The cases involving Oscar Wilde (1895) and Patrick Kavanagh (1954) are landmarks in Irish literary history. Much less well remembered, by contrast, is a libel trial of 1932, in which literature was also a major subplot.
The complainant on that occasion was Peadar O’Donnell, Donegal-born socialist, republican and writer. The defendant was the Irish Rosary, a monthly journal of the Dominican order.
The Irish Rosary trial had its origins in the “Red Scare” general election of 1932 and in emergency legislation introduced by the soon-to-be-outgoing Cumann na nGaedheal government.
That would have allowed special military tribunals to deal with radical opposition to the State. And pushing it through the Dáil, the Government cited the discovery of an arms dump in the Dublin Mountains, including documents linking the IRA with communist Russia.
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Those were said to show that O’Donnell – a leading figure in anti-Treaty republican circles – had organised a group of students to visit the Lenin School in Moscow in 1929, where he and they studied Bolshevik revolutionary techniques.
When this claim was repeated, without Dáil privilege, in an Irish Rosary editorial, O’Donnell sued the magazine, its printers, and the distributors.
The editorial’s author, the Very Reverend H V Casey, O P, accused O’Donnell and other socialist republicans of wishing to set up an “anti-God State”. He also referred readers to a separate pamphlet in which the Society Union was alleged to be promoting “free love” and other forms of decadence.
So as well as denying that he had ever been to Russia, O’Donnell’s defence included protestations of his own Catholicism and clean living: “I have never thought nor inculcated blasphemy,” he wrote in an affidavit. “I have never closed, nor have I attempted to close churches. I have never melted church bells; I have never encouraged drunkenness either among the youth or the adult population of this or any other country. I am a strict teetotaller, and regard alcoholic excess and the evils that attend it as a great obstacle to the achievement of the political and economic freedom of this country and the conquering of poverty ...”
Countering this, defence lawyers scoured the several novels he had written already for incriminating evidence, even in the mouths of fictional protagonists.
A line from The Knife (1930), in which a character complains about the bishops’ directive to refuse absolution for republicans, proved useful, referring as it did to how “the anti-Christs in Maynooth made a new religion to back the Treaty and because we won’t give up the Republic ... they won’t let a priest near us except gligíns like themselves”.
The most notable witness for the plaintiff, meanwhile, was WB Yeats. This was the fruit of an odd friendship between the elderly poet and the young radical, dating from O’Donnell’s attempt to write his first play, Wrack.
Encouraged by Yeats’s attention, O’Donnell nevertheless took advantage of it by asking in passing if he could book the Abbey for a forthcoming event. That event was to be the launch of Saor Éire, a hard-left organisation that would be banned almost immediately.
Yeats had to cancel it at the last moment, explaining that during his conversation with O’Donnell he had been distracted by literature: “I came away with a vague memory that he had said something about just hiring the Abbey for a meeting or a convention. However, my mind was on [the novel] ‘Ardrigoole’ and I thought nothing more of the matter until next day when a fellow director came round with the advertisement of a revolutionary meeting ...”
The misunderstanding was put aside in court, where Yeats described O’Donnell as a “a novelist of great promise”, and hoped he would join him in a planned Irish Academy of Letters. This did not mean they shared political ideas. On the contrary, Yeats had always supported Cumann na nGaedheal.
As paraphrased by one court report: “he wished very much that Mr O’Donnell would devote his interest entirely to his novels and leave politics for a pastime in his old age (laughter).” To which a defence lawyer replied: “If you can get him to do that you will be doing him a great service.”
Yeats risked some reputational damage himself in appearing for O’Donnell. But then the cause of literature was at stake too. And as Niall Carson, a Liverpool University academic who will have an essay on the subject in the Irish University Review later this year (and to whom I am indebted for much of the foregoing) argues, the relationship may have been mutually transformative.
The jury ultimately found in favour of Irish Rosary, rejecting the libel claims. But although the failed plaintiff would continue to be a political radical, his reputation as a threat to social order seems to have peaked then and there. As with Yeats, Carson writes, the trial marked a shift in O’Donnell’s direction too, with literature “taking a more prominent role in his life as the decade proceeded”.
