Laurence O’Neill (1864–1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917–1924), Patriot and Man of Peace by Thomas J Morrissey (review)

Abstract

Laurence O’Neill (1864–1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917–1924), Patriot and Man of Peace, Thomas J Morrissey SJ (Dublin, Dublin City Council 2014), 284 pages. Laurence O’Neill (1864–1943) Lord Mayor of Dublin (1917–1924), Patriot and Man of Peace, from the pen of prolific historian Thomas J Morrissey chronicles the life and times of a lesser-known Irish political figure, the eponymous first citizen of the capital from 1917–24, a turbulent period during which ‘all changed, changed utterly’, both in that city and throughout the island. The history of metropolitan municipal politics is one in which Morrissey has worked previously in his The Social Teaching of James Connolly and his biography of William O’Brien, as well as his twin portraits of William J Walsh and his successor as Archbishop of Dublin, Edward Byrne. The present work was published by Dublin City Council to mark the Decade of Commemorations, 1913–23 and is a worthy addition to the remembrances. The office of Lord Mayor, which originated in 1229, has regularly been a ceremonial position devoid of executive powers (thus far) and has frequently been an honour bestowed for services rendered or a prize divided amongst the several parties in power in the chamber on Dame Street. It has been common for incumbents to serve for a solitary year and rare to exceed two. It is a measure of his standing amongst constitutional nationalists (one of which he was himself) and militant republicans (which he was not) that O’Neill was to buck this trend by serving for seven of the years that embraced the War of Independence and the Civil War, before the position was suspended for six years (having been replaced by the Free State government with a commission), and then filled for nine by the far better known Alfie Byrne. O’Neill’s relative historical obscurity is all the more remarkable, given the number of better-known figures with whom he did more than merely rub shoulders. A well-known photograph of Arthur Griffith, de Valera and Michael Collins in Croke Park in 1919 has O’Neill firmly ensconced between the long fellow and the big fellow on the prized touchline seats. The book is replete with anecdotes detailing O’Neill’s relationships with the movers and shakers of the time. These range from his salutary meeting with (the ‘very different’) David Lloyd George and Bonar Law at Downing Street early in 1918 (in the matter of the Irish Convention), to a meeting with Austin Stack in which he persuaded his old acquaintance not to disrupt an international Studies • volume 106 • number 422 259 Summer 2017: Book Reviews golf match at Portmarnock, involving Irish, English and Scottish players. (The fact that the links were in O’Neill’s home area points up the old adage that all politics is local and demonstrates that O’Neill was a very successful local politician). O’Neill was wrongly imprisoned after the Rising, an experience that gave him considerable empathy with republicans, some of whom were concealed by him in the Mansion House during the Troubles, while the building also famously housed the First Dáil in 1919. Fr Morrissey’s book is divided into three sections with the bulk of its 284 pages dealing with the years of O’Neill’s mayoralty sandwiched between ‘A Long Prologue’, concerning his early life and career as a public figure to 1916 and ‘A Long Epilogue’, which deals with his second coming as a senator, both by election in 1929 and 1931 and under the patronage of Éamon de Valera in 1940, three years before his death. Morrissey commences the account of his subject’s political career with the neophyte councillor’s election for the Rotunda Ward in 1910 and traces his progress in the corporation during the years leading into the Great War (and away from Home Rule) and the Easter Rising. His election to the office of Lord Mayor as a ‘man of no party’ coincided with the long drawn-out introduction to the War of Independence and saw him on stage for many of the traumatic events of that period, from the death of Thomas Ashe...