Tim Healy at the Áras

The end of an empire is rarely closed by those who fought it from the barricades. More often it is closed, quietly and on headed paper, by a man who learned its grammar from the inside, who spent forty years walking the corridors of the institution he meant to dismantle, and who now stands in its grandest drawing-room holding the keys.

THE LONG APPRENTICESHIP

Timothy Michael Healy was born at Bantry on the seventeenth of May 1855, son of Maurice Healy, clerk of the Bantry workhouse, and Eliza Sullivan. He was schooled by the Christian Brothers at Fermoy, then sent out, at thirteen, to a clerk's desk in Newcastle upon Tyne. From there he wrote pamphlet and copy for The Nation in Dublin until Charles Stewart Parnell, in 1880, took him on as parliamentary secretary and sent him to Westminster. He sat in the Commons for Wexford, then Monaghan, then Longford North, then Louth North, then Cork North-East, the seats of a man who never quite belonged to any one constituency because he belonged to the wider quarrel. He was called to the Irish bar in 1884 and took silk in 1899. By 1922 he had stood at the Four Courts for twenty-two years as King's Counsel and had outlived every patron and every rival the Irish Party had produced. The Penal Laws of 1695-1829 had set out to dismantle the public Catholic and Gaelic identity of the Irish; Healy was of the first generation of Catholics for whom the bar and the Commons were open from the start. He had used both, and he had used them with a tongue acid enough that The Times once called him the most feared cross-examiner in either kingdom.

He had broken with Parnell in the committee-room split of December 1890 over the O'Shea divorce, with a phrase he never afterwards softened, that the party could not be led by the man named in the proceedings. He had been jeered for it in Dublin and was for thirty years thereafter the figure the Parnellite tradition would not forgive. He had watched the Irish Party fall, watched John Redmond go to his grave in 1918, watched the Sinn Féin sweep of December that year carry off the seats he and his generation had built. He had not gone with the gunmen and he had not gone with the diehards. He had sat at the Four Courts and waited, and the Treaty of December 1921 had, in the end, come round to where he had always stood: the constitutional path, dominion status, a parliament in Dublin under the Crown. The 1916 men had walked through a door he had spent forty years prising open.

THE MORNING OF THE SIXTH

Wednesday the sixth of December 1922. The Phoenix Park is in pale winter light, the grass still wet from the night's rain. Inside the Viceregal Lodge, in the State Drawing Room on the south side, the casements are tall and the December sun comes in thin and level. A turf fire has been laid in the marble grate. The room has been the room of Viceroys since 1782; the portraits along the walls are of men who governed Ireland in the name of Westminster, and the Garter star on the chimneypiece is older than the State that is about to be born in front of it.

Healy stands at the centre of the carpet, sixty-seven years old, in court-dress, a man not built for ceremony. He has a barrister's bulk and a Cork mouth and the rolled paper of the oath in his hand. To his left stands Edmund FitzAlan-Howard, Lord FitzAlan of Derwent, sixty-six, the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Catholic himself, the Garter ribbon across his breast and a leather portfolio of Letters Patent under his arm. At the east end of the room the Executive Council of the Irish Free State has formed itself in a half-circle: W. T. Cosgrave, Kevin O'Higgins, Ernest Blythe, Desmond FitzGerald. The Free State is twelve hours old. The Civil War is still going on in Kerry and the midlands. Erskine Childers was shot at Beggar's Bush ten days ago. The Four Courts, where Healy practised, is a roofless shell since June. None of this is spoken of in the room.

A SECOND OF TIME IN HISTORY

At twenty past ten he is asked to step forward, and in the second between the asking and the step there is room for the whole forty years to pass through him. The Bantry workhouse where his father kept the books, the boys' room at Fermoy, the train to Newcastle, Parnell at the head of the table in 1880 saying Tim, the committee-room in December 1890 and the phrase he could not unsay, Redmond's coffin, the empty benches after 1918, the body of Michael Collins coming up the quays in August. He has been called many things in the Commons: the Bantry attorney, the man with the poisoned tongue, the lawyer who knew every standing order. He has never been called Excellency. The Cosgrave Cabinet chose him, he knows, because his political career predates the Rising; because to put a 1916 man into the Viceregal Lodge would be to declare a revolution, and the Treaty is not a revolution but, by the careful legal language of the document, a settlement. He is the bridge they need, the constitutional nationalist who can stand in the room the Viceroys stood in and make the Crown's withdrawal look like continuity rather than retreat. He has thought, walking up the avenue this morning past the bare chestnuts, that the office is a piece of stage furniture and that the country is bleeding behind it; he has thought also that stage furniture, properly placed, is what tells a people the play has changed. He steps forward.

THE OATH

He reads the oath set down in Article Seventeen of the Constitution of the Irish Free State, in the phrasing he has gone over with his own hand: that he will be faithful to the Constitution of the Irish Free State as by law established and that he will be faithful to His Majesty King George V, his heirs and successors by law, in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain and her adherence to and membership of the group of nations forming the British Commonwealth of Nations. He signs. FitzAlan hands him the Letters Patent of the Office of Governor-General in the leather portfolio. The keys of the Viceregal Lodge, on a brass ring, are placed on the side-table. FitzAlan bows, withdraws. It is twenty-five past ten. The room is, on the formal record, no longer the room of the Lord Lieutenant. It is the room of the Seanascal, the Governor-General of Saorstát Éireann.

THE COUNTER-ROOM

Six miles south, at Beggar's Bush Barracks, the Civil War government is at its desks. In Mountjoy, four Republican prisoners (Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Joe McKelvey, Dick Barrett) have, two days earlier, been told they will be shot at dawn on the seventh. They will be. Cosgrave's cabinet has authorised it as a reprisal for the killing of Seán Hales TD on Ormond Quay the day before yesterday. The new State is being constituted, on this same morning, by the oath in the Drawing Room and by the order of execution in the gaol; the two pieces of paper are signed within the same Dublin hour. Healy knows, and the cabinet knows, that the dignity of the office in the Phoenix Park is the cover under which the harder work is being done elsewhere. There is no clean morning of foundation. There is only the man in court-dress reading from a card, and the men in Mountjoy listening for boots in the corridor.

THE FIVE YEARS

He held the office from the sixth of December 1922 to the thirty-first of January 1928, five years and seven weeks. He signed every Act of the Oireachtas of those years; he gave the King's Assent to the legislation that ended the Civil War, that brought in the Garda Síochána, that founded the Electricity Supply Board and the Shannon Scheme. He used the Lodge for receptions that mixed the old Castle society with the new Dáil, and he was criticised in the Republican press for both halves of the guest list. He drew a salary the Dáil halved, and then halved again. He wrote his memoirs in two volumes, Letters and Leaders of My Day, published in 1928, in which he spared no one, including himself. He was succeeded by James McNeill, who was succeeded by Domhnall Ua Buachalla, in whose hands the office shrivelled to a signature, and then, in the Constitution of 1937, was abolished. The Viceregal Lodge was renamed Áras an Uachtaráin and given to the elected Presidency, the first incumbent being Douglas Hyde in 1938.

RETURN

Healy retired to Chapelizod, to a house above the Liffey looking back towards the Park. He died there on the twenty-sixth of March 1931, seventy-five years old, and was buried at Glasnevin in the Healy plot with his wife Erina, née Sullivan of Bantry, whom he had married in 1882. He had survived Parnell by forty years, Redmond by thirteen, Collins by nine. The office he held for five years exists now only in the gilt frame round his portrait in the Áras and in the brass ring of keys catalogued in the State Papers.

The hinge moments of a country are rarely held by the men who fought for them in the open. They fall, more often, to a careful lawyer with a long memory and a steady hand, who knows that the document is the country and that the document must be signed by someone the country can recognise. The chestnuts on the avenue at Phoenix Park, planted under the Viceroys, still line the road to the door.