ESSAYS:The achievement and tragedy of brilliant academic and Labour TD, David Thornley, is captured in a collection edited by his daughter, writes RUAIRI QUINN.
DR DAVID THORNLEY was a brilliant academic, political activist, television journalist, and Labour TD and MEP. He was born in England in 1935 to an English father and an Irish mother and moved permanently to Dublin in 1944 when his parents separated. His agnostic father died in 1952.
David Thornley went to Trinity College Dublin at the age of 16 and got a first-class honours degree in history. He converted to Catholicism at 19, completed his PhD when he was 24, became a fellow at 30 and was later an associate professor of history. He had many other qualities, being a sportsman and a talented singer in the choir of Westland Row church. He married Petria Hughes in 1958 and they had two children, Yseult and Gerry.
It was his divided sense of identity, half-Irish/half-English, which was to haunt Thornley for most of his life. He was not alone in this regard, but it concerned him greatly. The sense of triumphant and exclusive nationalism, particularly in the 1960s, around the 50th anniversary of the 1916 Rising, was pervasive. By then, Thornley was a professor of history in Trinity and a television personality as co-presenter, with Brian Farrell, of what is now Prime Time.
A Catholic, socialist and nationalist, he was elected to the Dáil as a Labour TD in 1969, along with Conor Cruise O'Brien, Justin Keating and Barry Desmond, under the leadership of Brendan Corish.
The optimism for social change in the Republic, which was so characteristic of those times, was blown away with the eruption of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Within weeks of Thornley's election to the Dáil, the North was in turmoil and, in time, so was the rest of the island.
Forty years later, people forget the simplicity of passion and prejudice that informed those days. Fuelled by fear and bigotry on the unionist side and the refusal of a new generation of Northern nationalists to accept the unjust status quo, the Civil Rights movement was rejected by Stormont obstinacy and overtaken by Provisional IRA retaliation.
Thornley's sympathies and public statements were in support of traditional nationalism, like those of many other people in the South at that time. I believe that his unsettled sense of his own identity, English/Irish, Catholic/agnostic, aggravated his insecurity. In trying to prove his Irishness, he fell out with the Labour leadership.
Labour and Fine Gael won the 1973 general election. A year later, the new coalition government negotiated the Sunningdale Agreement, which was the forerunner of the Belfast Agreement. Thornley opposed the Labour leadership on the Northern question. He was passed over for ministerial office and was nominated to the (then indirectly elected) European Parliament. There, his isolation, compounded by his heavy drinking and diabetic condition, did the rest. He died in 1978 at the age of just 42.
THIS BOOK BRINGS together some of Thornley's writings, including a piece on Patrick Pearse and a number of speeches in the Dáil. They are complemented by 14 essays by friends and contemporaries during his brilliant and varied life.
Jim Downey, Rodney Rice and Muiris Mac Conghail are joined by Garret FitzGerald, Enda McDonagh and Michael D Higgins in thoughtful, sensitive and critical observations which reveal the qualities that Thornley clearly had. Barry Desmond, Seamus Scally and Fionnuala Richardson describe his work with the Labour Party. Miriam Hederman describes Thornley's immense contribution to the work of Tuairim, the voluntary organisation, or think-tank, made up of a new post-Civil War generation anxious for progressive social change. Edward Thornley, David's brother, recounts the family's supportive but difficult relationship with Dr Noel Browne.
Thornley's work with Basil Chubb in Tuairim and Trinity was a deciding factor in defeating Fianna Fáil's attempt to abolish proportional representation in 1968. His extensive essay, Ireland: the End of an Era?, reads well today, 40 years after its publication. It must have been incisive and provocative at the time.
In a short Dáil speech on Northern Ireland in December 1971, the anguish of Thornley's torn identity and the need to prove his Irishness is palpable. But he was not alone. Had he lived another 20 years he would have witnessed the 1994 ceasefire and the 1998 Belfast Agreement. One thing is clear: David Thornley left an indelible mark on all the students with whom he was in touch during his many productive years in Trinity. There are tributes in this book from some of them.
Yseult Thornley, David's daughter, is the editor of this most interesting book. In her preface, she writes: "He was the cause of some degree of lasting pain, if only through his far too early death." She concludes: "Through talking to the contributors and absorbing what they told me and reading these essays, my knowledge and understanding of a father I never really knew has been greatly enhanced."
DAVID THORNLEY MADE a significant and lasting contribution to the development of Irish life. This book underpins the necessity and importance of intellectual discourse and debate in public life. Sadly, Thornley did not live to see the resolution of the Northern conflict, nor could he have envisaged, back then, the new-found respect and public remembrance, in this State, for Irishmen who fought in the British armed forces in two world wars.
He helped a nation to think and develop, to respond to new, difficult situations and confront them successfully from within the resources of our own ideas, education and decisive actions.
This work is a fitting and compassionate tribute to an extraordinary man. As an academic and a father, Thornley would have been delighted that it has been brought together by his daughter.
• Unquiet Spirit: Essays in Memory of David Thornley, Edited by Yseult Thornley, Liberties Press, 288pp. €25
• Ruairi Quinn is a Labour Party TD and party spokesman for education and science