By Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh
It’s fair to say that a good deal of the fame enjoyed by Pádraic Ó Conaire can be attributed to the statue of him in Galway. His humble but strong likeness by sculptor Albert Power has maintained his presence and cultivated a kind of familiarity even on the part of those who have read little or none of his writing.
The statue has had a life of its own. It suffered some controversial relocations on Eyre Square, concern was expressed about lipstick damage from over-zealous female admirers, and the rim of its hat was vandalised in 1984. In 1999 Ó Conaire was beheaded by a group of students on the tear, who were brought to justice when attempting to smuggle the head across the border on a bus; it was successfully reattached. The statue was relocated to Galway City Museum in 2006 to protect it from the elements, with a bronze replica taking its place on the square in 2017.
One of the most enduring stories about the statue goes all the way back to its unveiling on 9 June 1935, however. In a ceremony broadcast live on Radio Éireann, the honours were performed by Éamon de Valera. If the story is to be believed, when he unveiled the statue it was found to be garbed in the uniform of the Blueshirts, sworn enemies of Fianna Fáil. Another version has it that the blue shirt was spotted just in time to be removed, thus sparing the blushes of the president of the Executive Council.
The tale has been repeated often, in print and verbally, and anyone who takes an interest in Ó Conaire will have come across it. It joins a gallery of tales about him, some of which emanated from the man himself. Subjecting such folklore to historical analysis can seem like the act of a killjoy, but it can also illuminate the times in which he wrote and has been read.
THE SHIRT ON THE STATUE
The story of the blue shirt on the statue first appeared the day after the unveiling. The Irish Independent reported that gardaí removed the shirt, ‘which apparently was placed on the statue some nights ago’. The anonymous reporter would have had no way of knowing how long the shirt had been there, of course, and was obviously repeating a claim rather than relaying an observed fact.
The Irish Press also carried the claim, however, refusing to let its Fianna Fáil sympathies trump a good story: ‘On Saturday morning some passers-by happened, it is stated, to uncover the unveiled memorial’, a form of words which betrays its speculative basis. The Kerry News dated the discovery differently: ‘on Friday night, whilst some men were having a look around to see that everything was all right’. Later in the week the Offaly Independent credited it to a lone self-appointed statue inspector rather than a group of them.
Agency reports made the story international, with The Scotsman and several English papers claiming that the shirt was only discovered ‘just before the unveiling took place’. According to the New York Herald and others, it was found ‘just before the ceremony’. The Sydney Sun went one better, with the blue shirt visible to all ‘on the removal of the shroud of bunting’ by de Valera, and proceedings resuming only when the crowd had ‘gathered its composure’.
A couple of days later, a contributor to the Melbourne Advocate surmised that Ó Conaire ‘would have been tender with the omadhaun who put a blue shirt on his statue, for he understood donkeys’. No attempt was made to square the obvious incongruities of the story or to reconcile the different versions of it. The day after the Independent and the Press reported it, they carried a clear statement by gardaí in Galway ‘that they had no knowledge of any such incident taking place’.
Liam Ó Briain, a professor in University College Galway, was on the committee that commissioned the statue and was directly involved in organising the ceremony, as well as providing the radio commentary. In an article in 1956 he wrote that the story was being spread at the time. He was close enough to see that there was no shirt on the statue when it was unveiled but, after initial scepticism, he now accepted that it had been there until shortly before.
By then, responsibility for the act was being claimed. That same year Patrick Lindsay TD spoke at a Fine Gael social in Tuam and was praised by his parliamentary colleague James Hession, who commented ‘that Fine Gael owed a debt to Pat Lindsay. He was one of the men who had almost brought Padraic O’Conaire [sic] into the Blueshirts!’ Lindsay was clearly dining out on the story and enjoying no little fame in party circles for an audacious attempt to take the wind out of de Valera’s sails.
PATRICK LINDSAY
Lindsay was a TD in his native Mayo North from 1954 to 1969, barring four years in the Seanad, and was briefly minister for the Gaeltacht. He combined this with a career as a barrister, rising to become Master of the High Court from 1975 to 1984. In his memoirs, published a year before his death in 1993, he recalled his student days in Galway and expanded on his exploits with the Ó Conaire statue:
‘Some nights beforehand, a few of us climbed over the railings then around Eyre Square, put a blue shirt, a tie, and a beret on Sean-Phadraic and replaced the tarpaulin which covered him.
On the following Sunday morning … a Garda by the name of Gill, originally from Aran, decided to examine the tarpaulin in Eyre Square and ensure that everything underneath was in order. Of course, he discovered our plan and took away the element of surprise which was a great pity.’
The more the story is embellished the less credible it is. In the middle of Galway, a group of young men had apparently scaled the square’s railings, climbed the stones surrounding the statue and removed the covering, all undetected by anyone. With the limestone Ó Conaire being unable to lift his arms, this blue shirt would have to have been on the large side. In no hurry, it seems, they stayed to add a tie, and a beret on the statue’s hat. Then they covered up the statue again and made good their escape without anyone noticing a thing.
The actions attributed to Garda Gill are harder still to believe. A garda patrolling the mean streets of Galway on a busy Whit weekend would have many things to do, and the idea that it would occur to him to investigate a covered statue—the thing least likely to be violating any law of the land—makes little sense.
County Galway was in the middle of a by-election at the time, although campaigning in the city was suspended on the day of de Valera’s visit. Lindsay was active in support of the Fine Gael candidate and spoke at election meetings, so eager young Blueshirts would have had more productive things to do in Galway that week besides dressing statues.
Lindsay was no stranger to Ó Conaire anecdotes. He knew Pádraic’s brother, Isaac, who, he claims, ‘was mining in Odessa at the age of nineteen’. The port of Odessa is nowhere near Ukraine’s coalfields, however, and Isaac Conroy actually worked in the less exotic mines of south Wales. Lindsay recounts a fable of Michael, another brother, converting to Islam and being deported by Kevin O’Higgins after turning up in Dún Laoghaire with four wives! Taken in by good yarns disproved only by the facts, Lindsay added another to the collection.
AN ‘UNREPENTANT BLUESHIRT’
In May 1935 Lindsay and three other students affixed a Union Jack to a flagpole in UCG to mark the silver jubilee of the king of England. His account of this incident is fuller and more plausible, and it was reported in the local and national press. He obviously went in for student pranks, and the blue shirt on Ó Conaire sounds like the plan for another one rather than its successful execution. Apart from offending republicans, affection for the British monarchy was never big with the Blueshirts, who were past their peak by then anyway. This could suggest that Lindsay wasn’t that much of a Blueshirt after all.
Almost 60 years on, however, he was at pains to contradict such an impression: ‘I’ve said it before and I say it again here, I am an unrepentant Blueshirt’. He maintained that the movement was an entirely legitimate endeavour to defend free speech against attacks from Fianna Fáil and the IRA. ‘As for the charge of fascism—that’s total nonsense’, he insisted. They had no knowledge of or interest in such theories: ‘We felt, and indeed we still feel, that our democratic credentials were impeccable’.
The objection that most immediately suggests itself comes in the form of the Blueshirts’ leader, who openly espoused fascist ideology, consorted with fascist movements in Europe and liked to be hailed with a fascist salute. As if in anticipation, Lindsay’s memoirs address the point: ‘As for Eoin O’Duffy I never regarded him as a man of judgement … It was a great mistake to make him leader of Fine Gael—but that’s history.’
When Lindsay was canvassing for Fine Gael in June 1935, O’Duffy had parted company with the party. Indeed, O’Duffy’s break-away National Corporate Party held its inaugural congress on the weekend when the Ó Conaire statue was unveiled. Lindsay must have retained some respect for his leadership abilities, however, as he mobilised on Galway docks the following year to join O’Duffy’s brigade of volunteers going to fight for Franco in Spain. Only the intervention of his Classics professor persuaded him to stay and continue his studies.
The effect—and the clear intention—of the tale of the blue shirt on Ó Conaire’s statue is to sanitise the Blueshirts, to present them as fun-loving scallywags concerned only to rebuff enemies of the state. Lindsay even introduces it as one of the ‘lighter moments’ of life in the Blueshirts. He and his comrades may not have studied the finer points of fascist theory, but it’s unlikely that the average Brownshirt in Germany or Blackshirt in Italy did either. The fact remains that the Blueshirt recipe contained a heavy dollop of fascism, to say the least, and its activities were far from a joke.
Ó CONAIRE
To foist the joke on Pádraic Ó Conaire adds insult to injury. From his earliest opinions on politics, he was very much on the left. He became an out-and-out socialist by 1918, the first writer in Ireland to hail the Bolshevik revolution in either language. Politics and current affairs overshadow fiction in his literary output of that period, as he advocated the overthrow of capitalism and British rule to usher in a society based on workers’ control and individual freedom.
It came as a surprise when he publicly supported the Treaty in 1921–2, although he was following the stance of the Labour Party to some extent. He was soon disillusioned with the social and cultural failures of the Free State. In 1927, a year before his death, Cumann na nGaedheal put his cousin Martin McDonogh forward as Dáil candidate in Galway, but Ó Conaire campaigned prominently for his Labour opponent.
To make Ó Conaire into a Blueshirt, advocate of a philosophy alien to all that he stood for, is therefore to inflict a cruel injustice on him. Even when this is done purely in the realms of anecdote, it shows scant regard for the opinions that he held sincerely against the tide of conventional political wisdom.
Another legend, which emerged only later on, claims that when his statue was unveiled a bottle of whiskey was resting in the crook of its arm, or a pint of porter on its lap. While the logistics of this are infinitely more plausible than the blue shirt, it is no less apocryphal. It draws on the undeniable truth that Ó Conaire had an unhealthy relationship with alcohol, exacerbated by the disenchantment of his later years, but to foreground this serves only to obscure his remarkable writing, which remains powerful almost a century after his death.
A more relevant story was related by his friend Austin Clarke. Ó Conaire met the editor of a local paper that he wrote for in Galway, and they went for a drink. On the way they saw a professor from the university, whom Ó Conaire asked for the loan of ten shillings so that he could stand his round. The professor made his excuses, however, and hurried along. ‘Padraic turned to the Editor and said in a grave tone which was unlike him: “The day will come when that man will unveil a statue to me”. That day came.’
Aindrias Ó Cathasaigh is editor of the new edition of Pádraic Ó Conaire’s classic novel Deoraíocht (Coiscéim).
Further reading
A. Clarke, A penny in the clouds (London, 1968).
P. Lindsay, Memories (Dublin, 1992).
A. Ó Cathasaigh, Réabhlóid Phádraic Uí Chonaire (Dublin, 2007).
P. Ó Conaire, An tAthrú Mór: scríbhinní sóisialacha (Dublin, 2007).