Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The Shadow of a Gunman
2 Emerging from the Shadows
3 Free State Minister
4 The Great Dictator
5 Mischief-Maker
6 Taoiseach
Conclusion
References
Select Bibliography
About The Author
Iowe a particular debt of gratitude to my good friend, colleague and critic Stephen Kelly; to my father, Peter Evans; to the long-suffering Marian Carey; and to the extraordinary generosity of that fine historian, John Horgan.
My sincere thanks to the following people for their assistance in the course of my research: Lisa, Hugh and Victor at the Military Archives; Rosemary at the Allen Library; Paschal at the Arts Council Archive; Séamus, Orna, and all at UCD Archives; the staff of the National Archives of Ireland; of the National Archives of the United Kingdom; of the Ó Fiaich Memorial Library and Archive (in particular Séamus Savage); and those who work in the Dublin Diocesan Archive;Trinity College Manuscripts Collection and Early Printed Books Department; the National Library; Dublin City Libraries; the Public Record Office of Northern Ireland; the Irish Newspaper Archive; and the Irish Architectural Archive.
Special thanks to those who allowed me to interview them: Seán Haughey, Ulick O’Connor, Michael D. Higgins, Des O’Malley, Tony O’Reilly, and Harold Simms. For their support, encouragement and advice I wish to thank: the straight-talking Diarmaid Ferriter, my mentor Susannah Riordan, Clara Cullen, Mary Daly, Michael Laffan, Michael Kennedy, Lindsey Earner-Byrne, Liam Collins, Kieran Allen, all at The Collins Press, Aonghus Meaney, Eunan O’Halpin, Paula Murphy, Ivar McGrath, Bryan Fanning and Robin Okey; the talented Jon Everitt, Eileen Lemass, Liam Delahunt, Ann de Valera, Éamon de Valera, Maureen Haughey, Fionnbharr and Róisín Ó Riordán and Angela Rolfe; Úna MacNamara, Greta Evans, Ros Evans and all my family, especially my grandparents Nora MacNamara and John and Eileen Evans; Anne O’Grady, Dennis O’Grady, Ed Carey, Anthony Carey, Peter Tighe, John O’Connor, Frank Kelly, Doney Carey and Máire Nic an Bhaird, Liz Dawson, Adam Kelly, Sarah Campbell, Fintan Hoey, Aoifie Whelan, Ashling Smith and Paul Hand.
Lastly, thank you to my colleagues and friends in the Department of History and Archives, UCD, and the Humanities Institute of Ireland, particularly Marc Caball, Valerie Norton and my office-mates down the years.
‘Not another biography of Lemass!’ Many of the people who have subsequently provided me with help in researching this book initially uttered these words. Their reaction is understandable. Seán Lemass (1899–1971) has been the subject of no fewer than five published full biographical studies.1 The publication of this, the sixth, coincides with the fortieth anniversary of his death.
The very fact that this book has been commissioned illustrates the lasting allure of Lemass. Unlike the majority of his political predecessors, peers and successors,‘the architect of modern Ireland’ enjoys an unsoiled status in the popular imagination. For a long time Irish historians were preoccupied with the debate on ‘revisionism’, a term describing the subjection of national myths to critical scrutiny. Lemass, though, has consistently escaped the revisionist’s noose. How?
Firstly, Lemass is acknowledged as an extraordinary historical figure. He held key ministerial appointments in every one of Éamon de Valera’s Fianna Fáil administrations from 1932 onwards, went on to become Tánaiste and, between 1959 and 1966, Taoiseach. He orchestrated two critical economic transitions in twentieth-century Irish history: the construction, and dismantling, of protectionism. A moderniser who, for his time, was exceptionally receptive to change, Lemass’s workaholic commitment is striking. His achievements have been extolled in the ample literature that has grown up around him. This ‘Lemassiography’ is at times cloying, but his qualities shine through in any work dedicated to him, and this book is no exception.
It would be trite, however, to ignore a major factor in Lemass’s enduring popularity: his place in the politics of memory or, to put it plainly, the use and abuse of Lemass’s name by Ireland’s elites. In recent history, successive taoisigh have realised the political capital that comes with paying Lemass lip service. Charles Haughey used to impress visitors to his lavish Kinsealy mansion with a prominently displayed oil painting of his father-in-law, which now hangs at the top of the stairs in Leinster House. The portrait of Lemass in the Taoiseach’s office is said to survive all changes of government.2 In his autobiography Albert Reynolds described Lemass as his ‘hero’; his successor Bertie Ahern, who himself launched two of the canonical books in the Lemassiography, said of his fellow Dub: ‘I never miss a chance to state my belief that Lemass was in the vanguard of almost every great event and decision that shapes the Ireland in which we live.’3 Launching the latest biography of Lemass in 2009, Ahern’s successor, Brian Cowen, used Lemass to urge support for the government’s bailout of the banks and endorsement of the second referendum on the Lisbon Treaty.4
During the belle époque of the Celtic Tiger boom, a period overseen by Ahern and Cowen, Fianna Fáil, the political party Lemass helped to found, projected itself as the spearhead of national progress. This ‘modern Ireland’, much like a newly emergent state, needed a creation myth. Éamon de Valera, the post-independence colossus of party and nation, was increasingly seen as peculiar and twee, ‘de Valera’s Ireland’ grim and anti-materialistic. At the same time revelations about the corruption of the modern ‘Boss’, Charlie Haughey, the bon viveur antithesis to the frugality preached by de Valera, were uncomfortably close to home. Lemass, however, fitted the bill. In the popular imagination he came to be contrasted with his close political ally, de Valera, and his son-in-law, Haughey. Lemass was invoked as the embodiment of the march of progress, a visionary free trader who kick-started progressive, cosmopolitan, secular, neoliberal Ireland.
When interviewed for this book Tony O’Reilly, Ireland’s first billionaire and arguably the greatest success story of Ireland’s ‘economic miracle’, said of Lemass, his personal hero:‘He had what every great politician needs – he was an extraordinarily good poker player!’5 O’Reilly’s reflection is an astute one. Like many political leaders of the twentieth century, most notably former US president Richard Nixon, Lemass was an avid poker player. The story of Lemass’s life is enduringly compelling because it combined all the elements of the game he loved: intelligence, skill and courage on the one hand; cunning, ruthlessness, luck and deceit on the other. The former aspects of Lemass’s game are familiar, but the latter much less so.
To the historian, the darker arts deployed in the game should naturally demand attention. But when it comes to Lemass an entire generation of Ireland’s historians have neglected them in favour of a tasty dichotomy. De Valera, we are told, stood for an Ireland ‘pious, disciplined and folksy’,‘a real-life version of The Quiet Man’.6 Dev’s Ireland was ‘a few comely maidens and the occasional athletic youth’, full of ‘asexual mothers of ten nodding approvingly, not an impure thought or an orgasm in sight’.7 Lemass’s Ireland was, by contrast, radical and modernising and ‘promised at long last to banish to the rubbish dump of history the wailing of Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the champion whiner of the western world, the princess of the begging bowl’.8
The construction of this gulf between two men who had worked alongside each other for the best part of forty years involved a considerable amount of airbrushing, particularly of Lemass’s career before he became Taoiseach in 1959. Most historians now recognise that the ‘Age of de Valera’ interpretation inhibited a fuller understanding of Ireland in the last century.9 The same cannot be said for its corollary, the ‘Age of Lemass’, which is loosely applied to pre-Troubles, Swinging-Sixties Ireland and remains popular with Irish historians.
Recent works celebrating Lemass, most prominently Tom Garvin’s 2009 biography, have clung dear to a ‘Whig history’ of the man, in which a narrative of progress and development obscures other considerations. Essentially, Garvin presents the reader with the same story as found in the biographies of Lemass by John Horgan (1997), Michael O’Sullivan (1994) and Brian Farrell (1983). The thrust of these books resembles all too closely and uncritically the upbeat tone of ‘Lifting the Green Curtain’, the famous 1963 Time magazine piece on Ireland:
The nation is at last facing up to its future . . . signs are everywhere: in the new factories and office buildings, in the Irish-assembled cars fighting for street space in Dublin, in the new TV antennas crowding the rooftops, in the waning of national self-pity . . . The nation’s new mood is that of Sean Lemass, who four years ago succeeded Eamon de Valera as Taoiseach (Prime Minister). Though Lemass has been de Valera’s protégé and heir apparent for three decades, the two men could not be more dissimilar.‘Dev’, the aloof, magnetic revolutionary with a martyr’s face and a mystic’s mind, was the sort of leader whom the Irish have adored in every age. Sean Lemass, a reticent, pragmatic planner . . . is by temperament and ancestry more Gallic than Gaelic, and represents a wholly new species of leadership for Ireland. In de Valera’s shadow, the new Taoiseach (pronounced tea-shook) has labored single-mindedly for decades to break the vicious circle of declining living standards and dwindling population that threatened Ireland’s very survival as a nation.10
The celebration of Lemass as the father of boom Ireland started around this time and is epitomised by Garvin’s much later book which, fittingly, was composed as the Celtic Tiger was starting to limp. To a number of influential commentators in between, the influx of foreign capital into Ireland was a sort of deus ex machina which resolved all the country’s problems. Lemass’s role in this process led to a tendency among historians to resort to ahistorical post hoc, ergo propter hoc reasoning when looking at Lemass’s life prior to his reforms as Taoiseach. And this, in turn, begat the intellectual laziness of hero worship.
It is significant that the first biography of Lemass (which all his subsequent biographers have drawn on but which remains unpublished) does not share the same philosophy as the later works. Liam Skinner wrote the unpublished Seán Lemass: Nation Builder before Lemass became Taoiseach in 1959. Skinner’s book verges on hagiography, but takes a dramatic and unexpected U-turn halfway through when he launches an unbridled attack on the ‘evil and pernicious tendency’ towards the welfare state and socialism. He lays the blame for the ‘octopus-like extent’ of state control squarely at Lemass’s door, accusing him of paying lip service to private enterprise while clamping down on it at every opportunity.11
How are we to view Lemass, then? Proto-neoliberal? Socialist? A heady mixture of both, or neither? The recent abrupt demise of Ireland’s economic boom may have brought few welcome results, but it has provided a fitting time to appraise Lemass fairly. The material wealth and cultural confidence of the Celtic Tiger era has dissipated and the Catholic Church is in a downward spiral.‘Where did it all go right?’ has become ‘Where did it all go wrong?’ And the answers to both questions, not merely the former, involve Seán Lemass.
This book is intended as a critical accompaniment to John Horgan’s seminal Enigmatic Patriot. Yet it also seeks to balance the scales: to jettison the machismo mystique of Lemass, the ‘man of action’; to get beneath his personal ascent, consolidation and exercise of political power; to shed light on under-researched episodes in his life; and, most importantly, to explode Tom Garvin’s contention that Lemass was a ‘cultural revolutionary’.12 It highlights the condescension inherent in the tendency to look nostalgically to the Fianna Fáil ‘golden age’; while no ‘hatchet job’, neither does it paint Lemass as icon or iconoclast.
Tim Pat Coogan, author of biographies on both Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins, considered writing Lemass’s biography, but confessed that his ‘prosaic businessman persona’ did not enthuse him. Coogan found his prospective subject neither colourful nor romantic enough.13 This reflection only reinforces Lemass’s success in concealing this side to his character because his story runs deeper than its sober, pragmatic facade. To borrow one of the many platitudes from an RTÉ documentary on him, ‘The story of Seán Lemass is the story of modern Ireland.’14 And it begins, overleaf, in the year 1899 . . .
In the summer of 1899 the heavily pregnant Frances Lemass travelled with her husband, John, and her midwife to Dun Laoghaire, south County Dublin. John and Frances were sufficiently well off to be able to regularly hire a large cottage belonging to a dairy farmer in nearby Ballybrack which they used as the family’s summer house. It was here that Frances gave birth to Seán Lemass on 15 July 1899. After two months the baby was christened and John and Frances returned to their home on Capel Street, in the heart of middle-class commercial Dublin.
Twelve years later a census was conducted across Ireland. The return for number 2 Capel Street, the family business and home, provides a snapshot of Seán Lemass’s early life. Seán had three sisters and four brothers in total; another sibling had been lost in infancy. John, a hatter by trade, was forty-three years old in 1911. Frances was thirty-nine. The oldest of the children was the sturdy Noel (thirteen). Next there was Seán, aged eleven and listed as ‘John’. Then there was Alice (ten), Clare (seven), Patrick (four), and Mary (one).1
This early glimpse of Seán Lemass’s life is indicative of his relatively comfortable upbringing. At the time Dublin contained some of the most unsanitary slum housing in Europe. By contrast Seán Lemass’s background was affluent. His father, John, ran a gentleman’s outfitters in a prosperous area of the city, and was listed in Thom’s commercial directory.2 When Frances gave birth it was in the country retreat and in the company of her own nurse.3 The Lemasses were also wealthy enough to have a domestic servant, a young woman called Elizabeth Kelly, who was aged nineteen in 1911.4
The eleven-year-old Seán Lemass was a pupil at the nearby Christian Brothers school in North Richmond Street, Dublin. He had followed his older brother there from convent school; Seán and Noel had enrolled together two years previously.5 Seán was a well-behaved, rather introverted and nervous child. Mathematics was his favourite subject. Outside of school he loved to play in the workshops in his father’s business.6 His older brother, Noel, by contrast, was taller and more outgoing.
A fellow student of the Lemass brothers in North Richmond Street was Ernie O’Malley. In later life he achieved fame as a republican militant and writer; he and Seán Lemass were to take up arms together in the Civil War a decade later. A slightly younger colleague was Brendan Bracken, later Viscount Bracken, and Minister for Information in the British cabinet during the Second World War.7 As an adult Bracken discarded his Irish roots for the altogether more advantageous identity of an English public school boy and became a sycophantic favourite of Winston Churchill. In London in the 1920s Bracken was approached in the street by another former Christian Brothers pupil who claimed to remember him, recalling from his face an odd childhood memory – the smell of his corduroy trousers at school. Characteristically, Bracken feigned ignorance and walked away.8 The man left standing in the street was Emmet Dalton. Dalton, a pupil in the same North Richmond Street school, played and studied alongside Seán and Noel.9 As they sat at their school desks none of these boys could have foreseen the different directions their lives would take, nor that the name Emmet Dalton would become linked with the untimely death of Noel Lemass.
In the Dublin of these boys’ youth, history and politics were fields of lively contention. In the year of Lemass’s birth Britain went to war with the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The Boer War, as it became known, elicited much anti-imperial feeling in Ireland. The concentration camps Britain erected for women and children in South Africa contrasted with a spirit of constructive unionism in Ireland and the passing of the land acts. The Irish Parliamentary Party, which Seán’s father supported, was undergoing a revival in fortunes. So too were the forces of cultural and revolutionary nationalism, the latter an underground tradition which Lemass’s mother held dear. His transition from innocent childhood to an awareness of civic nationalism in adolescence was punctuated most obviously by a major labour dispute: the Dublin Lock-Out of 1913. A strike by tram workers led to strikes in solidarity by workers across the city. In retaliation over 20,000 workers in Dublin were locked out by the city’s capitalists, who enjoyed the support of the state, the Church and the media.
The Lemass brothers grew up in the midst of such pivotal events in the Ireland of the Edwardian twilight. Because their father was a fairly prosperous businessman, their class allegiance was not as straightforward as many of their less well-off contemporaries. As products of a nationalistic Christian Brothers education, however, class and national issues intertwined, and their reaction to anti-nationalist outrages was hostile. One such event occurred very close to the family home. In July 1914 several unarmed civilians were massacred by British troops on Bachelor’s Walk, just yards from the Lemasses’ front door. In the same month, and just before the outbreak of the First World War, Noel left school. The timing of Noel’s school-leaving was no coincidence: great events were unfolding which made the classroom seem a small world indeed. For the eldest boy the pressure to work was also greater than for Seán, who did not enter the world of work with the same alacrity as his brother. Whereas Seán was educated to ‘seventh standard’ at school, Noel reached just ‘fourth standard’.10
Large numbers of young Irish men were joining the British Army around this time. Emmet Dalton enlisted in 1915 and at the age of seventeen was appointed to the rank of second lieutenant. He was to serve in nearly every theatre of war from France to Palestine.11 Seán Lemass’s path was different. After leaving school he briefly enrolled at a commercial training college, but when Noel joined the Irish Volunteers Seán followed him, still a schoolboy and aged just fifteen.
The body Noel introduced Seán to was a rump organisation, the smaller faction to emerge after the split in 1914 over whether or not the cause of Irish nationalism would be advanced by joining the British war effort. The adjutant of the battalion the Lemass brothers joined was a 32-year-old schoolteacher, Éamon de Valera. Lemass’s recollection of his first glimpse of de Valera has been repeated with relish by his biographers.‘My impression of him was of a long, thin fellow with knee breeches and a tweed hat. But he had, of course, enormous personal magnetism . . . it impressed me enormously, notwithstanding what I thought was his rather queer-looking appearance.’12 Lemass’s description of de Valera’s eccentric appearance squares with one witness’s recollection of de Valera when commandant at Boland’s Mills during the Easter Rising in 1916:‘a tall, gangling figure in green Volunteer uniform and red socks, running around day and night, without sleep, getting trenches dug, giving contradictory orders and forgetting the password so that he nearly got himself shot’.13 The immaculately attired Lemass never possessed the same peculiar charisma as de Valera, but was to remain at his side for the rest of his life.
As rank-and-file recruits in 1915 the Lemass boys had little idea that the organisation they joined had been infiltrated by a radical clique within the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) which was planning a heroic gesture. Eoin MacNeill, Professor of Early and Medieval History at University College Dublin and titular head of the Irish Volunteers, found himself outmanoeuvred by the radicals, who were plotting a symbolic armed insurrection against British rule in Ireland. When MacNeill learned of these preparations he cancelled manoeuvres due to take place on Easter Sunday, 23 April 1916. Despite MacNeill’s countermanding order the insurrection went ahead the following day with the rebels seizing strategic buildings in Dublin, most prominently the General Post Office (GPO) on Sackville Street.
The decision of the young Lemass brothers to join what became the Easter Rising was, as Michael Laffan has described much of the conduct of that week,‘engagingly casual’.14 Neither Noel nor Seán were close to the inner sanctum of the movement and, unaware that the Rising was taking place under the leadership of James Connolly and Patrick Pearse, they decided to head for a walk in the hills with their friends and neighbours, the O’Dea brothers. There they met Eoin MacNeill, out walking with his sons. There is something almost Olympian about this mountain-top meeting. MacNeill regretfully informed the boys that an insurrection had gone ahead.15 Noel and Seán listened sympathetically, then, hubristically, jumped on the next tram to the city centre to take part in the fight.
That the Lemass brothers were unaware of what was taking place was not unusual – the Rising was planned in secrecy – though their ignorance does indicate that they were not close to the leadership in any way. For this reason they did not fight with their own battalion under de Valera at Boland’s Mills. Instead they reported for duty at the GPO, were armed and then separated. Noel was stationed to the Imperial Hotel on the opposite side of the road while Seán was posted to the roof of the GPO.16
This posting was, as Lemass’s grandson Seán Haughey concedes, ‘very lucky’ from the point of view of his later political career.17 For young Seán the experience must have been a heady mix of terror and exhilaration, though hardly the gung-ho adventure some describe.18 Tom Garvin claims he ‘got up on top of the GPO with a shotgun and started blazing away’, a statement which rather creates the impression of a strident Lemass clambering madly to the building’s summit to take on the British.19 Lemass in fact said: ‘I fired a few shots from the GPO, but whether they hit anybody I don’t know.’20
According to others who were on the roof during Easter week, the most trying experience was not the fighting but the discomfort from the heat of the burning buildings on the opposite side of the street.21 There, among the flames, Noel was shot in the hand. Seán escaped the entire experience without wounds, instead recalling how the whole affair left him tired and hungry.22 When the British started to shell the GPO he was moved off the roof and did not get to use any of the bombs he had been armed with.23
When the GPO itself became engulfed in flames the order was given to evacuate the building and Lemass emerged on to Moore Street. He was armed with a Martini rifle and, finding a bayonet discarded on the street, fixed it to his gun. As he recalled:‘this could have been my death warrant’, because minutes later all volunteers with bayonets were ordered to assemble to charge the British barricade at the top of the street. But Lemass was spared the suicidal bayonet charge. He claimed, rather dubiously but not entirely implausibly, that this was because he fell asleep from sheer exhaustion. He explained: ‘I ate a tin of preserved fruit from a shop through which we had passed, and while seated on the stairway into the yard watching the obstacles being removed I fell asleep for a few moments.’24
Bertie Ahern professes a romantic attachment to the story of Lemass carrying James Connolly from the GPO after the ceasefire.25 But, as Lemass admitted, the process of carrying the fatally wounded Connolly from the building was less glorious, being ‘so slow and so frequently interrupted that almost everyone in the GPO helped in it at some stage’.26 After the surrender Lemass was taken with the other prisoners to Richmond Barracks, Inchicore. According to one source Lemass was allowed to leave custody by the intervention of a kindly constable of the Dublin Metropolitan Police who knew the Lemass family and drew attention to his youth.27 Time magazine was to paraphrase the Dublin vernacular account of this incident in an inimitably American way in its 1963 profile of Lemass: ‘The cops gave him a kick in the arse and told him to go home to his mom.’28
For the young Lemass the experience of flames and bullets, followed by the execution of the leaders of the Rising, was life changing. Although he recalled that after the Rising his father, a constitutional nationalist, ‘had come over to our side’,29 Seán’s abrupt transition from youth to adulthood on the parapet of the GPO was hard for his father to accept. For his mother, a sympathiser with revolutionary Fenianism, it was somewhat easier. In his primary and secondary education, however, young Seán had proved a bright student. On his release from detention John Lemass encouraged his son to become a barrister and the teenage Seán returned to school to prepare to sit his exams. But ‘you couldn’t expect a young fellow who had been through the Rising to sit down seriously and study’, as Lemass commented when interviewed in 1969.30
Lemass is celebrated by historians as the supreme pragmatist; but he did not subscribe to Michael Collins’ damning, anti-aesthetic appraisal of the Rising as a failure which possessed ‘the air of Greek tragedy’. Dublin was a drama-mad city in 1916 and there is evidence that Lemass subscribed to Patrick Pearse’s faith in the symbolic power of drama. The man who would later become associated with the politics of the possible also shared the spirit of fatalism that pervaded the event:
In the early days of Easter 1916 there were rumours that the German army was marching up from the South or that an enormous group of volunteers were marching on Dublin from the country. But by the Wednesday or Thursday we knew that these were only rumours, that we were on our own and that there was no one to save us . . . [and yet he stayed on, explaining that] escape would have been contrary to the basic philosophy of the whole business. The idea was that we were ready to take up the fight in arms and were ready to be executed and that this would produce the reawakening.31
Garvin seeks to situate Lemass away from Pearse and the emotionality of doomed rebellion.32 But Lemass – in his own words – described Pearse as ‘a very impressive person, mainly because of his bearing and solemnity and, of course, his wonderful oratory . . . in the GPO in 1916 he was terribly calm, very much in control of himself . . .’33
In that same interview the seventy-year-old Lemass also contended that history had neglected the period after the Rising and before the Irish Volunteers were reorganised in late 1917. Aside from accounts from nationalists held in ‘the university of revolution’, the British internment camp at Frongoch in Wales, this period sits rather awkwardly in the canonical revolutionary years, 1916–23. Given his later ascent in republican politics it is remarkable that Lemass was absent from the central revolutionary caucus across the Irish Sea. Instead he resumed a workaday existence at the family business in Capel Street.
In his spare time he helped found an acting troupe, the Kilronan Players, with his friend and later Dublin music hall favourite Jimmy O’Dea. Lemass would play the straight man to O’Dea, who was to make his name as a comic actor. With the leading figures of the Volunteer movement imprisoned, he instead spent a lot of time with the boys and girls of Dublin’s trendy artistic and literary set. On long summer Sundays the handsome young hatter’s son would travel out to Skerries, north County Dublin, in a hackney car with an assortment of young actors and actresses. On one such occasion, in 1917, the young members of the Kilronan Players were relaxing on the beach in Skerries. Holidaying beside them were the widows of four of the executed signatories of the 1916 Proclamation, James Connolly, Joseph Plunkett, Éamonn Ceannt and Thomas MacDonagh.34 Muriel MacDonagh, the widow of Thomas MacDonagh, was drowned accidentally that afternoon, leaving her two children as orphans. It was O’Dea and Lemass who ran for the police, ultimately to no avail, when it became obvious that the tragic MacDonagh had got into difficulty in the water.35
Lemass did not completely abandon his military activities at this time, and joined a private nationalist militia under Colonel Maurice Moore, an old but enlightened landed type who had done his soldiering in the Boer War.36 From late 1917 those who had been interned since the Rising were released and the Volunteers proper started to reform. Lemass was appointed lieutenant in a north Dublin company of troops. In defiance of a British-imposed curfew a lot of training took place at night. Lemass explained that many of his men
. . . used to complain to me that their wives never believed that they were out training all night when they’d come back covered in mud. Their wives always thought they’d spent the night lying in some ditch sleeping off the pints they’d been drinking. So part of my job was to assure their wives that they had been on serious business, not sleeping it out.37
Such prosaic responsibilities belied the rapid escalation of political and militant nationalism in a very short space of time. By 1917 the British Army had sustained massive casualties in France and Prime Minister David Lloyd George was under pressure to introduce conscription in Ireland. Angered at the unfulfilled promise of Home Rule for Ireland and the passage of the Military Service Bill, the Irish Parliamentary Party withdrew from Westminster in April 1918. Shortly afterwards representatives of the various political shades of Irish nationalism convened at Dublin’s Mansion House and produced an anti-conscription pledge which – crucially – was endorsed by Ireland’s Catholic bishops.
Sinn Féin, the radical abstentionists in the nationalist communion, ballooned in size and popularity. In a few months the party superseded the century-old Irish Parliamentary Party, its support buoyed by the British decision to crack down on cultural and political nationalism in Ireland. In the general election of December 1918 Sinn Féin’s separatist republicanism received a resounding endorsement from an enlarged Irish electorate. With this mandate the Irish Republic was declared in January 1919. The British government, however, refused to recognise it. Dáil Éireann, the revolutionary parliament of the new Republic, sat for the first time in April 1919 and the Democratic Programme was read out. At the same time two policemen were shot dead in County Tipperary by a group of volunteers. The War of Independence had begun and the Irish Republican Army was born.
Lemass was absent from all of these developments. But as violence surged in Dublin he was drawn into the conflict. The Dublin IRA battalion to which he belonged was involved in sporadic engagements with British troops and Lemass undoubtedly partook in some of these, although there is little evidence of his involvement. The specific biographical accounts of his activity during the hostilities are drawn chiefly from the writings of Liam Skinner which, in discussing this period of his life, are the stuff of a Boy’s Own war story. According to Skinner, Lemass was reputedly involved in the recovery of £500 of stolen jewellery from a ‘gang of robbers’.38 It is more likely that Lemass was himself involved in a number of armed seizures of money and material: unglamorous, if financially vital, episodes in the national struggle, involving conflict with civilians rather than soldiers.39
Seán and Noel’s former schoolfellow Dalton enjoyed a more meteoric ascent during this period, despite joining the fight late. Stationed with the British Army in north Africa in early 1918 his war diary captures the boredom of camp life and an emerging yearning to return home to join the Irish struggle. While Lemass was drilling in Dublin, Dalton was a restless soldier in the desert heat. He broke an oil lamp while playing football,40 drove to the pyramids with a nun,41 danced with a countess,42 played golf and billiards seemingly incessantly43 and accidentally cut the padré’s nose while playing ‘stone bombs’.44 But he also had more than one ‘heated discussion’ with fellow officers on the Irish question and, when talking to Arabs, compared their plight at the hands of the Turks to Ireland’s at the hands of the British.45 ‘There is something radically wrong with me because I feel terribly fed up,’ he wrote.46 In summer 1919 he was discharged and found his purpose in the War of Independence. His military experience ensured he rose quickly within the ranks of the IRA and he became director of training in its General Headquarters staff. Ernie O’Malley had been sucked in too, quitting his medical studies to become a captain in the IRA; he was also attached to General Headquarters.
Seán Lemass’s record in the conflict was less stellar than his schoolmates’. It is likely that he felt a little overshadowed by older brother Noel, who played a more prominent role despite balancing work as an engineer with military action. When asked about his brother’s activities during the War of Independence Lemass’s reply made much of Noel’s engineering apprenticeship and little of his soldiering.47 But there is evidence that Noel was engaged in illegal drilling in Derry early in the conflict.48 He certainly made more column inches than his younger brother at the time. He was arrested in south County Dublin as part of a large group of IRA men and imprisoned in Mountjoy Prison in north Dublin.49 At Noel’s trial a lieutenant of the South Lancashire regiment claimed that Noel had been drilling volunteers. On seeing a lorry of troops and policemen approach, these men fled, and Noel had allegedly thrown a loaded revolver and holster over a hedge. Unrepentant in court, Noel challenged the evidence as unsound and in the best tradition of Speeches from the Dock, the Irish nationalist bible, questioned the legitimacy of a court ‘constituted of an army of occupation’.50 He was imprisoned at Mountjoy and later Derry.51
As a captain in the Dublin IRA’s 3rd battalion Noel was remembered by one of the men under him as ‘a flamboyant extrovert; a very tall, swashbuckling type. But a great company man; very keen, an attractive person.’52 Noel heightened the battalion’s activities considerably, displaying leadership skills befitting his tall frame and dashing good looks. He orchestrated a major ambush on Dublin’s Mespil Road in February 1921 and in the following month was caught in a Black and Tan raid of IRA headquarters and interrogated (and in all likelihood tortured) by the notorious head constable, Eugene Igoe of British intelligence.53 He was released but a further arrest warrant was issued for him in June 1921 as someone ‘suspected of acting, having acted, and being about to act in a manner prejudicial to the restoration and maintenance of order in Ireland’.54
Seán Lemass’s record during the War of Independence is clouded by a smokescreen of his own creation. There has been persistent speculation that he was a member of Michael Collins’ ‘Squad’, the hitmen who executed eleven men suspected of being British intelligence agents on ‘Bloody Sunday’, 21 November 1920.55 The elite British group was replaced by an intelligence unit headed by Noel’s erstwhile interrogator, the infamous Igoe. When asked later in life if he was a member of Collins’ Squad Lemass’s reply was typically ambiguous:‘Firing squads,’ he said,‘don’t have reunions.’
Lemass was certainly not a member of the Squad though, and any evidence that he took part at all in the Bloody Sunday killings is dubious. Two years before the publication of his definitive biography Enigmatic Patriot, John Horgan claimed that Lemass shot dead a crippled British officer – a Captain G.T. Bagally – in a house on Lower Baggot Street.56 Yet Horgan omitted mention of Bagally’s disability when the book was published. Bagally, who had lost a leg in the First World War, was a courts martial officer who reputedly assisted Dublin Castle’s ‘Murder Gang’ in hunting down the IRA.57 One member of Collins’ Squad, Patrick McCrea, recalled that Bagally was suspected of being one of the torturers of Kevin Barry, the teenage volunteer whose execution by Crown forces on 1 November 1920 aroused much popular resentment.58
According to Michael Foy, an IRA hit squad including Lemass called to Bagally’s lodgings that morning with a sledgehammer to break into his bedroom. After being admitted through the front door by a maid, they discovered that the officer’s bedroom was unlocked. Finding Bagally lying in bed in his pyjamas, they shot him twice in the heart.59 According to McCrea, who does not mention Lemass in his account, Bagally made a pitiful attempt to jump out the window to escape, but before he reached it ‘he was out of action’.60
Was Lemass party to this murder, and if so did he pull the trigger? The evidence Horgan gives for Lemass’s involvement in the murder is based on fleeting references, omissions and gossip and, as such, is as unconvincing as his claim that Lemass’s supposed getaway route that day was a harbinger of his cool political strategy later on.61 Foy’s claim that Lemass carried out the killing is based on the single testimony of a junior IRA man collected years later and a series of illegible notes scribbled by Ernie O’Malley in later life.62 Tom Garvin admits his strong doubts about Lemass’s involvement in Bloody Sunday, but cannot bring himself to unequivocally dismiss the heroic role ascribed to Lemass by civil service whispers.63
It is significant that Lemass is not listed anywhere as a member of Michael Collins’ Squad.64 Before their deaths a number of its members provided a list of protagonists. Lemass does not feature in any of them.65 Although membership at the time of Bloody Sunday was somewhat fluid, flitting between twelve and nineteen named men, the Squad was by nature and necessity a small, tight-knit collective. The number of men in it was brought up to twenty-one only the year after the murders, 1921.66 Later that year membership swelled to fifty and the Squad became known as ‘the Guard’.67 By the time of the Civil War in 1922 members of this group had become the core of the Free State’s shadowy and thuggish Special Branch based at Oriel House just north of the Liffey. Special Branch would subsequently be involved in the abduction and murder of Noel Lemass in 1923 (discussed below), making Lemass’s participation in the intimate gang which carried out the Bloody Sunday murders all the more unlikely.
The 3rd battalion of the Dublin IRA ‘A’ company, to which Lemass belonged, operated around Parliament Street, Dame Street, George’s Street and Camden Street. Baggot Street was therefore near their turf and the unit is reputed to have been active on Bloody Sunday.68 There is no reliable evidence that Lemass took part in the killing, however. A key piece of evidence against Lemass’s involvement concerns gunmen and dinner parties. According to Lemass, firing squads do not meet for reunions but in fact Collins’ Squad did, in the form of reunion dinners. According to a witness of several of these reunions, Lemass’s name did not feature once in any of the frequent, macabre reminiscences about the Bloody Sunday murders across the dinner table.69
Given the absence of evidence that he pulled a trigger on Bloody Sunday, Lemass’s curious half-admission about firing squads and reunions appears disingenuous. He did little to quell rumours of his shady past as part of the Squad and with one very good reason: they greatly increased his political standing. If Lemass was involved it was in a very minor capacity. What is certain is that two other young men shared Bagally’s fate for their supposed involvement. Thomas Whelan and Paddy Moran, who both had alibis placing them elsewhere at the time of the killing, were hanged for the crippled captain’s murder on 14 March 1921.70 Lemass, an active but fringe member of the IRA at this time, was seized in Dublin in late 1920 by the Crown authorities, imprisoned and eventually interned in Ballykinlar Camp, County Down.
A year later, Lemass was released along with the other internees at Ballykinlar after the Anglo-Irish Treaty was signed in December 1921. ‘Its signing improved my personal circumstances and I welcomed it on that account,’ he recalled.71 On the train ride between Belfast and Dublin the 22-year-old Seán, never much of a drinker, became so inebriated that he required medical attention after the train pulled in to Dublin.72 High spirits aside, Lemass was quiet during this truce period. He reportedly helped disrupt trade through the Irish provisional government’s ‘Belfast Boycott’ of goods manufactured by unionist firms in 1922, but the records of that embargo contain no mention of him.73 Neither did he play a part in the subsequent Treaty debate.
One of the most significant steps he took at this stage was a change in his personal habits. He swore off drink and took to smoking his iconic pipe. Another serious incident involving alcohol may have had something to do with this resolution. Charles Haughey claimed that during the boycott of unionist goods, an IRA group including Lemass raided a distillery.
They were going along knocking out the bungs, emptying all the whiskey. He was the last in line and collapsed into the whiskey on the floor [after inhaling the fumes]. When the others got out they realised that he was missing and went back for him. If they hadn’t done so he would have drowned in whiskey.74
Lemass cheated death in this instance, but the division of Civil War loomed. The Irish negotiating team had achieved a substantial, but limited, degree of independence. The men who returned from London were viewed by many as heroes, by many others as sellouts. At a hastily arranged cabinet meeting Éamon de Valera suggested dismissing the signatories from the cabinet. Between the signing of the Treaty and its approval by the Dáil on 7 January 1922 Ireland’s Catholic bishops and their clergy exerted a disproportionate influence on public opinion and political debate in favour of the deal.75 After the Dáil narrowly ratified the Treaty, de Valera and his allies walked out of the chamber.
After the Treaty was signed Lemass took up a job as a training officer with the new Free State police at the Royal Dublin Society. He claimed to have switched to the anti-Treaty position after noting that his pay cheque came from the provisional government rather than the government of the Irish Republic.76 Curiously, following his initial resignation he enlisted again as a training officer, this time at Beggar’s Bush Barracks. Seán remained a peripheral figure at this point, party to the ‘debating and arguing’77 over the Treaty, but never a main player in the debate.
Soon he was to leave the employment of the Free State for a second time. In February 1922 the first volleys of the Civil War were exchanged in Limerick. The following month a large anti-Treaty section of the IRA removed itself from civil control. In April members of the Republican Army Council set up headquarters in the Four Courts, the courts of justice of the capital and just a short walk from the Lemass family home. Lemass took the decisive step of defecting with a handful of work colleagues to report to the Four Courts and to the leading dissident officer in the IRA, Rory O’Connor.78
As with Seán’s decision to join the fight at the GPO in 1916 it is likely that Noel was influential in this move. Noel left work to join the Four Courts garrison and was probably responsible for getting his brother, who was always more ‘reserved in manner’, to take up arms again.79 But by this action Seán really earned his militant republican spurs in his own right. O’Connor, who had mooted to the press the possibility of Ireland being guided under dictatorship by a virtuous minority, appointed him adjutant to the commander of the garrison, Paddy O’Brien. O’Brien was described by Ernie O’Malley, Lemass’s school friend with whom he was now reacquainted, as ‘straight, soldierly, beautifully proportioned . . . blue-eyed, serious, good featured’.80 The importance of Lemass’s role in the Four Courts garrison is indicated by the survival of a republican soldier’s pass, signed by Lemass as ‘Barrack Adjt.’, permitting the bearer entry to and exit from ‘Oglaigh na hEireann G.H.Q., Four Courts Barrack’.81
Lemass’s stance at this critical juncture is hard to fathom if viewed with hindsight coloured by a distorted conception of him as the pragmatic chairman of ‘Ireland Inc.’. As his biographers have agreed, in the impassioned world of Irish politics he was the supreme pragmatist. So why could he not identify with Michael Collins’ argument that the Treaty was a ‘stepping stone’ to independence and a 32-county Republic? For Garvin, Lemass’s initial pay-cheque resignation indicates a legalism and a somewhat marginal republicanism, a decision based on peer pressure rather than political conviction.82 This underestimates the logic of the broader anti-Treaty position at the time. The Treaty had received backing from the Irish electorate under the duress of an external threat of war from Britain. Lemass was not alone in seeing the discontinuation of Dáil Éireann, the revolutionary parliament of the republic they had sworn to uphold, as an ominous sign. Around the time that the agreement was signed, Willie Gallacher, the renowned Scottish communist from ‘Red Clydeside’, presciently warned the top brass of the anti-Treaty IRA that if the signatories of the Treaty were not arrested when they stepped off the boat ‘it will not be long before they’re arresting you’.83
There were many impassioned speeches during the Treaty debate. The controversy centred on the Oath of Allegiance to the British Crown that deputies would be required to take, but another aspect of the exchange was the association of the anti-Treaty position with a workers’ republic and the pro-Treaty with bourgeois and imperialist interests. This point was put forcefully by Countess Constance Markiewicz and others.84 After some deliberation Lemass became a confirmed anti-Treatyite, making Garvin’s assertion that he accepted implicitly the assumptions of private enterprise appear teleological.85 Lemass certainly did not identify so wholeheartedly with common sense capitalist constitutionalism that he would accept the Treaty. Nor, for that matter, was his much-celebrated hard-headed business pragmatism much in evidence when he joined the poets and dreamers in the GPO in 1916. Neither can these formative decisions be put down to naive youthful loyalty86 or quixotism87 alone. Boys matured into men much sooner in those days and Lemass, by virtue of his active service in the Rising, did so quicker than most. He was a fully fledged twenty-two years old when he entered the Four Courts.
Like many others, Lemass welcomed the Treaty but objected on principle to what many saw as the death of Dáil Éireann.88899091