturation.
He realised that a peace settlement had been wanted by the vast majority of the Irish people, even if opposed by many Sinn Féin activists. He saw the later as elitists claiming the exclusive right to interpret "the national will" and a mandate "to deny to the people the right to have any will at all".
O'Higgins was one of the negotiators with representative Southern unionists in formulating an Irish Senate that would be indirectly chosen by a limited electorate and having delaying power over legislation as a means of guaranteeing a voice for that minority in the Free State parliament.
He defended the arrangement in the debates in the third Dáil Éireann on the Constitution of the Irish Free State by noting that those unionists should be regarded "as part and parcel of this nation, and that we wish them to take their share of its responsibilities".
O'Higgins had the expectation of most nationalists that the Boundary Commission called for by Article 12 of the treaty would significantly reduce the size of Northern Ireland and make the island's unification probable.
He was one of the members of the government most determined to force the British to call the commission into being.
But by mid-1924 when the commission was about to be formed, O'Higgins developed second thoughts. He was almost alone in the government in his apprehension about allowing the imprecise mandate for the commission - to fix the boundary "in accordance with wishes of the inhabitants, so far as may be compatible with economic and geographic conditions" - to be determined by its British-appointed chairman.
In September of that year O'Higgins favoured the Free State seeking to pre-empt the commission by calling for a conference with the Northern Irish government. That would give the Free State the initiative in setting an agenda that would deal not just with the boundary, but with general relations between North and South, the formation of an all-Ireland authority, and the grievances of the nationalist minority within Northern Ireland.
In late 1925 the commission, dominated by its South African chairman, Richard Feetham, acted as O'Higgins feared and was ready to recommend minimal boundary changes, including even some transfers from the Free State.
Representatives from the Free State, especially O'Higgins, hastened to a conference with the British and the Northern prime minister, James Craig, at which they secured an agreement to permanently suspend the commission's report and maintain the status quo.
An added bonus to the Free State, encouraged by Craig, was being relieved from its Treaty-imposed obligation to meet its proportionate share of the British public debt at the time of independence.
In the Dáil debate on the agreement, O'Higgins responded to the outraged complaints of aggrieved irredentists. In one of his most eloquent addresses, he noted the necessity to bear with "the sneers of spatted hillsiders and armchair patriots and the jibes of those who think that the real statesmanship is for the perpetuation of hatred. We stand, not for the perpetuation of hatred, but for the rooting up and elimination of the old hatreds, old furies, and the quenching of old fires; we stand for peace and sanity and construction in this country, and peace between neighbours."
With such sentiments it is probable that had O'Higgins survived and been able to play a major role in Irish politics, events such as the recent amicable joint visit to the site of the Battle of the Boyne by the First Minister of Northern Ireland and the Taoiseach might have taken place long before 2007.
John P. McCarthy is Professor Emeritus of History, Fordham University, and the author ofKevin O'Higgins: Builder of the Irish State (Irish Academic Press, 2006).