Important aspects of the life and times of Ireland's first president, Douglas Hyde, are absent from a current television documentary, argues Charles Lysaght.
The much heralded TG4 series on our presidents, the second instalment of which appears tonight, deserves our attention. It began last Wednesday with an hour-long documentary on the first president, the Gaelic revivalist Douglas Hyde, one of the most significant and attractive figures in our modern history. While the programme was certainly good, it must be said that it could have been better.
The producers assembled some excellent footage. They were fortunate to have two first-hand witnesses, Hyde's housekeeper and his Gaelic-speaking grandson Douglas Sealy.
There was perceptive historical commentary. However, it was a less complete account of Hyde's life than one might have hoped. Unaccountably, no reference was made to the valuable Dunleavy biography published in 1991 and its authors were not among those consulted or interviewed.
One result of this gap was a sanitised account of Hyde's early life in Roscommon. There was no reference to the poor relationship with his bibulous clergyman father that led the young Dougie to seek friendship among the local cottage people. He came to know their songs and lore and in his early work, The Love Songs of Connaught, he saved for posterity treasures from the Gaelic past that would otherwise have been lost to us forever.
Hyde saw the language as a focus around which Irish people of every hue could build a national identity that was broader than Catholicism or even nationalism. His enthusiasm for Gaelic was infectious. He had triumphant tours of America where he was welcomed by the first President Roosevelt. A poll in 1906 ranked Hyde as the fourth most popular living Irishman; only the Catholic archbishops of Armagh and Dublin and the nationalist leader John Redmond scored higher.
Hyde paid a price for his enthusiasm. He was turned down for the chair of Celtic studies in Trinity by unionist bigots. His wife was alienated by his single-minded devotion to the Irish language. He was said to have a gamey eye. None of this was mentioned in the programme.
It was stronger on the republican intrigues that led to the politicisation of the Gaelic League in 1915 and Hyde's resignation as its president. Much of the sense of fun left the language movement with the ever-jovial Hyde, leaving the grim fanatics and academic pedants to go about their alienating ways.
Rather disgracefully, Hyde was not nominated to the original Senate of the Irish Free State, an episode not mentioned in the programme. His offence may have been to ask for clemency for Erskine Childers. He was co-opted by the serving senators in 1925 but defeated in the nationwide poll later that year. The programme attributed his defeat to his support for a pro-divorce resolution in the Senate but this is, in fact, far from clear.
Hyde was an agreed candidate for the presidency in 1938. The programme contained an amount of speculation on how this occurred. If the producers had asked Liam Cosgrave rather than Garret FitzGerald, they would have discovered that both the main parties put forward three candidates of their own political flavour. It was the Fine Gael leader, William Cosgrave, who suggested Hyde as a compromise.
De Valera agreed. He had every reason to do so. As Sinéad Flanagan, Bean de Valera had played the part of the fairy in Hyde's play An Tincéir agus an tSideog in George Moore's garden in Ely Place in the first summer of the 20th century. Dev himself had met Sinéad and come to the national movement through the Gaelic League. What is surprising is that he did not propose Hyde, who had been elected to the new Senate, in the first place.
As president, Hyde was the perfect symbol. A scion of a Protestant Ascendancy family, founder of the Gaelic League, graduate of Trinity College, professor in the National University, he reconciled in himself different Irelands. He came to the office with such historical stature that he did not require constant activity to establish his position.
The programme had charming accounts of President Hyde's lack of pomposity or self-importance. (He shocked his rank-conscious secretariat by asking his gardener in for a glass of whiskey.) Hyde's whole life's work had been built on shaking off the clinging coils of class, which were then so pervasive. It was a regrettable omission in the programme not to have played a recording of Hyde speaking English; significantly, his accent was more Maynooth than Trinity.
The programme is, I think, unfairly dismissive of Hyde's performance as president, suggesting that he settled for too diminished a role and set a bad precedent. No mention is made of the life he breathed into the human rights provisions of the Constitution by referring two pieces of legislation to the Supreme Court, one of which, the School Attendance Bill, was found unconstitutional.
I hope that the succeeding programmes in the series will be equally well produced but more thorough in their content.