Seán T. O'Kelly

President of Ireland (1945-1959)

• Born: August 25, 1882
• Birthplace: Dublin, Ireland
• Died: November 23, 1966
• Place of death: Dublin, Ireland

O’Kelly was one of the pioneers of the Gaelic Revival and the Irish Independence movement. After independence had been secured for the southern twenty-six counties of Ireland, O’Kelly emerged as a mainstay of the Fianna Fail Party and a leading statesman for the Irish Free State and Ireland. He culminated his public career with two terms as president of Ireland.

Early Life

Seán Thomas O’Kelly was the son of Samuel O’Kelly, a bootmaker by profession, and Catherine O’Dea. The family was always in straitened circumstances, and Seán’s education was adequate, at best: In Dublin, he attended Christian Brothers’ School (St. Mary’s Place) and O’Connell Schools (North Richmond Street). He achieved a major breakthrough in 1898 when, at the age of sixteen, he was employed at the National Library of Ireland on Kildare Street in Dublin as a messenger and errand boy. During his term of employment at the library (1898-1902), he profited from its facilities and largely educated himself, developing his writing skills to the extent that he was able to practice freelance journalism and, in 1903, become a full-time journalist.

The Gaelic Nationalist Revival, which blossomed in Ireland in the years after the eclipse of Charles Stewart Parnell’s constitutional nationalist movement in 1891, exerted a major influence on the young O’Kelly, who adopted it as his life’s cause. The broadly based Gaelic Revivalist phenomenon encompassed culture (literature, art, drama, language, and sports), religion, and politics, and O’Kelly flung himself into each of these. In 1903, he had come to the notice of nationalist leader Arthur Griffith and joined Griffith’s Sinn Féin Party, which at that stage advocated the creation of a dual monarchy on the Austro-Hungarian model for Britain and Ireland.

As an active member of the Gaelic League (Conradh na Gaelige), which focused on language revival, O’Kelly became managing editor for its publication An Claidheamh while regularly contributing to Griffith’s paper, United Irishman. In 1905, Griffith made him a full journalistic associate.

Life’s Work

In 1906, O’Kelly ran for Dublin City Council on the Sinn Féin ticket and was elected, launching what would be a fifty-three-year political career. He was to serve on the Dublin Council until 1932. O’Kelly became honorary secretary for Sinn Féin from 1908 to 1910 and would serve as general secretary for the Gaelic League from 1915 to 1920.

As hopes for a constitutional solution through Home Rule establishing a separate Irish parliament under the Crown were repeatedly frustrated, first by recurring vetoes of the Home Rule Bill by the Conservative-dominated House of Lords and then by Ulster Protestant resistance, Sinn Féin drifted away from dual monarchy to a more radical revolutionary nationalism centering on the establishment of an independent Irish republic. The Parliament Act of 1911 curtailed the House of Lords’ veto power. Instead of a permanent, absolute veto as before, the upper house could now only delay the passage of a bill for two successive parliamentary sessions. If a bill could pass the House of Commons in three successive sessions, it would automatically become law. The Irish Home Rule Bill carried the House of Commons in 1912 and 1913 and appeared destined for certain passage during the summer of 1914. However, Ulster Unionist Protestants swore to oppose the implementation of the bill by armed force if necessary. By 1913 they had assembled a paramilitary force named the Ulster Volunteers, which numbered some ninety thousand members armed with rifles that had been illegally smuggled into the port of Lame, County Antrim. In response, Irish nationalists formed their own counterparamilitary force, the Irish Volunteers, in November of 1913; O’Kelly, who was one of its founders, played a crucial role in smuggling in arms through Kilcoole, County Wicklow.

The Ulster Resistance and the outbreak of World War I caused the British government to delay its plans for Home Rule. Though most of the Irish seemed to accept the situation, a radical minority within the Irish Volunteers led by Patrick Pearse and numbering O’Kelly among their supporters favored an immediate uprising against British rule. During the consequent Easter Rebellion of 1916, O’Kelly participated as Pearse’s staff captain and was held in Richmond Prison, Dublin, on the rebellion’s collapse. On Pearse’s execution and the assumption of the Sinn Féin presidency by Eamon de Valera, O’Kelly became one of de Valera’s chief lieutenants. Sent to continued imprisonment in Wales, O’Kelly was released, then quickly rearrested, but he managed to escape by May of 1917 and successfully campaigned for a parliamentary seat for County Longford.

In 1918 he was named director in charge of organizing Sinn Féin’s general elections campaign; it was an overwhelming success, and O’Kelly was himself elected a member of Parliament for College Green, Dublin. He therefore sat on the first independent Irish Dail, as Sinn Féin members of Parliament styled themselves, on January 21, 1919. During the War for Irish Independence, O’Kelly served as Dail Speaker and as Irish emissary to both Italy and France, where he unsuccessfully attempted to present his country’s case before the Versailles Conference. O’Kelly joined de Valera in opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty and Partition of 1921-1922, serving the Republican cause during the Irish Civil War of 1922-1923. Incarcerated by the victorious Free State forces, he was released before the end of 1923.

When de Valera formed the Fianna Fail Party in opposition to the governing Cumann na Gael group, which had established the Irish Free State, O’Kelly became its deputy leader in 1926 and was elected to the Dail the following year. In de Valera’s first Fianna Fail government, O’Kelly served as minister of local government and public health (1932-1939). In 1932 he also relinquished his place on Dublin City Council, having served almost continually since 1906. In at least one significant respect, O’Kelly’s first ministerial tenure marked a continuation of his efforts at city council level. He had always advocated programs for improved housing for lower-income families (perhaps as a result of his family’s situation during his own formative years) and, as minister, implemented the building of working-class cottages. During this time, O’Kelly was instrumental in the drawing up and ratification of the Eire constitution of 1937, which personified his dreams and those of de Valera for a Catholic, theoretically self-sufficient, rural Ireland where Gaelic would be as much (if not more) a part of everyday speech as English. It was a constitution that assigned a favored position to the Catholic Church and specifically reasserted the Irish government’s claim to sovereignty over the six counties of Northern Ireland.

In 1939, O’Kelly was given the ministerial portfolio for education, which he held for only a few weeks before being transferred to head the Ministry for Finance from 1939 to 1945. In 1945, Douglas Hyde, who was the first president of Ireland elected under the Irish constitution of 1937, declined to run for a second seven-year term, and O’Kelly was convincingly elected under the Fianna Fail banner. He served two terms, from 1945 to 1959, after being reelected without opposition in 1952. His role as president included presiding over the change from the Free State (Eire) to establishing the Republic of Ireland (officially named Ireland) in 1949. He also assumed a nonpolitical, conciliatory role as far as attempting to distance the country from the lingering animosities of the Partition and civil war.

O’Kelly married twice, first to Mary Kate Ryan, daughter of John Ryan of Tomcoole, County Wexford, from 1918 to 1934, when she died. Two years later, he married her younger sister, Phyllis. There were no children from either marriage. In 1959 O’Kelly refused to run for a third term and retired to his home in Roundwood, County Wicklow, while de Valera succeeded to the presidency. O’Kelly died in Dublin on November 23, 1966, and was survived by his second wife.

Significance

Seán T. O’Kelly was one of those figures whose effective work was accomplished largely behind the scenes. In a better sense, he conducted his career as the ideal “right-hand man,” first for Griffith, then Pearse, and finally de Valera. His preferred role was as a backroom negotiator, conciliator, and power broker who shunned the limelight and deferred to his more flamboyant superiors. O’Kelly’s contribution is thus often difficult to gauge. One is often at a loss to know where his ideas and those of de Valera began and ended; the two men were nearly identical as far as their political and social vision of the nature of an independent Ireland.

The de Valera-O’Kelly vision has been a mixed legacy for Ireland. The dominant role assigned to the Catholic faith as stated in the 1937 constitution, the clerical legislation enacted under the auspices of de Valera’s ministries, and the continuing claims of the Irish Republic over Ulster have undoubtedly contributed to subsequent Protestant Unionist resistance, the resurgence of nationalist violence, and the troubles in the North. The Irish language, though rescued from extinction, did not supplant English as Ireland’s dominant spoken or written language, and a rural, self-sufficient Ireland never seems to have been a practical aspiration. In recent years there has been a repudiation of O’Kelly’s romantic vision: The Catholic clergy is held in lesser esteem, divorce and birth control have been legalized, Ireland has experienced increasing economic diversification, and the republic has been integrated into the European Community. It was during his tenure as president that O’Kelly achieved the detachment from the political arena that enabled him to come more into his own and to independently become a voice for conciliation. As ceremonial head of state, he was also able to represent his country abroad and establish the Irish presidency as a viable part of the government.

Bibliography

Allen, Kieran. Fianna Fail and Irish Labour: 1926 to the Present. London: Pluto Press, 1997. Though somewhat specialized and thus at times peripheral to the “grand scheme” of Irish political history, this monograph is important for the insights into the ruralist attitudes of the leaders of the Fianna Fail Party toward the very urbanized phenomenon of the Irish working class.

Bowman, John. De Valera and the Ulster Question: 1917-1923. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1982. Sheds a great deal of light on the inner workings of the early Republican Movement and the shaping of sentiment regarding the counties of Northern Ireland and the 1922 Partition.

Dunphy, Richard. The Making of Fianna Fail Power in Ireland: 1923-1948. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1995. Offers the best and most detailed examination of the philosophy, composition, and strategy of de Valera’s party and the most definitive view of the significant contribution rendered by O’Kelly in his role as deputy leader.

Lawlor, Sheila. Britain and Ireland: 1914-1923. Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 1983. Scholarly, objective summary of all aspects of the fragile relationship between Britain and Ireland, including evidence of O’Kelly’s persistent, behind-the-scenes activities during an early stage of his career.

Lee, J. J. Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989. Broadest account of the overall politics and personalities of the Irish Free State and the early Republic of Ireland.

MacCardle, Dorothy. The Irish Republic. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965. Covers the years 1916 to 1923. Though heavily biased in favor of the antitreaty views of de Valera and O’Kelly, MacCardle provides some useful information for the student of this period.

Martin, F. X., T. W. Moody, and F. J. Byrne. The Course of Irish History. Cork, Ireland: Mercier Press, 1984. This is still the most informative book as far as providing a background and placing the early twentieth century events into the broad sweep of Irish history. Though it falls short of detailed explanation in certain respects, the book commends itself as an adequate reference for beginners.