The Irish President forgotten by history books
Sean T. O’Kelly was as known for his intellect as his antics — yet his name is rarely heard
He earned the sobriquet ‘Shanty’ O’Kelly He excelled both in faith formation and in academics
HE was the President with an enigmatic middle initial long before Michael D., and just as modest in physical stature, wearing a top hat to compensate. Smiled upon by amused and towering rugby players when attending internationals, he suffered the indignity of catcalls from the crowd: ‘Cut the grass! We can’t see the President!’
But Sean T. O’Kelly lived an extraordinary, even Rabelaisian, existence – from the GPO garrison in 1916 to the grand halls of the Capitol as he addressed both Houses of the US Congress.
A man with an immense capacity for drink, he was known to slip out from the back door of the Áras to hurry over to the Hole in the Wall pub, set into the surrounds of the Phoenix Park since 1675, after giving staff the slip by demanding his official limousine be brought around to the front.
After such episodes – which allegedly extended to going ‘on the batter’ elsewhere with newly-made bosom pals — O’Kelly was permitted to have draught stout on tap in the old Viceregal Lodge, replaced regularly by Guinness Ltd, with never an invoice issuing.
His love life was just as complicated as any Clinton incumbency. There were rumours about a personal laundry-maid while he was installed as our Head of State, quite apart from the maelstrom of being married to two sisters, having supposedly not seen the ‘superior’ second until practically plighted to the frumpy first.
How did a man who was said to be the Little Fellow to De Valera’s Long – the two inseparable during the Civil War, and long afterwards – come to have such a charmed life, especially when born on the wrong side of the tracks and often appearing so dishevelled as to earn the sobriquet ‘Shanty’ O’Kelly?
And why has he been forgotten by history, such that his name is practically unknown to schoolchildren today, despite being the very first President of an Irish Republic? He earned that distinction by being Head of State on the day the long-sought Republic was finally declared in 1949.
It almost certainly has to do with the disapproval and distaste felt in clerical and ‘right-thinking’ circles that a small man once described as being ‘as Dublin as gur cake’ could achieve the highest office in the land and then hardly adjust from the on-the-run days of rumbustious guerrilla warfare through highways and byways, when the devil would very much take the hindmost, and wherever he could get it.
Sean Thomas O’Kelly, the heroic, the hell-raiser, the humble and Heaven-conscious, was born on the wrong side of the tracks, in a cottage in North Inner City Dublin, on August 25, 1882 – a time of ferment following the Phoenix Park assassinations of Britain’s two highestranking administrators three months earlier.
Other houses in the artisan quarter of Wellington Street – named, naturally, for the victor at Waterloo – were being raided that summer. But nobody seems to have bothered with the cramped quarters of cobbler and bootmaker father Sam, his wife Catherine, and their farrow of no fewer than eight children.
The father ran a shop called Kelly’s in nearby Berkeley Road, and there is evidence that the future President was known as John Thomas Kelly throughout his childhood, even being nicknamed ‘Johntom’. He went to the local Christian Brothers’ school, and such was the nationalist ferment of the time, in which ‘De Brudders’ themselves were steeped, that the child was soon being Gaelicized, even radicalised in modern idiom. By the 1911 Census, we see the now-widowed Catherine Kelly, his mother, signing her name thus, only for her son, Seaghán Tomás Ó Ceallaigh, to take over filling in the form. He then translates his mother’s name into Irish and writes it above her original entry, filling out the rest of the details for his siblings and himself in antiquated Gaelic script.
He even puts his own name in the space for the signature of the Enumerator – which was intended for the Royal Irish Constabulary officer collating the forms. Indeed policeman Hugh Roddy duly scratches out the presumptuous name and inserts his own, scrawling ‘all Catholics’, where O’Kelly had attempted to make all his answers opaque to officialdom, even while complying scrupulously with the law.
O’Kelly was indeed deeply Catholic, being a member of many sodalities while sedulously studying his schoolbooks, carefully observing the Church’s moral strictures at this early stage of his life such that he became a teacher’s pet, both academically and in faith formation.
In that census he wrote in Irish that his occupation was that of both clerk and newspaper journalist, a profession in which his proclivity for the intellectual ink of free-flowing alcohol would find full expression. But what separated O’Kelly from many of his peers was that he appeared able to hold it, becoming more garrulous with each libation, but no less coherent in his often trenchant views.
He had always studied as a boy in the National Library, described as the place where earnest offspring went to keep warm, and sometimes shared the reading room with his near contemporary, James Joyce. But it was O’Kelly who somehow became noticed and won a coveted job as assistant to the Head Librarian, T. W. Lyster, a man Joyce would immortalise in the Scylla and Charybdis episode of Ulysses.
By now O’Kelly was gloriously lost in the thickets of the Celtic Twilight, joining many mystical bodies, such as Celtic Literary Society and the Gaelic League. From there it was a short journey to Sinn Féin, the odd new movement advocating that Ireland should have a dual monarchy like Austria-Hungary, consisting of the existing British crown and a restored Irish High King, and a group called the Batholomew Teeling Society.
The latter debating and philosophical group was in reality a front for the IRB, and soon the bibulous O’Kelly was drinking deep of its doctrine too. He ran for election to the council and won a seat at the age of 23, helped by many sermons from the pulpit recommending this prayerful young man. He had also, incidentally, joined the Knights of Columbanus, achieving an inner track to higher ambition.
This led to him making an Irish language address to Pope Pius X in 1908, which was handsomely illuminated and presented at the Vatican in support of Catholic and nationalist rights, supported by discreet typewritten translations in both English and Italian.
Genuinely erudite on many fronts, O’Kelly was soon the editor of a campaigning newspaper weighed down by its ungainly title, An Claidheamh Soluis, meaning the Shining Sword or Sword of Light. Its aim was to
cut through the fug of Imperial prevarication with the laser-like logic of Irish self-determination.
The lofty, high-flown stuff also had practical purchase. When the Ulster Volunteers were formed to resist Home Rule, O’Kelly was a founder member of the rival Irish Volunteers. Tit-for-tat arms importations followed, and when war broke out between Britain and Germany it initially seemed a useful opportunity to calm all Irish passions by shoving Home Rule into cold storage. Pádraig Pearse had by now made O’Kelly his staff captain and it was inevitable that he should follow his leader into occupation of the General Post Office in April 1916.
The future President would later write of his own gallant actions in that fight, but there have been persistent rumours that O’Kelly left the building for a period – in one version, to go home for a meal, because they had no food, returning when better nourished; in another tale, not returning at all after the initial excitement of taking the building and his being asked to distribute copies of the Proclamation around the city; and in a yet further version, leaving before the end, while the building was ablaze, yet while it was still possible to do so, either with or without permission to relocate.
In any case, O’Kelly was duly rounded up. Roy Foster in his recent work, Vivid Faces, tells how the British authorities were ‘surprised to find so many of the rebels were cultured middle class people’. O’Kelly was interned in Oxford, but was allowed, on his honour, to potter about the dreaming spires of the University, even possessing a ticket to the Bodleian Library.
Back in Ireland, O’Kelly re-encountered the Seven Sisters, beautiful daughters of the Ryan family of Tomcoole, Co. Wexford, who by all accounts knocked spots off the legendary pulchritude of Constance and Eva Gore Booth, so swooned over by Yeats.
Min and Phyllis Ryan had been Republican couriers at the GPO, and a third daughter, Mary Kate, a Professor of French at UCD, was similarly interned for her fierce activities.
O’Kelly married Mary Kate in 1918, having become smitten with the whole sorority. She had initially been enamoured of the poet Tom Kettle, who was killed in khaki at the front, while Min was engaged to Seán Mac Diarmada, until he was shot out of hand as one of the seven signatories.
It was all rather complicated, but when Mary Kate died of heart problems in 1934 (alone in Nazi Germany – thereby hangs another mystery), O’Kelly, by now a Fianna Fáil Cabinet minister, was linked to one or two further Ryan daughters. He married Phyllis in 1936, although she was disapproving of his drinking habits.
Indeed, former Irish Press photographer Dougie Duggan remembers that after snapping O’Kelly on one occasion at the Áras, the President lightly touched his arm and suggested that they should both pray. Dougie was guided upstairs to the Presidential private oratory, falling on his knees in the darkness – only to be told to stand up, man, and handed a generous serving of whiskey. It doubled as yet another shebeen for the redoubtable Sean.
After spells as Minister for Local Government and Finance, O’Kelly had been considered to fill the post of first President of Ireland. But De Valera considered him the source of leaks from the Cabinet to the Catholic Church. Dev repeatedly asked his acolyte to resign from the Knights of Columbanus, which O’Kelly would do, only to re-join afterwards. Douglas Hyde got the job.
Sean T. was finally elected to the Aras in 1945. His chequered behaviour caused De Valera to consider that he himself would be official replacement when the term was up — but O’Kelly ensured that his brother-in-law, Fine Gael leader Risteard Mulcahy, married to yet another of the Ryan sisters, announced that the Opposition would consent to the incumbent serving a second term, thereby sparing an election.
Sean T’s shenanigans continued, including spilling Papal secrets back to politicians in something of quidpro-quo (which ensured he never received his coveted Order of Christ decoration), and misadventures such as getting more than tiddly at a dinner with President Dwight Eisenhower, the clear-eyed conqueror of Western Europe, who was apparently not impressed by this neutral’s necking of White House liquors.
O’Kelly died well-seasoned, but without issue, in November 1966 — half a century after first getting into a pickle in a public building.
He was 84.