radical nationalists … the previous generation had sold the pass to craven constitutionalism, by deciding that the Fenian agenda of achieving separation from Britain through physical force was outmoded and opting for parliamentary agitation instead.’120 What was emerging was a new generation alienated ‘not only from British rule but from the values and ambitions of their parents, and finally from the alternative offered by the constitutional Irish Parliamentary Party’.121
Members of the new generation felt like this because they were frustrated, their education often leaving them to face limited opportunities.122 Feeling also excluded from political power, they began to critically assess the status quo and became intent on self-transformation.123 After the 1916 rebellion, the police were convinced that many of the local leaders were people who turned to revolutionary politics in a society that offered them little opportunity.124 Garvin has observed: ‘In Yeats’ classic phrase many of them indeed possessed great hatred and suffered from little room; little room was accorded them by Irish society or by the Anglo-Irish establishment and great hatred was commonly the consequence.’125 In their assessment and rejection of the status quo there was also impatience with the power of the Catholic Church.126
On Hearne’s part, there was no rejection of Home Rule or of the previous generation. As we have seen, he and his father figured prominently in the Home Rule movement in Waterford. He promoted the same politics as his father. He was not impatient with the Catholic Church; on the contrary, he had been a seminarian for many years. It would seem that he did not feel or share in the frustration of the revolutionary generation. He did not experience ‘great hatred’ because he did not experience ‘little room’; his personal circumstances, because of the status and position enjoyed by his family, offered him the opportunity of a meaningful role in society. Crucially, there was also the influence of his father. Foster has noted that, in the life stories of many revolutionaries in this era, as confided to the Bureau of Military History in the 1940s and 1950s, the influence of a family member who provided a powerful nationalist conditioning was emphasised.127 Richard Hearne provided a different but no less powerful conditioning for his son. John Hearne grew up in a home where Home Rule politics were a central part of family life; and just as some learned revolution in and from their families, he learned constitutionalism.
He also shared things in common with the revolutionary generation. He was educated by the Christian Brothers, who may have influenced his nationalism. He could be robustly critical of the British government. He wanted freedom for his country and saw Home Rule as giving this. He was a nationalist, a representative of the 23 per cent who voted for the Irish Parliamentary Party in the 1918 election. John Hearne serves as a reminder that not all voters subscribed to the Sinn Féin version of nationalism; there were significant numbers who were recusants. This minority was to be silenced and marginalised in the years 1919–21, but their silence must not be allowed to obscure the fact of their existence.
John Hearne and the ‘lost generation’
Among those silenced and marginalised were many of the Catholic university elite who had expected to be leaders in a Home Rule Ireland. Their circumstances have been studied by Senia Pašeta.128 These young men and women were self-consciously preparing themselves for important roles in a self-governing country129 and expressed, confidently and regularly, their expectation that one day they would compose Ireland’s ruling class.130 Economist George O’Brien (1892–1973) commented:
We all took it for granted that if Home Rule was achieved, we would be among the politicians of the new Ireland. A Home Rule parliament in College Green in those days would, no doubt, have been dominated by the Irish [Parliamentary] Party, which would have earned the credit for its establishment. We, in the college [University College Dublin] had many connections with the Irish Party … We all confidently expected that in a short time we would be exercising our oratory, not in the dingy precincts of the old physics theatre in 86 [Earlsfort Terrace], but in the ‘old house in College Green’… I remember Arthur Cox saying to me that there were only three positions for which we were being fitted by our education – prime minister, leader of the opposition and speaker of the House of Commons.131
Pašeta has made the important point that ‘the years between Parnell and Pearse … was a period of preparation, not for independence but for Home Rule and a central place in the empire’.132 This world, however, disappeared with the 1916 Rising and the advent of Sinn Féin’s revolutionary politics. Thus the demise of constitutional nationalism dealt a death blow not only to Redmond’s party but to those members of the Catholic university elite preparing to be leaders in the new political era of self-government. The triumph of Sinn Féin doomed many talented men and women to become a lost generation of leaders.133 Some could not find a place in the Ireland of the Irish Free State.
Hearne was a member of this Catholic university educated elite. He might have expected to play an important role in an Irish Home Rule parliament. This would not have been an unreasonable expectation, considering his family’s status in one of the party’s strongholds, his political activism, his education and undoubted abilities, particularly in law, a profession with strong links to politics. Such speculation, such engagement in counterfactual history, while diverting, is of no value here. What did happen was that he had no role in a Home Rule Ireland because there was no such thing. Rather he came to play a significant role in the new political dispensation after the Anglo-Irish Treaty settlement of 1921. Instead of being one of the ‘lost generation’ of Home Rulers, he was to become a member of the ruling elite in a newly independent state.
CHAPTER 2
In the Service of the Free State, 1922–1932
John Hearne accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 and this influenced him to support the Cumann na nGaedheal party led by William T. Cosgrave.1 This party was to have a strong neo-Redmondite presence,2 the old parliamentary nationalist tradition being seen as its natural constituency.3 For example, in March 1923, at a Cumann na nGaedheal meeting in Waterford City, an extremely conciliatory mood was evinced towards the old Irish Parliamentary Party, with many in attendance advocating the adoption of William Redmond as the Cumann na nGaedheal candidate in an election.4 Four years later, in 1927, at a meeting in Mayo to select candidates to represent the interests of Cosgrave’s government, twenty-two of the thirty-one members of the election committee of the old Irish Party were in attendance and one of the candidates considered for nomination had contested a seat for the same party.5 Cosgrave took satisfaction in bringing together the different nationalist traditions, a fact illustrated when both the sons of John Redmond and his successor, John Dillon, joined Cumann na nGaedheal.6 In fact, as Patrick Maume has observed, ‘the involvement in the Cosgrave government of middle-class Catholic professionals who might loosely be described as Redmondites … meant that Redmondites could claim some degree of credit for the creation of the new state’.7
The Irish Parliamentary Party tradition was mediated in the highest levels of government by ministers such as Kevin O’Higgins, Vice-President of the Executive Council and Minister for Justice, and James Hogan, Minister for Agriculture.8 The former, who was particularly influential in the development of Cumann na nGaedheal,9 had strong family connections with Home Rule politics.10 Writing about the two ministers, John Regan observed:
O’Higgins and Hogan were in power, it might be argued, in spite of it [the Irish revolutionary period, 1918–21]. O’Higgins, in particular, acted and behaved, even in his days with Collins in the provisional government, as if he should or one day would lead. School, university, the practice of the law, family, status, politics, their nationalism had all been framed within a history, perhaps a story of Ireland, the terminal point of which was to be the achievement of home rule. As part of a small, educated, and connected Catholic nationalist elite rapidly on the way up, they would be part of that achievement and benefit from it.11
These observations have strong
