Kevin O’Higgins

Criticism
Terence de Vere White, Kevin O’Higgins (1948; pbk. ed. Tralee 1967); John P. McCarthy, Kevin O’Higgins: Builder of the Irish State (Blackrock: IAP 2006), xvi, 312 pp., ill. [8lvs. of pls.].

Patrick Keatinge, ‘The Formative Years of the Irish Diplomatic Service’, in Éire-Ireland, 6, 3 (Autumn 1971), pp.57-71; Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society (CUP 1989) [infra]; Rosemary Cullen Owen, ‘Kevin O’Higgins’, in Myles Dungan, ed., Speaking Ill of the Dead (New Island Press 2007) [q.pp.].

See also Michael Hopkinson, Green against Green: The Irish Civil War (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1988) [rep. 1992, 2004]; John M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1999); Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies Since 1922 (Oxford: OUP 1999); Enda McDonagh, ed., Remembering to Forgive: A Tribute to Una O’Higgins O’Malley (Dublin: Veritas 2007) [Contribs. incl. Frank Purcell, Brian Garrett, Sean Farren, Linda Hogan, Dennis Kennedy, Garret Fitzgerald, Mary Robinson, Noel Dorr, Colum Kenny, et al.]

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Commentary
W. B. Yeats, ‘Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears / A gentle questioning look that cannot hide / A soul incapable of remorse or rest’ (Collected Poems, 1955, p.368). See also Yeats’s lines: ‘Kevin O’Higgins’ countenance that wears/A gentle questioning look that cannot hide/A soul incapable of remorse or rest …’ (“Municipal Gallery Revisited”.) Note also the line ‘[If] O’Higgins its sole statesman had not died’ (“Parnell’s Funeral”).

W. B. Yeats called him ‘the one strong intellect in Irish public life’, recounting in a letter to Olivia Shakespear that O’Higgins saying to his wife, ‘Nobody can expect to live who has done what I have done. No sooner does a politician get into power than he begins to seek unpopularity. It is the cult of sacrifice planted in the nation by the executions of 1916.’ (Quoted in Frank Tuohy, Yeats, 1976, p.183; see alsoA. N. Jeffares, New Commentary on the Poems of W. B. Yeats, p.270.)

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W. B. Yeats Yeats remarked on the assassination in a letter to Olivia Shakespear of July or August 1927, asserting that George Yeats had a partial vision, which ‘had we seen more’, would have saved him. whil on the death of Kevin O’Higgins, ‘We thought this age of violence had found / One man whose will had wrought a nation’s peace / And given to men that passion he had crowned / With all the fearless intellect of Greece. / Did we forget that Athens had no room / Even under Pericles, for those who best / Had loved her, that we thought, short of the tomb / A mind like his could rest?’ (Quoted by his widow in Kevin Myers’s portrait, [Sat.] Irish Times, June 1992.) Yeats later made extended reference to O’Higgins in his notes to Collected Poems, calling called him ‘the finest intellect in Irish life and, I think I may add, to some extent my friend’ (cited in Jeffares, New Commentary, [1980], p.270).

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Donal O’Sullivan, in The Irish Free State and Its Senate (London: Faber & Faber 1940), writes of Senate tributes to O’Higgins, remarking first that ‘[e]ven after a lapse of twelve years it is difficult for anyone who enjoyed the friendship of Kevin O’Higgins to write without emotion concerning his death.’ (Quotes tributes by Lord Glenavy and Ernest Blythe’ [infra].)

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Joseph Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, Politics and Society (Cambridge UP 1989), O’Higgins, supported by Patrick Hogan, Min. for Agric., and Ernest Blythe, represented vigorous social reaction For O’Higgins, son of a doctor who also happened to hold a hundred acres, ‘the land had … always had almost emotional significance’ (de Vere White, p.1, 3). To him, the civil war [97] was more a social war than a national war. He felt ‘only a very small proportion’ of Irregular activity arose from genuine anti-Treaty motives. Most of it, he claimed, sprang from a feeling that anybody who had helped in any way against the British ‘is entitled to a parasitical millenium. Leavened in with some small amount of idealism and fanaticism, there is a good deal of greed and envy and lust and drunkenness and irresponsibility’ (O’Higgins to chairman of Comm. of Inquiry into army mutiny, 12 May 1924; memo 11 Jan. 1923). Not only must Irregulars be crushed, but illegal land-holding, refusal to pay debts, and poteen-making. ‘The problem is psychological rather than physical, we have to vindicate the idea of law and order to government, as against anarchy’ (memo 11 Jan 1923). He held ‘as a first sign of crumbling civilisation , it may be pointed out that the bailiff, as a factor in the situation, has failed…. There are large numbers of decrees (county court and high court) unexecuted in every county’ (quoted in Lyons, Ireland, p.482). Lee comments, Mulcahy himself could scarcely be called a revolutionary, but he realised that making Ireland safe for the bailiff had not featured among the more seductive slogans of the Independence struggle. [98] Mulcahy revitalised the IRB under government control when Liam Lynch sought to reorganise it in Nov. 1922, hoping to form a nucleus for an efficient army O’Higgins saw total victory as the only solution [in the civil war]. He not only felt that ‘IRB policy demanded that the Irregular snake be scotched rather than killed’ (memo, 12 Ma[y] 1924), but also dismissed the IRB as ‘a Tammany, politically irresponsible, to which members of the Dail would become the merest puppets’ (evid. to Committee, 16 May 1924). Further, O’Higgins argued before the Mutiny Committee, ‘there should be executions in every county’ because ‘local executions would tend considerably to shorten the struggle’, memo of 11 Jan 1923). [100] According to Patrick Hogan before the same committee, ‘reviving the IRB was mutiny … weakens the allegiance the soldier bears to government […] all the more serious if done officially’ [102]. Lee cites Higgins fallacious claim that ‘in 1922 the whole trend of thought in the North was to accept the situation created by the Treaty and come in, but that the civil war disillusioned their Northern bretheren. (Irish Independent, 9 Mar 1925). ALSO, Kevin O’Higgins Intoxicating Liquor Bill of Feb 1927 occasioned some unpopularity, orchestrated as protest by the drinks trade [153]. Lee’s summary of Higgins’s character, pessimistic view of human nature and Irish nature in particular; the temperament of a colonial governor; able, energetic, fearless, stern, dedicated to his concept of the public good, refusing to be cowed even by the murder of his father; few men in Irish public life have cherished to exalted a sense of the mission of the statesman to reform public morality and improve the quality of civic culture; sought to cram a century, cleansing the national character of the marks of the serf, into a few years; roused fierce resentment among intend beneficiaries. [153-54].

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Terence de Vere White interview with Mrs Brigid O’Higgins (Irish Times [in June-July] 1992): O’Higgins’s widow She later married Arthur Cox, a loyal friend of her first husband. O’Higgins is accredited with a role in world history by his leading influence on drawing up the State of Westminster which sets out the rights of the member states of the Commonwealth to equal development. Sir Sonny Ramphal, assured his Unionist host and others at a meeting of the Irish Association in Belfast City Hall in 1988 that the Free State, represented by O’Higgins, had played a historic role in fashioning the Commonwealth of 48 equal and independent nations. He was laid in state in the Mansion House Oak Room. At a Booterstown Mass in 1987, the recently named assassins and their victim were named and prayed for together in a special concelebration; his daughter is Una Higgins O’Malley.

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Roy Bradford [[with Una Higgins O’Malley], “Kevin O’Higgins”, Special Supplement with Fortnight [331] (Jan 1993); inc. short piece by Una O’Higgins O’Malley, an assessment by Roy Bradford, first delivered as a lecture to the Irish Association in Belfast, June 1992; incls.. short piece by Una O’Higgins O’Malley, an assessment by Roy Bradford, first delivered as a lecture to the Irish Association in Belfast, June 1992. Una O’Malley, the younger of his two daughters, writes: ‘The republic has not yet faced the depth of the sacrifice it may have to make before peace is established in the north.’ He claims that the territorial claims in the Constitution was foreign to his thinking, and quotes from his contribution to the treaty debate in 1921: ‘We have responsibility to all the nation and not merely to a particular political party within the nation.’ Further: ‘The welfare and happiness of the men and women and the little children of this nation must, after all, take precedence over political creeds and theories.’ (Supplement, p.3). Bradford, ‘Figure Cast in Bronze’ (pp.4-12), with photo. ills. O’Higgins, a dilettante law student at 23, present at Pearse’s graveside oration for O’Donovan Rossa (‘The fools, the fools, the fools! They have left us our Fenian dead and while Ireland holds these graves, Ireland unfree will never be at peace.’ BIOG: b. Higgins [changed to O’Higgins in 1921], Stradbally, Co Laois (Queen’s County); his mother dg. of TD Sullivan, Nation ed., and IPP MP, author of ‘God Save Ireland’; a great uncle of Kevin and one time ed. of The nation, Alexander Higgins, had been accused by the Fenians of revealing an armed conspiracy in Cork in 1857; raised on a 100 acre farm; ed. CBS, Clongowes and NUI; Yeats later remarked that his English style was ‘in the direct line of Burke’. Graduated from Clongowes with great distinction and choose to enter Maynooth; expelled from Carlow seminary after disciplinary offences involving cigarettes, of the kind that had led to his expulsion from Maynooth before; studying law at UCD in 1914; his brother Michael killed in France, another Jack, ed. TCD, became a surgeon commander on Beatty’s flagship. His own mind made up by Pearse’s oration. By 1917, he was captain of the Stradbally company of the Carlow brigade of the ‘Irish Republican army’. A canvasser for the Sinn Féin candidate, he made outstanding speech in the Carlow bye-election when pressed by Desmond Fitzgerald; sentenced to five months for seditious speaking at the Garryhinch crossroads; conducted his own defence; served his sentence in Belfast. Elected for Sinn Féin in Queen’s county, 1918. Assisted William T Cosgrave in local government ‘ministry’ of the Dail Eireann sottogoverno and simultaneously took honours in law; ran his ‘office’ on the run during the Anglo-Irish war, lodging under the name Casey; raised National Loan on putative success of future independence; fell in love with Eileen Cole, and English teacher at Knockbeg, to whom he wrote letters which have survived. Bradford writes: ‘In 1921 and 1922, when Ireland won its independence and then tore itself apart over what might have been, the genius of O’Higgins emerged for all to see: his political far-sightedness, his gift to get to, and then strike at the heart of the matter, in language both lucid and persuasive.’ In March 1922 he publicly reflected, ‘for two years the “existing republic” had existed largely in a couple of backrooms in Dublin’; His father murdered at Stradbally 11 Feb. 1923. He was alone in Irish government in standing at the cenotaph in London to honour to 50,000 Irish dead of World War One. A Treaty of Amity with Craig’s government in the North was signed in Dec. 1925. O’Higgins said, on that occasion: ‘I want to see the day when the lord mayor of Dublin is cheered on the streets of Belfast and the lord mayor of Belfast is cheered in the streets of Dublin.’ O’Higgins broached with Craig his scheme of a dual monarchy on Austro-Hungarian lines, a king crowned in Dublin by the Church of Ireland archbishop and a Catholic cardinal as well as at Westminster. Assassinated 10 July 1927. Dying at home, for six hours, and conscious, he made farewells, and said of de Valera: ‘Tell my colleagues they must beware of him in public life; he will play down to the weaknesses of the people.’ Further, [Defending the decision to execute four prisoners in Mountjoy, including Roderick O’Connor, best man at his own wedding, following the assassination of TD’s on 7 December and the burning of senators’ houses, &c.:] ‘There was talk here of the rules of war and the laws of war .. and the deputy [Gavan Duffy] who with a kind of doll’s house mind comes here to talk of the rules of war, was careful to say little of the practices of war .. while the life of the nation is being threatened there is but one code, a grim code .. salus populi suprema lex.’ [9] Accused of personal vindictiveness, he cried: ‘This was never an act done through personal vengeance, never an act done through hot blood. We have no higher aim than to place the people of Ireland in the saddle and to let them do their will. But we will not acquiesce in gun-bullying and we will take very stern and drastic measures to stop it. Personal spite! Vindictiveness! Great heavens! One of these men was a friend of mine’ [O’Higgins was unable to continue]. Churchill wrote of the events: ‘These men, although deeply troubled in their soul, were courageous and hot-blooded and, driven as they had been into a corner with their lives at stake - and far more than their lives, the cause they had conducted so far - they hit back with primordial freedom.’ [9-10]

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Charles Townsend, reviewing Eunan O’Halpin, Defending Ireland: The Irish State and its Enemies since 1922 (OUP), writes of O’Higgins: ‘His role in the execution without trial of four IRA leaders in Dec. 1922 is notorious, and the Free State’s forces may have killed another 150 prisoners in custody or “attempting to escape”. O’Higgins represents the split nature of the Irish State, harping on about the rule of law, while repeatedly setting it aside.’ (Times Literary Supplement, 7 Jan. 2000, p.22.)

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Quotations
Treaty negotiations: ‘At the last moment [of the Treaty negotiations] the terms were put up not for bargain but as the price of signatures. There were big improvements in the final document - improvements affecting trade, defence and Ulster .. a sovereign and independent republic was our claim and our fighting ground .. but we would do well to scrutinise the document not so much in relation to the inscription on our battle standards but in relation to our prospects of achieving more […; de Valera and Stack knew] in their own hearts and consciences that we were not entitled to plunge the plain people of Ireland into a terrible war for the difference between the terms of this treat and what they knew a united cabinet would recommend to the Dáil. […] if we go into the Empire we go in, not sliding in attempting to throw dust in people’s eyes, but with heads held high. […] I believe the evolution of this group [the Commonwealth] must be towards a condition, not merely of individual freedom but also equality of status. […] I do the English people the justice of believing that they would gladly have endorsed a more generous measure [than Lloyd George] […] I do hope and believe with the disappearance of old passions and distrusts […] what remains may be won by agreement and peaceful political evolution.’ (Quoted in Bradford, “Kevin O’Higgins” [Special Supplement], Fortnight [331], Jan. 1993 [supra].)

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Wild men: O'Higgins addressed Irish Society at Oxford asserting that Ireland was emerging successfully from turbulence by overcoming the ‘savage, primitive passion’ of irregulars, 1924 - as a government consisting in ‘simply eight young men in City Hall. standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the keyholes’. (Quoted in Diramaid Ferriter, review of Donal P. Corcoran, Freedom to Achieve Freedom: The Irish Free State 1922-1932, in The Irish Times, 1 Feb. 2014, Weekend Review, p.11 - calling that work ‘disappointing’ and ‘bland’).

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Ireland in 1922: ‘To appreciate Ireland in 1922 it is necessary to remember that the country had come through a revolution and to remember what a weird composite of idealism, neurosis, megalomania and criminality is apt to be thrown to the surface. The provision government was simply eight young men in the City Hall standing amid the ruins of one administration, with the foundations of another not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the keyhole.’ (O’Higgins in Dail, 1922; quoted in Bradford, op. cit., [supra], 1993).

Against the motion (War Memorial in Merrion Square:) ‘I do not want a little park on front of this state’s seat of Government dedicated to those who fell in the War’ (7 April, 1927; cited Sighle Bhreatnach-Lynch, ACIS paper 1998.)

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Besieged: ‘We were seven young men living in canvas beds in a besieged parliament while wild men were screaming down the keyhole.’ (O’Higgins’s explanation of the executions of Liam Mellows, Rory O’Connor, Dick Barrett, and Joe McKelvey in reprisal for the assassination of Seán Hales, TD, and the wounding of Padraig Ó Maille, deputy-chairman of the Dáil, in 1922; q. source.)

On Irish Protestants: ‘These people are part and parcel of the country, and we being the majority and strength of the country […I]t comes well from us to make a generous adjustment to show that these people are regarded, not as alien enemies, not as planters, but that we regard them as part and parcel of the nation, and that we wish them to take their share of its responsibilities.’ (Kevin O’Higgins, 1922; quoted as epigraph in Jack White, Minority Report: The Anatomy of the Southern Irish Protestant, Chap. 8: “Part and Parcel”, p.91.) See further, ‘O’Higgins had called upon the Protestant minority to ‘take its share of the responsibilities’ of running the country […]’ (White, op. cit., 1975, p.92 [link].)

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Foresees his death: ‘“Nobody can expect to live long who has done what I have done” [was] a phrase of O’Higgins’s that W. B. Yeats’s was frequently to cite.’ (A. N. Jeffares, New Commentary, 1988, p.271). Also quoted in Richard Kain, Dublin in the Age of William Butler Yeats and James Joyce (Oklahoma UP 1962; Newton Abbot: David Charles 1972), p.102 - who also quotes his purported dying words, ‘I forgive my murderers’ (idem.).

Letter to Lady Lavery (27 Oct. 1922), regarding the appt. of Healy to the Governorship and with clear political intent: ‘[…] You cannot measure the effect it would have here if they agreed to appoint me. It would be worth more than a completely smashing military victory. If they are statesmen they will do it - if they are merely politicians they probably won’t, and a wonderful opportunity will have been lost.’ The letter was passed in time to the Colonial Sec., Duke of Devonshire.’ (Quoted in Frank Callanan, T. M. Healy,Cork UP 1966, p.597.)

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References
R. F. Foster, Modern Ireland (1988), gives bio-details: Kevin Christopher O’Higgins, joined Sinn Féin while a student; imprisoned in German Plot arrests, 1918; MP Queen’s Co., 1918; Asst. Local Minister for Locl. Govt in Dáil, 1919; Minister Economic Affairs, Justice, and External Affairs, 1922-27; defended execution of 77; shot by IRA gunmen. Kevin O’Higgins arguing for the Treaty, stressed that it was the only alternative to ‘a war in which there would have been no question of a military victory’ [501]; O’Higgins roughly defined the opposition to the new government as 20% idealism 20% crime, and 60% ‘sheer futility’ [508]; when O’Higgin’s declared that a man who killed without a constitutional mandate was a murderer, Liam Mellows interjected reasonably enough, “Easter Week” [510]; referred to Pearse’s social ideals esp. regarding state ownership of natural resources as “largely poetry” [521]; gave special powers over army to Garda Commissioner Eoin O’Duffy enforcing resignation of Mulchay and others [524]; O’Higgin’s assassination gave govt. opportunity to enforce Oath of Fidelity under Emergency Laws [526]; O’Higgins actually claimed that most northern nationalists were happy to leave the border as it was [531]; Mulcahy discerns a “Ballsbridge” complex seeking to unseat O’Higgins, in 1926 [533]; assassination of, in chronology [615].

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Notes
Liam O’Flaherty’s novel The Assassin (1928), which ascribes a mixture of Nietzchean and Dostoievskian motives to the leading conspirator, is loosely based on the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins.

Re/publicans: Reputedly when Kevin O’Higgins introduced legislation to alcohol abuses in the drink trade, the strong opposition that he met with from the drink trade moved him to say that the publicans were harder to deal with than the Republicans. (See ‘Alcoholism’, in W. J. McCormack, ed., Blackwell Companion to Modern Irish Culture, 1999.)

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Love, letters: Over 50 letters chronicling the love affair between Kevin O’Higgins and Hazel Lavery, wife of the painter Sir John Lavery, were discovered in 1991 by Mrs Alice Gwynn, Lady Lavery’s daughter and author of a biography of Lady Lavery. The letters went on show at the Municipal Gallery, Dublin, in the “Society and Policitics” exhibition (Sept. 1996; see review by Brian Fallon, Irish Times, 25 Sept. 1996, in Library, infra).

Platonic?: Rory Brennan, reviewing John MacCarthy, Kevin O’Higgins, in Books Ireland (Sept. 2006), remarks that the author believes O’Higgins’s relationship with Hazel Lavery was platonic.

Women non-jurors: O’Higgins was determined to exclude women from jury-duty in order to preserve them from exposure to information about rape and sodomy. (See Rosemary Cullen Owen, ‘Kevin O’Higgins’, in Myles Dungan, ed., Speaking Ill of the Dead,New Island Press 2007; noticed in Books Ireland, Summer 2008.)

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