The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual by Tom Garvin review

The Lives of Daniel Binchy: Irish Scholar, Diplomat, Public Intellectual

Author: Tom Garvin

ISBN-13: 9781911024224

Publisher: Irish Academic Press

Guideline Price: €22.5

In 1921 Daniel Binchy was a student at Munich University on an NUI travelling studentship. He was invited by a fellow student to a meeting of a new political party in a Munich beer cellar. It was his first but not his last meeting with Adolf Hitler.

He was not impressed. “His countenance was opaque, his complexion pasty, his hair plastered down with some glistening unguent, and – as if to accentuate the impression of insignificance – he wore a carefully docked ‘toothbrush’ moustache.” Binchy remarked to his friend that Hitler was “a harmless lunatic with the gift of oratory”. His German friend, with rather more prescience, retorted: “No lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless.”

The name of Daniel Binchy is little remembered and rarely heard in Ireland today. His main claim to fame may be that he was a rather remote and awesome uncle to Maeve and other remarkable Binchys. Prof Tom Garvin’s interest in Binchy was sparked by his late father, John Garvin, one of the first of the young civil servants appointed by the new Free State. He went on to hold many top positions in the public service and, on the side, was a serious Joycean scholar.

From him and his friends, Garvin heard of that great generation of Celtic scholars – Thomas O’Rahilly, Kuno Meyer, Richard Best, Eoin MacNeill, Osborn Bergin, James Carney, “while having no great notion as to who they were and what they had done”. He was particularly intrigued by the name Dan Binchy, “spoken of by the older generation in tones of great respect”.

This interest remained dormant until Garvin retired from the chair of politics in University College Dublin in 2008, when he began to fully realise not just the stature of Binchy as a scholar but his political influence in the 1930s, when he warned Fine Gael against “any flirtations with fascism in any guise”. This was at a time when, in Garvin’s words, “such ideas enjoyed a certain cachet in parts of the Irish civil service, the teaching professions and in both Fine Gael and de Valera’s Fianna Fáil”.

Binchy had good reason to warn. He had been a first-hand observer of Hitler in his student days in Munich, when he had been struck by “his strange mixture of intellectual inferiority, slatternly appearance and rhetorical genius”. More pertinently, as Irish ambassador to Berlin from 1929 to 1932, he had seen the Nazis in action and never had any illusions about the true nature of the movement or its intent.

In addition, he had spent time in Italy and written a scholarly – and still valuable – analysis of Italian fascism. He despised Mussolini but saw him as an improvement of sorts on Hitler; the Italian dictator was a ruffian but at least some kind of human being.

Binchy was first and foremost a scholar – a medieval scholar, a jurist, a polyglot, a historian, a political scientist, appointed professor of Roman law and jurisprudence at UCD in 1925. From then until his death in 1989, he was a major figure in Irish academic and intellectual life, a friend of Seán O’Faolain and Frank O’Connor, a founding professor at the Dublin Institute of Advanced Studies, an exacting but helpful mentor to emerging scholars, internationally respected, a senior fellow at Oxford. He was also, in Garvin’s words, “a public intellectual, a Catholic liberal democrat and a fervent anti-Nazi”.

He was born in 1899 in Charleville, Co Cork, into a well-off family with a tradition of producing doctors and solicitors – a shopkeeping family that was conservative and Catholic in the Redmondite tradition.

Binchy’s father took the pro-Treaty side in the Civil War, and one of the consequences of this was his dismissal and refusal to rehire workers who had taken the other side. One of those dismissed into a situation of hardship was John Higgins, father of our current President, Michael D Higgins, who has referred to that situation on a number of public occasions.

Daniel Binchy later went to Clongowes, where one of his teachers was Joseph Walshe, later to be the first head of the new department of external affairs and a major influence on Binchy’s later career. He followed on to University College Dublin, where he collected a string of first-class honours. He won a National University of Ireland travelling studentship and began an awesome academic career, which Garvin elaborates and analyses in critical detail.

Garvin spends much – and entertaining – time on the intellectual and academic world in which Binchy made his way. As is sometimes the way in academe, it could be a world of vitriolic, and at times personal, differences of opinion, of offence easily taken and the nursing of long-term grudges, but it was also a world of real academic giants. Garvin takes us through this world, which sometimes takes itself a tad too seriously, and does so with a light touch.

Garvin, a friend, colleague and rival of mine over a lifetime at UCD, is no stranger himself to academic eccentricity, with a sharp eye and ear for the foibles, pomposities and preciousness that is sometimes such a part of this rarefied world.

Apart from recreating so many of the characters from this period, Garvin reconstructs some of the great debates on aspects of early Irish history and linguistics in which Binchy engaged with enthusiasm and indeed, at times, partisanship.

In 1929, Binchy’s academic career was diverted when he was appointed the first Irish ambassador to Germany. External affairs was one of the few genuinely new departments in the new State. Its very existence was questioned by the department of finance, but it had strong champions in WT Cosgrave and, later, Éamon de Valera – support that Joseph Walshe cultivated assiduously, if not always loyally.

Binchy never really wanted to be an ambassador, but his reports from Berlin show his acute grasp of the unfolding events and personalities in the critical last days of Weimar, combined with an ability to make important contacts, including a good relationship with President von Hindenberg.

Indeed, Hindenberg encouraged the young bachelor to find a nice German wife and promised to help in this matter – not an offer that was taken up. Binchy, in fact, had little time for the round of social engagements, the formal dinners and stuffy dress of diplomatic life, and had to fight off the constant undermining of his position by the British.

His reports to Dublin were sharp and prescient. He foresaw the consequences of the failure of the democratic parties to work together and had no illusions about the brutality, cynicism, anti-Semitism and murderous racism of the new regime. All of this was reported to Dublin with great clarity.

He returned to Dublin and the academic life he was to adorn in 1932, to be followed in Berlin by the disgraceful anti-Semite and Nazi admirer Charles Bewley – but that is another story.

In spite of the efforts of Hindenberg, Binchy never married. During a late-night drinking session in Oxford in 1948, Frank O’Connor asked him: “Dan Binchy, why did you never get married?” In Garvin’s words, Binchy “poured out a story that sobered O’Connor up a bit, a tragic account of the love of his life”. O’Connor promised never to tell the story until Binchy was 70. But by then it was too late for O’Connor and he died with the secret.

Tom Garvin has chosen a good subject and written a book of charm and erudition.

Maurice Manning is chancellor of the National University of Ireland