IN CORK HE was known as Coroner Horgan. As a teenage reporter sent with a sinking heart to record an inquest at the City Morgue I was calmed by his courtesy, reassured that there would be no corpse and relieved by his easy dispatch of details I could hardly spell, let alone stomach. We were to meet many times again, briefly and on business, but that politesse was unfailing, one felt better about oneself simply for being its recipient.
To see him walk along the South Mall, then a promenade for the city's legal and financial elite, made the town seem important merely because it had such a man in it. That was just noting his presence; of his achievements I, like many other Corkonians, had little or no knowledge, except for that single wondrous moment in which, presiding at the inquest on the victims of the torpedoed Lusitaniain 1915, he had pronounced a verdict of wilful and wholesale murder against the Kaiser.
John Joseph Horgan would remain Coroner Horgan for more than 50 years, but for him there was always a world elsewhere. A world of politics, of international issues, of engagements in the arts, in diplomacy, theatre, scholarship, local government and industrial expansion. He married – twice – and raised a family at Lacaduv on the Lee Road, and from that brood his grandson, press ombudsman Prof John Horgan, has written a biographical introduction to a new edition of the coroner's own book, From Parnell to Pearse.
As the son of MJ Horgan, Parnell’s friend and election agent in Cork, John J’s background manifested itself in “a passionate and unrepentant commitment to the spirit and politics of John Redmond, and in an openness to, and understanding of, Northern unionism which was rare, if not unique, among Irish nationalists of his and later generations,” the younger Horgan explains.
A career dominated by his desire to close the gap between the North and the South of Ireland was influenced by his appreciation of his own family tree, which combined “a sturdy English constitutional and civil liberties tradition with a nascent Irish nationalism”, a strand in Irish public life which was often unacknowledged or minimised.
In a country which distrusted literature, Horgan found his second great driving force in his commitment to the power of the written word. While his father’s prolonged illness tied him to his legal practice in Cork, his journalism gave his mental energies scope. Sometimes he took up contradictory causes, a fact which his grandson treats with a kind of humorous sympathy – along with a fine historical comprehension
It was noted by his friend Denis Gwynn that Horgan’s “first attribute was his unflinching moral courage on any issue that seemed to him important even if it meant provoking opposition where none existed before”.
But as Prof John Horgan reminds us, the other side of this occasionally combative temperament was a rare skill in brokering peace deals in one or other of his capacities as a solicitor, a member of the Harbour Board, or of the Cork Chamber of Commerce.
The longest-serving chairman of the Cork Harbour Board and a director from 1912 until 1967, he was designated referee of all dock disputes at the request of the Federated Union of Employers and the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union in 1934. “The result was a virtual total absence of dock strikes in Cork for about 30 years.”
He worked constantly against sectarian and social injustice; appointed to the Irish Convention by Lloyd George he produced the Complete Grammar of Anarchyas a record of unionist attitudes in Northern Ireland. His advice was valued by English, American and European diplomats, yet in Ireland he thought it better to conceal his authorship of the pungent commentaries in The Round Table, for which he became the Irish correspondent from 1925 until a year before his death. He wrote for Studies, for The Hungarian Quarterly, The Atlantic Monthly, the Belfast Telegraphand An tOglach, among other journals.
Reviewing these crowded, sometimes conflicting but always whole-hearted engagements the ombudsman John Horgan, surely suspecting a journalistic wheel cranking towards a full circle, is aware too of his grandfather’s disappointed political aspirations, of his sense that history had passed him by. Yet this was a man whose achievements included a new system of municipal government for Cork city, which was enshrined in legislation in 1929 and was later used as a template for local government for the whole country, including Northern Ireland.
His frequent letters to The Irish Times(that wheel again!) provoked fervent responses, but speechwriters and journalists nowadays might look with envy at some of his commentaries as quoted in this new edition.
Remembering Lacaduv the younger Horgan remembers some of the stories, such as that of the final encounter between JJ Horgan and his friend Erskine Childers during the Civil War. The Republican forces occupying the city were on the brink of defeat when the two men met by chance on the Grand Parade.
Childers asked his Cork friend to keep two things for him – a clutch of papers, and a revolver. Horgan took the papers, but could not accept the revolver. “This”, writes the younger Horgan, “was quite possibly the weapon that had been given to Childers by Collins, and for the possession of which Childers was later executed”.
And there is the story of Coroner Horgan’s last meeting with President de Valera, his old adversary. The professor remembers his grandfather recalling “with a profound sense of loss and perhaps also of loneliness that must have been shared by the two men, born within a year of each other”, that de Valera told him: “I’m going to the morgue too often.”
Parnell to Pearse; Some Recollections and Reflectionsby John J Horgan, with a biographical introduction by John Horgan (University College Dublin Press).