Sir, - In his review of John Cooney's biography of John Charles McQuaid (Books, November 20th), John Horgan suggests that Mr Cooney's analysis is seriously flawed by a failure to situate socio-political events in the culture of their time and a tendency to ill-founded certitudes which are firmly anchored in 1960s journalism.
This seems unfair to Mr Cooney. Few authors are able to sustain certainties or judgements over six years and 433 pages; Mr Cooney is no exception. But it is facile to suggest that his analysis is irretrievably lodged in a 1960s time warp. On the contrary, he demonstrates an acute awareness of the intellectual forces which formed the young McQuaid.
Those influences were grounded in a defensive and predominantly French Catholic tradition whose relevance to Ireland lay not so much in its substance as in the purely fortuitous circumstances which established a group of Distinguished French scholars, Louis Gilles Delahogue, Justin Delort, Francois Anglade and Andre Darre as the animateurs of the newly formed faculties of theology and philosophy in early 19th-century Maynooth. It was this tradition, reinforced by his order's traumatising experience of the awesome combination of le petit pere Combe's extreme Gallicianism and Clemenceau's anti clericalism in the first decade of the present century, which underlay Dr McQuaid's inward-looking authoritarianism. This revealing insight permeates Mr Cooney's analysis from introduction to conclusion.
Archbishop McQuaid sought to resolve Irish problems by the rigorous and unbending application of formulae derived from an alien Franco-Italian culture. The significance of his contribution to de Valera's Constitution lies not in his draughtsmanship, as Mr Horgan rightly points out, but rather in his subsequent exploitation of the access to inner circles of government that followed. His privileged position enabled him to exercise a profound influence on legislation and on the implementation of legislation, to create, in Mr Cooney's words "a state within a state". Dr McQuaid's subversion of Irish civil society, so painstakingly documented by Mr Cooney, can only be described as reprehensible even within the narrow and sectarian perspectives of his time.
It is difficult to escape the conclusion that Mr Horgan has failed to appreciate the intellectual foundation of Mr Cooney's analysis and, as a consequence, has presented your readers with a deeply flawed review. - Yours, etc., Noel Coghlan,
Lucan, Co Dublin.