His Grace Is Displeased: Selected Correspondence of John Charles McQuaid ed. by Clara Cullen and Margaret Ó hÓgartaigh (review)

There is a fashion among certain circles of the Irish chattering classes that sees the late John Charles McQuaid, archbishop of Dublin (1940-71), as the source of so much that was wrong with Irish society and the Irish Church. This selection of his letters, at face value, would seem to aim at contributing to that fashion. We are told in the introduction that McQuaid "retained the sectarian border antagonism of his childhood"(p. 3). Such a statement begs so many questions that it is difficult to know where to begin to address it. To say the least, no evidence is adduced in the pages of this book that would confirm, without serious qualification, such an assertion. Nor is it a proposition that would have passed muster with the late Mercy Simms, wife of George Otto Simms (sometime archbishop of Dublin and Armagh in the Church of Ireland), who consistently defended McQuaid from this type of barb.

In the brief introduction to the work almost the entire space is given over to trying to undermine McQuaid's character, and indeed there is much to criticize, but there is nothing on the methodology of selection that the editors employed in choosing for publication the letters that appear here. Nor do they say much about the extent of McQuaid's archive so that the reader could form some sort of judgment as to why these letters are to be regarded as, presumably, the most important.

The very title of the work suggests that we are to be given a diet that will enable us to form an opinion of McQuaid as a crotchety "naysayer" at odds with the culture in which he found himself. But in fact, in a number of instances, we find a man not indicating his displeasure but responding to pleas for financial help, either for deprived children or for the dependents of imprisoned political dissidents, although in the latter case McQuaid insisted that his contributions be kept anonymous and that they had "no political meaning whatever" (p. 134). It also is odd in the context of the chapter of letters dealing with "Republicans" that the editors do not advert to McQuaid's intervention to bring about the IRA ceasefire at Christmas 1971, nor do they reproduce an important exchange with the then-apostolic nuncio to Ireland, Archbishop Gaetano Alibrandi, in which McQuaid explains his thinking and actions in that extraordinary episode.

There are further indications in the work not of McQuaid's displeasure but of his capacity to forgive those who have crossed him or who unfairly criticized him. These included the Irish Times, which in a famous editorial misrepresented his role in having two plays banned from the Dublin theater festival in 1958 and whose editor the archbishop ultimately corresponded with in a most friendly manner. There also is the case of Ronnie Burke-Savage, to whom McQuaid wrote over an incident when that turbulent Irish Jesuit was most certainly in the wrong: "There is nothing to forgive. I have long since forgotten" (p. 184).

In general, this volume of letters lacks good critical apparatus so that, at times, one is left wondering just who McQuaid's correspondents are. In a number of instances, dates of letters are clearly wrong, and the names of individuals are rendered incorrectly; for example, Sir Lauriston Arnott (p. 247) becomes Sir Lewiston Arnott three pages later. At times, we are treated not to letters—and why reproduce letters from anonymous correspondents—but to excerpts from newspapers such as those dealing with McQuaid's 1934 objection to mixed male and female athletic events (pp. 38-69), which reproduce almost exactly the same material in a manner that becomes simply tedious.

One might have expected in the conclusion that the editors would have attempted some estimation of...