John Charles McQuaid - The Archbishop and The Poet

The Archbishop and The Poet

McQuaid regularly gave money to the poet Patrick Kavanagh whom he first met in 1940. In 1946 he found Kavanagh a job on the Catholic magazine 'The Standard' but the poet remained chronically disorganised and the archbishop continued to assist him until his death in 1967. Patrick Kavanagh was a great religious poet but his long poem 'The Great Hunger' (1942) gave a very bleak view of Catholicism, and the ultra-orthodox prelate must have been well aware of this. Why he chose to disregard this uncomfortable fact is something of a mystery.

(However journalist Emmanuel Kehoe wrote of Kavanagh: "As a teenager I'd nourished a natural Irish anti-clericalism and anger at the sex-denying Catholic Church by reading his staggeringly powerful poem, The Great Hunger. Yet even this epic exercise in savage indignation did not lose Kavanagh the patronage of the Blackrock Borgia, the Archbishop of Dublin, John Charles McQuaid. What this ostensibly austere Spiritan found to admire and support in the raggle-taggle character who sometimes sounded like a latter-day William Blake long puzzled me, except that McQuaid must have seen in him a deep and authentic Catholicism.")

The following is an extract from 'Patrick Kavanagh: A Biography' by Antoinette Quinn (2001):

"Since the cancer operation, Dr McQuaid had maintained an interest in his protégé's welfare. When Kavanagh was still living in No 62, the archbishop's chauffeur-driven Humber would draw up outside at Christmas time and the priest at the wheel would be sent to ring the doorbell and summon the poet. Kavanagh, who checked the identity of all callers to the front door in a car mirror he had rigged up for the purpose, would join His Grace in the car rather than let him see the state of his flat. On the first occasion he confided in the priest that the visit was inconvenient because he had a woman with him. When Dr McQuaid was told, he showed his sense of humour by responding, 'Some good woman from the Legion of Mary, doubtless.'"

The Archbishop also played a role in the events that led to the composition of Kavanagh's poem "On Raglan Road".There was a curious (chaste!) triangular relationship involving Kavanagh, McQuaid and Hilda Moriarty, the lady whose rejection of the poet provided the theme of the song.

Regarding the poet's sudden death on 30 November 1967, Antoinette Quinn wrote: "Immediately on learning of the death, Dr. McQuaid sent a handwritten letter of sympathy to Katherine, telling her he would like to have visited Patrick in his last illness and that long before the marriage he 'had arranged that at the shortest notice the poet would be received and cared for in the Mater Private Nursing Home. But it was not God's will.'"