As the 125th anniversary of John A Costello's birth was remembered on June 20th, it was remarked that as taoiseach from 1948 to 1951 he appeared subservient to the Catholic Church.
During the 1951 Mother and Child crisis, which brought down his government, he told the Dáil: "I, as a Catholic, obey my church authorities and will continue to do so, in spite of The Irish Times or anything else." He is less well-remembered as standing up to the church in a most formidable fashion, defending the right of Trinity College to be treated as an integral part of national life.
The Catholic hierarchy opposed Trinity's representation on the board of the new Agricultural Institute – An Foras Talúnta later subsumed into Teagasc – during his second period as taoiseach from 1954 to 1957.
The Bishop of Galway, Micheal Browne, and the Bishop of Cork, Cornelius Lucey, told Costello in 1955 that their National University of Ireland "must not be impaired and that Trinity College must not have a say in the teaching of agriculture in the new institute".
Costello told them that “the association of Trinity with the institute was already agreed in principle, and was now an accomplished fact”. He assured them the government “would not do anything which would give material for unfriendly persons to make charges against us of intolerance or unfairness towards the Protestant minority”.
Moral law
The church was in no doubt about its right to make such demands. At a Christus Rex
Congress
in April 1955, Bishop Lucey said: “The church was not just one group among the many groups making up the State, but had a firmer and broader base than any of them . . . They intervened on the higher ground that the church is the divinely appointed guardian and interpreter of the moral law . . . In a word, their position was that they were the final arbiters of right and wrong, even in political matters.”
At a confirmation in September 1955, Bishop Lucey went on to declare the proposal to give Trinity a role in the new institute as “socialism of a gradual, hidden and underhand type”.
He said Trinity College “if not wholly Protestant, is free thinking or indifferent as regards religion”.
Within the Catholic hierarchy only Archbishop Joseph Walsh of Tuam supported the institute.The bishops wrote to the taoiseach on October 18th, 1955, through the Bishop of Achonry, James Fergus. They attacked the institute as "another incursion of the State into the sphere of higher education . . . it would transfer Catholic students to a purely secular institute . . . it was a serious setback to the historical efforts of the Catholic people to secure higher education".
The real agenda of the bishops was sectarian and they did not mince their words, writing: “The Catholic bishops have never denied to their Protestant fellow citizens their just rights and due proportion of State endowment, in accordance to their numbers.
Intrinsic danger
“We regard with serious misgivings the trend in recent years to allocate to Trinity College a State subsidy out of proportion to the number of Protestants in the State . . . even though Trinity had an extensive endowment originating from the confiscation of State property. It is a serious matter for the Catholic taxpayer to be asked to endow an institution which is prohibited to Catholics as intrinsically dangerous and it raises issues of serious importance as to who are charged with the defence of the Catholic faith.”
Costello’s reply on November 4th, 1955, rejected the bishops’ charges and inaccuracies, particularly their assertion that this was “another State incursion”. He continued: “The proposal of representation to Trinity College is not a question which can be decided on the basis of the number of Protestants in the 26 counties. Broad conditions of the national interest could not close their eyes to the fact that Protestants amount to 24 per cent of the population of Ireland as a whole, and that the ending of partition is a primary aim of national policy.”
He ended his letter saying that the government would try to meet the views of the bishops and all other interested parties “to the utmost extent that may appear compatible with the general interest of the country as a whole”.
The bishops were most displeased with this unexpected rebuke. In a reply dated January 19th, 1956, Bishop Fergus said that the hierarchy expressed "its deep regret at the tone and contents of the document". A note in the taoiseach's file, dated January 25th, 1956, says that the government view was that the letter from Bishop Fergus "does not call for any reply". Anthony J Jordan is author of John A Costello: Compromise Taoiseach, published by Westport Books 2007