Mary Harris
(Cork University Press, £32)
This scholarly and handsomely produced volume fills a surprising void in twentieth-century Irish history. It might have been expected that the role of the Catholic Church and the foundation of Northern Ireland would already have become the subject of intense research. Yet Mary Harris is the first historian to publish a monograph exclusively devoted to that theme. Her work is a rewarding read for anyone interested in being challenged to think and reflect on the complexities, the paradoxes and the ironies of the role of Catholic bishops confronted by a world of real politick. Partition was not welcomed by the Catholic church. The Bishop of Dromore, Edward Mulhern, in 1929 lamented with the psalmist: ‘How long can we sing the song of the Lord in a strange place?’ This prelate had lived through hard times in the early 1920s where he lived in fear of his very life. He looked nostalgically southwards where Catholics had ‘full religious liberty’ in the Free State. In the North, in contrast, he believed that neither peace nor contentment could exist as long as Catholic people were denied ‘their just claim to educate their children in accordance with their wishes without having to suffer thereby’.
Paradoxically, as Harris argues, the bishops had been obliged to make many accommodations when dealing with the Northern Ireland authorities on education in particular. But the bishops were never particularly comfortable with the political status quo. This volume provides a contrasting portrait of Cardinal Patrick O’Donnell, Archbishop of Armagh from 1924 until 1927 and his immediate successor, Joseph MacRory. The former is presented as being a prelate of great intellectual subtlety and commitment. His reaction to the disappointing outcome of the Boundary Commission illustrates that point: ‘the area of the six counties is now fixed as the area of Northern Ireland, and everyone within it has to take account of that fact’. By ideology and by temperament, MacRory was less accommodating. Nevertheless, the political existence of Northern Ireland was an irreversible fact which O’Donnell did not welcome but it was a fact that he had no alternative but to accept.
This book analyses how the Northern bishops confronted what was for each one of them without exception an unpalatable reality. The fears and the apprehensions which gripped many of the bishops during the ‘pogroms’ were not surprising. MacRory wrote to a clerical friend in Rome: ‘If you want to give His Holiness an idea of the Orange spirit, get him to dip into the song book I sent, but have a look through it first yourself. It will give some idea, though faint, of the spirit of these savages’.
But the Northern bishops had to continue to ‘sing the song of the Lord in a strange place’. Harris charts how that was possible and how the battle to maintain a distinctive system of Catholic education evolved. This is one of the many strengths of this work. She has laboured long in ecclesiastical and state archives. It is unfortunate — but this is a constraint on all academics working on Northern Ireland — that there are so many files unavailable in the Public Records Office, Northern Ireland. If the state archives were as available to Harris as ecclesiastical archives had been, she would have been in a position to draw more definitive conclusions in certain areas. A little less closed government in Northern Ireland in relation to archives would be good for scholarship and also good for inter-community relations.
This is not in any sense a defensive confessional history of a beleaguered church living through a period of permanent crisis. It is fair-minded and balanced and it treats inter-church relations with sensitivity. It points to the many possibilities of co-operation in the writing of the history of Northern Ireland from an ecumenical perspective. This volume breaks important new ground and opens up a field of research where the author will be in a position to develop in greater detail elsewhere a range of themes which had to be radically reduced even in a monograph of this generous length. The 1919 Macpherson Education Bill would be one such topic.
Dermot Keogh