Sir, - The reports with unambiguous banner headlines in the newspapers of an alleged liaison between the actor Mac Liammoir and Eoin O'Duffy calls for comment to redress the harm done to O'Duffy's reputation. Your own Eddie Holt (Weekend, October 23rd) is circumspect, and that is greatly to be welcomed.
When I arrived from the country at Garda Headquarters in 1964, I worked with colleagues who had served under O'Duffy. On the threshold of retirement, they remembered the second Garda Commissioner with real affection.
As head of Crime Branch during all the early years, Chief Superintendent Patrick Carroll on a daily basis had worked close to O'Duffy, and socialised with him in the Officers Mess. Standing with me at a window overlooking the depot square, Commissioner Carroll (as he now was) spoke of his pride as a young officer, stirred by the sight of an inspiring leader crossing the square. Such was the respect for O'Duffy among all the ranks, an enduring mark of the esprit de corps he inculcated in the Garda Siochana.
In 25 years of research for my recently published history of the Garda Siochana, including conversations with older colleagues who had known O'Duffy, I did not pick up even a breath of scandal touching his life. Instead, I discovered the real personality of the dedicated man behind the prejudice that has tended to distort the history of the period.
The mutiny at the Civic Guard depot in Kildare in the summer of 1922 left the nascent police force in disarray. The Civic Guard needed "firm handling by some outstanding personality", the new Minister for Home Affairs, Kevin O'Higgins, wrote to the Army Commander-in-chief, General Richard Mulcahy. "The new Commissioner . . . must be a disciplinarian and himself a model to the men of efficiency and self-restraint." He pleaded with Mulcahy to release O'Duffy, knowing that he was asking the Army "for its right arm."
With an assurance from the Provisional Government that he would be given a free hand, the charismatic soldier began his life's work, and in an astonishingly short time put heart back into a demoralised force.
The free hand promised to him was immediately challenged by the secretary of the Department of Home Affairs, Henry Friel, precipitating a war of attrition as the Garda Commissioner fought tenaciously for his vision of the new police service, including his ideas for the welfare of the rank and file that were ahead of his time.
The love he bore his men knew no bounds. At the height of the civil war, in January, 1923, following a raid by armed Irregulars on the barracks in Baltinglass, he told his beleaguered Civic Guards that their interests were his own interests.
The wrongs they suffered, and the injuries and indignities unjustly inflicted on them, affected him no less than if the cruelties were practised personally on himself. "I feel elated as they do, and have the same pride and confidence in the Guard and in their future when I receive the modest reports which cover heroism of the highest kind. This is why on occasion, as now, I feel impelled to address the Guard as a whole, and to say how much I appreciate their courageous stand and firm attitude."
In 1930, the year of the alleged liaison with the actor, writing to the Representative Body, O'Duffy defined his philosophy, all the more revealing in a confidential letter. "The one characteristic above all others which I have sought consistently to develop from the earliest days is (that) of manliness. On every possible occasion I have tried to impress upon the force the difference between authority and servility."
He strove to make the politicians and their obdurate administrators see the sense of allowing the rank and file be part of the process of moulding the service. "It would be in the best interests of the force and the State if a change in policy came graciously and spontaneously and not as a product of long agitation and bitterness. If this is not conceded I fear the future will only bring discontent and exasperation (making) for indiscipline and inefficiency." In the end, O'Duffy the prophet broke himself on the wheel of his perfectionist nature.
Modern historical writing has tended to concentrate on O'Duffy's turbulent years in politics. A political associate, Professor Michael Tierney, wrote of "an amiable and attractive man without any real tendency to dictatorship . . . whose career had ended so tragically. It was a tragedy in which those of us who had induced him to get involved in politics were really more to blame that he was."
In the complex character of the man there was a highly developed sense of patriotic idealism that was no discredit to him. If he was proud to a fault, a nation uncertain of itself had need of his vanity, and had need of the determination he communicated to his men that they would succeed, and that to make the effort was the bounden duty of every member of the Garda Siochana.
In the evening of his life he admitted that he had made two great mistakes. "I did not marry, and I entered politics." Making a rare appearance at a Garda Benevolent Fund dance, "his unostentatious entry to the ballroom was the occasion of a purely spontaneous ovation . . . He was delighted to find that, despite the vicissitudes of politics and ideologies, the force still reciprocated the love he bore for the Garda."
The story now put about by the RTE documentary "Dear Boy", based on rumour and the questionable evidence of a conversation between an actor who lived in a world of fantasy, and a curious young woman, is an outrageous calumny on O'Duffy's reputation. - Yours, etc.,
Gregory Allen, Blackrock, Co Dublin.