McBride was author of insincere letter to Pope

I had assumed that former Taoiseach, John A Costello, a devout Catholic, had written the Uriah Heep-type letter of cloying humility and obsequiousness to Pope Pius XII.

But it was the shadowy Seán McBride, then minister for external affairs of that inter-party government, who wrote the cringingly submissive and insincere letter and, later, similar ones to the despotic Dublin Archbishop, John Charles McQuaid.

The same Seán McBride who, in later years, always promoted himself to the world at large as a civil rights champion.