The Curious Case of the Mayo Librarian (22 page)

The Irish correspondent of the
Round Table
claimed that the outcome was ‘fair to the lady, soothing to the Mayo bigots and good for the government.'
1
This was not a view shared by all. The
Catholic Bulletin
was disapproving of the government's actions. Under the headline ‘The Mayo Collapse and its Sequels', it argued, using an extended martial metaphor; ‘With his usual ineptitude and even more than his usual clumsiness of procedure, the politico-military bully has evacuated the Mayo front … So a new post was created: that eminent literary man, Minister Fitzgerald, had to develop a need for a librarian. The pretence of unbending firmness was kept up to the last moment, for with the usual tenacity of the politico-military bully, it was denied and delayed until it was clearly a rout, not a retreat.'
2

The
Catholic Mind
adopted a slightly different tack. ‘It is not putting it too bluntly,' it wrote, ‘to state that Miss Dunbar Harrison was ruthlessly sacrificed to the interests of the Cumann na nGaedheal candidates in County Mayo … it was an act of political corruption, so clumsily performed that no one with any intelligence was fooled by it.'
3
This new-found compassion for Miss Dunbar Harrison was used as a stick with which to beat the government. ‘Nobody has apologised yet to Miss Harrison for the indignities to which she has been subjected,' continued the
Catholic Mind
. ‘On behalf not only of ourselves but of the Catholics of Mayo whose mind in the matter has been made clear to us by several of the most influential of the clergy of Tuam, we offer her our sympathy … may Miss Harrison's days be long and happy.'
4
Given all that had gone before one can only wonder at the sincerity of these best wishes.

It is possible to exaggerate the sectarian element to the opposition but, as previously mentioned, a dislike of outsiders was not confined to Mayo. Kathleen White faced similar resistance in Leitrim, if on a lesser scale.

In Clare, Dermot Foley had substantial difficulties when he was appointed county librarian. ‘In March 1931, at the tender age of twenty-three, he was recommended for the post of librarian. Initially the council refused to appoint Mr Foley, and proposed to delay his appointment for six months pending the improvement of his knowledge of the Irish language. However, under the threat of legal action from the Department of Local Government, a special meeting was called on 9 July 1931 and it was agreed to appoint Mr Foley.'
5
A Dubliner, he was not exactly welcomed with open arms.
6
As he described it himself, ‘An hour or so before the first meeting of the library committee, a small packet was delivered to me by post. It was a tin box marked Oxo, but when I unwrapped the rolled up piece of paper, there were no soup cubes. Instead, out fell two .45 bullets. There was a short message, headed with a skull and cross-bones. “Get out of the county,” it said, “you have a Clareman's job.”'
7

The main reason the locals took an instant dislike to Dermot Foley seemed to be that he was taking the job of a good Clareman. This was akin to the argument used against Kathleen White in Leitrim, that by being selected as county librarian, and coming all the way from Laois, she had caused one more poor local to emigrate. This excessive regionalism was essentially a form of xenophobia. The difference in these cases from that of Letitia Dunbar Harrison, was that religion was not an exacerbating factor, fanning the flames. Miss Dunbar Harrison was seen as even more of an outsider, on the grounds of education and class as well as religion. The Irish language, the pretext for her rejection, seemed hardly relevant at all.

Kathleen White survived in Leitrim, as did Dermot Foley, after a fashion, in Clare. He lasted the best part of twenty-three years as county librarian so he was presumably not particularly perturbed by his initial reception. Dermot Foley later moved on to Cork and eventually became director of An Comhairle Leabharlanna, the state's library authority, which was formed in 1947. He had survived in Clare though he did not exactly thrive there, having entered into many a battle with the library committee, the County Council and a specially constituted fifty-strong censorship board.
8

Letitia Dunbar Harrison on the other hand was never going to last in Mayo. The forces arrayed against her were too strong. While maintaining a strong front publicly, the Cumann na nGaedheal government had tacitly accepted at an early stage of their private meetings with members of the Catholic hierarchy that she would have to be moved. In the transcribed memorandum of the meeting between President Cosgrave and Archbishop Gilmartin on 15 April 1931, it was stated ‘that while no promise in writing could be made, and nothing done immediately, if it were possible to do so, the government at a suitable time, would see whether a position elsewhere could be found for Miss Dunbar.'
9
In other words the government was waiting for the opportune moment, when the hubbub had died down, to quietly move her on. With this strategy, as with many of their actions throughout the affair, the government proved unsuccessful. Almost every newspaper pointed out the proximity of a general election as the impetus for Miss Dunbar Harrison's ‘promotion' to the Department of Defence in January 1932. In fact the
Catholic Bulletin
insisted on taking things a step further. It accused the government of the Machiavellian policy of backing her while at the same time hoping and indeed encouraging her to resign of her own volition. This would have got them off the hook. It was only when she showed admirable stubbornness that they were forced to act themselves. The outcome of the whole affair could hardly be labelled a victory for central government.

While many people linked the government's movement on the stalemate with the imminent announcement of a general election, it is difficult to gauge the electoral impact of the dispute. The Dáil was dissolved shortly afterwards, on 29 January 1932. The election was held on Tuesday, 16 February. The successful candidates in Mayo received the following first-preference votes.

Fianna Fáil gained one seat in Mayo but at the expense, not of Cumann na nGaedheal, but of the Labour Party, whose leader T.J. O'Connell lost his seat in Mayo South. Thomas O'Connell, who was also general secretary of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation, had opposed the appointment of Letitia Dunbar Harrison on the basis that his party had not agreed with the setting up of the Local Appointments Commission in the first place. He had also questioned the dissolution of Mayo County Council. There is no record of him speaking out against the sectarian element of the antagonism towards Miss Dunbar Harrison as might have been expected of the leader of the Labour Party.

Prior to the assassination of Kevin O'Higgins, the Labour Party had led the parliamentary resistance to the incumbent government, but once Fianna Fáil had changed their abstentionist policy and taken their seats, the Labour Party found itself vying with the numerically superior Fianna Fáil to make an impact.
The Watchword
of Labour, the party's weekly newspaper had, on the other hand, been broadly supportive of the government's actions. It is more likely that Thomas O'Connell's silence on the sectarian component of the disagreement was for purely local reasons, and that realising what a contentious issue it was, he had tried not to antagonise anybody. Overall, Labour's nationwide performance in the election was atrocious. Of the party's thirty-three candidates, just under half lost their deposits.
10

Moreover, it cannot be said that Mr O'Connell lost his seat in Mayo due to his actions or his inaction with regard to the Miss Dunbar Harrison affair. In fact it is difficult to see what effect, if any, the affair had on the voting patterns in Mayo. The librarian issue cannot be said to have had a drastic effect on the Cumann na nGaedheal Party vote but as most of their public representatives had taken an anti-government stance on the controversy that hardly proves anything one way or the other. Mr Fitzgerald-Kenney, the outgoing Minister for Justice and the only Mayo TD to vote with the government in the Dáil debate on 17 June 1931, actually topped the poll in Mayo South.

Nationwide Fianna Fáil won seventy-two seats compared to fifty-six seats for Cumann na nGaedheal. The Labour Party lost six seats. On 9 March Eamon de Valera was elected President of the Executive Council by eighty-one votes to sixty-eight. Mayo TD P.J. Ruttledge was appointed Minister for Agriculture in the new administration.

It was a number of years before the new government eventually restored Mayo County Council. Commissioner P.J. Bartley maintained a good working relationship with Fianna Fáil, and at a later date he was appointed commissioner to Westmeath and to Laois. In 1942, following the Local Government (County Management) Act of 1940, he became one of the first newly created county managers for Laois where he had previously acted as Commissioner. One could argue that county managers were given many of the executive functions that commissioners had exercised in the past, so P.J. Bartley was well suited to his new role.

One other civil servant was not quite so fortunate. Fianna Fáil's antipathy to E.P. McCarron had not abated. In 1935 he was dismissed after falling out with his new minister, Seán T. O'Kelly. He was one of the few secretaries of departments in the history of the state to be clearly forced out of office due to a dispute with his minister. The immediate cause of his removal was that he was accused of exceeding his authority in sanctioning an appointment to a medical post in Grangegorman and Portrane mental hospitals.
11
The government could at least take some satisfaction in their stout defence of the Local Appointments Commission. If they had allowed Mayo County Council to overrule its recommendation it is doubtful that the LAC could have survived. The LAC together with the Civil Service Commission are generally regarded as examples of the successes of the Cumann na nGaedheal government's decade in office. The merit-based central recruitment agency is still in existence today. In 2004 the civil service and Local Appointments Commission were merged into one body, becoming the Public Appointments Service. As regards recruitment, librarians are still required to have a working knowledge of Irish.

Mayo County Council was not restored until May 1932, following a prolonged eight-hour meeting. Canon McHugh, who was a supporter of Commissioner Bartley, was removed from all committees. Rev. Jackson and Dr McBride were also voted off the library committee.
12
The post of county librarian in Mayo was eventually filled in October 1932 by Kathleen Ronaldson, who had been an assistant librarian in Galway. Incidentally, she was a Catholic.

Notes

1.
Quoted by Dermot Keogh,
Twentieth-Century Ireland
, p.58.

2.
Catholic Bulletin
, vol. xxii, no. 2, February 1932, p.60.

3.
Catholic Mind
, vol. iii, no. 2, February 1932, p.31.

4.
Ibid.

5.
www.clarelibrary.ie/eolas/library/history/colibser.htm.

6.
Clare Champion
, 25 September 1998, p.13.

7.
Dermot Foley, op. cit., p.208.

8.
Ibid.

9.
NAI D/Taioseach S2547B.

10.
Niamh Puirseil,
The Irish Labour Party 1922-73,
p. 37.

11.
Mary E. Daly, op. cit., p.163.

12.
Connacht Sentinel
, 3 May 1932, p.4.

The actions of Mayo County Council did not go unnoticed in the North of Ireland. St John Ervine, in his biography of Lord Craigavon published in 1949, gave a detailed account of the dispute. ‘It is dangerous,' he concluded, ‘apparently, to the faith and morals of an Irish Roman Catholic to receive across a library counter a copy of
David Copperfield
; if, that is to say,
David Copperfield
, which was written by a Protestant, and one, moreover, who was antipathetic to Roman Catholicism, would be permitted to lie on the bookshelves of Ballinrobe and Ballina.'
1

Seán O Faoláin, in his biography of Eamon de Valera, pub-lished in 1939, declared that while the pious aspirations of the Constitution might guarantee religious tolerance, there was as little chance of Protestants in the South getting the same share of public appointments as Catholics in the North. He then referred to ‘the furore raised when a Protestant girl was appointed librarian in Mayo …' He concluded that, ‘Neither North nor South need pretend that the other is alone in this kind of penalisation on account of religion and private opinion. Religion in the South is just as solidly organised as in the North, and is no less narrowminded.'

Discrimination in the North was much remarked upon. Reactions differed. Anything that they can do, we can do too, was one response. No matter what was done down South it was worse up there, was another.

In later years the Mayo librarian affair was seen as a telling moment in church-state relations in the formative years of the Free State. Michael D. Higgins was particularly critical of Fianna Fáil's stance. ‘De Valera,' he said, ‘had provided the good people of Irishtown with an exercise in casuistry that must have left the three-card-trick man of Ballinrobe Races without a shred of credibility. If the librarianship was an “educative” post, he could understand Catholics requiring to be recommended books by a Catholic librarian and so on. If Miss Letitia was suddenly dumb she would no doubt have satisfied.'
2

De Valera's standpoint on the Mayo librarian issue has been criticised. Garret Fitzgerald mentioned the affair in a critical analysis of Eamon de Valera's constitutional politics, which he saw as sectarian. Historian John A. Murphy, in a senate debate in 1981, referred to the outcome of the affair, stating that Letitia Dunbar Harrison was transferred ‘to an army barracks where it is presumed the denizens were too corrupt to be corrupted by a Protestant librarian.'
3
Diarmuid Ferriter in his broadly favourable recent biography of de Valera describes his attitude to the issue as ‘regrettable'. T.P. O'Neill, an earlier biographer, also defended his subject against any claim of sectarianism. ‘De Valera's statement,' he wrote, ‘was certainly not as considered as his later speeches were but he is not alone in that.' Mr O'Neill added, ‘The whole affair was ineptly handled by the government of the day.'
4
Undoubtedly, the Cumann na nGaedheal government's handling of the crisis was less than assured. Always one step behind, they appeared to react to circumstances rather than to take control of the situation.

The segregation of the Protestant minority in the new state was much remarked upon. Even Trinity College had suffered a crisis of confidence in the aftermath of Independence. As one history of the university puts it, the period was one of ‘adjustment and survival', where ‘the most unhealthy aspect of the college's situation was its growing isolation from the main currents of national life.'
5

Hubert Butler was a Protestant who had himself worked with Sir Horace Plunkett as a librarian in Ireland in the 1920s. In 1955 he went forward as a candidate for election to Kilkenny County Council. He was not successful. In an election address at the time, he spoke about the cultural and political isolation of the Protestant minority. He was particularly critical of the Protestant community for not getting more involved in Irish society in the twenty-six counties in the immediate aftermath of Independence. ‘As an Irish county librarian,' he declared, ‘I saw many years ago how it was usually through their own inertia that Irish Protestants lost cultural influence in the provinces.'
6
Referring directly to the Mayo librarian affair, he commented, ‘The government supported the Protestant candidate, but their stand received only lukewarm support from the Protestant community and ultimately the government capitulated.'
7

Neal Ascherson, in his introduction to a collection of Hubert Butler's writings, refers to this isolation as a form of ‘inner emigration'.

It is little wonder that the minority community were nervous. In March 1932, there was an attempt by the
Catholic Mind
to broaden the scope of the Mayo affair by stirring up a similar quarrel in Cork. The
Catholic
Mind
published an anonymous letter in which the writer complained that it was impossible to get a Catholic Bible in Cork city library, whose librarian, a certain Mr Wilkinson, was a Protestant. According to the periodical, ‘This case proves that it is the librarian who counts. No matter how well disposed the non-Catholic librarian may be, he cannot possibly be expected to get inside the Catholic mind. Mayo was right.'
8
Given the lack of local support, this controversy fizzled out, but public servants like Mr Wilkinson can hardly have felt secure given what had happened in Mayo. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that the most vehement and vocal opposition to Letitia Dunbar Harrison's appointment was representative of general opinion in the country.

In 1936 Fr Stephen Brown published a commentary that was severely critical of the
Catholic Bulletin
. ‘The tone of editorials and articles,' he wrote, ‘was marked by violence of language. The Cosgrave government was assailed in every issue with extreme virulence. And both Catholics and Protestants who did not meet with the editor's approval were held up to scorn and obloquy.' In reply to this outright attack, Fr Brown's fellow Jesuit, Fr Timothy Corcoran, seemed quite happy to accept the charge of extremism. ‘For Catholics who deliberately place themselves in contact with plague-bearing insects,' Fr Corcoran said, ‘a drastic disinfection process is quite in order … persons whose ebullient brains are poorly underpinned by wobbly knees.'
9

Some personal joy had come of Letitia Dunbar Harrison's time in Mayo. She had met Rev. Robert C. Crawford, a Methodist minister originally from Belfast who was based in Castlebar at the time. They were married in St Philip's Church, Milltown, County Dublin, at the end of June 1932, by which stage Rev. Crawford had finished his five-year stint in Mayo and had transferred to Dundalk. Letitia Dunbar Harrison worked in the Military Library based in Parkgate Street for just a short period. Her colleague Mr Flood has left a description of the working conditions there:

The present library premises, though suitable as a housing room for books does not answer the purpose for clerical duties. The room is long and very draughty. There are six ventilators and all seem to be open and out of order. The fire is continually smoking and distributing soot and fine ashes around the place. The windows are all loose and create an abominable noise even in the slightest breeze. On a very windy day it is impossible to concentrate on work with the din created.
10

Letitia Dunbar Harrison's duty as librarian consisted mainly in organising the purchase of books such as
Elements of Imperial Defence
,
The Battle of Dora and The Intelligence Service – Canadian Corps
. Their spending fund for the year April 1931–March 1932 was £600.

On her marriage, Letitia resigned and Mr R.J. Flood returned to writing letters of supplication to his superiors. On 17 July 1932 he wrote, ‘the resignation of Miss Letitia Harrison in June last has had the effect of imposing extra duties on me and at the moment I find myself again in the unhappy position of combining two jobs in the working time of one.'

In his career as a Methodist minister, Rev. Crawford served in a number of towns during the 1930s and 1940s. He and Letitia travelled several of the southern circuits. They lived for some time in Dundalk, followed by Adare and Roscrea. In later years the couple settled in Whitehead in Northern Ireland, a coastal town near Carrickfergus not far from Belfast, where Rev. Crawford exercised his ministry. Letitia suffered the premature loss of her husband after just twenty years of marriage when Rev. Crawford died in 1952. The death notice in
The Irish Times
described him as a ‘dearly loved husband'.
11

By this stage, Letitia Dunbar Harrison was known as Aileen Crawford, and was perhaps happy to spend her days in quiet obscurity, living out her life away from the glare of controversy and public scrutiny that had plagued her in the Free State. She did, however, have at least one other brush with authority in her lifetime. After her husband's death Aileen Crawford ‘developed the conviction that she should continue his work.'
12
She successfully completed her local preachers' examinations and became an accredited local preacher. Much to the consternation of the Methodist church in Ireland, she then presented herself as a candidate for the ministry; she was the first Irish woman to do so. The board of examiners ‘could find nothing in the rules as then formulated to say that all candidates must be men.' However, to the undoubted relief of the board, Mrs Crawford failed one of the written examinations, the one on knowledge of the scriptures. Nevertheless, as the first woman to apply for the ministry she was the catalyst that led to the Methodist church in Ireland in 1954 considering the matter of women ministers. A report was presented at conference in 1955. The Theological Committee found that ‘there is no obstacle in Holy Scripture, in the tradition of the church, or in the nature of woman to prevent the ordination of women to a separated ministry in the church.'

Turning to the practicalities of the matter, the committee discussed the physical strain involved in many of the country circuits, the attitude of individual circuits to the appointment of a woman as their minister and the effect on circuit work of the possible claims of motherhood and domestic responsibilities. They then indicated the first essentials that must be satisfied before a woman could be admitted, and these were three:

1. The legal alteration of the Constitution.

2. The elucidation of the problem, both legal and practical, of the occupancy of the manses by men not subject to Methodist discipline.

3. The re-adjustment of the regulations governing the administration of the supernumerary, children's and annuitant funds.

Given that list of essentials, it will come as no surprise that the membership of the Theological and Sectional Committees was entirely male. The report concluded that, ‘In view of the absence of any clearly defined or generally expressed desire on the part of our people for the admission of women into the full ministry of our church, no legislative action be taken at this juncture.'
13

Essentially it was felt that while there was no doctrinal reason why women could not be ministers, there were a number of practical considerations, the most telling of which was that it was felt that none of the circuits at that time were likely to employ a woman. Though nothing came of the debate at that time, it was to remain a live issue in the Methodist church for the following decades. The first woman Methodist minister was not ordained until the mid-1970s.

Perhaps Aileen Crawford had been naïve in accepting the post in Mayo in the first place, given the level of opposition she was bound to encounter. But then jobs were not that easy to come by for educated young women in Ireland in the 1930s. And she did not have the safeguard of any employment legislation to protect her from discrimination as she undoubtedly would if the same situation occurred today.

Aileen Crawford redirected her energies to other areas. She showed a strong interest in the temperance movement and was a school lecturer for the temperance board. She also became heavily involved in the Methodist Women's Association and was the all-Ireland secretary from 1945 to 1959 and subsequently all-Ireland president from 1959 to 1962. Her interest in the temperance movement led to a visit to Delhi in 1962 as a delegate to a White Ribbon Conference, from where she went to visit the missionaries Dorothy Robb in South India and George Good in Sri Lanka. She was also involved with Meals on Wheels and a friendship club for pensioners at University Road Methodist church.
14

Following in the footsteps of her husband, Aileen Crawford was a regular contributor to the Methodist paper, the
Irish Christian Advocate
, first writing under the pseudonym ‘Miss Silver Birch, BA'. When she married, she became just ‘Silver Birch, BA'. And when she acquired an MA from Trinity College in her later years (i.e. she purchased it), the byline on her articles was changed from ‘Silver Birch, BA' to ‘Silver Birch, MA'.

Given Aileen Crawford's treatment at the hands of the government, Mayo County Council and the people of Mayo, it is hardly surprising that she did not pursue a career in librarianship. She died in Belfast in October 1994 at the fine old age of eighty-eight.

Notes

1.
St John Ervine,
Craigavon Ulsterman,
p.41.

2.
City Tribune
, 21 August 1987, p.10.

3.
Seanad Eireann Debates, 9 October 1981.

4.
The Irish Times
, 1 March 1982, p.10.

5.
J.V. Luce,
Trinity College Dublin: The First 400 Years
, p.142.