Rift between bishop and the Examiner detailed in book

Paul Hughes

The Maynooth Studies in Local History series – edited by Maynooth University historian, Prof Ray Gillespie, and published by Dublin-based Four Courts Press – has been very kind to Westmeath over the years, contributing much to our knowledge of political, social and religious life in the county over the centuries.

The latest tranche of books from the series – which mainly offers a publication route for Masters graduates from Maynooth University’s history department – is no exception, featuring two books of strong local interest.

A review of the first of these publications – Michael Nolan’s ‘The Parnell split in Westmeath: the bishop and the newspaper editor’ – is timely, given that last weekend, a new bishop was installed in the Diocese of Meath.

While relations between the episcopal See and the Westmeath Examiner were strong for the duration of the 20th century and for what has elapsed of the 21st, this was not the case in the latter part of the 19th century.

Such was the deterioration of the relationship between then Bishop of Meath, Dr Thomas Nulty, and the young founder of the Westmeath Examiner, John P Hayden, that by the late 1880s, the bishop had declared the newspaper to be “dangerous to the faith and morals of the people”. By 1894, he had ruled that any parishioner who read it, let alone bought it, would be denied the Sacraments.

When a devastating split between Irish nationalists took place in 1890, caused by the divorce case in which the Irish Parliamentary Party leader Charles Stewart Parnell was cited as co-respondent, the rivalry between Hayden and Nulty intensified.

Few counties in Ireland existed in such an atmosphere of polarisation at the time of the split, and Michael Nolan expertly lays out where this atmosphere derived from, how it was exacerbated by Parnell’s fall, and how it played out.

Nolan’s central argument is that the story of the Parnell split in Westmeath was a sub-plot to a “wider revolt by a section of the Catholic middle class against the dominant role of the Church in the politics of the county”. The original source of the struggle was the insistence of Bishop Nulty to forsake rendering Caesar unto Caesar, instead playing a very direct role in the politics of the diocese.

The Westmeath Examiner was barely four years old when, in 1886, its 23-year-old editor Hayden joined Mullingar town commissioners in backing a poor law board proposal for a new water scheme for the town of Mullingar. Bishop Nulty, unhappy with the plan and the costs it would entail, proposed his own scheme. But Hayden and his supporters, while deferential to the Church on most matters, were indignant at the bishop’s flagrant intervention in municipal politics.

As Nolan points out, however, this was a time when the clergy had a declining role in politics and was keenly aware that it was being “elbowed out” by a rising Catholic middle class. For instance, the selection of Irish Party election candidates was controlled exclusively by the party hierarchy.

There were also other points of conflict. For example, when Parnell had, in 1886, imposed his lover’s husband, Captain William O’Shea, as a candidate for a parliamentary election in Galway. Much to the chagrin of Nulty et al, Hayden and his allies in Westmeath political circles backed Parnell to the hilt.

And so, long before the Parnell split actually occurred and intensified the battle between Hayden and Nulty, the fault lines were there. The split itself, Nolan says, “provided Hayden with the perfect pretext to re-enter the political arena and settle old scores with the bishop”.

While the Westmeath Examiner became the propaganda organ of the Parnellites, the bishop and his allies had a decisive upper hand and bled the Examiner of its readership and commercial support, with Hayden forced to rely on influential Protestants and Parnellite business allies to keep the paper afloat.

Doubly crippling to Hayden was the fact that Parnellite gains in successive local elections in Westmeath seemed to matter little in the fact of clerical power.

However, as Nolan convincingly argues, Nulty’s victory was short-term and pyrrhic; it “came at a cost, both in the shape of a disaffected minority of Catholics and also in the criticism which Nulty in particular had to grapple with in the remaining years of his life”.

Time was on Hayden’s side; in contrast, Nulty died – still entrenched in his old positions – on Christmas Eve, 1898, and did not live to see the reunification of the Irish Party in 1900.

Thereafter, the author concludes, Hayden and his supporters “finally achieved the freedom to think and act as they saw fit in local politics”. It must be pointed out, however, that Hayden’s eminence as a rebel was short-lived. Before long, the Examiner became a standard for another hierarchy and its orthodoxy – that of John Redmond’s Irish Party, one which, from 1906 onwards, became increasingly challenged in Westmeath by Laurence Ginnell and, later, the rise of Sinn Féin. When these figures and forces emerged, Hayden’s pen reserved for them the same venom with which he had once been targeted by Bishop Nulty.

A very accessible primer on local politics in late 19th century Ireland, ‘The Parnell split in Westmeath’ is a well-researched study employing, among other sources, police reports, newspapers and papers held in Meath Diocesan Archives, the National Library and elsewhere.

The author, Michael Nolan, is a BA Humanities graduate from Dublin City University, and also holds an MA in History from Maynooth University. He is retired from the aviation industry, and lives in Dublin.