The Correspondence of Myles Dillon, 1922-1925: Irish-German Relations and Celtic Studies edited by Joachim Fischer and John Dillon Four Courts Press 298pp, £25
The late Mrs James Dillon used to say that listening to her husband converse with his four brothers was like attending a university seminar. The epistolary conversations under review testify to this affectionate fraternity.
The correspondence is of significance because of the Dillon contribution to political and intellectual life during the past 150 years. Furthermore, it illustrates the lost art of letter-writing. But its fascination lies in the insight provided into conditions in Ireland and Germany, each ravaged by war. Myles, then on a travelling scholarship from University College, Dublin, exchanged letters mainly with his widowed father, John Dillon, the last leader of the Irish Parliamentary Party at Westminster.
The Dillons were appalled by the savage birth pangs of the new State. They believed in devolution rather than revolution, and the outbreak of civil war confirmed their opinion that Sinn Fein was unfit to govern. Besides, the views of Dillon pere were influenced by Free State troops occupying his house in Ballaghaderreen and by a protracted strike at the family business, Monica Duff's. He commented on the policy of official executions: "This is going beyond anything done by the British government." His sons were lucky to be out of Ireland, he wrote despondently, "for it grows less and less fit for civilised human beings to live in".
Myles Dillon, despite his pro-Allies background, was indignant at the post-war humiliation of Germany, particularly by the French. He even echoes some of the anti-Semitism which sprouted in the punitive Versailles Treaty era. The family have no reason to blush, however. During the Hitler war, James Dillon was the only TD who raised his voice in the Dail to say we had a moral duty to assist the Allies. But as this correspondence underlines, at the time they were one of the few Irish political families with a European consciousness.
Already at twenty-two, Myles was a scholar of broad culture. While admiring German civilisation, he found Berlin "poor and sad, and very pagan". "In spite of all the horror of the present," he concluded in February 1923, "the Irish people are the holiest and most Catholic in the world."
In 1932 he was passed over for the chair of Modern Irish at UCD because of his opposition to the policy of compulsory teaching of the language. He thought it didn't really matter "whether we spoke Irish or Tungusish so long as we possessed our own tradition". (His father had feared that, "just as the SF campaign has killed all enthusiasm in Irish public life and politics, so the rabid Irish language enthusiasts will kill enthusiasm for the language, and provoke a bitter and cynical reaction".) Around the same time, with similar profligacy, Sean O Faolain was turned down for the chair of English at University College, Cork. This book is edited and annotated in a scholarly fashion as befits its subject.