Brendan Hoban: Edna gave Irish women a voice in a dark time           

Western People 20.8.2024

I’m in mildly reminiscent mood this week as, with the recent death of the writer, Edna O’Brien, and the memories it evokes. I recall my student years in Maynooth College, and the memory of priest-professor, Peter Connolly (or Pete as he was known to students) who was Professor of English in a Maynooth struggling to make its peace with a changing world. Connolly, who was a breath of fresh air among the musty corridors (if not ‘dreary steeples’) of Maynooth, stood head and shoulders over his colleagues – and not just in the English Department. He reflected an expansive view of the world – in part the result of his Oxford education and in particular, the role universities (and even seminaries) could play in introducing future priests to the rich possibilities of the modern world.

His wider project, if such it can be described, was what Fr Michael Conway of Killala described in a contribution to ‘I Remember Maynooth’, as ‘waging a quite war on the literary censorship introduced by the Irish Free State’ and in particular how it was misused by ‘zealots with a very narrow view of the canons of literary expression’.

When my classmates and I arrived in Maynooth in 1966 and, swathed in the then prescribed uniforms of long, black cassocks topped by Roman collars, trooped into Connolly’s lectures we must have presented a dismal prospect to the fastidious Connolly, ever the demanding don who had a lifelong habit (red pen in hand) of annotating everything he read, even his copy of The Irish Times.

Connolly, bursting with ideas and characteristically hopping on his seat, was given to holding forth on occasion about what the future might look like – as with the prediction he made to Declan Kiberd, a fellow academic: ‘The Irish people are not sentimental. See how quickly they abandoned the Gaelic language when they saw it as no longer of practical use. Religion will go in the next generation and when it goes it will go so fast that nobody will even know it is happening.’ In the lecture hall, Connolly was less direct but the sometime oblique messages he sent had the same punch – Ireland was changing and the future for Catholicism was going to be different from what it was then.

In that same year, 1966, at a public meeting in Limerick, Connolly (as part of his campaign against literary censorship in Ireland) publicly defended Edna O’Brien, a young novelist from Clare whose early books had been denounced by the Catholic Church and banned by the Irish State. Connolly praised the ‘high spirits and cheerful natural ribaldry in her writing’ though his supportive comments weren’t universally appreciated, not least by the hostile response from some of the panel and of the audience. O’Brien herself, also in 1966, wrote in the Irish Times that a ‘fear of sin’ made her think of her body as ‘a sort of tabernacle of sin’.

In 1960 when O’Brien’s first novel The Country Girls appeared, telling the story of two young women going through adolescence, it was banned and two years later when The Lonely Girl was published, Archbishop McQuaid of Dublin sent a copy to Charles Haughey, the then Minister for Justice, enclosing a letter expressing his alarm that ‘such stuff’ could be printed. As Fintan O’Toole writes in We Don’t Know Ourselves, Haughey, then ‘a young rising princeling of Fianna Fáil’, visited McQuaid the next day formally ‘to express his disgust and revulsion’.

In 1966, Connolly’s defence of O’Brien was an astonishing stance, widely publicised in the media and it is unknown how the Irish Catholic bishops or the Maynooth authorities responded but it can be taken as somewhat less than an unambivalent welcome. The long arm of the Catholic Church was then dictating a series of interventions in public life that today would be unthinkable and unacceptable.

It was a time, for example, when it was a reserved sin for Catholics in most dioceses to attend a service in the Protestant Church. (I remember my aunt, Bridie McDonnell, the most gentle of women, explaining to us at home in the kitchen how she told the priest in Confession that she had attended the funeral of a Protestant neighbour and how she ‘wouldn’t let it go with him’ when he demanded that she promise never ‘to repeat the offence’.) This requirement on Catholics was evidenced too in 1949 at the funeral of Douglas Hyde, a Protestant and the first President of Ireland, when members of the Irish government of the day preferred the option of sitting in their State cars outside St Patrick’s (Protestant) Cathedral rather than risk the salvation of their souls by drawing the ire of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid. Officially, the government was represented by Erskine Childers, whose suitability was determined by the fact that he was a Protestant and thereby not committing any sin by attending.

When Edna O’Brien died a few weeks ago, her well-laid plans for a Catholic funeral and for burial on Holy Island, Co. Clare were followed to the letter – in her parish church where she was baptised and where she had been denounced from the altar. Fr Donagh O’Meara, the priest whom she had asked some years ago to say her funeral Mass, described her as ‘a speaker of the truth who held up a mirror for us in a very narrow time in Ireland’. Edna O’Brien, he told the congregation, had described ‘the hardships that women faced in a silent way. But she paid the price. Because when you stand out at any moment, at any time, you find yourself isolated quite quickly. And we did that. And that is to our shame as a society and as a church’. And he added, ‘Maybe she has discovered now, that in God’s eyes, she was infinitely loved’.

The congregation, that included a bishop and three priests, applauded. It was a fitting tribute and apology from an oppressive, patriarchal Church, so often so reluctant (as we are) to own our shame.