Knighthood? How About A Punch On The Face?
Patrick Ryan takes a look at the long, and controversial history of civic honours in Ireland.
Beloved of fans of Father Ted, singer songwriter Neil Hannon’s 2010 album title offers an insight into a slightly different version of Irishness.
Bang Goes The Knighthood was written in the immediate aftermath of the economic crash, but though you suspect Hannon hardly hankered after a call from Buckingham Palace himself the title isn’t something you’ll ever see on a Kneecap album.
This son of the Bishop of Clogher, better known as The Divine Comedy, grew up in Fermanagh and attended Portora Royal School in Enniskillen, where the past pupils includes Dubliners Samuel Beckett and Oscar Wilde.
In the north the New Years Honours may, or may not mean a lot depending on whom you ask. Van the Sir was in no doubt, in 2016.
“It’s amazing, it’s very exhilarating, the whole thing” Van Morrison admitted to the BBC, still in wonder as this working class boy from Protestant East Belfast was presented with his knighthood.
The equivalent in Dublin, where Neill Hannon got married, just off St Stephen’s Green? In 1998 by the All-Party Oireachtas Committee on the Constitution noted the idea of Irish honours had “been raised in a desultory manner by governments since 1930”.
The Most Illustrious Order of Saint Patrick had been created in 1783 by King George III at the request of the then Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. Membership was restricted to knights and gentlemen who could boast three generations of “noblesse” (ancestors bearing coats of arms) on both the father’s and mother’s side though in practice it was limited to British princes and Irish peers, political payback for favours given. The last holders of the title started to disappear a century ago, and both the 1922 and the 1937 Constitutions were emphatic in consigning such titles to the dustbin of history, .
“No title of honour in respect of any services rendered in or in relation to the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) may be conferred on any citizen of the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann) except with the approval or upon the advice of the Executive Council of the State,” the 1922 statute stated.
Though the Cumann na nGaedheal government tried to raise a revised Order of St Patrick with Westminister Fianna Fáil’s 1932 General Election win put paid to the plan. However the new government faced a tricky situation with the forthcoming Eucharistic Congress in Dublin and soon-to-be papal knight Charles Bewley, Irish ambassador to the Holy See, warned that great offence might be caused if the papal legate to the event, Cardinal Lorenzo Lauri was not given an honour during his week-long stay.
The government held firm. A million people attended High Mass in Phoenix Park, Irish tenor John McCormack, in his uniform as a Papal Count sang Panis Angelicus to rapturous applause, Lorenzo was made a Freeman of the City of Dublin, and Vatican officials beamed.
Civic awards weren’t exclusive to the British monarchy of course. France gave us our tricolour and several of us their highest honour, too. Established in 1802 by Napoleon Bonaparte La <em>Légio</em>n d’honneur recognizes exceptional service to that republic, and Irish recipients include Samuel Beckett, who as well as being an outstanding writer served with the French Resistance in WWII, and U2’s Bono, along with a man if not born, then bread and buttered in the Liberties; Cornelius Ryan, war correspondent and author of The Longest Day which chronicled the Normandy landings.
Growing up around the corner from George Bernard Shaw’s former home in Portebello Ryan’s talent for music, and writing was evident early on to his teachers at the CBS in Synge Street. He never received a formal award from his homeland, though and the best we could offer then, as now was Freedom of the City of Dublin, something granted to another writer, Jonathan Swift on January 13th, 1730 by a city council made up of guild officers representing the artisans, merchants and traders in a formal ceremony at the old Thosel (precursor to City Hall) on Skinner’s Row, close to Christchurch Cathedral.
Swift was rewarded not for writing Gulliver’s Travels but “The Hibernian Patriot” who penned passionate pamphlets arguing against the use of British copper coins, and calling for us to burn “all things that came from England except her people and her coal”.
The charter under which Dean Swift received the city’s highest honour was later superseded by the Municipal Corporations (Ireland) Act 1840 and in certain aspects the Local Government Act 2001, though privileges such as the right to gaze at your sheep grazed on city commons like College Green and St Stephen’s Green remained.
The list of recipients from 1876, all nominated by the Lord Mayor currently stands at almost 90 people and is certainly impressive.
Standouts include WE Gladstone, British Prime Minister; US President Ulysses S. Grant; Home Rule Party leader Charles Stuart Parnell; writer George Bernard Shaw; US President John F Kennedy; Tour de France winner Stephen Roche; imprisoned South African leader Nelson Mandela (enrolled by proxy by Oliver Tambo), Mother Teresa of Calcutta (who learned English at Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham); football manager Jack Charlton; and US President Bill Clinton.
The addition of one Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof, by then Sir Bob in British tabloid’s having accepted a knighthood for his work on Live Aid in 2017, remains a case study in civic caution. The musician soon returned his award in protest over another recipient, Myanmar leader Aung San Suu Ky and her handling of violence against Rohingya Muslims in her country. Councillors voted to withdraw the honour from her and shortly afterwards removed the Boomtown Rats singer’s name from the Roll of Honorary Freemen, too.
Geldof remained Sir Bob, a member of an exclusive club which included the very bad as well as the very good: men like brutal Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu, Robert Mugabe, who was responsible for a similarly despotic regime in Zimbabwe, and serial sex offender Jimmy Savile.
The list of those who have declined the plethora of British “gongs” is storied and includes writer Rudyard Kipling (who turned down both a knighthood and later the Order of Merit British twice – four refusals in all) as well as Dublin playwrights Seán O’Casey, and George Bernard Shaw (who initially considered rejecting his Nobel Prize for Literature) but adding a moniker before or after your name still confers kudos meaning in the UK, as shown in David Beckham’s dogged and widely mocked pursuit of his recent knighthood..
Both Éamon de Valera and Seán Lemass had toyed with the idea of reviving lrish honours in the ’50’s and in 1986 following entreaties from TDs like Michael O’Leary, Gay Mitchell and Bernard Durkan Taoiseach Garrett FitzGerald suggested that the party whips might discuss the issue, but once more the belief that a jaded electorate might view it a variation on appointments to state boards, widely dismissed as a way to reward cronies, saw the proposals shelved.
FitzGerald was happy to establish the Gaisce President’s Award scheme for young people, based on a pilot brought in by Fianna Fáil in power under the previous Taoiseach Charles Haughey, who’d hoped it would also prove a model for a wider non-partisan and non-political honours system.
A decade later Labour leader Ruairi Quinn acknowledged that “opposition to an honours system in the past arose out of the sense that it conveyed some kind of quasi-aristocratic benediction on the recipient”, but argued that their time had arrived. Taoiseach Bertie Ahern was receptive and following meetings between senior members of the three main parties the systems employed by other countries were investigated, and it was proposed that after recommendations from an independent panel our President would present a medal and parchment to recipients but Fianna Fáil was insistent on government involvement, and again the plans ground to a halt.
In 2003 Ahern proposed that the Oireachtas Committee on Procedure and Privilege examine the issue once more. Four years on golfer Pádraig Harrington’s British Open win focused minds as politicians struggled to properly honour his achievement but the recent UK Cash for Honours scandal, whereby several large donors to the Labour party were nominated for life peerages by then Prime Minister Tony Blair, worried party whips and as ever lack of agreement led to no action being taken.
Fast forward to 2012. The coalition revealed plans for the Distinguished Service Award for the Irish Abroad, and announced that it was open to a similar initiative for those living here.
Three years later businessman and Senator Feargal Quinn introduced a private member’s bill to establish “Gradam an Uachtaráin”, through which nominees would be put forward by an Awarding Council, and be presented with their titles by the President, while the government maintained a veto, but this was shelved following the fall of the 2016 coalition. However plans were revived in 2023 when a new bill modelled on Quinn’s proposed legislation was proposed by Independents in Seanad Éireann, and given cautious support by Minister of State Hildegarde Naughton.
Apart from the Freedom of Dublin what honours can Ireland actually offer?
Honorary university degrees are an option, though in many cases they exist simply to gain free publicity for the conferring institutions.
Then there’s Aosdána. An autonomous affiliation of artists, it was established by government in 1981 to honour men and women who made outstanding contributions to arts in Ireland, and nominees are welcomed as Saoi, presented with a gold Torc…nah. Too narrow focused and it lacks the all-important name recognition with Joe Public. Next!
How about a punch on the face, and being bundled into a sack?
The Irish might pretend they are not too pushed by the honour of having their likeness featured on a postage stamp but just like past recipients with close links to the Liberties, from Irish patriot Robert Emmet to brewer Arthur Guinness and Sinéad O’Connor they’ll certainly be slapped – onto countless envelopes.
“In a country like Ireland that doesn’t have an honours system, being on a stamp is the highest honour the public can bestow and it’s fitting that the groups’ families are here with us today to celebrate,” enthused Anna McHugh, head of Corporate Communications at An Post in 2010 at the launch of stamps featuring Irish showbands.
There is one slight problem. It’s a biggie…
Usually you have to be dead.
Living people simply seldom make it onto stamps. It’s the same craic with having a public street, or a park, named after you. The worry there is your dark past might be uncovered.
“He was a well-loved personality,” declared local Conservative Party Councillor David Jeffels in an interview with the BBC shortly after the death of a local man in 2011 whom a North Yorkshire town planned to honour in his spiritual home.
“He loved Scarborough and Scarborough loved him. ”
Yes, as chairman of the commemoration group Jeffels was happy to reveal plans for a path, along with signs – and a £100,000 public fund – to put up a a statue of the late Sir Jimmy Savile, already a Freeman of the Borough, on the seafront.
“This is in the very early stages but I think this would attract a lot of people to the resort,” the Councillor predicted.
If we were to introduce a viable honours system what would it even be called?
“Duine Uasal” – DU – perhaps, indicating in Irish a person of high standing. Uachtarán na hÉireann could be involved in the process, and perhaps the Council of State and the People’s Assembly, with nominations accepted from members of the public, with transparency throughout the process. These Irish honours could come with something more practical, such as actual Irish citizenship.
“It was where I should be. I felt it was home,” he said of Ireland, with great disappointment.
Easing some of Hurt’s pain by making him an Irish citizen,thus granting this to his children, and by extension to gift it to grandchildren, would seem an opportunity missed, in hindsight.
Howld your horses me auld segoise. For now forget gongs, and just take those repeated bangs on the face at the GPO.
Remember it’s the way of saying “we loved you” in Dublin.
