John Charles McQuaid - Legacy

Legacy

In a sermon delivered in 1955 on the occasion of the Catholic University of Ireland centenary, McQuaid praised his predecessor Cardinal Paul Cullen: "No writer has done adequate justice to his character or stature...Silent, magnanimous, far-seeing, Cardinal Cullen would seem to be as heedless of self-justification after death, as he was intrepid in administration during life. Not his the multitude of letters and scrupulous autobiography that help a later age to reconstruct a picture of the unspeaking dead."

Shortly after McQuaid's death, Cardinal John Carmel Heenan, Archbishop of Westminster, predicted in an RTÉ radio documentary that history would vindicate him. In his work "Ireland 1912–1985" Professor John Joseph Lee wrote: "The Church is a bulwark, perhaps now the main bulwark of the civic culture. It is the very opportunism of the traditional value system that leaves religion as the main bulwark between a reasonably civilised civil society and the untrammelled predatory instincts of individual and pressure group selfishness, curbed only by the power of rival predators .... If religion were no longer to fulfil its historic civilising mission as a substitute for internalised values of civic responsibility, the consequences for the country, no less than for the church, could be lethal" (page 675).

In his book "Twentieth Century Ireland", published in 2005 historian Dermot Keogh writes:

"Ostensibly the old order was changing. The resignation of two figures from Irish public life at the beginning of the 1970s reinforced that perception. On 4 January 1972, John Charles McQuaid retired as archbishop of Dublin after spending over 30 years in the post; he died on 7 April 1973. Eamon de Valera retired from the presidency in June 1973; he died on 29 August 1975. Both men had been close friends in the 1930s. They were representative of a culture of service that had been a feature of the political life of the young state. In the 1970s both men had lost their relevance. But the culture of service, upon which both had built their public lives, was an ever-diminishing influence in a state which had come to revere the philosophy of radical individualism."

In a hostile article in the Irish Times on 7 April 2003, McQuaid's biographer, John Cooney provided a different slant to the observations of Professors Lee and Keogh:

"Generally, there was a consensus that McQuaid's death marked the end of the era of Renaissance-style prelates. Officially, the President, Eamon de Valera, was "deeply grieved" to hear the news. In the privacy of Loughlinstown Hospital Dev wept over the corpse of the Holy Ghost priest on whose behalf he had lobbied the Vatican in 1940 for elevation to the See of Dublin and the Primacy of Ireland. Although their relationship at times was strained, both men co-operated to control people's lives for so long in a closed and puritanical society which the writer Seán Ó Faoláin memorably decried as a "dreary Eden".

After McQuaid was buried under the High Altar in Dublin's Pro-Cathedral, he was quickly forgotten, as his successors struggled, unsuccessfully in the end, to fend off what became known as 'the liberal agenda'."