Who is who in Ireland

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From The Times Literary SupplementFebruary 3, 2010

Who was who in Ireland?

Saints to singers, politicians to painters: a work set to

transform the world of Irish scholarship

The definition of Irishness is notoriously contested, which is perhaps the reason why the Irishhave had to wait so long for a dictionary of national biography. Individual and rather scrappyvolumes have long circulated, notably by Alfred Henry Webb (1878), John S. Crone (1928) andHenry Boylan (1979); but otherwise, prosopographical guides tended to be organized by genre orsubject, such as Padraic OFarrells useful Whos Who in the Irish War of Independence 19161922 (1980), later extended into Whos Who in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War

19161923, Walter Stricklands venerable but invaluable Dictionary of Irish Artists (1913), orBrian Cleeves three-volume Dictionary of Irish Writers (196771: updated, with Anne Brady, asA Biographical Dictionary of Irish Writers in 1985). The standard of biographical entry becamea good deal more demanding with the appearance of Oxford University Presss large-scaleCompanions to Irish literature and to Irish history, edited respectively in 1996 and 1998 byRobert Welch and Sean Connolly, but the people whose lives were covered were necessarilyselective. Now, at last, we have a large-scale multi-volume Dictionary, available online(dib.cambridge.org) or in nine thumping volumes. It is packed with detailed entries, all of themsigned, and accompanied by guides to sources; the trawl is laudably ambitious, and the editoriallabour Herculean. This project has come in triumphantly on time; and many of the entriesincorporate very recent scholarship, though some do show signs of having been composed some

time ago. Previous compendium-projects in Irish academe have not always proceeded smoothly,with histories of running badly behind schedule and producing work that is inconsistent inapproach or outdated by the time it is printed; the Dictionary of Irish Biography has vindicatedthe format. It is safe to say that it will transform the world of Irish scholarship.

The obvious comparison is with the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, published fiveyears ago, and this Cambridge project can stand the test. Though the online version does nothave the ODNBs lavish visual material and the range is necessarily far narrower, theauthoritativeness, balance and eye for a telling detail are of the same order. The new Dictionaryof Irish Biography is also similarly user-friendly. Online searching is both flexible andsophisticated; besides text-search, subjects can be tracked by date (or place) of birth and death,floruit dates, gender, religion, profession or career. The ODNB, of course, includes many entrieson Irish subjects, up to independence and slightly beyond; in fact, the new DIB opens with thesame person as Leslie Stephens old DNB, a seventeenth-century Dean of Killaloe with the hard-to-trump surname Abbadie. (It ends with the balladeer Michael Moran, aka Zozimus.)

However, Irish incursors into the DNB in both its previous incarnations tend to be people whoselives impinged on British consciousness and experience, whether through politics, war or culture.The wide range of people covered in the DIB provides a profile of life within the island from the


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earliest times to 2002. As with the ODNB, the editors, James McGuire and James Quinn, haveclearly made a decision to take in those often excluded from official Irish history, for reasonsof disreputability or gender. Their introduction makes clear that achievement rather thanposition has been taken as the benchmark; election to the House of Commons or Dil ireann,or religious preferment, is not an automatic passport to inclusion. Our abiding criterion has been

to include those names which seem most likely to be the objects of enquiry in the twenty-firstcentury. There are many entries on women and artists, conveying a great deal of unfamiliar andvaluable information; criminals and black sheep also feature, and a fair number of boxers, hurlersand footballers have shouldered their way in. The worlds of Irish academe and intelligentsia aregenerously treated. And not the least attractive feature of this enterprise is its adherence to thetradition of Irish historical scholarship (as reflected in the Committee of Irish HistoricalSciences, or the journal Irish Historical Studies) which embraces the whole island: there is anevident wish to pay close attention to Northern Ireland in its various spheres of activity andachievement.

Taken all in all, it cannot have been easy. Starting in those earliest times, particular difficulties of

identification and confusion are inseparable from medieval Irish history, especially where saintsand scholars are concerned: two Marianus Scottuses flourish at exactly the same time, and thereare three different entries for Mo-Chua, Crnn, saint in the Irish tradition, spanning the sixthand seventh centuries. Their respective cults and activities are briskly sorted out by Ailbhe MacShamhrin, who also deals with a horde of Vikings and minor kings. Irish pseudonyms alsocreate problems. A search for Mary Anne Kelly, who wrote poetry for the Nation in the 1840sunder the pseudonym Eva, yielded no cross-references under Kelly, Mary Anne or Eva;she turns up rather illogically alphabeticized as Kelly \[Mary Anne\], Eva (an excellent entryby Brega Webb and Frances Clarke). This is just one instance where looking up entries onlineprobably yields a quicker result than doing so in print.

The approach to who qualifies is also engagingly broad. Those who were born in Ireland butachieved fame elsewhere find their place, even when their parentage was for instance English. The painter Francis Bacon is a good example; an Irish childhood in County Kildarehorse-racing circles qualifies him for a long entry, ending with the point that his legendary SouthKensington studio is now a permanent installation in Dublins Hugh Lane Gallery. This brilliantcoup de thtre by the gallerys director reclaimed Bacon for Ireland at a stroke, and the processis confirmed by his inclusion here. Margarita Cappocks useful entry is less racy than recentBaconian commentary by John Richardson and others; sexual masochism goes unmentioned,though the concept of conscious sadism turns up unabashedly in the long entry on someoneelse not often seen as primarily Irish, C. S. Lewis. Lewiss biography here is one of several toursde force by Patrick Maume, who has contributed many entries distinguished for theirintelligence, imagination and concise but thought-provoking judgements. Lewis the Ulsterman isgiven his due: Prince Caspians discovery that he is the descendant of pirates who conqueredNarnia, massacred the native population and pretended that they never existed is not simply acritique of ahistoric rationalism. It is occasionally suggested that a Hibernocentric Lewis seekingthe Celtic Twilight instead of the Nordic myths might have been a greater artist, but he mightalso have been a provincial crank, as were several of his intellectually frustrated relatives.


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Editorial inclusiveness is also practised concerning people who were born and largely livedoutside Ireland but exercised a notable influence on the country. There are exceptions (noCasimir Markievicz, though he was active in the theatre movement with his wife Constance) andthe principle immediately raises some knotty problems, especially where politicians areconcerned. British people who held office in Ireland qualify for an entry, but not those politicians

who made Ireland a special interest or cause. Thus William Ewart Gladstone is missing; thoughhe only visited Ireland once, he arguably left a more lasting impression on Irish policy than anyother British politician. (Oliver and Henry Cromwell do receive authoritative and absorbingentries, by John Morrill and Toby Barnard respectively). By the same token, the long-forgottenseventh Duke of Marlborough qualifies for an entry because of his stint as Viceroy in the 1870s,but not his son Lord Randolph Churchill (whose disgrace at court precipitated the appointment).

However, Lord Randolph spent much of his short but meteoric career absorbed in Irish affairs,actually lobbied to become Irish Chief Secretary (no doubt seen by some as an early sign of thedementia that killed him), and famously travelled to Ulster in 1886 to endorse Unionistresistance to Home Rule. It is true that Lord Randolph is, to a certain extent, smuggled in under

his fathers entry, a strategy also employed elsewhere as with the Maxwell family, where theentry on the tenth Baron Farnham segues neatly into an account of his successor, or with wholeclutches of socialite Guinnesses. Families of painters such as the Mulvanys or the Robertses alsosometimes share entries; thus the promotional material can boast 9000 entries, but 9,700lives. All this extends the trawl usefully, but is not an aid when using the Dictionary by strictalphabetical order.

Politicians are generally given a good deal of space. The lengthy entries awarded to amon deValera and Sen Lemass (both by Ronan Fanning, both excellent) were rather preeninglyhighlighted by the current Taoiseach, Brian Cowen, at the Dublin launch of the Dictionary;perhaps fortunately for the purposes of Fianna Fils continuing enterprise of self-congratulation,

Charles James Haughey died too late for inclusion. One eagerly anticipates his entry in a futurevolume. More obscure figures are often treated generously: eighteen columns, for instance,awarded to Timothy Michael Healy, antiParnellite and first Governor-General of the Free State.This is contributed by Healys biographer Frank Callanan, who also writes thirty-two exemplarycolumns on Parnell; full of interesting quotations and with a lengthy coda summing up aspects ofhis career, it stands as a Brief Life in itself.

The other giant of nineteenth-century Irish politics, Daniel OConnell, receives eighteen columnsby Gearid Tuathaigh a model of judicious concision. But less-established politicians gettheir due too. The protean Patrick Maume contributes a fascinating entry on Daithi Conaill(193891), foundermember of Provisional Sinn Fin/IRA; the sources employed involve a widerange of obscure journalism, and the text even directs us to a roman clef by Eugene McCabeabout a character based on Conaill. And due space is given to people who laboured lessglamorously in public life, such as the priest John Hayes, who founded the agriculturalorganization Muintir na Tre one of several strikingly informative biographies of earlytwentieth-century figures by Diarmaid Ferriter. A similar project of reclamation is represented byJames Kellys entries on the luminaries and opportunists of the eighteenth-century Irishparliament.


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The entries on Irish writers significantly mirror the burgeoning of Irish literary history,particularly in reflecting literary production in the eighteenth century at a wider level than Swift,Goldsmith and Sterne, and in including popular but now forgotten writers of the late nineteenthand twentieth centuries. The long and judicious entry on the novelist Kate OBrien includes auseful paragraph detailing the rediscovery of her work by feminist presses and critics from the

1980s, and the deservedly high status she now holds; it is also refreshingly matter-of-fact abouther personal life, introducing a tone unfamiliar to previous Irish biographical dictionaries (\[herhusband Gustav\] Renier was probably bi- or homosexual; OBrien was lesbian and notdomesticated and the marriage only lasted eleven months). Edwina Keowns entry on MariaEdgeworth similarly ends with a useful appraisal of her reputation and its recovery; the main partof the entry contributes to this by concentrating on the underrated novel Ormond at the expenseof Edgeworths many other productions.

The lives of some writers are drawn so as to parallel their creations, as with the roisteringWilliam Hamilton Maxwell, clerical novelist and author of Wild Sports of the West (1832): Heusually passed his days fox-hunting, shooting and fishing, often with the 2nd marquess of Sligo,

who made him his personal chaplain, perhaps for expert advice on misdeeds. The giants of Irishwriting receive their due; Joyce, Yeats, Shaw and Wilde are the subjects of impressive essays byBruce Bradley, Terence Brown, Nicholas Grene and Owen Dudley Edwards. Appropriately,there is also a provocative assessment of the great critic of Yeats, Joyce and Wilde, RichardEllmann, by Diarmaid Ferriter: His admirers saw him as providing a critic commensurate withthe Irish authors capacity for complexity, a skill lacking in native critics, and suggested thatwhile he was born into an age of new criticism and died in an age of critical theory, he neverfully belonged to either group, being too sophisticated to be labelled categorically. The widevariety of authors drawn on for the entries on literature adds to the interest (Colm Tibn onFrancis Stuart, for instance) though, oddly, the adjacent entries on Sean OCasey (by RobertLowery) and on his wife Eileen (by Lawrence William White) give different dates and

circumstances for how the couple met (the latter seeming more circumstantially exact).Due attention is also given to creative artists in other genres, such as the designer Eileen Gray(who spent most of her life in France) and the adoptively Irish film director John Huston though curiously, no judgement is passed on his films, in marked contrast to the analytical toneadopted where most novelists are concerned. Singers and actors feature interestingly: DerekWalshs fascinating entry on the great tenor John OSullivan makes clear just how celebrated hewas before James Joyce took his cause up in 1929, though it is perhaps through his friendshipwith Joyce that he is now most vividly remembered.

The entries on Irish painters indicate the rapid developments in art history over the past threedecades or so, notably in Peter Murrays entry on James Barry though the contribution onDaniel Maclise, clearly submitted some time ago, inevitably missed the re-evaluation (and themagisterial catalogue) associated with a major exhibition in 2008. But the Dictionary providesfar more than an updating of Strickland; artists of the early and mid-twentieth century are fullycovered: there is a great deal of useful information about painters such as Jack Hanlon, CharlesBrady, Laetitia Hamilton, Norah McGuinness and Colin Middleton hitherto only accessible insources such as back numbers of the Irish Arts Review. These sometimes apparently draw onpersonal knowledge and experience, clearly hard-won. The character sketch of the marvellous


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portrait painter Edward McGuire (193286) carries a heartfelt ring: A complex, paradoxical,highly-wrought personality, he alternated bouts of bohemian conviviality with long periods ofmonkish solitude; handsomely patrician, courteous and impeccably mannered, he could turn rudeand bitterly sardonic when so moved.

Overall, though, the national stereotype of creative, quarrelsome, undisciplined Celts receives amuch-needed corrective. The entries on business people and entrepreneurs reflect recenthistoriographical reassessment of this under-valued aspect of Irish experience, and take in notonly the shipbuilders of Belfast and linen barons of Derry, but the brewers and bakers of Corkand Waterford. There is also a wide representation of engineers, medics and scientists, male andfemale. Here, the intentions declared by the editors introduction have been impressivelyrealized. Overall, the tone is remarkably readable, partly because the editors have wisely alloweda certain quirky dryness of tone to creep in, and perhaps contributed to it themselves. MarigaGuinness, co-founder of the Irish Georgian Society, is described, with some restraint, as anexotic and sometimes glamorous hostess. Ruth Dudley Edwards affirms that the distinguishedjournalist Brian Inglis refused to become Director of Programmes for RTE, knowing that it

would have been hell to deal with pressure-groups and that like all high-profile returning Irish hewould be savaged by the Irish media. And Patrick Maume (again), refining faint praise to an artform, suggests that James Chichester-Clark, briefly Premier of Northern Ireland, should not beseen as devoid of ability.

Larger themes and conclusions about a biographical approach to Irish history suggest themselvesas one peruses these volumes. There is the prevalence of certain families, dynasties and extendedtribal groups, some producing professional middle-class politicians and academics (Gwynns,Dillons, Webbs), others soldiers and statesmen (Butlers, OBriens), and others, such as theMoores, scientists, doctors and writers. The venerable nationalist notion of the exemplaryindividual life reflecting that of the nation at large is subtly subverted by much that we read here.

The Dictionary of Irish Biography represents, overall, a triumph of imaginative scholarship aswell as painstaking generalship on the part of the editors, whose commitment is above praise.The editorial principles followed are sound, sensible and consistent, but not to the point ofobsession. Very long entries are usefully subdivided, many (though by no means all) ending inthe DNB style by listing extant portraits as well as archival and secondary sources; in the case ofSt Patrick, the bibliographical guide is immensely long, and much of the actual entry isconcerned with problems of evidence. One oddity concerns the titles of the nine volumesthemselves: Volumes 2, 5, 6, 7 and 8 are designated by names of the first and last subjects, in theold DNB style (as in Volume 2, BurdyCzira); Volumes 3 and 4 appear under alphabetical letteronly (as in Volume 3, DF); Volumes 1 and 9 mingle the two approaches (as in Volume 1, ABurchill). The admirably informative yet crisp introduction gives no rationale for thisinconsistency. In any case, it does not intervene between the curious reader and the riches withinthe individual volumes. As one closes them, a remembered phrase from rural Ireland comes tomind. After a long visit spent discussing friends, relatives and family interconnections, it wassometimes remarked We had a great evening, tracing. Many such evenings can be promised tothose fortunate enough to have access to this wonderful series.


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James McGuire and James Quinn, editorsDICTIONARY OF IRISH BIOGRAPHYNine volumes.Royal Irish Academy/ Cambridge University Press. 775 (US $995).978 0 521 63331 4

Roy Foster is Professor of Irish History at Hertford College, Oxford. His books include ModernIreland 16001972, 1988, and Luck and the Irish: A brief history of change 19702000, 2007.

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