A brief review of Trevor White’s Alfie: The Life and Times of Alfie Byrne (Dublin: Penguin, 2017) (reviewed Sept. 2017).
Trevor White is currently the Director of the Little Museum of Dublin, a registered charity (educational) that partly relies on corporate sponsorship and government funding (and unpaid internships and the now (thankfully) defunct exploitative Job-Bridge scheme). White himself is probably best known for his role as the Dubliner magazine’s owner and editor during that publication’s more contentious period (the Tiger Woods controversy/ Elin Nordegren libel, the ‘Negro’ and ‘darkies’ controversy, the black doctor/cancer controversy etc.). The Little Museum (LMD) has been running an exhibition on Alfie Byrne for some time now. Byrne’s son, Paddy Byrne (former TD), donated some of his father’s papers and possessions to the LMD and White has produced what amounts to an exhibition catalog.
White’s biography of Byrne is sympathetic to its subject. To a lot of Dubliners, and Irish people, Alfie Byrne is the archetypal corrupt politician, a reactionary popular with a large portion of the more servile constituents but despised by the rest, a forerunner to the likes of Jackie Healy Ray, a man who spewed a political dynasty and left the country to pick up the mess and foot the bill. White begs to differ, casting Byrne as, on balance, a good man out to do laudable things. This biography, while not hagiography, often skirts close to it, and the reader is left with the impression that it is an exercise in ingratiating himself with the subject’s descendants and LMD donors. And this probably accounts for the flatness of the book. One gets the sense that often the author is trying to enthuse himself in spite of himself. White appears to be intent on demonstrating an excitement and admiration for Byrne that he doesn’t quite wholly believe himself.
A proper review of this book would require many pages, so a few points are given instead.
First and foremost this book omits much, and it’s debatable as to whether the author is unaware of certain facts, or if aware of them, omits them as inconvenient to his general thesis. Among the most noticeable is White’s failure to acknowledge Sean O’Casey’s play The Star Turns Red (published 1940; begun 1937). O’Casey had an audience with Alfie Byrne in 1927 and based the fascist mayor of the play directly on Byrne (as O’Casey literary scholars have regularly pointed out). The Star Turns Red is located in Dublin and concerns the Christian Front (based on the Irish Christian Front), the fascist Saffron Shirts (based on the Irish fascist organization the Blueshirts) and Red Jim (i.e. James Larkin). This play merits a chapter in itself, but White is utterly silent on it, preferring to spend two pages wondering whether Byrne influenced the Batman comic series (a question that could have been answered quickly with two letters).
Where the biography does acknowledge the nastier elements of Byrne’s character it often tries to palliate them, excuse them, qualify them or refer to them briefly and hastily move on. For example, the anti-Jazz movement. That movement was a failure. It was led, and supported by, the more extreme wing of the population. But whereas most in this minority movement saw it as an anti-foreign music campaign (with a nod to the import-substitution and home-manufacturing debates that occurred during the Great Depression, etc.) few racialized the question as Alfie Byrne did. Jazz was objectionable to Byrne for the very reason that it was the intellectual product of black musicians.
Likewise, while White is content to talk about that Dublin folklore that views Byrne positively, White basically ignores that other Dublin folklore about Byrne, the one that posits him as a corrupt and deeply selfish individual who used his supposed anti-poverty crusade to enrich himself. These stories are plentiful, but White is either unaware of them (a possibility) or just elides them. White endlessly repeats that Byrne was nicknamed the ‘shaking hand of Dublin’ but he fails to mention that this phrase had an ironic double-edge to it. Byrne shook a lot of hands, but his hands, Dubliners said, also shook for want of (or excess of) a drink (White’s biography insists that Byrne was a teetotaler; he became one, but he certainly didn’t begin as one as Kernoff and Curtis, amongst others, attest to). Part of the problem stems from White’s over-reliance on information given him by Paddy Byrne, Alfie Byrne’s son. Paddy, who admits that he didn’t know his father well (his father being a workaholic among other things) views his father far too uncritically. White doesn’t mention Alfie Byrne’s interaction with Patrick Pearse, he doesn’t mention that James Connolly thought Byrne utterly corrupt, that Alice Milligan wanted to slap Byrne across the face. Kate O’Brien, novelist and anti-fascist, is absent from the biography, as is Signe Toksvig. W. B. Yeats’ fascinating relationship with Byrne (he courted Byrne during his fascist phase and blasted him in his late work On the Boiler) is omitted, as are Byrne’s strong links with William Martin Murphy and his son. Jack B. Yeats’ incisive remark about Byrne (that he willed himself to be whatever he wanted) is not quoted. Byrne’s double-dealing in controversy over the eminent Celticist Kuno Meyer is not referenced (Byrne promised support to both sides, and then ran when the votes were being cast). Why isn’t Liam O’Flaherty in this biography? Or Peadar O’Donnell? White mentions that Byrne opposed conscription during World War I. That is true. But Byrne was very active in the military recruitment campaign (as were most Redmonites) and there’s a poem from the era that berates Byrne for this. White insists that Byrne was a pacifist; rather we should note that Byrne was a cheerleader for war and Empire and had no scruples about leading men to the abattoirs of Gallipoli and the Somme.
The next major problem is that of Alfie Byrne and fascism. In the age of White Nationalism, Le Pen, Charlottesville, Trump, Jobbik, the AfD, Golden Dawn, Wilders, the PP, etc., an author needs to tread carefully here. Byrne adhered to fascism. It’s an objective fact. Byrne admired Hitler, Franco, Mussolini and Salazar. He was happy to give the fascist salute, to raise money for Franco, to attend dinners given by the Nazis in Dublin, to present gifts to Mussolini’s fleet, to sponsor and speak for the Irish Christian Front (an organization that believed the Great Depression was engineered by the Bolsheviks, Jewish financiers, the Masons and a miscellany of secularists). The Irish Christian Front (ICF) was, as Behan pointed out, a far-right group that even the regular, church-going conservatives avoided. Byrne’s secretary, an interesting figure, doubled as his secretary and the secretary for the ICF. For a period the ICF’s mailing address was Byrne’s office in the Mansion House. White insists that the Blueshirts were not fascist or anti-Semitic. To prove this point he references the opinions of the revisionist historian Anne Dolan (Eunan O’Halpin’s disciple) whose work has always been sympathetic to the Redmonite, Cumann na nGaedheal and Fine Gael tradition. White also quotes Fearghal McGarry, whose biography of O’Duffy claims that he wasn’t a fascist in the proper sense (despite O’Duffy claiming he was one and offering Hitler Irish troops to fight the Soviets). Mike Cronin is also (not surprisingly) referenced. Those who disagree with this historiographical narrative (both Irish and international) are not given space.
Fine Gael’s roots were various, and fascism was one strand. Fine Gael is now a party in the Christian Democrat tradition (with a propensity to coalesce with Ireland’s conservative Labour Party) and contemporary revisionist have worked assiduously to downplay the fascism that informed its birth and that embarrasses them. The Blueshirts attracted, among others, large portions of ex-British military men, and Byrne’s constituency contained a disproportionate number of these. White also nods to the (Irish) Jewish Representative Council (JRC) which states that as far as they are aware (from a quick ask around), Byrne was not anti-Semitic. Considering that Byrne’s contemporaries from the 1930s are mainly all dead now this means little. The JRC (an all-male body) recently attracted attention for defending Kevin Myers after his anti-Semitic comments regarding Venessa Feltz (needless to say Feltz spoke of how she found Meyers comments deeply anti-Semitic. Myers had previously argued that the only thing Africa had given the world was AIDS. Myers has been invited to speak at the LMD various times). The Jewish population in Ireland in the 1930s was overwhelmingly anti-Franco and was at the forefront of the campaign to raise funds for the republican side during the Spanish Civil War (in fact, it’s difficult to find even one member of the Jewish community that was pro-Franco). They were acutely aware that if Franco won, international fascism would strengthen immeasurably. The foundation of the Irish Christian Front worried the Irish Jewish Community for obvious reason (they expressed their deep concerns to Archbishop Byrne among others). John Carey’s point should always be kept in mind, those who made fascism respectable in the 1930s, those who fostered an intellectual climate favorable to fascism, are directly responsible for the Death Camps of Nazi Germany and the Concentration Camps of Franco’s Spain. It wasn't only guns that murdered Lorca.
Another problem with White’s biography is the question of sources. The archive that Paddy Byrne donated to the Little Museum of Dublin is used heavily. Other sources are utterly neglected (the Archbishop Byrne and Archbishop McQuaid’s archives, the archives of Oliver J. Flanagan, Patrick Belton, etc.) Printed material suffers too. Catholic publications of the period, where Byrne figures repeatedly, are not referenced or quoted from (Catholic Standard, Sacred Heart Messenger, etc.).
What good can be said of Alfie Byrne? He opposed the industrial schools and he advocated votes for women. The former White deals with well, the latter far too briefly.
White finishes his biography by wondering why there isn’t a statue in Dublin to Alfie Byrne. How would the sculptor fashion it? Byrne giving the fascist salute? Byrne kowtowing to a Cardinal or the Pope? Byrne smashing the recordings of black musicians? Byrne leading a reactionary mob to destroy a bookstore? Today’s Dubliners wouldn’t stand for it. We may have named a public bridge after Matt Talbot (Byrne’s ideal citizen), but that wouldn’t happen in 2017. There was a monument to Byrne but, being made of wood, it rotted (a rather too-easy metaphor for the afterlife of his reputation). He still has a pub named after him operated by Galway Bay Brewery (another pub named after him renamed itself recently) and a road bears his name. Dubliners still talk proudly of Rosie Hackett, of Noel Browne, of Big Jim Larkin. Byrne is barely remembered, he is neither a folk-hero nor a model for emulation. Few quote him, few tell their children to follow his example.
White’s biography of Alfie Byrne is emblazoned with an enthusiastic nihil obstat from Joe Duffy, but it’s difficult to share Joe’s joy. This book should have been rigorously peer-reviewed prior to publishing, and Penguin ought to have removed the padding that disrupts all the chapters (well-worn anecdotes, oft-repeated historical morsels, endlessly recycled bon mots, etc.). The font size of this book is large, and had the publishers trimmed the fat and reduced the lettering it would’ve made for a sharper, more compact and more readable book. White’s style is often pleasantly conversational and accessible, and the editors should have brought this out more. In summation, more misses than hits, and this is a pity, because the author has far better in him.
© Niall Gillespie 2017.
