The following article was written prior to the death of Tom Dunne
When the idea of reviewing Tom Dunne’s memoir was put to me, I hesitated. Years ago, I had resolved not to review books written by friends or close acquaintances. On the whole, despite, some regrets, it made life simpler and the expression of opinion less fraught.
Where or how, in any case, did Tom Dunne stand on such scales? Certainly, I used to meet him on occasion in the 1980s and ’90s during my visits to Cork to see my mother and father, then my father only, and some friends. I can’t remember exactly when these occasional meetings with Tom began. The fact that he was a co-editor of The Irish Review, as I was of Graph, was a factor from the mid-’80s on, but these were agenda-less meetings: I simply respected Tom and enjoyed his company and conversation. After my father’s death, soon enough followed by the disappearance of a family base in the city, I was a far less frequent visitor to Cork; our chats, with no falling-out or formal suspension, came to a halt about twenty years ago.
So, did I feel like reviewing The Good Boy? (I had yet to read it.) A few other mouse-thoughts were nibbling at some corner of my mind. The book did not seem to be a late episode in the history wars and I didn’t want to be drawn into that over-familiar territory (though I couldn’t help noticing the Eoghan Harris endorsement in the blurb). If revisiting in memory the New Ross of Tom Dunne’s childhood and early education was central to the book, New Ross, where my favourite maternal uncle had lived and taught, was already occupying, more than it normally would, a portion of my thoughts, memories and despairing attempts to locate half-remembered letters, clippings and photos: a slightly older cousin of mine, who had lived abroad and largely disconnected from our family network since his twenties, suddenly and happily reconnected, and has been attempting, for reasons of his own, to reconstruct the detail of his parents’ lives. As a result, I have found myself revisiting a particular hinterland of memory: my mother’s delightfully innocent diaries of her earliest holidays in the Kerry Gaeltacht with my uncle Noel and another brother or sister or two; my own memory of a tall, kindly uncle chatting to my mother in the kitchen, aware of us children without feeling the need to torture us with the set curriculum of adult questions; later again, my taking advantage of an Arts for All excursion and open-air performance for children in New Ross to meet my uncle in a café during the year and a half that I spent in Waterford; and a few sparse memories of the house on the quay not far at all from the shoe shop that Tom Dunne’s mother set up and managed.
I was also intrigued by the fact that Tom cited the French Renaissance humanist Montaigne as an influence on his thinking and on the enterprise of composing The Good Boy. How often did any Irish writer – let alone a historian – place his ship under such a flag? I could be wrong but I do not recall any great enthusiasm for Montaigne when we students had to study a slim selection of the Essais at UCC. As Tom notes in his book, certain writers reveal themselves more fully to readers of a certain age.
Tom had published many (sometimes controversial) essays in which poetry and novels were approached for what they might have to say about the society of their day or the colonial dimension of Irish history. During the years when my contact with him had trailed off, I had been surprised to come across his detailed work on the painter Daniel Maclise in an impressively illustrated collection of essays, edited by Peter Murray and published jointly by the Crawford Art Gallery and Gandon Editions. Some years later I was happy to cite this work to reinforce a point in my belated thesis, in which Irish cultural history is read through the lens of classical music.
I didn’t of course need any prodding to remember that, as a secondary pupil, Tom had been my teacher of both history and English for five years before his departure for Cambridge. It also occurred to me that two of my friends, Dan Bradley and Mark O’Neill, had also sat, for a year at least, in Tom’s history class and might have something to say about him as a teacher and influence. I was walking along Wicklow Street when this idea began to take hold. Having a little time on my hands before dinner, I decided to pop into the Secret Book and Record Store, which I had rather neglected in recent times. As I scanned the shelves, I noted a book, Suspended Judgements, by John Cowper Powys (a novelist I have never got round to reading, though I have read a few quirky books by his clergyman brother Theodore). Hadn’t this book lingered in the same spot for years? I took pity on it. Here, I read, were non-academic talk-based essays ‘designed to stimulate a return to original texts’. And when the first essay after the introductory chapter (‘The art of discrimination’) proved to be about Montaigne, that seemed a sign: I resolved to write something, though maybe not quite a review, about The Good Boy.
In the following days, both Mark (based in Scotland) and Dan (in Dublin) agreed to write a few paragraphs. I gave them free rein. As it happens, Dan’s piece is, among other things, a mini-review. Let him speak for himself:
A good primary or post-primary teacher can make a significant contribution to the development of young minds. Some of those students may, over the years, recall that teacher and ponder how the teacher’s life has been. For those of us who sat in Tom Dunne’s 5th Year History class in Cork at the start of the 1970s, more than 50 years ago, the opportunity to get an insight into Dunne’s life is presented with the publication of his memoir The Good Boy (Cork UP 2024).
Starting a teaching career as an 18-year-old Christian Brother in Francis St primary school in the Coombe, Dublin 8, he was handed a leather by the headmaster to slap the boys, with the injunction: ‘It’s either you or them and they understand nothing else’ Dunne was ideologically opposed to the use of corporal punishment, so widespread at the time, substituting instead ‘reason, religion, kindness’. He learned that there were alternative ways of imposing discipline, by keeping the boys busy and also by use of the voice, changing its pitch and tone and volume. ‘Teaching,’ he observes, ‘is a branch of acting – or is it the other way round?’ (p 127). He also always saw teaching as a vocation. For me, Tom Dunne was a dedicated and thought-provoking teacher who really had the interests of his students at heart. He encouraged students to question the perceived wisdom.
An abiding memory of the school year 1971-72 was of him introducing us 5th-Year History students to FSL Lyons’ Ireland since the Famine, which had just been published in 1971. The enthusiasm of Dunne’s recommendation of FSL Lyons was infectious. We soon learned that, while Irish historians up to then had been largely concerned with political history, FSL Lyons in his great book addressed the economic, social, cultural and constitutional history of Ireland from the Famine to the 1960s, and wrote with great style.
Meeting Tom many years after leaving school, I was impressed by his immediate recall of my class and my role in it. The class, he recalled, were always up for a laugh and were inclined to treat King Lear as a comedy. He remembered me as the one with many questions, egged on by classmates – asking, for example, whether Leonard Cohen could be discussed instead of the usual material in religion class. Alas, at the end of 5th Year, Tom announced that he was leaving us to pursue his PhD at Cambridge. In his final class, he made an impression by earnestly urging every student to strive for excellence in whatever work they pursued, and he has taken his own advice in the writing of The Good Boy.
Edward Said advised Tom that the purpose of writing a memoir was to understand oneself. Dunne doesn’t flinch from the task, laying bare his painful experience in the Christian Brothers, from the age of 14 to 21, and the later upheaval in his family life.
Dunne professes that teaching, from primary to university level, was the most fulfilling aspect of his life’s work. He accepts the assessment of his performance as a secondary school teacher by one of his past pupils. As a young Christian Brother, Tom taught JP McManus, the business magnate, in Sexton St CBS in Limerick. At a school reunion, 50 years later, to celebrate Sexton St’s hurling successes the year Dunne taught there, McManus offered the judgement, “You were always fair as a teacher.”
“I’m very happy to settle for that,” replied Tom.
He continues to teach us in his early 80s in The Good Boy, in particular in explaining how Montaigne’s humanist philosophy guides his life.
When I met Tom for the first time in twenty years or so, the episode he remembered best from his secondary teaching days was how Dan, who had been placed in the stream for the supposedly less academic in our year, was offered a move upstream, as it were, after it became clear that he was more academic and questioning than most. Dan said he was comfortable where he was and, as a result, became something of a culture hero to his classmates. This fact adds an extra layer to some of Dan’s own memories above; it also illustrates how Tom Dunne, as Dan underlines, was not just impartially and out of principle a fair teacher, but that he positively enjoyed the interplay of personality and opinion in class. He encouraged every pupil to express himself as constructively as he could and was amused rather than outraged when the consensus in a class was against the received opinion.
The school we attended began in a converted house on the outskirts of Cork near Dennehy’s Cross, and was soon sprouting pre-fabs before it eventually moved to new more impressive premises in (alien) Bishopstown. The school’s development reflected the accelerating urban growth of the 1960s and early ’70s. Our year had an unprecedented ninety pupils or so, which is why streaming was deemed necessary. Who knows how rigorous that educational apartheid system was, or what part assumptions about class (would the son of a land labourer automatically be placed in the bottom level?) played when the crude triple division was made? With the Inter Cert behind them (and sometimes making their case), pupils had a degree of autonomy where affinities and abilities were concerned; the walls between classes became more porous and so Dan, Mark and I found ourselves together for certain subjects.
Dan remained true to his early stance and loyalties when, some years later, he chose to do an MA on the treatment of land labourers in independent Ireland and worked for many years (whether teaching or designing courses) in the emerging further education sector in Ireland to give adult students (from what used to be called an underprivileged background) the opportunity to develop the skills and confidence that would help them to break through barriers to employment or to third-level education.
In his tribute above, Dan comments on the importance of Tom’s refusal, from the beginning of his career in primary teaching, to include corporal punishment in his school-bag. A few years later, he had left the Christian Brothers and found his way to a job in the secondary school where I had the good fortune to have him as a teacher of both English and History for five years.
He didn’t impose himself on the class by coercion or eccentricity or by a combination of the two. We noticed, of course, from the beginning that he didn’t use a stick or leather, that he didn’t yank pupils by the ears or hair, that he didn’t dig his fingers into the upper arms in a way that could cause excruciating pain, or that he didn’t show the glee of a demented colonial commissioner as pupil after pupil fell, crumbled or stuttered into error under interrogation until only a few remained in their seats and the long snaking line of those awaiting punishment grew and grew. No, in a school that contained an unusual number of talented and sometimes brilliant young teachers, but also some old-style torturers and a handful of droners into submission, Tom mysteriously didn’t need to raise his voice (light enough but with a hint of grit). Instead, he strode back and forth in front of the desk, or came some way down the aisles between the rows of desks, so that he seemed to be talking, thinking and making matters clear for us as individuals, not as an undifferentiated mass. The rhythmic rush and condensed expression of the ‘darksome burn, horseback brown’ in Hopkins’s ‘Inversnaid’ began to entice, maybe a little more than the involuted politics of the Balkans. I still didn’t get the hang of the word hegemony, which I wouldn’t meet again till long after that first encounter in our European history textbook for the Inter Cert.
In The Good Boy, Tom mentions the few useful lessons he had from the actor Barry Cassin as part of his self-imposed task of mastering the craft of teaching. As Dan says, we boys had no idea of the emotional and intellectual turmoil behind the craft. If someone tested Tom’s patience, the reaction would convey that the pupil had let himself down and was capable of better.
As we grew into our teens, his teaching grew with us: participation, discussion and questions were encouraged.
This is perhaps the moment to introduce Mark’s words:
I left school for university all of 52 years ago. Having no idea what I was going to do with my life, I did subjects I was good at in school (English and History), and for the same reason drifted on to a Secondary Teaching Diploma. I hated teaching; I never found a persona that could control a class. Returning from a year abroad, I took a few hours teaching in my old school. I began to have what would now be recognised as anxiety attacks.
How I envied the calm which had pervaded Tom’s history lessons, which were never disrupted – even the unruliest pupils could not break that calm down. I moved on to any job I could get. Eventually, aged 27, I found myself, along with 20% of the Irish workforce, out of work, but got a place on an Arts Administration for the Unemployed course run by the Irish Museum Trust. This led to a 40-year career in museums, mostly in Glasgow, where I ended up as Head of Museums. I worked with history every day, but through exhibitions rather than teaching, which suited my personality better.
All this was built on a foundation laid down in Tom’s classes. One lasting memory is of a discussion based on our textbook, Maurice Larkin’s Gathering Pace: Continental Europe 1870-1945 (first published in 1969) about the changing political views of the middle class in France in the late 19th century. I found the whole question of social change very puzzling. How could a group of people all change their minds at the same time? Did they know that they were middle class? If they did, how did they know this? These were not questions that were addressed in my university studies, but, as I look back, they shaped my museum work: every exhibition in some way explored how the life experience of individuals related to the major social, political and economic forces that shaped their lives. What choices, opportunities and constraints did they encounter? And in choosing how to make those exhibitions, key questions arose. How could barriers to accessing museums be reduced? How could opportunities for those disadvantaged by these structural forces be increased? Tom’s class triggered an insight into the basic struggle between structure and agency – and gave me personally slightly more agency in a career devoted to applied history.
Mark will not mind (I hope) if I say that, through decades of work negotiating institutional, bureaucratic, political, religious, ethnic and individual forces in the intense, conflict-ridden and exhilaratingly creative Glasgow museum world, he has become one of the most lucid readers I have encountered of the spaces where individuals and communities meet institutional forces. As can be guessed from Mark’s own words, the anxiety-ridden pupil who used wit (sometimes aggravatingly) as a defensive shield had no inkling yet of the field where his abilities would be harnessed. It is noteworthy that Mark, like Dan, mentions the calm that prevailed in Tom’s classes. Each also mentions the stimulating effect of a book: FSL Lyons’s Ireland Before the Famine in one case, Maurice Larkin’s Gathering Pace in the other. Books can die in darkness when the teacher can’t light the class’s way to discovery.
I should add that Dan and Mark live on entirely separate islands of my friendworld and have had no contact on this or any other issue for decades – so much so that I am a little embarrassed to admit that I had never thought about how, in different dialects, they had each been addressing questions of class and access in their own areas. And if any reader is imagining that Tom’s history class in his last year in secondary teaching was a school for subversives within a school, this was not the case, as a systematic survey would reveal.
I didn’t for some reason do History in UCC and so, a few months after the final exams, I was headed for one of the satellite towns of Rouen (near enough to permit a long walk home through unCorklike cityscapes after the weekly gathering of a loose and slowly shrinking affiliation of fellow-assistants working in the Rouen constellation). Among these English friends and acquaintances, I was surprised to find that, while the annual death toll from the Troubles had yet to undergo its sharp drop in the later ’70s, some didn’t know that there was such a thing as an Irish passport or that there was a reason that I wouldn’t see them at some Sunday event at the British consulate. This was a lesson in itself, of wider application than the conflict and relations within and between ‘these islands’.
I also discovered that many French people didn’t know that the Republic was part of the EEC. In contrast, at one of the two schools where I worked, the lively group of young or youngish teachers and their friends who kindly welcomed me into their circle were better informed. They included some, broadly speaking, leftists – and a handful of dedicated Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire Trotskyists in particular. They were certainly aware of the Troubles but tended to read them as directly analogous with the Algerian War. Articles and books have been written on the subject, some quite interesting, but these friends had little or no idea that Belfast contained a Shankill as well as a Falls Road and that Northern Ireland contained a million-strong Unionist population that, I argued repeatedly, couldn’t simply be ignored. Yes, I could almost hear Tom Dunne whispering in my ear as I argued.
A few years later, I was again in France during the hunger strikes and devouring French newspapers, journals and books on politics, literature and anything else that caught my attention. The point that speaks to present-day concerns is this: most mainstream newspapers and magazines were shockingly inadequate in their coverage of Irish issues. Libération, the outlet that took the Troubles most seriously and had a correspondent on the ground, was by turns wonderful, juvenile and appalling, often within the same issue – unrecognisable as the rather stale paper it was to become. Where Northern Ireland was concerned, Libé presented the syndrome mentioned above: reportage that, on the whole, conveyed the impression of a univocal embattled West Belfast: Unionist working-class voices did not figure.
Journalists, like historians, have every right to express their opinions and interpretation; the unforgiveable sin, intellectually speaking, is to wilfully ignore important facts or factors that could undermine one’s argument. Lines are less clear when journalists face existential choices, whether as part of a liberation struggle or of a battle for core values within a threatened polity. No tidy definition and only continuous self-questioning allow one to navigate these choppy waters. My observation of French journalism made it impossible for me subsequently simply to take allegedly or self-proclaimedly objective and middle-of-the-road (often statist) outlets at their own word and valuation. Thus, over the last year and more, many Irish broadcast journalists have been taking their cues uncritically from mainstream newspapers such as The New York Times and The Guardian – appearing blithely unaware that these reputable outlets are not mysteriously exempt from the pressures or biases that prevail in countries that actively fund and support, and take their severely damaged ethical compass from, a state that has journeyed from (setting aside, for the purposes of this sentence, all previous history and beliefs to that point) shock and outrage to general acceptance, in regional matters, of an absolutist, eliminationist, expansionist, religio-ethnic leadership.
Participants in history wars may disagree on particular events or issues, but must endeavour to remain open to having blind spots, weak arguments and errors pointed out, whether by friends, neutrals or enemies. The stands and standing of states, political and militant movements, media outlets and individuals evolve or mutate over time and cannot legitimately claim to be beyond criticism.
In The Good Boy, Tom Dunne uses the material at hand – New Ross, the adjacent countryside, his own life and the Catholic institution which he joined and quit in a relatively short formative period – to provide insight into Catholic-nationalist Ireland as it was, beyond his personal narrative. When I think of the difference between Cashel and Clonmel, or between Clonmel and New Ross; when I think of how degrees of tolerance for social, personal, religious and ideological difference can vary from one town or townland to another; when I think of how a pious aunt of mine and the cousin with whom she ran a newsagent’s shop plucked the child, born outside marriage to a post-War child refugee whom they had taken into their care, from one of the oppressive and cruel institutions we now know so much about and stood by the mother; when I think of a friend who spent some years in the cold care of a Protestant institution for girls – when I think of such cases, I can’t help drawing a tentative line from the austerity that drew a fourteen-year-old boy to enter a religious order, to his principled stand against corporal punishment, to the profound dedication to teaching as a vocation as his religious vocation died, and to the dedication to laying bare the bloody consequences of unthinking nationalism that marked his career as an academic historian. There was a moral zeal to his insistence that the atrocity of Scullabogue or the sheer slaughter of the Battle of New Ross should not be erased from or glossed over in both popular and official history.
As I was writing this piece, and flicking through old issues of Graph in order to identify the author of a particular review (part of another conversation), I was reminded that I had titled a sub-section of one of my articles ‘From Boolavogue to Scullabogue’. This was sparked, not by anger at being reminded of the bloody reality of 1798 (all significant facts must be acknowledged, as I had argued against my French friends), but by exasperation at the glib and profoundly ignorant way it claimed that 1798 figured in traditional nationalist or Republican history. As I had also seen in a spontaneously offered comment by an acquaintance whose interest in history was at that time confined to the minimum needed to erect flimsy scaffolding around his literary constructs, one glib set of word associations was replacing another in journalistic versions of the currently approved state narrative. Who knows in any case how and by whom we’ll be judged, footnoted, dismissed or forgotten in the long run – as Tom Dunne acknowledges in The Good Boy?
Rather than amplify points concisely made by Dan in his contribution, I offer a few further observations and speculations of my own. In writing the memoir The Good Boy, Tom Dunne is examining the person he was as a boy, the older boy who surprised his parents when he chose to become a Christian Brother, the young man who stepped away from his vocation and his religious faith and to live his life as best he could as a secular humanist. He is looking back with some satisfaction on his career as a professional historian and with greater ease on his late career as an art historian.
I imagine that Tom Dunne, as he embarked on writing The Good Boy, didn’t feel even mildly tempted by the profusion of forms and (sometimes flamboyant) voices in contemporary memoir writing. As he scrutinises his family background, his parents, the move away from farm to town, his siblings, his schooling, his friendships, his reading, and his own feelings, this microhistory becomes as engrossing as the larger historical patterns that are a historian’s normal concern. How exactly was the family dynamic affected by the move into New Ross – his father somehow exiled and marginalised, his mother becoming the provider and authority in all things? What explains the sway his mother held over him that he was able to change so many aspects of his life but not to speak of them to his mother? Was his choice, as eldest brother, to enter a seminary in his mid-teens to create an unbridgeable emotional distance from his siblings, though affection continues into the present? On all such matters, Dunne writes with the scruple of a historian, but also with respect, sympathy, affection and love.
From the vantage-point of his eighty years and more, his young self becomes an object of grounded speculation. The family snaps and other photographs that are incorporated into the narrative give rise to no autobiographical and self-indulgent rhapsodies. These uncaptioned materials – captions would allow readers to rise too easily to the surface – are scrutinised minutely (see those shoes, the exact nature of that smile, that stance!). What can that young man have been thinking? The scrutiny of paintings and visual material that are part of Tom Dunne’s turn to art history can only have sharpened his eye in this regard.
In the following passage, he moves from a formal photo of his novitiate group (of forty-two) to a more informal snap:
My noble-seeming pose, as I stand at the far left of the back row, doubtless reflects my response to the solemnity of the occasion but also perhaps that romantic sense of vocation. In a ‘snap’ taken the same day with Danny Brennan, a fellow novice from my hometown, I look more relaxed, my childish face at odds with my adult religious garb and carrying no marks yet of the radical changes in my life experience since I left home. Such an individual photograph was possible because it was taken by Danny’s brother, already a member of the order (Figure 29). There are, of course, no photos of me on that day with my parents – no parents were invited. With my new name, and wearing its uniform, I now belonged more emphatically than ever, to my new religious family. How did they look after me?
This chapter, titled ‘Training’, becomes a complex interrogation of personal memory, vocation, the inadequacies of the spiritual training he received, his own departure from the Brothers before too much damage could be done to him, the whole issue of obedience in his life, his testimony before the Ryan Tribunal, and much else.
Tom Dunne acknowledges his debt to the secular humanism and the self-reflective enterprise of Montaigne’s essays – the late essays in particular. Montaigne’s essays are richly digressive; the French humanist was much given to revision and insertion. Dunne’s book, in contrast, is neatly structured: Part One. Growing up in Postwar Catholic Ireland comes in two sets (Home and Life with the Christian Brothers) of three chapters of roughly thirty pages each; Part Two (Learning to Adapt: The ‘Good Boy’ in later life) presents a sequence of six essays of varying length on defined themes such as Working Life and Old Age. Tom Dunne is his own writer, not an imitator. The disciplined self-scrutiny of the first part of the book bears the mark of Ignatius of Loyola perhaps more than of Montaigne. In the later chapters, it’s as if he could take his stylistic ease as he approached the completion of the demanding task of self-exploration on which he had embarked. There are other pages where the writer’s love of chamber music or particular poets shines through, but in Chapter 11 Dunne literally takes his time. He reflects on others’ doubts about his early retirement and outlines what he himself had hoped for:
However, the future I hoped for also involved ‘retirement’ in the sense of an expansion of time, not only to pursue other things but at times to do nothing in particular, time to stop being continually busy and active, time to think and look around me, time to enjoy life, not least the sense of being alive, and time above all to understand myself and my life experience better, the need for which will have been apparent to the reader of the earlier chapters.
He reflects on what writing a memoir means, on the time out that is necessary to the process, and then depicts himself performing his family duties as chauffeur and shopper, but taking time out to walk with Bobby, the family terrier, along the Marina, to interact with a robin, to observe and reflect on the movements and characteristics of herons. These later chapters, with their shifting perspectives, quotations and reflections reveal a Tom Dunne who can justifiably invoke his spiritual ancestor in sceptical humanism, Montaigne.
When I was in my mid-teens, I saw one of my more decent primary teachers walking along the side of Roches Stores towards Parnell Place. I felt the impulse to approach and salute him. Shyness, or stupid hesitancy, overtook me and the opportunity passed. So here I am – this time stepping up to Tom Dunne, tapping him on the arm and saying ‘Thank you for the teaching. Thank you for the book.’
1/7/2025
Barra Ó Seaghdha has contributed essays, reviews, interviews and other writings in the fields of cultural and intellectual history, music, politics and poetry to a wide variety of publications.
