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

Abstract

His Grace Is Displeased: Selected Correspondence of John Charles McQuaid. Edited by Clara Cullen and Margaret O hogartaigh. (Dublin: Irish Academic Press. Distrib. ISBS, Portland, OR. 2012. Pp. viii, 280. $89.95. ISBN 978-1-908928-08-5.)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, 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. …