John J. Horgan (1881-1967)

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Works
Parnell to Pearse: Some Recollections and Reflections, introduced by John Horgan (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1948) [extracts]; Great Catholic Laymen [2dn edn.] (CTS [1908]) [infra].

Reprint, John Joseph Horgan, From Parnell to Pearse: Some Recollections and Reflections (UCD Press 2009), 400pp.

Bibliographical details
Great Catholic Laymen, by John J. Horgan [2nd edn.] (Dublin: CTS [1908]), xiv, 305pp., index [v]; epigraph, ‘Is example nothing? It is everything. Example is the school of mankind and they will learn no other.’ Chaps. on Andreas Hope; Gabriel Garcia Moreno; Frederick Oconam; Montalembert; Frederick Lucas; Windhorst; Louis Pasteur; Daniel O’Connell (pp.335-88).

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Commentary
D. George Boyce, Nationalism in Ireland (Routledge 1982; 1991 Edn.), p.385: ‘[A] learned academic in 1973 declared that the “main function of the National University of Ireland … has been and will be to build the Irish nation. A large part of the task is rebuilding: the recovery of the almost obliterated spirit and traditions in which our country lived and developed up to the disasters of the seventeenth century.”’ (J. J. Horgan, in Foreword to Martin and Byrne, The Scholar Revolutionary: Eoin MacNeill … [ &c.], 1973, [q.p.].) Boyce remarks, ‘if learned, gifted and privileged men thought like this, there was little chance that the less favoured members of the “race” would think otherwise.’ (idem.)

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R. F. Foster, Paddy and Mr. Punch (London: John Lane 1993): In 1946 Horgan he called for definitive biography as centenary tribute to Parnell (NLI unpublished paper; cited in Foster, p.41.) Note that his ‘reasoned’ obituary of Yeats is cited by Roy Foster in ‘When the Newspapers have forgotten me ...’, in Warwick Gould & Edna Longley, eds., Yeats Annual 12 (1996).

Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), notes: ‘J. J. Horgan, lawyer, declared that the Rising was a sin and Pearse a heretic.’ (p.211; see Horgan, From [sic] Parnell to Pearse, 1948, p.285.)

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Quotations
From Parnell to Pearse (1948) - summary remarks: The book takes its epigram from Bunyan (‘Some said, John, print it; others said, Not so: ... I'll print it, and so the case decide.') In his Foreword Horgan acknowledges an indebtedness to Denis Gwynn and Donal O'Sullivan, a personal friend; also to J. L. Hammond, Gladstone and the Irish Nation. Among family forebears whom he cites are Fr. Horgan, a contemp. of Fr. Prout, who wrote poems in Irish incl. “Gortroe”, a caoine[adh] on the massacre of 16 men by British military forces in a [Tithe War] episode nr. Rathcormac, Co. Cork, 18 Dec. 1834; pub. anon. 1835; translated Horace and Moore into Irish [cf. Fr. Prout/F. S. Mahony, q.v.]; designed churches, and built at Whitechurch, nr. Blarney, round towers to prove their Christian origin [3]. Horgan lays claim to English family through his mother, Bowring, incl. Sir John Bowring, FRS (1792-1872), a linguist and Gov. of Hong Kong who was subject of attack in George Borrow's Romany Rye. In his appendix Horgan draws on papers of his father, a Coroner for Cork by election. Horgan identifies John Ronayne the man who transmitted the lesson of obstructionism as practised by George Henry Moore to Biggar and hence to Parnell; describes Biggar as ‘an uncouth little Ulster tradesman’. [16] Horgan narrates the unwitting nomination of Parnell for Cork on money put up by the Tory candidate to raise a nationalist extremist in order to split the Whig vote. [19] Further, gives account of Parnell's shy, aloof, but kindly character and his close relationship with his father [Horgan the coroner], for whom he acted as best man at his wedding. [20-21] He calls The Royal Divorce - of Joycean renown - a ‘hoary romantic melodrama’. The book includes letter from D. P. Moran to Horgan calling himself a ‘reasonable extremist’ in the matter of Carson not being coerced.

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Parnell to Pearse (1948) - Foreword.: ‘My story ends with the collapse of Constitutional movement in 1918 when there began a new and blood-stained era of which Pearse was the fore-runner. But the bitter harvest since reaped was sown in the preceding quarter century. That period of germination - one of the most critical in our history - with which my book deals - provides the key to all that has happened and, indeed, is yet to happen, in Ireland. (vii.)

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Parnell to Pearse (1948) - cont.: ‘I am in fact of Irish-English descent, a very different thing from Anglo-Irish in the ordinary meaning of the term. The Anglo-Irish are colonists, the English settlers and planters long established in Ireland, the Irish-English are the result of modern intermarriage between the two races. The influence of English blood in Ireland is a subject that would well repay detailed investigation. The Anglo-Irish furnished most of the leaders in the struggle for Irish colonial and constitutional freedom, such men as Grattan, Flood, and Burke during the struggle for colonial liberty, Parnell and Redmond in more recent times. Irish nationalism, in the modern sense, was in fact an English idea, quite beyond the conception of the old Irish aristocracy or their peasant successors. The Native Irish were always more concerned with such fundamental objectives as the recovery of the land, Catholic Emancipation, and the restoration of the old Irish way of life with all this implies - in short the abolition of [8] the ascendancy imposed upon them after the Treaty of Limerick in 1691. But the Irish-English have been an even more disturbing factor; they were the spearhead of the final revolt against English rule. Wolfe Tone, Emmet, Davis, and Mitchel, the forerunners of modern Irish Republicanism, were all men of Irish-English blood. In more recent times, Patrick Pearse, Terence MacSwiney, and Erskine Childers, to name three of the most prominent leaders of the modern revolt against England, were all children of Irish and English parents. The sturdy and inherent love of liberty, so characteristic of the English, seems to germinate with remarkable speed and strength in Irish soil. So, by a strange paradox, the Irish-English have been a major factor in destroying English rule in Ireland. Their English blood, without hesitation, denied and challenged the validity of the English conquest. But, like most cross-bred peoples, the Irish-English, as I have personally experienced, suffer from the results of different inherited racial characteristics and the demands of a divided allegiance which, whilst they add to the interest of life, do not always conduce to peace of mind. [Quotes ‘Northern poet’ Richard Rowley: ‘The words I speak, my written line, / These are not uniquely mine, / For in my heart, and in my will / Old ancestors are warring still.’ Such an origin does, however, enable one to bring a charitable and comprehending mind to the consideration of Anglo-Irish differences and problems. To see the view-point of both sides enables one to understand and to pardon much that might otherwise be incomprehensible and unpardonable. [... &c.]’

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Parnell to Pearse (1948) - cont. [on the Famine:] ‘[...] there can be no doubt that a native govt. would have stopped its [food] export when famine became imminent. But even if this had been done the problem would not have been solved. The great majority of the people could not afford to buy corn, much less meat. If they did not sell their produce they could not pay their rents. The British govt. could therefore intervene to prevent famine only by a general interference with the rights of property They [11] might indeed have safeguarded those rights by compensating the landlords, but this could not have been done without violating what were regarded as the sacrosanct laws of political economy, that policy of laissez faire which forbade the state to interfere with the free play of economic forces. The workhouse thus became the only remedy for famine. ... It seemed clear that the British government did not really wish to retain the Irish people in Ireland.’ (Parnell to Pearse, 1948, p.12.)

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Parnell to Pearse (1948) - cont [on Yeats's Cathleen Ni Houlihan]: ‘No more potent lines were ever spoken on the Irish stage. All our hopes were in that answer [viz., “she had the walk of a queen”], it had an echo in every heart. It symbolised and rekindled that flame of romantic revolutionoary nationalism which was to consume so many of its devotees and which has not even yet been quenched by the healing waters of freedom and experience. Poets have much to answer for.’ (Ibid., p.94); quoted in Terence Brown, The Life of W. B. Yeats: A Critical Biography, Gill & Macmillan 1999, p.136.)

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References
James E. Doherty & D. J. Hickey, A Chronology of Irish History since 1500 (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1989): That Horgan is identified as one of the supporters of the Blueshirts in DIH.

Carty Catl. (No. 357) lists The Complete Grammar of Anarchy, by Members of the War Cabinet and their Friends (1918); see also ; Hyland Catl. (Oct.1995).

Library of Herbert Bell, Belfast holds John J. Horgan, Parnell to Pearse (Dublin 1948).

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