THE name of Joseph Connolly is not well known nowadays yet he played an important role at critical points in modern Irish history. A close associate of Eamon de Valera's for many years, he was one of the few people appointed to the cabinet from the Seanad. Memoirs by Irish cabinet ministers are a rarity and although Senator Connolly's recollections have been available to historians, their appearance in book form must be warmly welcomed.
The book immediately invites comparison with the memoirs of Todd Andrews: Dublin Made Me and Man of No Property have the breadth and scope of a Russian novel but their tale of selfless public service falls on heedless ears in this age of me fein and "me too".
Andrews himself described Connolly as "a very intense and humourless little man". On the evidence of this book, the description was not altogether fair. In later life Connolly became something of a political dissident and it's a common response to such people to say they have "lost their sense of humour".
The author's mood certainly darkens in the middle and later periods of his life. Among other things, his memoirs give a useful psychological insight into the heartbreak caused by the Civil War and the disillusion of working in Irish public life in the fallow years of the mid century.
The happiest days of Connolly's life were the pre war years in his native Belfast when he was starting out in business and when nationalist activities were focused on the Gaelic League, the theatre and the coruscating journalism of Arthur Griffith and D.P. Moran.
As a boy or young man he encountered Michael Davitt, GAA founder Michael Cusack, "Big Jim" Larkin, James Connolly (perhaps a distant relation), Roger Casement, Thomas Clarke, and the anti Carsonite Presbyterian Ministers J.A.H. Irwin and J.B. Anour, the famous "Armour of Ballymoney".
He particularly admired Casement for his "courtly manner, his intensity and his wonderful personality" and naturally regards the homosexual "black diaries" as "forged and faked".
A bright light radiates from the pages as he recalls life in "The Athens of the North" before the sectarian constitutional mould had fully set. Those were the early days of the Ulster Literary Theatre, counterpart of the Abbey. You might see Charlie Chaplin or Harry Lauder on the commercial stage. Connolly was happy in his business life and, young as he was, all but ignored the storm clouds gathering overhead.
His only involvement in the 1916 Rising was to deliver Eoin MacNeill's countermanding order in the Drogheda area. How naive he was, a well known militant nationalist, to continue turning up at his retail furniture premises in Belfast as Dublin went up in flames. Of course, the "G Men" were waiting and carted him off to the Crumlin Road, thence to Richmond Barracks in Dublin, and Reading Gaol.
The steel enters his soul at this point and his incarceration with the ill fated idealists Terence MacSwiney and Tomas MacCurtain was hardly calculated to blunt his republican zeal.
It is almost with disbelief that he chronicles the mistakes in British policy of the time: the force feeding of Thomas Ashe, the attempt to impose conscription, and the "German Plot", which all nationalists considered a fake. "Sinn Fein", he writes, "was no longer a party but a people's movement".
Back in Belfast, he played a leading role in organising the boycott of all goods from that city, including his own, as a protest against the treatment of Catholics.
Out of the blue, he was asked to go to the US as Consul General for the Irish Republic. Griffith persuaded him: "I want you to go, doe." He sold his business and headed off but, a year later, disappointed by the Treaty and shattered by the Civil War, he resigned and returned to Ireland.
He advised de Valera to accept the Free State as a fait accompli and adopt a policy of political opposition. Connolly chaired the dramatic open air election meeting in Ennis where Free State soldiers fired over the heads of the platform party and arrested Dev, who was on the run at the time.
Elected as a Senator for Fianna Fail in 1928, he was one of the early board members of the Irish Press. Dev appointed him Minister for Posts and Telegraphs in his first government.
Since this was considered one of she less demanding portfolios (Michael Lowry please note), Connolly was chosen to substitute for Dev at the League of Nations, where Ireland had assumed the presidency. In Geneva, he met most of the leading statesmen and diplomats of the time. Playing bagatelle with Ramsay MacDonald, he found himself "worse than bored".
Not so with Roosevelt, whom he met four times on subsequent visits to the US. "We smoked Camels while we got deeper and deeper into our talk on affairs generally," he writes of their first encounter. FDR was clearly "pumping" him for the inside word from the League of Nations, where the US was not a member. FDR's secretary entered and rustled some papers but was told: "All right, Louis, leave us for a while."
Al Smith, H.L. Mencken, Huey Long, Alger Hiss... Connolly met them all. Back home, he had become Minister for Lands and Fisheries. His efforts to redistribute the big estates through the Land Commission met with some initial success but he was ultimately disillusioned. When he accused Dev of backtracking on Fianna Fail policy, the latter denied it vigorously.
Connolly is proud that he carried through the first resettlement of Gaeltacht families on the more fertile soil of Meath. With the abolition of the Seanad in 1936 he was obliged to relinquish his cabinet post. Dev made him chairman of the Commissioners of Public Works, today's OPW, and there he stayed until his retirement in 1950, apart from a two year spell as controller of censorship during the "wartime emergency".
As head censor, he incurred the wrath of the US Ambassador at the time, David Gray. Connolly writes that, of all the diplomats he met in Geneva, Washington and elsewhere, "the only one that seemed to me to be dangerously incompetent was the one who represented the US government here during the war and misrepresented Ireland to the US at that critical time".
There is much else of interest in these voluminous but never less than readable recollections. He finally broke with de Valera after a ferocious row sparked off by Connolly's growing conviction that Dev had abandoned key economic and land policies which Fianna Fail was set up to implement. His parting shot to Dev is in the best "frankly my dear I don't give a damn" tradition: "All right, you do what you think is best. As far as I am concerned, I'm through."
Once again we are indebted to Anthony Gaughan for reviving the memory of a significant figure from our recent past, adding to the list that includes the Labour leader Tom Johnson, Austin Stack and Professor Alfred O'Rahilly. An otherwise handsome volume is marred by proof reading errors, all too common in Irish published books these days. It would be a pity if this book was read only by "old stagers", because it deserves a wider circulation among the generations for whom Connolly believed himself to be working.