Both Fintan O’Toole and myself were born in Dublin when Eamon de Valera was Taoseach and John Charles McQuaid was Archbishop of Dublin. Both of us were taught by the Irish Christian Brothers. O’Toole was born in 1958 and has lived there ever since. I was born in 1941 and lived in Dublin for the first 23 years of my life, except for a couple of years as a boarder of Rockwell College, Cashel.
O’Toole served Mass, a privilege I never had, and on one occasion when McQuaid was the chief celebrant.
I never set eyes on the Archbishop, although I understand he used stay at times in Rockwell.
To have some idea of how I suffered under the de Valera regime, you can access two films in colour on Youtube. One was taken at Howth Regatta in July or August 1942 and has had a musical score added. It depicts Heaven on Earth. The previous April my mother’s youngest sibling, Leo Burke, died at sea near Singapore. He was a Senior Warrant Officer in the British Army and had been evacuated when his ship was attacked by the Japanese. Jack Burke aged 42 was then serving in the Home Guard in London. He had been badly wounded, six weeks shy of his 17th Birthday in May 1916, when a German shell hit the Battle Cruiser HMS Princess Royal off Jutland.
My idyllic life in Howth must be blamed on de Valera, not to mention Pearse and Connolly and the tradition handed down from Tone and Emmet. I understand there was a family connection with John Devoy, without whose lifelong work there would have been no 1916 Rising.
Anyhow while the British were eating powdered eggs, we had chickens in our garden, goats’milk and cows’ milk from across the road, fish from the sea off Howth. We had electricity. My father, an engineer, had in the early 1920s worked on the Shannon Scheme, a by-product of the 1916 Rising, and I believe, the greatest hydro-electric project of its time. (The Morning Post – an ideological twin of the Irish Times, asked if the Irish intended to electrocute the farmers.)
Another film available on YOU TUBE was made in Howth when Fintan O’Toole was about the age I was when the Howth Regatta film was made. It is called ONCE UPON A TRAM and it is narrated by Cyril Cusack. I knew all the tram drivers and conductors. It might interest O’Toole, as his father was a bus conductor :one of my Uncles, a veteran of the 2nd Boer War and WW! was a driver of the Hill of Howth tram.
Anyhow Fintan has been musing, obsessing about his year of birth – 1958. I remember it well. Elvis was called up by Uncle Sam andI lost any interest in pop music. The BBC regularly reported mass hangings at Thompson Falls in Kenya -in fact there were nearly 1,100 in the first 8 years of Her Gracious Majesty’s reign, and occasional hangings were reported from Cyprus. The BBC announcers adopted the tone of a Victorian humbug parent – “This hurts me more than it hurts you” and almost had me pitying their suffering whilst bearing the White Man’s Burden.
In the early 1950s Radio Eireann didn’t come on the air before 5.00 PM. So i remember the anger I felt at the hanging of 18 year old Derek Bentley, for the killing of a policeman shot by a younger accomplice, Christopher Craig. in Croydon. I remember hearing of the hanging of the unfortunate Ruth Ellis,for a crime of passion by a wronged woman.
The London-born Mrs Van der Elst lived on the Hill of Howth and used protest outside the gates of British prisons during hangings.
The last Judicial Hanging in the 26 Counties was in 1954. In the 31 years since the Civil War there were about one per year. In that respect the Irish State could not be considered vindictive, whilst in England Lord Chief Justice Goddard was reputed to have an orgasm on the frequent occasions he sentenced poor wretches to death.
Fintan O’Toole has no concept of history, time or geography. He has been obsessing for over 20 years about the 1957 prosecution
arising from the staging of Tennessee Wiliams’s play THE ROSE TATTOO. He lectures in PRINCETON UNIVERSITY ON IRISH LETTERS but trips up on FRENCH ones. For he has repeatedly claimed that a condom was dropped on stage by one of the actors during its staging.
A key member of the theatre company involved, Carolyn Swift, refuted the assertion in THE IRISHTIMES 21 years ago but Fintan sticks to it.
I remember the biggest American Story of 1957. The United States put National Guard units in Arkansas under Federal control to escort black schoolchildren to school in Little Rock.
I read the story in Dublin’s EVENING HERALD, EVENING MAIL and EVENING PRESS, having bought them at Kingsbridge Station as I took the train for what I thought of as the DEEP SOUTH of Ireland – Tipperary.
I was on my way to Rockwell College in Cashel, There were a lot black boys on the train. They were on their way to Rockwell too. They were much better dressed than I was, in beautifully tailored suits, carried silk umbrellas with gold trimmings, wore gold wrist watches. Many had waistcoats and might have been expected to have gold pocket watches with gold chains.
Dirt-poor American share-croppers’ sons they were not..
At first sight any stereotype notions I had about black people were knocked on the head.
The HOLY GHOST FATHERS were revered in Africa for their work there over the previous six decades. One of my Rockwell teachers, Thady O’ Connor, had been a missionary in Nigeria with Joseph Shanahan, the son of a Tipperary farm worker before the First World War. Shanahan became a bishop. He died in Kenya in 1943 but the Nigerians demanded his remains be interred in their country where it was in 1956 in a site reserved for their chieftains. I met a Nigerian Holy Ghost Father in London a few years ago. He told me that Joseph Shanahan’s reputation in Nigeria equalled that of St Patrick in Ireland.
Thady O’Connor (Father Thady) was one of the most delightful men I have ever met and was loved by all who met him. A photograph of him as Captain of Rockwell’s Senior Rugby Team from 1904 hung, indeed still does in the 100 yard hall there. Prominent in the team was the unmistakable tall figure of the son of a Co.Limericjk born serving maid, the New York born “Ed” de Valera still a cherished friend of Thady.
I remember Pat McGrath, from Cork, who was later capped for Ireland, persuading Thady to reminisce about Dev and Rugby and Joseph Shanahan and Nigeria. De Valera and Shanahan would probably rate lower in the IRISH TIMES list of Irishman than the “Strong Farmer’s” Son from Tipperary Sir Michael O’Dwyer, Governor of the Punjab at the time of the Amritsar Massacre,
In Rockwell we had Asian as well as African students, as Ireland’s struggle for freedom, won her respect unrivalled by other European nations in their continents.
Perhaps Fintan O’Toole is not the Greatest Humbug to be associated with Princeton University.
I believe that that distinction belongs to its former President, Woodrow Wilson who went on to the White House. Wilson praised D.W.Griffiths’ movie BIRTH OF A NATION which gave rise to the rebirth of the KU KLUX KLAN.
I think Albert Einstein was the greatest scholar associated with Princeton and a thoroughly good man. De Valera thought highly of him and Ambassador Robert Brennan called on him on Dev’s behalf.
(By the BYE my CBS school was ST .FINTAN’s in Sutton.
And on my Confirmation (not by John Charles) i took as my Confirmation name Lawrence O’Toole, in honour of his Sainted predecessor, the Patriot Lawrence O’Toole. In 1979, quite by chance I visited the town of Eu in Normandy, and stumbled on his resting place in the Cathedral there. In the Middle Ages, it was like Canterbury, a place of pilgrimage. I doubt that either myself or Fintan O’Toole will be so honoured when we kick the bucket)
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