Domhnall ua Buachalla undoubtedly had an interesting career worthy of a biography, but this book is twice the length it should be and would have benefited from an assertive editor. It is filled with far too much extraneous detail and meanderings and never quite succeeds in providing a weighty analysis of ua Buachalla and what motivated him.
To be fair to the author, ua Buachalla did not leave much behind for a biographer to work with; he did not want to write about the events of the War of Independence as they were, according to the author, “a private matter; travails he had no need to share with the wider world”.
The book is propelled by a personal mission– the author, a veteran sports editor, is a grandson of ua Buachalla – to make amends for the relative neglect of ua Buachalla, “a man of great courage and unquenchable resolve”, who “lived for his country”. This reverential tone is sustained throughout.
Ua Buachalla is primarily remembered as the last governor general of the Irish Free State after de Valera orchestrated the removal of James McNeill from that office in 1932. Ua Buachalla was appointed to be inactive and almost invisible to facilitate de Valera’s policy of undermining dominion status, part of a process of dismantling the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which led to the abolition of the position of governor general in 1936. But this account of ua Buachalla’s very long life – he died in 1963 at the age of 97 – certainly underlines that there was a lot more to him than the governor generalship.
Intense commitment
Born Dan Buckley in 1866, he used the Irish version of his name from 1901, and inherited his father’s business to become a successful grocer and hardware merchant in Maynooth. He had an intense commitment to the promotion of the Irish language, raised funds for the Gaelic League, and sent his son Joe to Patrick Pearse’s school. While we are told that his mind in the run up to the 1916 Rising was “very much on a rebellion”, we rarely get any insight into his thought process or what drove his increasing commitment to violent insurrection. He fought in the GPO and as a sniper in its vicinity, where he killed at least three soldiers, and narrowly escaped death himself.
Following his release from Frongoch, in what became a recurrent theme of his career, he was pushed into “a role in the nation’s political life which he never aspired to”; he also suffered the death of his wife Sinéd in 1918, leaving him a widower with seven children. He worked to strengthen Sinn Féin in Kildare with Patrick Colgan, who explained in relation to ua Buachalla standing in the 1918 general election, where he trounced the opposition in North Kildare, “I had the job of breaking the news to Domhnall who accepted only because it was his duty to do so”. There is not enough concrete detail about what underlay this reluctance, and we get little on why he agreed to shelter Dan Breen and Sean Treacy during the war of independence, bar the assertion that he was doing it “on the basis of necessity and the national interest”.
The author’s account of that war is largely filled with the witness statements of others; we are told ua Buachalla was involved in “much planning and implementation of destruction” but there is little probing. In keeping with his reluctance, he was elected to chair Kildare County Council but said he “would prefer some other member” do it. His son Joe described him as “at home…the quietest man alive, but in politics he was adamant”. This ferocity was apparent in his speech opposing the Treaty: “The country is not thinking. It has been stampeded and it now seeks to stampede its representatives.”
The Kildare Observer (the author makes good use of the provincial press) did not doubt his patriotism but faulted him for "arrogating to himself" an attitude to the Treaty "in conflict with the wishes and expressed desire of his constituents".
He lost his seat in the June 1922 election for the Kildare-Wicklow constituency, was arrested for “his involvement in IRA activity” (of which, again, scant detail is offered) and spent two months in jail. At that stage, in contrast to his fellow rebels, he was “a 56-year-old man with a grey beard”.
Incarceration
He escaped from incarceration in Dundalk with 20 others and made his way to Dublin, “a prisoner at large, an absentee father, an unseated TD, a missing chairman and a merchant divorced from his business”. But ua Buachalla tends to remain on the fringes in the latter chapters as a wider Civil War story is told circuitously.
He also failed to win a seat in the 1923 general election, was subsequently involved in organising the new Fianna Fáil party in Kildare and was vocal about the dangers of freemasonry and the need to champion Gaeltacht communities, "the purest people of their race". Elected for Fianna Fáil in the second general election of 1927, he was strident about "the middle and humbler classes" not having "sufficient legitimate recreation that is untainted by foreignism" and the "filth that comes to us from magazines and novels". He lost his seat in 1932 and then came de Valera's offer of the governor general position; once again he took a post, in de Valera's words "much against his own will". Unfortunately the author decided to reprint in full, over four pages, some of the congratulatory telegrams received by ua Buachalla. More interesting was the observation of Time magazine that the downgrading of the governor general's office was a "tactical victory for the de Valera republicans"; ua Buachalla "will fill the office with his tongue in his Gaelic cheek".
He took half his salary and was “virtually consigned to anonymity”; he signed himself out of a job when a constitutional amendment bill in 1936 abolished the role. Sparks flew in the Dáil, however, over his lump sum and pension. Not unreasonably, John O’Sullivan TD wittily suggested it was “rather peculiar that a man who had got for four years a salary of £2,000 for doing nothing . . . should now get a gratuity of £2,000 for doing nothing and £500 a year to enable him to do nothing for the rest of his life.”
Ua Buachalla became an inveterate writer of letters to the Sunday Press about the Irish language and religious and cultural standards. But he was a lot more than a cranky old killjoy and there is little doubting his patriotism. By all accounts, he was courteous, witty and dependable and the author unearths some letters that reveal his strong views; one of the funniest is one he wrote to his sister while he was on honeymoon in Cork in 1897: "Cork is a dirty, sleepy hole compared with Dublin. It looks well when seen from a particular point [of] about a mile or so. But don't come nearer to it."
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at University College Dublin. His book A Nation and not a Rabble: The Irish Revolution 1913-1923 is published by Profile
