Frank Callanan: Distinguished barrister and historian of note

Born: October 23rd, 1956
Died: December 12th, 2021

Frank Callanan, who died suddenly at his home in Fitzwilliam Square aged 65, managed to combine a busy practice at the Bar with an output of historical and literary writing that, in quality and quantity, equalled that of the most eminent scholars.

Frank was the son of solicitor Fionnbar Callanan, who was also a champion athlete. Young Frank eschewed his father’s athleticism but starred academically at school in Gonzaga College. He won an open scholarship in classics to University College Dublin, where he took a degree in history. He was auditor of the Literary and Historical Society, whose 150-year history he was to edit for publication in 2005. He ignited controversy having Conor Cruise O’Brien, an implacable critic of violent Irish nationalism, elected a vice-president of the society.

After a year studying economics at the European University in Bruges, Callanan read for the Bar and was called in 1979. In the Law Library he joined his maternal cousinhood of barristers, John Blayney, Tommy McCann, Hugh Geoghegan, John and Mary Finlay, all descendants of John Baldwin Murphy, one of only a handful of Catholics who were Queen’s Counsel in Ireland in the Victorian age. Callanan chose as his pupil master Peter Kelly, subsequently president of the High Court, and practised exclusively in Dublin.

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While waiting for his practice to take off, Callanan availed of the long vacations to spend time in Greece, nourishing his interest in its ancient civilisation first kindled by teachers John Wilson and Fr Eddie Keane in Gonzaga. Paris was another regular haunt; Proust was a favourite author.

While he made a good living, he was more attracted by a good cause than a fat fee

Callanan embarked on a book about Charles Stewart Parnell’s battle to retain the leadership of the Irish Parliamentary Party, having been exposed in 1890 as the paramour of the married Katherine O’Shea. The book, published in 1992, credited Parnell, whom Callanan admired greatly, with being motivated by resistance to the confessional conservative tendency of Irish nationalism, which, in the event, triumphed and endured into independent Ireland.

The success of this book led Callanan to write a biography of Parnell’s most bitter adversary, Tim Healy, who was the arch-priest of this kind of nationalism. Published in 1996, the biography suffered somewhat from the author’s lack of sympathy with his subject. While its detail was intimidating for general readers, its examination of contemporary sources afforded historians a better insight into the politics of the period and one of its most significant participants.

Fine Gael support

Callanan’s own political views favoured a less confessional Irish state. He was to the fore within Fine Gael in the 1980s supporting the introduction of divorce and the decriminalisation of homosexuality. An attack he made in a review in The Irish Times in 1992 on Mr Justice Brian Walsh on account of his perceived illiberality on these issues ruffled feathers in the profession.

Meanwhile, Callanan’s practice thrived. “I don’t play golf,” he responded to those who marvelled at his ability to combine a busy practice with his historical writing.

Much of his work at the Bar was in employment law and judicial review; while he made a good living, he was more attracted by a good cause than a fat fee. The historian in him was delighted when briefed by An Taisce in 1994 to challenge plans to demolish the house on Harcourt Street where Edward Carson was born.

Callanan was prone to be overly convinced of the merits of his clients, had an abrasive quality as a barrister and was slower than most to settle cases short of their demands

Callanan became a senior counsel in 1998. As such he represented whistleblower James Gogarty, whose allegations of bribery by the builders who had employed him were the subject of a tribunal of inquiry. “Mr Callanan,” remarked an opposing counsel, who was irritated by Callanan’s zeal for his client, “is beginning to jump up and down with the frequency that one would normally associate with the bloomers of members of the oldest profession.” “I wasn’t unduly upset,” Callanan retorted drily when the presiding judge intervened indignantly to insist on an apology.

Callanan was prone to be overly convinced of the merits of his clients, had an abrasive quality as a barrister and was slower than most to settle cases short of their demands. He was also less sycophantic to the bench than was the norm.

Mounted on his bicycle making his way around Dublin with his purple socks on display, having the odd combative altercation with inconsiderate motorists, he was far removed from the stereotype of the stuffy senior counsel conscious of his dignity.

Joycean scholar

His position as a leader in areas of practice he had made his own and his status as a trustee of the Fine Gael party raised expectations that he would become attorney general to governments they headed after 2011. It did not happen. He never aspired to judicial office, recoiling from the restrictions it would have imposed.

Joycean studies were the main focus of Callanan’s scholarship in more recent years

In May 2020 Callanan married his long-standing friend Bridget Hourican, who survives him. They had come together, each contributing a multitude of superb entries to the Dictionary of Irish Biography published in 2010. For the wedding in Westland Row Church he attired himself in a frock coat that, like his beard, was redolent of the era of history to whose illumination he had devoted so much of his leisure.

Joycean studies were the main focus of Callanan’s scholarship in more recent years. He lectured abroad as well as at home and contributed many articles to learned journals, harnessing his unrivalled knowledge of the Ireland in which the writer grew up, and the mind-set of its people, to remove misconceptions about Joyce harboured by scholars less familiar with this background. Callanan’s forthcoming book, James Joyce: A Political Life, to be published by Princeton University Press next year, focuses on Joyce’s somewhat neglected involvement with Irish nationalism in the first decade of the 20th century.

Poignantly, Callanan died, having emerged from hospital, where he was awaiting a routine cardiac operation, in order to prepare the obsequies and the tribute to his father, who had died two days earlier. The tribute was read at the father’s funeral Mass in Sandymount by Callanan’s younger brother Richard. Their mother, born Margaret Magan, died two years ago.