KILDARE COUNTY COUNCIL, 1899-1926 by THOMAS P. NELSON THESIS FOR THE DEGREE OF PHD DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF IRELAND MAYNOOTH Supervisor of Research: Professor R.V. Comerford October 2007 Acknowledgements I wish to express my thanks to the following people who helped to bring this study to its conclusion. In particular, my supervisor, Professor R.V. Comerford was an immense help with his encouragement and deft direction of my research and writing. His comments and suggestions opened up new avenues and perspectives that were previously hidden from me and helped me to see my evolving study in the wider context of the history of Ireland at the time. All this was done with a courtesy and warmth that made the whole enterprise extremely enjoyable. The research for this study could not have been done without the help of Mario Corrigan, the local studies librarian in Kildare County Library in Newbridge which houses the minutes of Kildare County Council. Mario does his job with an enthusiasm and knowledge way beyond the ordinary and his example and good humour often sustained me during the long years of this work. The staffs of the Russell library and of the John Paul II library at NUIM were helpful and approachable at all times, as were the administrators of the department of History at NUIM, Ann Donoghue and Catherine Heslin. During the process of this research I received helpful advice and encouraging comments from many members of the staff of the history department at NUIM, including, Professors Jackie Hill and Colm Lennon and Dr Terence Dooley. I also learned much from my fellow post-graduate students in the research seminar and I will always be grateful for the generosity with which they shared their insights. Two inspirational teachers, Mr Michael O’Donnell at secondary school and Monsignor Patrick J. Corish at university, kindled and fanned the flames of my interest in the study of history. I am grateful to them both. Thanks also to my wife Helen and to my children, David, Fiona and Meadhbh for their encouragement and cheerful forbearance during the completion of this thesis. Meadhbh’s good nature and company were an especial help at times during the work. This thesis is dedicated to my late parents, Tony and Kathleen Nelson who gave their four sons a love of learning that has enriched our lives more than material wealth. I am grateful to them both for this legacy. Tony Nelson worked in St. Patrick’s College Maynooth from 1938 until his death in 1970. iii Abbreviations A.C.G.B.I. Automobile Club of Great Britain and Ireland J.K.A.S. Journal of the County Kildare Archaeological Society K.C.C. mins. Minutes of Kildare County Council K.C.C. fnce. cmte. Kildare County Council finance committee K.C.B.H. Kildare County Board of Health K.O. The Kildare Observer N.A. National Archives Dublin N.L.I. National Library of Ireland LGB Local Government Board L.L. The Leinster Leader RDC Rural District Council UDC Urban District Council U.I.L. United Irish League iv Map of Kildare showing the names of the twenty-one electoral divisions in the county council elections, 1899-1920 v CONTENTS Acknowledgements iii Abbreviations iv Map of Kildare v Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Local government in Kildare before 1899 21 Chapter 2 The first Kildare County Council, 1899-1902 62 Chapter 3 Consolidation and development, 1902-11 123 Chapter 4 Responding to national events, 1911-16 174 Chapter 5 The council in a time of change, 1916-18 221 Chapter 6 The council through the war of independence, 1919-21 279 Chapter 7 The council under the Free State, 1922-26 342 Conclusion 407 Appendix 1 The poor rate in Kildare, 1899-1927 418 Appendix 2 The origin of the poor rate 425 Appendix 3 Kildare County Council elections, 1899-1925 433 Appendix 4 Committees of Kildare County Council, 1920 439 Appendix 5 Table of officials’ salaries, 1919 440 Appendix 6 Kildare county councillors, 1899-1926 441 Bibliography 450 ii Introduction There was something of a revolution in Ireland in 1899. In March of that year the grand juries in each of the thirty-three administrative counties met for the last time to conduct the business of local government. They consisted, as always, of the twenty- three leading property owners of the counties, selected by the High Sheriffs. Before the end of the next month they had been replaced, under the Local Government (Ireland) Act 1898, by elected county councils, chosen by a wider franchise than was ever before used in any election in Ireland. Apart from three token former grand jurors on each council, as ex-officio members, the old landlord class had been completely replaced by new men. This thesis is a study of that revolution as it occurred and was carried through in Kildare. Perhaps the worst legacy of the Irish experience of the nineteenth century is a lack of self-confidence, a nagging doubt that the country possessed the ability, politically and administratively, to conduct its own affairs. It is an insidious legacy because it is heard more often in the windy nationalist rhetoric that proclaims the opposite, than it is directly referred to, and it is a sad legacy because even when the political and military revolution was complete, the sense of inadequacy remained. Thus the ultimate victory of the coloniser is in capturing the mind and self esteem of the colonised. We can see this phenomenon clearly in the initial responses of nationalist Ireland to the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898, which established the system of representative local government that is more or less what we have today. The editorial in the Leinster Leader, on the Saturday before the local government elections of 1899, said that a wise use of local self-government would provide irresistible arguments for home rulers as the country stood on the brink of 1 the ‘supreme reform’,1 as it termed full Home Rule. If Ireland were seen to handle local government well, then it would prove that the country was fit to be trusted with national self-government. The editorial ended: ‘This wise use begins on Thursday’ (local election day, 6 April 1899).2 The first chairman of Meath County Council, P.J. Kennedy, a nationalist M.P. said that: in his endeavour to make the council a success he was actuated by the belief that much depended on the actions of bodies established by the Local Government Act as to the future of Ireland. He was, he said, utterly convinced that Irishmen were well capable of the administration of public business in Ireland.3 This sense of the Local Government (Ireland) Act of 1898 being in some way a test of the nation’s ability to govern itself even found its way into the apparently positive policy statements of nationalists as they prepared to implement the act. At a meeting held in Ballitore county Kildare, early in 1899, to select nationalist candidates, the first of four planks of nationalist election policy was put as follows: ‘The first great measure everybody has before him is Home Rule (applause). This local government board is an intermediate system of education for Home Rule’.4 Even at national level this sense of Ireland needing to prove its ability, if only to itself, is evident. John Redmond welcomed the act as the ‘most important initiative in Irish politics in his generation, in that it helped prepare nationalists for the responsibility of self-government, by giving them an opportunity of acquiring 5 administrative experience’. This is the cautious, self-doubting frame of mind in 1 L.L., 1 Apr. 1899. 2 Ibid. 3 Denis Boyle, A history of Meath County Council, 1899-1999 (Navan, 1999), p. 48. 4 L.L., 28 Feb. 1899. 5 Joseph Lee, The modernisation of Irish society 1848-918 (Dublin, 1973), p. 127 2 which many Irish nationalists embarked on the enterprise of local government in 1899. Others, both locally and nationally, took a more positive attitude to it, recognising the measure, as being revolutionary in its possibilities. At the selection meeting mentioned above, the parish priest of Ballitore spoke in the following terms: ‘Everyone was aware of the revolution that had been caused by the act coming into force, by which the people of Ireland had got a good deal of authority into their hands’.6 John Redmond later described the effect of the act as a social revolution that ‘disestablished the old ascendancy class from its position of power and made the mass of the Irish people masters of all the finance and all the local affairs of Ireland’.7 One of the aims of this thesis is to test the extent and nature of this claimed revolution by a close study of the implementation of the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1899, in County Kildare. Historiography The historiography of the period tends to note the significance of the Local Government (Ireland) Act, 1898 and its faults or strengths without studying closely how it actually functioned. F.S.L. Lyons, in Ireland since the Famine, says of it that in social terms ‘the effect of the Local Government Act was not far short of revolutionary’,8 while in his contribution to A new history of Ireland vol. vi. he calls it, ‘one of the most important measures to have been carried by a British government 6 L.L., 28 Feb. 1899. 7 Pauric Travers, ‘A bloodless revolution: the democratization of Irish local government 1898-9’ in Mary Daly (ed.), County and town: one hundred years of local government in Ireland (Dublin, 2001), p.