of the new Ireland. A Home Rule parliament in College Green in those days would, no doubt, have been dominated by the Irish [Parliamentary] Party, which would have earned the credit for its establishment. We, in the college [University College Dublin] had many connections with the Irish Party … We all confidently expected that in a short time we would be exercising our oratory, not in the dingy precincts of the old physics theatre in 86 [Earlsfort Terrace], but in the ‘old house in College Green’… I remember Arthur Cox saying to me that there were only three positions for which we were being fitted by our education – prime minister, leader of the opposition and speaker of the House of Commons.131
Pašeta has made the important point that ‘the years between Parnell and Pearse … was a period of preparation, not for independence but for Home Rule and a central place in the empire’.132 This world, however, disappeared with the 1916 Rising and the advent of Sinn Féin’s revolutionary politics. Thus the demise of constitutional nationalism dealt a death blow not only to Redmond’s party but to those members of the Catholic university elite preparing to be leaders in the new political era of self-government. The triumph of Sinn Féin doomed many talented men and women to become a lost generation of leaders.133 Some could not find a place in the Ireland of the Irish Free State.
Hearne was a member of this Catholic university educated elite. He might have expected to play an important role in an Irish Home Rule parliament. This would not have been an unreasonable expectation, considering his family’s status in one of the party’s strongholds, his political activism, his education and undoubted abilities, particularly in law, a profession with strong links to politics. Such speculation, such engagement in counterfactual history, while diverting, is of no value here. What did happen was that he had no role in a Home Rule Ireland because there was no such thing. Rather he came to play a significant role in the new political dispensation after the Anglo-Irish Treaty settlement of 1921. Instead of being one of the ‘lost generation’ of Home Rulers, he was to become a member of the ruling elite in a newly independent state.
CHAPTER 2
In the Service of the Free State, 1922–1932
John Hearne accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and this influenced him to support the Cumann na nGaedheal party led by William T. Cosgrave.1 This party was to have a strong neo-Redmondite presence,2 the old parliamentary nationalist tradition being seen as its natural constituency.3 For example, in March 1923, at a Cumann na nGaedheal meeting in Waterford City, an extremely conciliatory mood was evinced towards the old Irish Parliamentary Party, with many in attendance advocating the adoption of William Redmond as the Cumann na nGaedheal candidate in an election.4 Four years later, in 1927, at a meeting in Mayo to select candidates to represent the interests of Cosgrave’s government, twenty-two of the thirty-one members of the election committee of the old Irish Party were in attendance and one of the candidates considered for nomination had contested a seat for the same party.5 Cosgrave took satisfaction in bringing together the different nationalist traditions, a fact illustrated when both the sons of John Redmond and his successor, John Dillon, joined Cumann na nGaedheal.6 In fact, as Patrick Maume has observed, ‘the involvement in the Cosgrave government of middle-class Catholic professionals who might loosely be described as Redmondites … meant that Redmondites could claim some degree of credit for the creation of the new state’.7
The Irish Parliamentary Party tradition was mediated in the highest levels of government by ministers such as Kevin O’Higgins, Vice-President of the Executive Council and Minister for Justice, and James Hogan, Minister for Agriculture.8 The former, who was particularly influential in the development of Cumann na nGaedheal,9 had strong family connections with Home Rule politics.10 Writing about the two ministers, John Regan observed:
O’Higgins and Hogan were in power, it might be argued, in spite of it [the Irish revolutionary period, 1918–21]. O’Higgins, in particular, acted and behaved, even in his days with Collins in the provisional government, as if he should or one day would lead. School, university, the practice of the law, family, status, politics, their nationalism had all been framed within a history, perhaps a story of Ireland, the terminal point of which was to be the achievement of home rule. As part of a small, educated, and connected Catholic nationalist elite rapidly on the way up, they would be part of that achievement and benefit from it.11
These observations have strong resonances with Hearne’s circumstances, as described in the previous chapter. He too was university educated, a lawyer and the scion of a family of status which was steeped in Home Rule politics. Therefore, he could entertain reasonable expectations of benefiting from the establishment of a Home Rule parliament. This explains why he had more in common with the Cumann na nGaedheal regime than a putative Sinn Féin one; the former was more consonant with his political beliefs and formation.
Moreover, O’Higgins, in his politics and approach to government, wanted to integrate into the new political system being established in the Free State the Irish nationalist Catholic elite.12 Some had once been ‘members of the Roman Catholic establishment in waiting’,13 pending the advent of Home Rule. Their rightful place was now in leadership roles in the Free State, according to O’Higgins. It is interesting to note, as will be seen in this chapter, that it was the same O’Higgins who first identified Hearne as a possible candidate for a position in the service of the new state.
For a strident opponent of Sinn Féin, such as Hearne, Cumann na nGaedheal in government won his support as it jettisoned much of the revolutionary Sinn Féin policy and its rhetorical republicanism after the 1923 general election.14 In Cumann na nGaedheal’s election manifesto, it was argued that ‘the essence of a republic is the effective rule of the people, responsibility of governments to the people through their parliamentary representatives, the authority of the laws of the country derived from the people and exercised through a legislature elected by the people’. This had been established by the Constitution of the Free State; therefore, the republic had effectively been won.15 Sentiments such as these would have struck a chord with Hearne, as he had denounced Sinn Féin’s irresponsible policies in 1918, his views likely being reinforced by the country’s apparent descent into anarchy in 1922–3, as a consequence of that party’s pursuit of its illusive republic. Cumann na nGaedheal committed itself to an agenda of stable and efficient government and this represented a sensible and reasonable contrast and antidote to what Hearne would have regarded as the deplorable excesses of Sinn Féin.
The negation of extremism by Cosgrave and his ministers was more in keeping with the politics of an erstwhile follower of John Redmond than the more radical views of de Valera and his supporters. Interestingly, Kevin O’Higgins was criticised for his failure to understand what the Irish revolution of 1918–21 was all about – he was accused of having reduced it to the notion of the Irish people getting a parliament.16 Such an opinion is one with which Hearne might have identified and sympathised, given his ardent support for a Home Rule parliament for Ireland, and in the context of the perilous political situation in the country in 1922–3. Perhaps applicable to him also, to some degree at least, was an observation made by de Valera in the course of a press interview he gave on 15 January 1922. In it he argued that the Treaty would undermine Ireland’s position. He said that people did not realise this and explained why:
The national policy of the dominant political leaders of the last century, and of the present century up to the time of Mr Redmond’s death, has so affected the mental background of all who are now above middle age that they slip back quite easily over the last decade as if it had not existed and regard this Treaty from the point merely of a Home Rule Act that cannot ‘fix the boundary of the march of a nation’.17
While the reference to middle age is not relevant to Hearne, the Treaty viewed in the context of the Home Rule Act may be. It is interesting to remember that, in the course of his address to the Young Ireland branch in Waterford in 1918, discussed in Chapter 1, he rejected the charge that the Home Rule movement was setting boundaries to the march of the nation. He would have appreciated how much more freedom the Free State enjoyed under the Treaty settlement than it would have enjoyed under the Home Rule Act – the boundaries had been further extended. This represented real progress