John A Murphy: One of Ireland's foremost public intellectuals
While best known to the public for his roles outside academia, John A. was first and foremost a UCC man
Professor John A. Murphy (known throughout Ireland simply as ‘John A,’ so wide was his renown at its greatest extent) was arguably Ireland’s best-known historian for most of the 1970s and 80s, and one of its most widely-discussed public intellectuals. A native of Macroom, he made the short journey to Cork city when matriculating in University College Cork in October 1945, and save for short periods abroad while on academic sabbatical he remained a proud resident of the city for the remainder of his days.
He gave evidence of his outstanding intellectual ability at Macroom’s De La Salle secondary school, and was an active member (and sometime president) of its past pupils' union for many years. Awarded one of only three Cork County Council scholarships available in 1945, he graduated three years later with a first-class degree in History and Latin, and first place in the order of merit. A teaching career beckoned, and now equipped with both HDip and MA, he took up a position at the diocesan seminary in Farranferris. He spent the following ten years honing his intellect and delivery, while also marrying his college sweet-heart, Aileen (‘Cita’) McCarthy, and becoming a father to the first of what would ultimately number five children (Susan, Clíona, Brian, Hugh and Eileen). Head-hunted shortly before his death by James Hogan, the long-standing Professor of History in UCC, he was appointed Assistant in Irish History in 1960, to a new Lectureship in the subject in 1968, and to the Professorship in October 1971.
While best known to the public for his roles outside academia, he was first and foremost a UCC man, and wearing his teaching, research and administrative hats in turn, he served the college, and the National University of Ireland, loyally and well. Blessed with a warm delivery in his lectures (occasionally enhanced by a recourse to song, his fine voice being one of many gifts he acknowledged he derived from his mother), he nurtured talent at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, while also serving at different times on the College’s Governing Body and the Senate of the NUI. Eschewing the modern tendency to specialise in a narrowly-defined period, he wrote and lectured on Irish history over the longue durée, emphasising that the national narrative could properly be understood only in the context of broader European and world events. His overseas sabbaticals undoubtedly added depth to this viewpoint.
Sympathetic in particular to the difficulties experienced by students of limited means, he supported claims for improved grants and inflation-linked means test. The numerous demands on his time prevented him from being a prolific author, but his output of journal/book articles was by no means inconsiderable, while his two-volume school textbook Stair na hEopra (1955, 1958) and Ireland in the twentieth century (1975) made significant impacts in their time. Arguably his best work came after his retirement, most notably the landmark history of UCC itself, The College (1995). Knowing how demanding the craft of writing was, his reviews of the works of other authors were invariably perceptive and generous.
An accurate indicator of the standing he enjoyed in his profession was the never-ending stream of invitations to either address, or chair, gatherings of learned societies such as the Conference of Irish Historians, the Military History Society of Ireland, and local historical groups, to name but a few.
Regarding the latter pride of place was occupied by the Cork Historical and Archaeological Society, whose field trips he frequently addressed, whose journal was deftly edited by him for many years, and on whose council he sat for longer still.
His time in Farranferris predisposed him to sympathise with the position of both teachers and school students alike, and he freely gave of his time to address both groups, whether in the form of his participation in the Education Forum, his trips to the Teachers’ Centre, his regular addresses to History Teachers Association gatherings, or his talks to groups of nervous Leaving Certificate students.
Adult Education was a particular concern, and building on the pioneering work of Alfred O’Rahilly he made time to teach on the diploma course offered by UCC, and to attend, where possible, the graduations of each class. With the platform subsequently provided by his election to the Senate, he publicly called for the establishment of a distinct section within the Department of Education dedicated to the sector. The service he rendered to Tuairim was of a piece with this commitment.
Starting out with invitations to participate in RTÉ’s Thomas Davis lecture series, at some point he made appearances on practically every historical and current affairs programme broadcast by the station, either on television or radio, and even made the difficult transition to its entertainment output. Especially frequent were his appearances on its Irish language programming (and on Radio na Gaeltachta and TnaG/TG4 after their creation) – appearances that helped him to spread the gospel of a language he cherished all his life. A passionate commitment to RTÉ’s editorial independence and public service remit led him to speak out against both political interference in its operations and, in surprisingly passionate terms, commercial radio. His column for the Sunday Independent, of course, was compulsory reading for many over its lifetime.
So high indeed was his media profile by the late 1970s that some queried whether ‘the most televised don in Ireland’ was becoming over-exposed (one wag wondered in August 1977 why he was not being asked for his opinion on the death of Elvis); others pointed out that he was being asked for his opinion on topics far removed from his area of specialism. But even his critics had to concede that he rarely left the impression of being poorly prepared for, or perturbed by, whatever questions were directed at him.
At one point he was almost a permanent fixture on the country’s Summer School circuit, whether it was Dungarvan’s Social Study group, Clare’s Merriman, Donegal’s McGill, Doneraile’s North Cork Writers festival, or UCC’s own pioneering Irish Studies gathering, which attracted students from America, continental Europe and further afield and whose work in Ireland counted as credit towards their home university degree programmes.
Arguably the major turning point in his life in terms of public engagement came in 1977 as a result of his decision to run (successfully as it turned out) for a seat in Seanad Éireann, as an independent on the NUI panel. This new high profile representative political role forced him to engage with issues some of which were completely outside his ken, for which his disciplinary knowledge and training could not fully prepare him, and where deference to his views could not be expected and was not forthcoming. Just as many of the criticisms he directed towards aspects of Irish life and state policy frequently hit the mark, now so too did much of the return fire.
In common with many Irish intellectuals who came to prominence in the 1960s, he identified himself as a socialist, albeit a systematic analysis of the role played by social class was not a pronounced feature of his historical writings. He rarely expounded upon in detail as to what he understood by the term beyond a marked preference for the public over the private sector (the 1970s, of course, was a poor decade for both), sympathy with the plight of the large contemporary underclass, populist rhetoric damning ‘beef barons,’ ‘tycoon hoteliers’, and the like, and broad support for the trade union movement (a support reciprocated locally by the Cork Council of Trade Unions, whose Connolly Hall was the venue for many of his talks).
An avowed admirer of James Connolly, and critic of Jim Larkin, he was a supporter of the Irish Labour History Society from its foundation in 1973. His famous observation that snobbery prevented the Cork working class from voting for Labour party candidates may have been said tongue in cheek, but it was indicative of a presumptive mindset among the Irish middle class left wing fraternity that was far more significant than chauvinism in explaining that party’s poor performance nationally over many years.
As such, his opposition to the Single European Act and wariness of the new European Treaties of the 1990s and 2000s was entirely predictable and consistent. Two driving forces behind this opposition were a fear that the creation of a European superstate would compromise Ireland’s military neutrality, and a belief that the European project posed a threat to national control over Ireland’s natural resources, whence his endorsement of the aims of the Resources Protection Campaign.
Through his active membership of the Ireland-USSR Friendship Society (which led to periodic speaking visits to the Soviet Union) he sought to promote a favourable view in Ireland of Moscow’s global role. His observation in 1980 that there was no more evidence of a police state in the USSR than in Ireland certainly damaged the credibility of his commentary on international (and to a lesser extent domestic) affairs. Moreover, his defence, in the face of academic opposition, of a donation of books to UCC Library from the Soviet government following the latter’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 and subsequent jailing of the dissident physicist Andrei Sakharov, on the grounds that cultural or academic activities should not be tainted by political considerations, gave rise to the credible charge of double standards. Certainly there was an inconsistency between his explicit strictures regarding the undeniably malign nature of America’s interference in Latin America in the 70s and 80s (most famously in Chile) and the exculpatory language he employed when addressing Soviet domination over eastern Europe, including such events as the declaration of martial law in Poland in 1981.
His greater concern with America was with the supply of funds and weapons from the Irish-American community to the armed campaign undertaken by the Provisional IRA from 1970 onwards, and it was his observations on that campaign, and on what he argued was the excessive prominence of the Catholic church in Irish public life, that generated the most intense controversies of his life. Dismissing the Provisional movement as armed Hibernianism and unworthy of the title republican, his views on the optimal outcome of the national question went from a wholesale endorsement of a united Ireland in the late 60s to advocacy by the early 80s of an internal settlement based on an intact border. Having protested against the introduction of internment in 1971, and the Emergency Powers Act of 1976, in the aftermath of the 1985 Anglo-Irish Agreement (of which he approved), he supported a change in the state’s extradition laws that would eliminate the defence of political motivation against proceedings under the laws – a most sensitive issue for the new Fianna Fáil government in 1987.
His public criticism of the hunger strikers of 1980-81, and of their supporters (which on one famous occasion included a contretemps with the Secretary of the Cork County Board of the GAA) led to the most fraught period of his entire life, one that was not diminished by his admission that for all his condemnations of the activities of the Provisional IRA, and prognostications on the problems of the north in general, he had, up to that point, never visited any of the trouble spots in the six counties. It was an admission that inevitably damaged the authority of his analysis.
His hostility to the armed campaign endured long after he had left both the senate and university life, and led him bitterly to criticise even such a revered figure as John Hume, that life-long exponent of non-violent protest, when he made overtures to Gerry Adams in the late 80s and early 90s, in order to bring Sinn Féin in from the isolation it experienced as a result of its endorsement of the IRA’s activities. The words expressed by Professor Murphy on this and other occasions were undoubtedly sincere, and in his eyes the vehemence with which they were expressed were justified – but it is difficult to deny that in this instance John Hume had the wiser, wider view.
For someone who was a cradle Catholic, who had served mass in the Honan chapel while a student, and who taught priests in a diocesan seminary, his journey towards atheism was a profoundly difficult, nay, traumatic, one – albeit once he had made the leap of unfaith he manifested the zeal of the apostate in a head-on assault on Catholic teaching and practices. It is fair to say that time has not been kind to the argument he espoused for much of the 1980s, that were the southern state to be shorn of denominational influences it would go a long way towards winning the support of the northern Protestant community for the removal of the border. Forty years on, four decades that have witnessed the evisceration of the Catholic church in the Republic, and there has been no concomitant shift in the Protestant-Unionist identity within Northern Ireland. The fact that this outcome was foreseeable from the very outset of the project led many to suppose that Professor Murphy’s real intention was to effect change in the twenty six counties of Ireland irrespective of its impact in the other six.
Especially vocal in his criticism of the 1979 Family Planning Act and the outcome of the 1986 Divorce referendum (and of Charles Haughey’s role in both), he was more reflective in his response to the Abortion referendum of 1983. Personally opposed to the practice as he undoubtedly was, he opposed for principled reasons the insertion into the constitution of the proposed amendment as worded.
More troubling was the inference that he believed politicians and the laity were somehow cajoled into acting in the manner that they did, that they lacked the agency to think for themselves and if necessary disagree with the bishops: that in effect only opposition to the Church was proof of intellectual maturity, courage and sophistication. If this was true it was a mindset that was far from exclusive to Professor Murphy.
While old age inevitably took its toll in terms of mobility and illness, he was still sufficiently engaged in his chosen progression to take up the offer in 2012 of a position on the Government’s Advisory Group on the Decade of Centenaries, albeit he had to step down after only a few months as the burden of travelling for meetings in Dublin was too great. His last significant intervention in public life came during the same-sex marriage referendum campaign of 2015, when he publicly described the proposed constitutional amendment as ‘grotesque nonsense.’ It was a stark reminder that the reformers of one generation can very quickly be rendered passé by the very process of change they advocated.
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