The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (7 page)

He concluded, ‘I have great pleasure in asking this council to stand by the resolution of the Mayo library committee submitted here on two occasions and that will put an end to this long controversy. If they want to dismiss the council let them do so.' Councillor Joyce sat down to warm applause.

Councillor O'Donnell then proposed a motion, seconded by Councillor Joyce, ‘that we the members of Mayo County Council, called together by request of the Minister for Local Government to reconsider our attitude to the recommendation of the Local Appointments Commission regarding the appointment of Miss Dunbar as librarian for County Mayo, beg to point out to the minister that we have already unanimously refused to appoint or invite the young lady mentioned. This decision on our part is definite and irrevocable and we are of the opinion that no useful purpose can be served by further discussion.'

Councillor O'Donnell gave as his reasons – that Miss Dunbar Harrison had no Irish, that she was a graduate of Trinity College and as such must be imbued with West-British sentiments, and thirdly that she was not a Catholic.

‘I am very sorry,' he said, ‘that this question of religion has to be brought in, but I bring it in and I have nothing to apologise for or to be ashamed of. I am not a bigot; I am not hostile to her being a Protestant, but the library is an educational institution in this county and the idea of appointing a Protestant to it is, as I say, intolerable. If this county was as Protestant as it is today Catholic, I would object to a Catholic having this position, it would be most intolerable, unsuitable, regrettable and unfortunate to have a Catholic in charge.'

‘Is this to go on all day?' Councillor O'Hara enquired.

‘Don't mind them,' replied Councillor O'Donnell. ‘They are sent here for this purpose. I say history is repeating itself. I don't want to go into it, but let it not be pushed too far. I would be very sorry that anything should occur here that would upset these good relations [between the councillors].'

‘What has occurred since the first meeting that would make us alter our views?' continued Councillor O'Donnell. ‘We are lectured and who are the lecturers? Who are the men who tell us what we should do? The first a Presbyterian from Belfast, then a doctor from Galway who tells us he spent sixty years in England and then a kind of migratory Micawber named Mr O'Malley, plying between Athlone and London. A Presbyterian minister, probably an army doctor in England and the other tramp politician, are these the men we would apply to, to ask what would be suitable for a Mayo library?

‘I hold nothing has occurred since that we need to be ashamed of. Mayo always held its own and it will hold its own now,' he asserted, to cheers and cries of ‘Up Mayo!' and ‘O'Donnell Abu!' from the gallery, which seemed to surprise the speaker.

‘Mayo made a stand against tyranny in the past and it will stand against tyranny now,' he concluded.

Councillor Duffy complained that the chairman wasn't keeping to standing orders. ‘It is all Castlebar as usual,' he said.

‘Look here,' Councillor Morahan responded, ‘you mention Castlebar again and I for one man will fire you outside the door.'

There were great cheers in the gallery and cries of ‘Good man, Johnny.'

Councillor O'Donnell continued, ‘I would appeal to the council to be unanimous for the sake of what we stand for in Mayo. I would say to those who come to lecture us, whether
The Irish Times
or the individuals, I object to Trinity College not because it is Protestant but because it is un-Irish. It is anti-Irish and anti-Catholic, if you will. Every day don't we see where it flies the flag of that other country in our eyes? Are we going to be pro-Britons and submit to them? Are we going to be browbeaten into allegiance to the Trinity way or that of
The Irish Times
?'

Councillor O'Donnell concluded by asking the council not to rescind their previous order, because if they did they would be met with nothing but contempt.

Councillor Morahan was next to speak, and he delivered a well-prepared speech:

At our last meeting I took a stand against the appointment of a Trinity Protestant and non-Irish speaking candidate to the position of county librarian in Catholic Gaeltacht Mayo, and despite Minister Mulcahy's threat to mint a new brand of Seán na Sagart, despite the threat of abolition by a whilom tool of England, Mulcahy's professional council breaker, I stand unflinchingly where then I stood, and were I to stand in that attitude alone today, I should still cry out, ‘Come one, come all, this rock shall fly from its firm base as soon as I.'
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The kindly Celtic people of Mayo are solidly against this appointment.

I challenge any Protestant professional man or trader residing in Mayo to say Mayo is bigoted. And yet while we kindly people acknowledge the right of those differing from us in religion to live among us and on us, we enshrine the principle that education is based on and lives around religion, and we are determined that our library as an education centre, serving a county of 99 per cent Catholics, shall never be placed in the charge of a Protestant.

Are we bigots? Rise up you kindly Celtic hillsides, by whose rocks our priests and people were butchered. Are we bigots? Flow on, you noble rivers of Ireland, your ripples testifying to a treachery that choked your courses with the lifeless bodies of Celtic women and children. Are we bigots? Whisper you waves that lap up our coasts, an echo of the agonising caoin [cry] that rent the air as the slave-ships and coffin-ships, loaded with their human freight, departed from kindly Celtic shores.

Take up that echo, you kindly Celtic wind and waft it to this council chamber. We are listening. We are not bigots; neither are we knaves. The story of this kindly Celtic people's suffering for their religion is written in letters of blood across the pages of our country's history. Through centuries of persecution and relentless torture, our ancestors have handed down to us the glorious heritage of the True Faith.

That treasure we zealously guard, and we are determined, come what may, and never, never again, will we allow a bigoted minority to creep into our strongholds and drench our land with kindly Celtic blood. They have razed our proudest castles, spoiled the temples of the Lord, burned to dust the sacred relics, put the people to the sword, desecrated all things holy as they soon may do again, if their power today we smite not, if today we be not men.
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I am opposed to the appointment of a product of Trinity to the position of librarian in this county. Trinity culture is not the culture of the Gael; rather is it poison gas to the kindly Celtic people. We know the history of Trinity; we are aware of what it stands for today. It is the bigoted anti-Irish outpost of England in Ireland. It is a spurious outgrowth, having no roots in Irish soil. In the past it fed like a parasite on the flesh and blood of our kindly Celtic people, and if we mean to preserve our distinctly Gaelic culture we must check the progress of the pest.

Miss Dunbar Harrison with her Trinity culture is not a fit person to place in charge of a county library as a centre of culture for Mayo. I am opposed to the appointment of Miss Dunbar Harrison to the position of county librarian in Gaeltacht Mayo on the grounds of her incompetency in the native language. Irish is the official language of the state as laid down in the Constitution. Trinity ignores the Constitution by refusing to place the official language as a compulsory subject in its curriculum.

Miss Dunbar Harrison gives Irish no place, and she now comes forward for a position in the gift of the Constitution she and her university defied. At the command of the bigoted and Freemason Press, Catholic rights are ignored. The unanimous voice of Mayo's representatives is flouted, and the minister is prepared to violate Article 8 of the Constitution. I should not be surprised to learn that the Distinguished Service Medal has already been struck with the minister's head on one side and the head of Seán na Sagart on the other.

To us a sacred trust is given. We are the connecting link between past generations of our great Catholic dead and the generations yet unborn. We are the spear-head of the far-flung empire of Erin's exiled sons and daughters. The honour, the great privilege, is ours and God helping us, we shall prove worthy of it. The issue is clearly knit – Catholic rights and Gaelic culture: for or against?'

Let there be no mealy mouthings about its sickening attributes in the twenty-six counties, where tolerance is synonymous with slavishness. North of the Boyne tolerance has a very different meaning. The minister thought he could insult the county with impunity, but we all stand honoured in that knowledge and we are ready to meet him and hand over the council to him, backed as he is by the powers of Freemasonry, which would not plead purely against the council. That council might soon be finished, but in relinquishing our positions we would tear Freemasonry from its roots, and how then would their little, prostituted government expect to survive? Personally I would welcome its political suicide as it dashed itself upon the rocks. [Loud applause]

Councillor Moclair opposed the selection of Miss Dunbar Harrison, describing the Local Appointments Commission procedure as flawed, like a game of ‘Spoil Five'. The successful candidates who had Irish should have been chosen for service in Mayo. He claimed that Mayo had faced tyranny before and was now facing a tyranny of bureaucracy and despotism imposed on the County Council by the Minister for Local Government.

‘The librarian,' Councillor Moclair said, ‘may be designated the literary confessor of hundreds of young men and women who directly or indirectly must depend on her for guidance in reference to the type of books to be placed at their disposal. There may be some who may choose to lay down like beaten cowards and lick the hand that insults and rains blows on them. I refuse to be one of those and come what may I will fight against such tyranny to the bitter end.'

Councillor Peter Sweeney, a national-school teacher from Achill, did not agree with the library committee's stance with regard to Miss Dunbar Harrison's lack of Irish. He argued that if the passing of an examination in Irish was made an absolute qualification, very few appointments would be made in Mayo. Having said that, he was still going to oppose the employment of Miss Dunbar Harrison because the community needed to have confidence in their librarian.

‘You have everyday dumped on our shores,' he said, ‘shoals of communistic literature, sordid, vile literature.'
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The library committee would not be able to read everything so they would have to depend on the librarian and trust her decisions on what books she selected.

Councillor John McGeehin of Geesala said that had he not already made up his mind, the letter read by Councillor Bernard Joyce would have convinced him to oppose Miss Dunbar Harrison's appointment.

P.J. Ruttledge, a TD and vice-president of Fianna Fáil, ‘tall, scholarly looking and unemotional',
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declared that he and his colleague had been accused of intolerance by a certain paper.

‘I am not here to parade toleration,' he said, ‘but we do not stand for any religious bigotry.'
20
He opposed the methods of the Local Appointments Commission.

‘A certain body of this council knows and I am very sorry the chairman has seen fit to stay away today, but there is a certain body of members here who knew a week ago that the [council] chairman [Michael Davis] was going to stay away. I am delighted Mr Chairman [Pat Higgins] that you have faced up to your responsibility but I always expected you would.'

The gallery cheered.

Thomas Campbell, Swinford, spoke initially in Irish, before switching to English. According to the
Roscommon Herald
, the solicitor ‘addressed his remarks to the chairman as if he were endeavouring to bring a judge round to his view on a law point.'
21

‘When Miss Dunbar initially crosses the Shannon,' Mr Campbell said, ‘as she probably will when we are wiped out as a council she will not shed the scales of Anglicisation. She has been nurtured in the school of anti-nationalism. She is admittedly ignorant of the national language, sent here by the minister that acted as chairman on the Gaeltacht Commission. So much for his consistency.'
22

He then mentioned that a Swinford local, Bridge MacNulty, had applied for the position only to be told that ‘she was not acceptable as she had no official experience of indexing and cataloguing in libraries, and all that sort of thing that could be learned by an office boy in two months.'

The gallery responded with jeers.

‘This pretence that Miss Dunbar must make good when she comes down here, that she will reverse engines as it were, wipe out the past anti-nationalism and dedicate herself to the study of the Irish language, with great respect to Miss Dunbar, that cannot be more than a pretence. It would be absolutely impossible even with the best will in the world.'
23

Seán Munnelly, Erris, ‘one of the farmers' representatives, spoke briefly in pure Connaught Irish,'
24
opposing the acceptance of the recommendation of the Local Appointments Commission. Seán Ruane from Kiltimagh, yet another national-school teacher (he was also at the time president of the Connaught Council of the GAA), rose to his feet and explained that he had changed his position since the first meeting, as he had not known then that Irish was not a compulsory requirement for the job.

‘It is not a religious issue,' he said. ‘You have the opinions of certain distinguished ecclesiastics and I have my distinguished clergy-
men.'

‘Name the clergymen,' countered Councillor Mullarkey.