The archbishop and his unlikely fan at the FBI

Richard Fitzpatrick on two powerful men, operating on both sides of the Atlantic, who admired each other’s methods.

THE similarities between FBI boss J Edgar Hoover and Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, who was buried 40 years ago today, are striking. Both men were born in 1895 — the spymaster in Washington, the cleric in Cootehill, Co Cavan. They were power brokers who exercised considerable influence over their respective governments and societies.

Their lengthy reigns overlapped: Hoover assumed control of the Bureau of Investigation (as the FBI was then known) in 1924; McQuaid became Archbishop of Dublin a few years later, in 1940. Hoover never retired, dying in his post in 1971; McQuaid stepped down a year afterwards. Their chief personality traits were alike: great administrative gifts, but authoritarian and disturbingly prurient.

They admired each other. When Hoover heard from a New York monsignor that McQuaid spoke highly of his espionage work against communist trade unionists, he sent him a note thanking the archbishop for his “highly valued support”. He also put a copy of his Masters of Deceit book in the post for McQuaid.

“Had they met, they would have had another shared interest,” says John Cooney, author of John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland.

“J Edgar Hoover was allegedly a transvestite; McQuaid with his cassock would have matched him in dress sense,” says Cooney. He has also claimed that McQuaid was a notorious paedophile and created a huge controversy in this country when he published his claims.

Cooney says he will chart McQuaid’s deviant sexuality in a follow-up book, The Curse of McQuaid. But several Irish historians challenge the allegations about paedophilia made in the original biography. “John Cooney’s allegation was not backed up by sufficient evidence to be convincing,” says Diarmaid Ferriter, UCD professor of modern history.

McQuaid was obsessive in recording information. He left over 700 crammed boxes of papers. Files were Hoover’s forte, too. He began keeping a dossier on himself in childhood, including details like his clothes sizes. The FBI files he compiled on the eight presidents he served under were notorious; he even had one on Éamon de Valera, who was mistakenly labelled “a Portuguese Jew”.

Hoover carried out “political” wiretaps for every president. He traded on this information to stay in power, compromised as he was by the dirt the Mafia had on his own sexual proclivities, according to Anthony Summers’s The Secret Life of J Edgar Hoover.

McQuaid exerted inordinate influence on Ireland’s taoisigh. He even had the power to demand an audience with de Valera in 1953 so he could rant about the so-called obscene books that were filtering into the country. De Valera, who was no bohemian, managed to parry McQuaid’s suggestion that he fix a “trap” at the island’s points of entry. It would be “a very difficult net to close”, pleaded the Taoiseach.

McQuaid had more sway with Taoiseach John A Costello, who kept him briefed about cabinet discussions; and in one of the most bizarre interventions in Irish government policy, he allowed McQuaid to draft his administration’s acceptance letter of the bishops’ condemnation of Dr Noel Browne’s Mother and Child scheme in 1951. “I wouldn’t push the idea that McQuaid was like Hoover too far,” says Ferriter.

“They were obviously working in very different worlds. An FBI chief and a Catholic archbishop are in very different positions.

“When RTÉ was established in the early 1960s, he kept files on the various employees of RTÉ, on their personal lives, their adherence or not. There’s a certain sinister element which is like something you’d find in a bureau. He had people in key places who fed him information,” he says.

McQuaid’s spy ring included middleclass professionals from the Order of the Knights of St Columbanus; men like Frank Duff, founder of the Legion of Mary, which administered among emigrants and delinquents; Monsignor John Horgan, a “thought control” cleric on the UCD campus; and Fr Cecil Barrett, or “Balls Barrett, as he was known who policed renegade clergy.

McQuaid’s ‘helpers’ felt it was their duty to let McQuaid and the clergy know so they could take the steps to get them locked up in these Magdalene laundries, to get them out of harm’s way.

“Hoover in the FBI was doing the same thing – spying, spying even on the Kennedys and their sexual activities. He was part of the McCarthy witch hunt of Communist actors, especially if they were Jewish. McQuaid shares all these phobias. McQuaid was anti-Semitic. He had all this knowledge about the Holocaust and persecution of Jews, but he didn’t speak out about it.”

* John Cooney’s John Charles McQuaid: Ruler of Catholic Ireland is published by O’Brien Press.