A Catholic priest in the Gaelic League

I have written about a brother of my husband’s great grandfather who was a Catholic priest in Northern Ireland. Father Henry Boyle was actually the half brother of Maurice John Macauley, a physician who was educated in Ireland but eventually settled in England. They shared the same mother, but had different fathers. The two men appear to have remained close over the years despite living in different places – Henry officiated at Maurice’s marriage ceremony in 1904 in Scotland, and Maurice returned to his birthplace of Belfast in 1933 to attend Henry’s funeral. Before serving as a parish priest in the counties of Antrim and Down, Father Boyle had strong ties to St. Malachy’s College, a boy’s school in Belfast. According to the Catholic publication The Tablet, he attended the school himself as a boy, became a professor there in 1880, and was appointed president of the college in 1895, an event that “was received with great cheering by the students”.

Another St. Malachy’s alumnus was the Irish statesman and scholar, Eoin MacNeill (he often went by John). I believe that Henry and Eoin were cousins, based on the close relationship between their mothers, Rosetta McAuley MacNeill and Lillian Gracey Boyle Macauley, the fact that they appear to have grown up together in Glenarm, and the family name McAuley/Macauley figured in both their backgrounds. I’ve also recently found more documentation that the two men were close. In 1933, The Irish Weekly and Ulster Examiner published an account of the funeral of Henry Boyle. Among the many attendees at the ceremony held at St. Patrick’s church in Downpatrick were Eoin/John Macneill and his brother James Macneill, and Maurice John Macauley. Further evidence of their relationship is held in the a collection of Eoin MacNeill’s papers at the University College Dublin archives. In addition to two photographs of Father Boyle, there is a set of letters from the priest to Eoin, whom he addressed as John. The correspondence was from the 1890s (although one letter was not dated).

Henry asked after Eoin’s family in the letters, and that his “best regards” be sent to Eoin’s mother (that would be Rosetta McAuley MacNeill). He also requested help in purchasing a Royal Enfield Roadster motorcycle for a Father Crolly, hoping for a good price and specifying (somewhat mysteriously) that the seller not be told the bike would go to Belfast, because “the agent here might object”. Much of the writing concerned a subject of great mutual interest – the Gaelic Irish language.

Eoin MacNeill was a co-founder of the Gaelic League. Begun in 1893 by MacNeill and scholar/publisher Douglas Hyde, it was a non-sectarian organization that sought to revive traditional Irish language, music, and culture. One of their primary activities was advocating for teaching the Gaelic language, which had been suppressed by the British Government for centuries. The establishment of language classes in Ireland was clearly a passion of both MacNeill and Boyle. While serving as a professor at St. Malachy’s, Boyle wrote in 1891:

“Many a time I wondered why we hadn’t an Irish class. Of course you know it doesn’t lie with me to run any class. I have just spoken to Fr. Tohill on the matter and he says he would like very much to see such a class and offers, if I get it started, to lend me a hand. What may be of more importance, marks are given for Celtic at Easter Exams … F. Tohill thinks you should write to Fr. Henry.”

The Father Tohill he referred to was John Tohill (1855-1914), a priest who attended St. Malachy’s and taught classical language there from 1878 to 1894, and was eventually appointed bishop of the diocese of Down and Connor. Fr. Henry was Henry Henry (1846-1908), a long-time president of St. Malachy’s who also became the Bishop of Down and Connor.

In an 1895 letter, Father Boyle asked that his friend John “kindly take charge of the enclosed cheque for the ‘League’ “, and remarked on it’s “solid success in the last year”. He also requested recommendations on books for learning Gaelic, and even for MacNeill’s help with corrections on a written Gaelic language exercise. In an undated letter, he asked that John enroll him as a member of the “Conradh na Gaeilge” – the Gaelic League.

With the help of his friend Eoin MacNeill, Father Boyle’s study of the Gaelic language must have been successful, as the Irish national censuses of 1901 and 1910 both list “Irish and English” as the languages he spoke.

Sources

1. The Tablet, October 5, 1895
2. St. Malachy’s College, 2025
3. University College Dublin Archives, Papers of Eoin MacNeill (1867-1945)
4. University College Dublin Archives, Eoin MacNeill Additional Papers collection
5. National Library of Ireland, 1916, Those that set the stage Douglas Hyde, Eoin MacNeill, and the Gaelic League, 2016
6. NY Times obituary for John Tohill, July 6, 1914