Seán MacBride, A Life

From IRA Revolutionary to International Statesman

Elizabeth Keane

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2007
• ISBN:
  9780717167470
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

An exceptional man, an extraordinary career – a life of Seán MacBride, Ireland's most distinguished statesman Sean MacBride (1904–1988) was at different times the Chief of Staff of the IRA, a top criminal lawyer, leader of Clann na Poblachta, Irish Foreign Minister, UN Commissioner, and a founding member of Amnesty International. He is the only person to have won both the Nobel Peace Prize (1974) and the Lenin Peace Prize (1977). Seán MacBride, A Life, by accomplished historian Elizabeth Keane, is the first complete biography of this multifaceted, complex and internationally renowned Irish politician. From revolutionary terrorist to conservative constitutional politician to liberal elder statesman and international humanitarian, Seán MacBride uncovers the political and personal story of one of twentieth-century Ireland's most controversial figures. Seán MacBride begins with MacBride's birth in Paris in 1904. With icons of the nationalist movement in Ireland for parents, MacBride's future as a politician was fated: his father John MacBride was a Boer War hero executed for his role in the Easter Rising of 1916; his mother Maud Gonne was an outspoken revolutionary and the lost love and muse of Ireland's most famous poet W.B. Yeats. Seán MacBride then looks at MacBride's membership of the IRA, which he joined as teenager. He fought in both the Irish War of Independence and the Irish Civil War. Seán MacBride charts his rapid rise through the ranks, looking at how he became the Director of Intelligence and later Chief of Staff of the IRA before relinquishing his position and becoming a top criminal barrister. MacBride entered Dáil Éireann for the first time in 1947 as the leader of Clann na Poblachta, and formed the first coalition government in Irish history in 1948. Appointed Minister for External Affairs (Foreign Minister), Seán MacBride considers MacBride's tenure in office, which included overseeing the acceptance of the European Convention on Human Rights, the rejection of NATO and Ireland's exit from the Commonwealth. His refusal to support fellow Clann na Poblachta TD Noël Browne's Mother-and-Child Scheme in the face of the opposition of the Catholic bishops led to the collapse of the coalition. MacBride lost his seat in the 1957 election, retired officially from Irish party politics and entered the third phase of his life: international statesman and human rights activist. Seán MacBride looks at the pivotal role MacBride played in European and international politics and human rights over the course of his later years, including founding Amnesty International, opposing apartheid in South Africa and agitating against nuclear armament. Few Irish politicians have had such an impact domestically and internationally. From MacBride's violent IRA beginnings to his later advocacy of peace in politics, Seán MacBride, A Life captures the twists and turns of a fascinating career. A figure of national and international importance, one of the most distinguished Irish people of the twentieth century, he has found a biographer of authority and assurance in Elizabeth Keane, whose survey of his life and times is astute, insightful and convincing. Praise for Elizabeth Keane: 'A singular voice in Irish history'
The Sunday Business Post

Seán MacBride, A Life: Table of Contents

Preface

• Man of Destiny
• A Sort of Homecoming
• From Chief-of-Staff to Chief Counsel
• Fighting Your Battles
• The Harp Without the Crown
• Rattling the Sabre
• Coming out of the Cave
• Catholic First, Irishman Second
• A Statesman of International Status
• Never Lost His Fenian Fate
• Conclusion

Chapter 1

MAN OF DESTINY: SEÁN MACBRIDE’S EARLY LIFE

‘What a heavy burden is a name that has become famous too soon.’

— VOLTAIRE

The only child of ‘Ireland’s Joan of Arc’ and the militant hero of the Boer War was bound to attract attention in certain circles. Seán MacBride’s background made a role in Irish politics almost inevitable: his parents were formidable figures in the Irish nationalist movement and a weight of expectation existed even before his birth that the adult MacBride might have sometimes found hard to bear. His mother Maud Gonne once showed Noël Browne’s wife Phyllis a photo of him at about age ten with ‘Seán, Man of Destiny’ written across it.¹

MacBride’s own memoirs say very little about his childhood or his parents’ backgrounds. Perhaps he preferred to concentrate on his own achievements, but the lack can more likely be attributed to the bitter end of his parents’ marriage and the resulting scandal of their divorce hearings.

Maud Gonne is best known as a fervent Irish nationalist and the muse of poet William Butler Yeats. Her position as the heroine of Yeats’s poetry and the details included in her oddly titled autobiography, A Servant of the Queen, make it difficult to separate the person from the myth. In her memoir, Maud ‘conceals, distorts, alters, and rearranges facts, incidents, and dates for both personal and political reasons.’² She was always conscious of her public persona and A Servant of the Queen provides an idea of how she wanted to present her life, but the book is not terribly honest or revealing. In her autobiography, she ‘continued the fictions she had had to practise throughout her life.’³

These fictions were necessary not only to establish and maintain her nationalist credentials but also because Maud had two illegitimate children at a time when this behaviour was seen as morally suspect. Although she referred to the children as adopted relatives, most people seemed to be aware that they were her own. It was never mentioned in the open; at the time in Ireland, ‘a certain inconsistency between what one says and what one does seems to be an accepted way of life.’⁴ Though Maud was indifferent to many of society’s conventions (when told that she would require a chaperone to travel with her, she christened her pet monkey ‘Chaperone’), she recognised that others might not be so permissive or understanding. Charles Stewart Parnell’s affair with Katharine O’Shea provided a harsh example of what could happen if what was privately acknowledged became public domain. Moreover, A Servant of the Queen was written in 1938 when Seán was contemplating a political career and Maud’s family did not want her to reveal too much about her private life.⁵ It is a shame that Servant conceals her allegedly scandalous past or that she never finished a later memoir that might have been more forthcoming.

What is certain is that she was the daughter of Thomas Gonne, a British Army officer, and Edith Cook, and was born on 21 December 1866 near Aldershot and baptised in Tongham, Surrey. Two years after her birth, her father was stationed in Ireland near the Curragh Military Camp in Kildare in the aftermath of the Fenian Rising of 1867. Maud’s younger sister Kathleen was born in 1868. The family moved to Donnybrook, a suburb of Dublin, a few months later.

Maud’s mother Edith was physically delicate, a trait Maud would inherit, and she died of tuberculosis in 1871, when Maud was five. Edith had been brought up by her paternal aunts and sent to boarding school, both of which she hated. She made her husband promise never to do the same to Maud and Kathleen.

Maud and her father had a very close relationship and, after her mother’s death, she helped to run his household. The family lived briefly in England for two years. Maud, Kathleen, and her father moved back to the Curragh in 1876, moving again to Howth the following year. While there, Maud and Kathleen’s nurse, Mary Anne ‘Bowie’ Meredith, took them to visit local families in and around Howth. Despite Maud’s claim in Servant that her father had expressed an interest in joining the Home Rule movement later in life, the New York Daily Tribune reported that ‘her father was an officer in the English army . . . and was decidedly English in his sympathies.’⁶ In an interview Maud gave in Peoria, Illinois, during an American lecture tour in 1897, she described Thomas Gonne as ‘on the English side, a colonel in the British army’, making no mention of his support for Home Rule.⁷

The girls were looked after by Bowie and a governess. The family was well off; the Cook family made its money in the linen trade and the Gonnes were wine-importers. In an interview with the St Louis Globe on 5 December 1897, Maud described herself as having belonged to the ‘Castle set in Dublin’, a member of the fading Protestant ascendancy class gradually displaced during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. A debutante and hostess for her father, she was presented at court and acknowledged to be a great beauty, attracting the attention of the Prince of Wales. Wary of his daughter’s becoming too involved in court intrigue, Thomas sent her to Europe to travel.

Thomas Gonne died on 30 November 1886 of typhoid fever. Maud and Kathleen were sent to London to live with Thomas’s stern bachelor brother William. In order to keep Maud reined in, William informed her that she would have very little money coming to her and suggested that she allow her rich great aunt Augusta to adopt her. After Maud threatened to become an actress to earn her own living, William was forced to admit that his nieces did indeed have enough to live on; when she turned twenty-one, Thomas Gonne’s will provided a trust fund and a share in the family diamonds and property, giving her a comfortable income.

Shortly after Thomas’s death, Maud discovered that she and Kathleen had a half-sister, Eileen, born on 17 July 1886. Maud met Eileen’s mother, Margaret Wilson, and made plans for her half-sister’s upbringing, sending Eileen to Bowie, now in retirement in Farnborough. Maud arranged for Margaret to work as a governess for a Russian aristocrat, Baron Budberg. Why did Maud separate mother and daughter? According to Paul Durcan, Eileen’s grandson, ‘it seems she [Maud] felt that it would be a scandal if it became known that her father had a mistress.’⁸ However, Thomas’s wife had died several years before his relationship with Margaret began and he was no longer alive to suffer the taint of scandal. Perhaps Maud thought that it would be difficult for an unmarried woman with little money to raise a child alone. At the time, Maud believed that she had no real income and probably did not want Eileen raised by her London relatives. Whatever her motives, Maud’s life of concealment had begun; in Servant, Eileen is referred to as ‘Daphne’. Margaret never returned and never saw her daughter again. She died in 1939.

Maud took a trip to Royat in the Auvergne Mountains in central France during the summer of 1887, for a lung condition. There she met Boulangist journalist and politician Lucien Millevoye. At the time he first met Maud, he was hoping for a Franco-Russian alliance and dedicated to regaining Alsace-Lorraine after its loss to Prussia in 1870. Millevoye was married, but separated from his wife. He attracted Maud with his fervent patriotism and his hatred of England. They began a political alliance as well as an affair. She would later call Millevoye ‘the only man she ever loved’.⁹

Apparently, she had become politically aware of conflicts in Ireland after witnessing evictions in the west. According to Servant, she decided to work on behalf of displaced tenants. She recounts a visit to a hunt ball in the country where her host disparagingly referred to an evicted family lying in a ditch, remarking that the wife was sure to be dead by morning.¹⁰ She was so outraged at his callousness that she left the following morning. This is probably partially correct; her interest in Irish independence was likely ignited by a combination of her infatuation with Millevoye, her childhood in Ireland visiting the families around Howth with Bowie, and the memory of her regimented, stilted life in London. The idea of personal independence held great appeal — it could be that she saw the British oppression and mistreatment of Ireland as parallel to her own experience with her father’s relatives in London.

Because of her Anglo-Protestant class lineage, Maud was seen as an outsider in nationalist Ireland; Michael Davitt thought her a spy and the Irish Parliamentary Party saw her as a ‘fanatic’, using her for electioneering purposes, nothing more.¹¹ The Fenians, the Land League, and the National League would not have her because of her background and gender, so she ‘“land-leagued” mostly on my own’.¹² In order to establish her nationalist credentials, in October 1900 she founded Inghínidhe na hÉireann (the Daughters of Ireland), an organisation for women who were not taken seriously by the male-dominated nationalist groups, and edited the nationalist publication L’Irlande Libre from 1897 to 1898. She met John O’Leary, Douglas Hyde, Arthur Griffith, and James Connolly, and assisted evicted tenants in Donegal. She was introduced to the Yeats family through O’Leary’s sister Ellen.

She had already gained a reputation as a nationalist agitator when she met William Butler Years at his family home in Bedford Park, West London, on 30 January 1889. Yeats ‘had never thought to see in a living woman so great beauty’.¹³ Likening her to the past Irish legends that intrigued him, he began a long pursuit of her.

He was unaware of her relationship with Millevoye. Maud kept her ‘French life’ secret, understating the differences between what was tolerated in Parisian society and what would be acceptable in an ostensibly conservative Ireland. She had given birth to Millevoye’s child, Georges Silvère Gonne, on 11 January 1890. Georges fell ill with meningitis and died on 31 August 1891. She usually wore black after his death, although most assumed that the mourning gear was for John MacBride after his death in 1916. She travelled to Ireland shortly after, coincidentally on the same boat as the body of Parnell. Yeats met her on 10 October, while she was still in mourning. She told him that a child she had adopted had died, concealing the real situation; ‘she was dressed in extravagantly deep mourning, for Parnell, people thought, thinking her very theatrical. We spoke of the child’s death . . . speech was a relief to her.’¹⁴

In her grief, Maud longed for the reincarnation of her son. Two years after Georges’s death, she brought Millevoye to the memorial chapel she had built at Samois for Georges, in the hope of conceiving a child. A daughter, Iseult Germaine Lucille Gonne, was born on either 4 or 6 August 1894 at 51 rue de la Tour, Paris.¹⁵ The Gonne family was fond of nicknames and Iseult was known as ‘Bellotte’ or ‘Isolda’. Iseult called Maud ‘Moura’, an Irish-sounding anagram of ‘amour’. Seán would carry the unfortunate moniker ‘Bichon’, meaning curly-headed puppy, reflecting the family’s love of animals.¹⁶

In 1898, having several times refused to marry him, Maud finally revealed to Yeats the truth about Millevoye and her two children. He was devastated; ‘my thoughts have gone round and round, as do miserable thoughts, coming to no solution.’¹⁷ He probably felt foolish; the times when he had hoped that they were growing closer, she was pursuing a secret life apart from and unknown to him. She told Yeats that she could never marry him. The primary reason for her refusal was her intuition that they were not suited to one another. He wanted her to give up politics and live a peaceful life with him and she would have found such a life intolerable. Yeats was devoted to establishing an Irish national theatre and the infighting involved led Maud to insist...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Nomenclature
• Preface
• Chapter 1: Man of Destiny: Seán MacBride’s Early Life
• Chapter 2: A Sort of Homecoming: Seán Returns to Ireland
• Chapter 3: From Chief-of-Staff to Chief Counsel: Seán MacBride in Transition
• Chapter 4: Fighting Your Battles: Seán MacBride and Clann na Poblachta
• Chapter 5: The Harp Without the Crown: Ireland and Britain
• Chapter 6: Rattling the Sabre: Ireland and the United States
• Chapter 7: Coming out of the Cave: Ireland in the Wider World
• Chapter 8: Catholic First, Irishman Second: Seán MacBride, Clann na Poblachta, and the Church
• Chapter 9: A Statesman of International Status: Seán MacBride’s Later Career
• Chapter 10: Never Lost His Fenian Faith: Seán MacBride in Ireland
• Conclusion
• Endnotes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan