Courtney McGrailIn 1966, when the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, in which he had fought, was being marked, Joe McGrath, revolutionary, politician and founder of the Irish Sweep among many other businesses, died in his Co. Dublin home, Cabinteely House.
His family did not want to live in the 18th Century mansion, swathed in Virginia creeper, but they offered it to the State with the surrounding land, on certain conditions. Thus opened a curious saga which is very revealing of attitudes to Irish heritage and resources.
But for a long time little was done. This came to a head in the summer of 1985 with a complaint from the local residents association, who wanted a museum of local history put in the house.
A civil servant in the Taoiseach’s department spoke to Tom Sheehan in the Dublin County Council. He reported to his superiors that “Mr Sheehan said that negotiations are taking place between the valuer of Dublin County Council and a valuer from the McGrath family with a view to the purchase of the fee simple [a form of freehold ownership] of the house, the furniture remaining in the house which was not sold at public auction and an additional six acres of land around (not part of the area already owned by the council).”
Poor condition
The McGrath family were looking for £100,000, and an additional £150,000 would be needed as the house was in poor condition and riddled with dry rot.
The house was take on by the State, and there began a competition to use it. The Dublin and Regional Tourism Organisation wanted to use it as their HQ, but they would first have to sell their current offices.
However, a scientist called Derek Felton had his eye on it as a possible home for the state geological collection, an idea supported by the director of the National Museum. They emphasised that this collection had never been properly housed or exhibited. But with the increasing importance of all things related to geology in Ireland with the rise of gas and oil exploration by land and sea, the public ought to be able to have access to a geology collection which illustrated this new Irish industry.
In 1981 Dublin Country Council approved the setting up of the museum. But a structural report showed that aside from repairs, if it was used for a museum of that kind the floor beams would have to be twined with steel joists to bear the weight.
Finance considered the whole scheme too costly “in the economic circumstances prevailing” – a mantra now over-familiar in the 30 years since.
But the County Council now told the Government that Cabinteely House was no longer available, “as the McGrath family had made clear to the council that they wished the house contents to remain there for public enjoyment”. (The McGraths had, of course, already sold off the really valuable pieces. At the time they were one of the wealthiest families in Ireland)
According to the County Council website Cabinteely House, “while its refurbishment is ongoing, it is available for guided tours (by appointment) and corporate or community events. Within the courtyards the Council has refurbished a former grain store that is now used for the promotion and development of youth arts in the county.”
Also there is now an adventure playground and a coffee shop in the stables. But nothing long term has been decided about what will go into the house, or what it might be used for, aside for an occasional reception.
There is still no local museum, to the dismay of the residents. The geology collection still has no home worthy of its value to the nation, though some mineralogy specimens can be in the Natural History Museum, the Geology department in Trinity College, and the Geological Survey Offices in Beggars Bush (though only by appointment).
It seems that we have still not incorporated into our imagination the idea that our landscape and its geology is as much a part of our heritage as antiquities and poets’ cottages. Derek Felton’s dream remains to be fulfilled.
“A pagan people with Christian superstitions” – Wise words from Bishop Cahal Daly
Scattered among the state files are many items preserved for their importance and interest from other sources. This year one of these rare documents is a record of a 1981 lecture on the Irish situation made in Denmark to the Second European Ecumenical Encounter by Dr Cathal B. Daly, who had experience at first hand the horrors of the Northern troubles. A fierce critic of the IRA, he was later Primate of Ireland.
This “remarkably penetrating exposition” was copied in the Department of Foreign Affairs and sent to all Ireland’s diplomatic missions abroad.
He addressed himself specifically to the pain and scandal to European Christians that the troubles had the appearance of “a religious war”.
“I said that Loyalist extremists and paramilitaries represent a secularisation of Protestantism. Something corresponding can be said about Republican paramilitaries. Religious traditions, I suggest, ‘secularise’ in characteristically different ways. One characteristic way in which Irish Catholicism ‘secularises’ is the way of revolutionary nationalist ideology.
“The Irish struggle for national independence was often presented in quasi-religious terms — terms of redemptive sacrifice and national resurrection. ‘The Cause’ is presented still as something sacred, almost holy, whose ‘patriot dead’ have something of the halo of martyr-dom and sainthood.
“The fact that the Irish conflict is in part motivated by two opposing ex-religious ideologies points both to the paradoxical religious appearances of the struggle and to the impotence of the Churches to resolve it. Ex-religious ideologies retain elements of religious fervour.
Referring to a once Christian country now massively de-Christianised, someone spoke of ‘a pagan people with Christian superstitions’.
“It is possible to have ex-Christian people, Catholic or Protestant, with religious prejudices, passions and fanaticism. They are totally and defiantly outside all influence from the living Church. They retain, alas, some of the rancours and resentments, suspicions and fears even hates inherited from the past. I must note that the replacement of religion by ‘ideology’ need not be total; but, to speak of Republican paramilitaries, over the whole range of argument and activity connected with ‘the Cause’, these have resolutely sealed off mind and heart and conscience from all influence of Catholic Church teaching and are schooled in deafness to all appeals from clergy, bishops or Pope.”
As we enter a year of special commemoration, this speech is worth reflecting upon, in the light of both the past and the present and the future.
(Cardinal Daly’s reference is to a passage in Fr Jacques Loew OP, En Mission Prolétarienne: Étapes vers un Apostolate Integral (Paris, 1946), p.95. Fr Loew was one of the first “worker priests” in the 1940s, enthusiastic about taking the faith rather than the Church out into the real life of the community. He was writing of the people of the Marseilles among who he laboured for three years as a docker.)