This social stigma was explored in a play written in 1912 by Thomas C. Murray (1873–1959). Entitled Maurice Harte, the eponymous protagonist decides to quit his clerical studies at Maynooth, to the deep shock of his parents and brother.50 His mother proclaims: ‘If you don’t return [to Maynooth] how can I ever face outside this door, or lift up my head again? … How could I ever face again into the town of Macroom? … I tell you, Maurice, I’d rather be lying dead a thousand times in the graveyard over at Kilnamartra.’51
While it is not being suggested that the Hearne family reacted with such melodramatic intensity, the play does give a valuable insight into contemporary attitudes. Maurice Hearne was aware of the Hearne family’s ‘disappointment’ and the social attitudes then prevalent. His source of information for both was almost certainly John Hearne himself. This reinforces the sense that, for personal, family and social reasons, it was probably an anxious and difficult time in his life. The fact that he had an older brother, Maurice, who had been trained in St John’s College and ordained on 17 June 1906,52 could have either exacerbated or mitigated this anxiety. Whatever the case, significantly for John Hearne, he had the support of his father.53 This made things somewhat easier for him, but the distress the decision might have caused him should not be underestimated in the Ireland and Waterford of 1916.
Hearne was a committed Catholic throughout his life. He was known to his contemporaries as a devout man,54 a view confirmed by his niece, Alice Bowen, who knew him well and remembers him as being very religious.55 A letter he sent her in acknowledgement of her expression of sympathy on the death of his son, Justin, aged twenty, as result of a shooting accident in September 1957,56 suggests a person with a deep sense of personal faith.57 The influence of his clerical training revealed itself in particular ways. While acknowledging a letter of sympathy from a nephew, Fr Ignatius Fennessy, again on the occasion of his son’s death, he observed that a Catholic priest would be able to appreciate what he felt at that time.58 This was a remark respectful of the Catholic priesthood and informed by his association with clerics, especially at the seminaries he attended. While serving as Irish Ambassador to the United States (1950–60), his younger son, David, was involved in a motor accident in which an elderly woman was killed. Hearne insisted on going to the woman’s funeral in South Carolina and preaching the sermon at the funeral service.59 During his tenure as ambassador, he was invited to speak at Catholic universities and his addresses were inspired by deeply-held religious beliefs. He delivered a speech on the occasion of the commencement exercises at the University of Notre Dame on 4 June 1950 and included the following:
It will depend on you [the graduates] whether or not this country can weather the maelstrom [of challenges facing it]. Be prepared for that. Be prepared by being practical, day to day, men of faith; not believers merely, but doers also. Let the excellence of your lives shine for all to see in the community in which you live, in your professional relations and your social surroundings. Be intellectually honest and intellectually humble. Teach your friends and neighbours, aye, and your enemies, how to distinguish money from wealth, interference from influence, notoriety from fame, pride from self-respect, speed from progress, luxury from elegance, glamour from distinction, fashion from taste, respectability from worthiness – I mean the spurious from the genuine and the temporal from the eternal.
He continued with an exhortation founded on Christian principles:
Never before has mankind been so much in need of the true pattern as well as the true tradition of human life formed in the mind of the Designer and spun from the hand of its Author. The world needs teachers much, but it needs models more. And if we be not the models there will be none. On us and our example will depend the issue of whether or not the image of God is written upon the character of this and the next generation.60
Throughout his life he retained a deep interest in philosophy and theology, interests which served him well during the drafting of the Constitution.
In 1916, Hearne entered University College Dublin, graduating with a LLB degree in 1919.61 He was also admitted to the King’s Inns as a student in the Michaelmas term, 1916, and was called to the Bar in 1919.62 His career at the King’s Inns was an illustrious one. He received three gold medals for his achievements in the year 1917–18: for oratory, legal debate and the Lord Chancellor’s Prize for oratory and legal debate combined.63 For 1919–20, he served as auditor of the Law Students’ Debating Society of Ireland.64 In that capacity he delivered the inaugural lecture, entitled ‘University Culture and the Rule of Law’, at the opening meeting of the society’s nineteenth session. Some of the sentiments he expressed, as reported in the Freeman’s Journal, are of interest in light of the future part he was to play in the making of the state’s new basic law in 1937 and as a diplomat at the League of Nations:
[the] … upshot from all their [the audience’s] knowledge of the world war was that international law as a governing force in the world had signally failed. He believed that the power and permanence of their legislative and executive establishments in the state, and of progressive international polity in the world, would depend increasingly in the future upon the degree of advancement obtained by the common people of the nations in moral culture and self-discipline, in public virtue, in knowledge to appreciate their liberties, and prudence to use them wisely, in light to understand those of others, and to recognise them generally, in the consciousness of their power as the makers and administrators of the law, and a corresponding sense of their responsibility as citizens of the state and the custodians of its destinies … Self-discipline and social betterment would carry us a long way further at this moment than the world had yet advanced, and make the new citizenship the chief and primal sanction of a reformed international system and of the capital institutions of every free land.
The same newspaper reported that the vote of thanks was proposed by the Lord Chief Justice, who complimented Hearne on his address and ‘predicted for him a great career at the Bar’. Seconding the motion, Timothy Healy, KC, a future Governor-General of the Irish Free State, joined the Lord Chief Justice in prophesying for the auditor ‘a high place’ in the profession.65
Hearne was to practise law on the Leinster Circuit, which included Waterford, until 1922. However, before he began his legal career, his oratorical skills were to be employed in the political bear-pit of local and national politics.
Politics
On 6 March 1918, John Redmond, MP for Waterford City, died and a by-election was called for 22 March. His son, Captain William Archer Redmond, was selected to contest the seat by the local United Ireland League; his opponent was Dr Vincent White, representing Sinn Féin. This political contest, an important one locally and nationally, was bitterly fought. Prominent in their support of Captain Redmond were the Hearnes, John and his father, Richard. For the younger Hearne, it was to be his first public engagement in electoral politics and, by his involvement, he revealed the extent of his commitment to the Home Rule cause and the Redmondite tradition.
For the two parties the election had a practical and symbolic significance. Sinn Féin had won four by-elections in 1917, though it had suffered a defeat in Armagh South in February 1918.66 In practical terms, a victory in Waterford would represent a continuation of successful progress in its determination to supplant the Irish Parliamentary Party as the dominant force in Irish politics. There was also a deep symbolic significance attached to a win. The election was for John Redmond’s old seat and the opposing candidate was his son. His nomination was regarded by Sinn Féin as ‘the last kick of the dying “home rule upon the statute book” Irish Parliamentary Party’.67 Defeat for Redmond would deliver a political coup de grace, sending his party into a spiral of irreversible decline. Therefore, there was no doubt that Sinn Féin understood the importance, even the necessity, of victory. Its local director of elections, Nicholas Whittle, recorded the fact that:
all members of the executive