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INTRODUCTION

The Political Life of Richard Mulcahy,

1890–1959

In a political life which spanned the spectrum of the three major political phases of late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Irish history, namely the Irish–Ireland phase, the belligerent phase and the post-Civil War, party-political phase, Richard Mulcahy’s contribution to both the formative and the developmental processes of modern Ireland’s polity place him at the top of the country’s founding nationalist elite.

The Irish–Ireland Phase, 1890–1913

Mulcahy did not come from a radical political background, quite the opposite, in fact. His father, Patrick, a post office clerk, and conservative by nature, frowned on anything which might compromise his position in the postal service or might hinder the attainment of safe and respectable prospects for his children. Instead, it was in the strict practice of religion and learning that he, supported by his wife, Elizabeth, resided all of his hopes for his family’s future.

Ironically, therefore, due to both local convenience and economic necessity, Mulcahy came to be educated within the ambient nationalist environment of the Christian Brother schools, starting in Waterford city and finishing in the town of Thurles. In particular, the patriotic content of some of the Brothers’ textbooks exerted an important influence over him. As a consequence, during the period 1890–1902, he began to develop an interest in Irish history and current affairs.

But Mulcahy’s own powerful, self-reliant, autodidactic tendencies, especially on topics of special interest to him, came into play too. As a result, at the start of the new century, when he was about fourteen years of age, he took the opportunity to participate in extra-curricular, spoken Irish classes. Furthermore, at approximately the same time, his neighbour, Jim Kennedy, who was four years older than him and who became centre of the local circle of the clandestine, oath-bound, physical-force Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), began befriending and influencing him. In that event, by 1903, nationalism had become such an identifiable feature of his personality that, upon joining the postal service after his Intermediate Certificate examinations, some of his work colleagues during the short time he was in Tralee passed on their used copies of Griffith’s United Irishman to him. A year later still, he joined the Gaelic League in Bantry. And, in 1908, after a brief sojourn in Wexford, he moved to Dublin, where he immediately joined the IRB. Then, four years later, as an indication of the IRB’s early response to Asquith’s Home Rule Bill, he took part in military drill practice and maybe rifle practice as well.

The Belligerent Phase, 1913–24

Mulcahy joined the newly formed Irish Volunteer army during the winter of 1913. The following year, after the commencement of the First World War, saw him participate in the Howth gunrunning episode. Moreover, he was one of a small radical group, made up mostly of IRB members, whose plan, subsequently cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances, was to occupy the Mansion House in order to disrupt a British army enlistment rally which was to be addressed by Asquith and Redmond.

However, the full strength of his revolutionary political interests did not become apparent until the Rebellion of Easter Week 1916, when, after spiritual reflection at a retreat in the Jesuit House at Milltown Park during Holy Week, he unreservedly answered MacDiarmada’s call to arms. Undoubtedly this decision was a watershed moment in his life. It ended his career in the postal service and by the same token it resulted in him playing a conspicuous part in a five-hour-long confrontation with a detachment of Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC) in Ashbourne, County Meath, this being one of the few military success stories of the Rebellion. As a consequence, he was detained as an internee at Frongoch internment camp, North Wales and came into the company of Michael Collins, who was determined to reorganise the post-Rebellion independence movement using his own version of the IRB as the launch pad.

As a result, Mulcahy, then in his thirtieth year, set out on what may be termed his professional politico–military career, a career which would bring him authority and power, satisfaction and dissatisfaction, as well as fame and infamy. The three principal leitmotifs of this particular phase were the following: the forging of the national army out of the furnace of change brought about by the further rise in the intensity of militarism and the advent of two wars, one of liberation, the other of brothers; the ambiguous role which the IRB played in the ignition, venting and modulation of that furnace; and the overlapping, military and political executive positions which Collins and Mulcahy came to occupy within the army-building and state-building processes.

For example, by the time of his release from Frongoch, Christmas 1916, he had become an enthusiastic member of Collins’ IRB. Then, while on his tour of Munster for the Gaelic League (early 1917), he availed of the opportunity to help reorganise the Volunteers. He became Director of Training (DT) (1917); maybe Chief of Staff (CS), but certainly acting CS (most of 1918); and temporary Minister for Defence (MD) (January 1919). Next, in 1919–21, as CS of the emerging Irish Republican Army (IRA) and Assistant Minister for Defence (AMD), he helped mastermind a war of independence, at the end of which he pragmatically accepted a compromise Treaty settlement which involved, inter alia, an oath of allegiance to the English monarch and the splitting of the island of Ireland into two separate political states.

Clearly, this was a pivotal time in the nation’s history when the overall process of establishing the norms of self-government, together with its attendant personal pecking order, engaged Mulcahy. The same process also engaged some of his fellow Ministers, the likes of de Valera, Collins, Brugha and Stack, followed later by Cosgrave, O’Higgins, de Blaghd and McGrath.

For instance, de Valera and Brugha were convinced that Ireland, after the Rebellion, no longer needed the services of a clandestine revolutionary organisation in order to fulfil its destiny as an independent democratic state. For that reason, Brugha, more than de Valera for a while, viewed with great suspicion the rise of Collins’ IRB, or, more accurately, as it was centrally about to become, the IRB of the general headquarters (GHQ) staff of the IRA. Indeed, he regarded this cadre as being so exclusive, undemocratic and dangerous that, as early as January 1919, he set out to persuade the army to swear an oath of allegiance to the Dáil. This was a considerable challenge which he succeeded in achieving by 29 June 1920. However, later on, during 1921, he also tried to fundamentally discredit Collins’ integrity in the handling of the Glasgow gunrunning accounts. More than that, he twice tried to fire Mulcahy as CS. Yet those attempts at disempowerment ended in failure, principally because of the strength of GHQ’s politico–military position.

But, even though de Valera initially kept his thoughts to himself as far as possible for unity purposes, he eventually backed Brugha and Stack, particularly on the crucial issue of determining the authority/power hierarchy, an issue which he hoped to begin to solve by means of his ‘new army’ proposal. But Mulcahy and GHQ together became the principal stumbling block to the achievement of that solution, when, on 25 November 1921, being slow to accept change, they, but especially Mulcahy, caused the frustrated and belittled de Valera to fly into a rage, exiting and shouting: ‘Ye may mutiny if ye like, but Ireland will give me a new army’.

Next, as Dáil Éireann (Irish Parliament) MD and soon as de facto and eventually formal, member of the Provisional Government (i.e. the transitionary, non-elected, executive body created according to the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty) but, in reality, as CS, Mulcahy negotiated long and hard, yet ironically, with secessionist, anti-Treaty IRA members, who, during the period, January–March 1922, demanded that a convention be convened in order to reverse Brugha’s original Dáil initiative and return the army to a position of fealty to its own executive. And, after the death of Collins on 22 August 1922, he also took on the responsibility of the office of Commander-in-Chief (CC).

This was at the early stage of a bitter civil war during which capital-punishment military courts were introduced, resulting in the controversial executions of Erskine Childers and the quartet of McKelvey, Barrett, O’Connor and Mellows. Kevin O’Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs, was dominant in the former case but Mulcahy took the initiative in the latter. Both of those decisions, especially Mulcahy’s one, served to break the morale of the anti-Treaty forces. Nonetheless, Cosgrave, O’Higgins and de Blaghd, being politicians rather than soldiers, remained dissatisfied. In particular, they had little tolerance for the way Mulcahy was handling the harsh and ill-disciplined methods of the army in Kerry. For that reason, they deliberately set out to restrict what they perceived as not alone his obstinate power but also the obstinate power of his top generals, MacMahon, O’Sullivan and Ó Murthuile.

Then, at war’s end, the time came to downsize and reorganise a victorious but bloated and, in some respects, pampered Irish Free State army. Not unexpectedly perhaps in such demanding circumstances, some officers had mutinous tendencies. Mulcahy decided to postpone the solving of that ticklish problem until the tail end of the demobilisation process. And he might have succeeded in solving it thereby had he not retained an outdated belief that the conspiratorial IRB still had a positive role to play, not just within the officer corps of the army but within the emerging polity.

For, it was his belief in the IRB which involved him in yet another conflict of interest, one which this time he had little hope of winning because, in a manner reminiscent of his September 1922 secret meeting with de Valera on the topic of peace, he overstepped the boundaries of Cabinet co-responsibility and authorised an army raid on a group of mutineers holed up in Devlin’s public house, Parnell Street, but also because, more fundamentally that fateful event occurred during the relatively quiescent conditions of March 1924, when, unlike September 1922, his fellow Ministers no longer felt obliged to defer to him. Thus, with his Ministerial position forfeited and an army inquiry endured, his eleven-year association with the nascent Irish army come to an end.

The Post-Civil War, Party Political Phase, 1924–59

Mulcahy had to undergo three years in the political wilderness before he returned to Ministerial office once again. This time he held the portfolio of Local Government and Public Health, June 1927–March 1931. For him, returning to Cabinet was a clear indication of his commitment to what would become an extremely long career as a parliamentary representative. (Though he formally retired in 1961, he actually ceased to be active in 1959 after James Dillon replaced him as leader of Fine Gael, the successor to Cumann na nGaedheal, which was the original Treaty party, founded in March 1923.) Throughout that period, he became a Minister on a number of other occasions: Minister for Education, during the First and Second Inter-Party governments, February 1948–June 1951 and June 1954–March 1957 respectively; and of the new Ministry of the Gaeltacht as a temporary adjunct to Education, 3 July–24 October 1956.

What is noteworthy about this phase of his parliamentary career, however, is the fact that he, in the manner of Sisyphus, seemed destined never to consign the boulder of his civil war image to the other side of the hill. For example, in 1925, he attended an Inter-Parliamentary Union event in New York, after which he spent five weeks touring the east coast of the United States and Canada. During that sojourn, he was both physically and verbally assaulted by emigrant anti-Treatyites. Furthermore, he was pilloried in the Irish diasporic press under the shibboleths of ‘murderer’ and ‘traitor’. In reality, however, that was merely a continuation of the slightly less vituperative treatment already meted out to him in the form of the anti-Treaty, civil war, propaganda sheets. And it was also a treatment which he would have to tolerate, in varying degrees, throughout the remainder of his public life. Most particularly, almost a generation later, in 1948, during the First Inter-Party government coalition negotiations, republican Clann na Poblachta refused outright to accept the possibility of him becoming Taoiseach, even though he was then leader of Fine Gael, the second largest party in the Dáil to de Valera’s Fianna Fáil.

Yet it is the severity of the Civil War legacy – along with Cosgrave’s reluctance to appoint him to Cabinet after he had bungled the army mutiny and the fact that, by nature, he was not suited to the glad-handing demands of a slowly normalising, patron-client, political system – which puts into stark focus just how impressive his political comeback was after 1924 and how much of a success story, relatively speaking, his post-revolutionary career would become.

His comeback began in June 1927 when, as evidence of his extreme frustration, he privately threatened Cosgrave that he would vote against the government if he was not reinstated. Given Mulcahy’s intense dislike of de Valera, such a threat was almost certainly no more than a checkmating move in the foreknowledge that Cosgrave, needing a united team around him then more than ever, could no longer stonewall him; and sure enough, he did not. Mulcahy, as has been mentioned already, received the portfolio of Local Government and Public Health.

He performed well in Local Government. His Cork City Management Act of 23 February 1929 is illustrative of that. This Act reformed the local electoral system, harmonised the linkages between the council and its bureaucracy and gave a clear delegable role to the city manager, Philip Monaghan. In the process, it was recognised as such a competent legal instrument that it became a precedent for municipal government nationwide, with managers being appointed in Dublin (1930), Limerick (1934) and Waterford (1939), together with its management system being applied as well to county councils (1940).

In comparison, however, during the First and Second Inter-Party governments, 1948–51 and 1954–57 respectively, he took charge of Education. Education was potentially a major spending department, over which Finance exercised considerable control. Consequently, as in Health previously, his was a cautious and conservative approach by and large. For example, even though the comments he made while in opposition indicated some sympathy with the demands of national teachers during a strike for improved working conditions and better pay in 1946, he withdrew considerably from that position by selectively implementing the findings of the Roe report, 1948–49.

At any rate, by then he had already made what would become far more valuable contributions to the welfare of the body politic over time. The first contribution occurred in early 1932, when he refused outright to support an approach made privately to him that a coup d’état, subsequently abandoned, should be undertaken in order to thwart de Valera’s return to political power. The second occurred during the period, 1944–48, when he relentlessly conducted a comprehensive re-organisational campaign in order to try to revive the political fortunes of the Treaty party, which was then under the banner of Fine Gael after Cumann na nGaedheal had been repackaged during its increasingly unstable dalliance with O’Duffy, as saviour, and with Fascism, as panacea, in the form of the Blueshirt movement, 1932–34. And the third occurred immediately after the general election of February 1948, when, belying his latter-day public image as an anachronistic, headstrong, inarticulate, conservative type, he breathed life into the negotiations for the formation of the First Inter-Party government by not making an issue when MacBride pointedly proposed the non-Cumann na nGaedheal, junior Fine Gael member, John Esmonde, for Taoiseach (Prime Minister), thereby effectively clearing the way for John A. Costello as the most suitable, though reluctant, candidate.

Therefore, from the collective evidence of those contributions, contributions which incidentally transpired during what was regarded by the perplexed and mentally tired majority of the Treaty establishment as the inexplicable supremacy of the de Valera years, 1932–48, it seems reasonable to conclude that Mulcahy did not allow the bitterness of the Civil War to dominate him, because, whenever his core values were tested, he chose the future over the past. By that means, as always, he resided great faith in the survival instincts of the Irish people, a people for whom, if not for himself, he intended disencumbering the burden of history in order to revitalise the practice of democratic politics within the state he originally helped found.