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The success of Edna O’Brien’s latest book about the girls who were abducted in Nigeria will surprise no-one. It might, however, have surprised some of her early critics. Few of them broke cover at the time, and one of the most powerful of them, Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, confined his most biting commentary to the notes he famously appended to internal communications, many of which are now available for study in the superbly managed Dublin Diocesan Archives.
The story about the supposed clerically organised burning of O’Brien’s first novel in her home parish in Clare is now sharply contested, but there is no need to rake over those coals in the light of what the archives contain. Specifically, she surfaces in a communication to Dr McQuaid from his first press officer, the former Irish Independent journalist Osmond Dowling, on January 21st, 1966, after an article she had written had just appeared in the Daily Telegraph.
“Your Grace”, Dowling wrote in a note accompanying a copy of the offending article, “will not be surprised by Edna O’Brien’s silliness in the supplement issued with today’s Daily Telegraph.”
The archbishop’s six-word, hand-written comment made up in its unusual intensity for what it lacked in length: “A renegade and a dirty one.”
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Another aspect of the article also attracted archiepiscopal comment. This was a paragraph which read: “I went to Trinity College Dublin to see the Book of Kells. A thing I had not dared to do when I was a student in Dublin . . . It is still a sin, according to his grace the Archbishop, to enrol at this Protestant university, but with true Irish ambiguousness, his nephew and niece have been students there.”
The archiepiscopal comment was even more telegrammatic. “Absolutely untrue”.
Quite a few journalists feature in the commentaries in these files, including Desmond Fisher, then editor of the Catholic Herald (“an ex-cleric”), Louis MacRedmond of the Irish Independent, Helen Lucy Burke (writing on the Catholic Church and the trade unions in Business and Finance), and myself.
Dowling notes, for the archbishop’s attention, a report I wrote about Dr McQuaid’s address to clerical students in Clonliffe, which he described as “good but ambiguous”. Dr McQuaid was not surprised. Noting the use of the conjunction “however” in my article, which also reported an address by an English bishop to the Irish Social Study Conference, he observed: “He wishes to put my thoughts (conservative) over against the Cardinal’s thoughts (progressive and very warmly reported). There is no ambiguity.”
His most vigorous comment on my writing was never entrusted to print. It was when he was paying a visit to the then Institute of Catholic Sociology in Parnell Square. There was a small display of books in the foyer, which included a collection of essays on Humanae Vitae to which I had contributed. A clerical friend of mine who was present on that occasion described to me later how Dr McQuaid had spied my name on the cover of the book and pointed at it: “Knows nothing”, he said. “Self-taught. Remove it.”
Many of the entries reflect Dowling’s opinions rather than those of the archbishop, but the late John Healy, then “Backbencher” of the Irish Times, was singled out by Dr McQuaid for that journalist’s light-hearted use of religious terminology in a political context.
“May I ask you”, he wrote to Dowling, “to see the writer and entreat from him to never in his life to speak in any disparagement of the mother of God. That is an action from whose consequences we may well shrink.”
Dowling assured Dr McQuaid that he would handle Healy personally. “I know him quite well. He is from Sligo, and I do not think he would intentionally blaspheme. I must say that such a phrasing as he used in this instance I find rather frightening. I think your Grace’s restrained comments will have an effect.”
The relationship between the archbishop and The Irish Times can never have been a warm one, but there were stories, at around the time I joined the staff in the early 1960s, that DrMcQuaid had actually made an overture to Alan Montgomery, following the latter’s appointment as editor (which McQuaid apparently told Montgomery he had read of in the Daily Telegraph) suggesting that they might meet.
This never happened, and Montgomery’s tenure as editor was short-lived – he departed to be press officer for Guinness’s, after sitting on an appointment board for that position which had failed to find a suitable candidate.
Although the Guinness company rarely lacked for good publicity, its image was occasionally burnished, in an era in which journalistic ethics were rarely publicly discussed, by the supply by Monty of kegs (the famous “iron lungs“) containing 64 pints of the precious liquid to journalists (myself included) for parties.
All this happened a long time ago but, as the late Richard West once memorably put it, journalism is very ecological: everything gets recycled.