Preface

This book is about my family, the Findlaters, who have been merchants in Dublin over the past 175 years. I try to give as full a picture as possible of the lives and times of members of the family, at work and at play, in politics, religion, business and our parts in the shadow of historic events. I encompass as wide a family circle as possible to cover the full spectrum from grocer to doctor, from merchant to soldier. The text is enriched by reminiscence from customers and staff. The story itself is not one of rags to riches, nor riches to rags. We were neither ascendancy nor peasantry. We were the new merchant and professional class in-between—first Presbyterian and then Church of Ireland—through this period.

In his memoir, Dublin Made Me, Todd Andrews, one of the architects of the present state, recalled his childhood in the inner city in the first decade of the 1900s: 'From childhood I was aware that there were two separate and immiscible kinds of citizens: the Catholics, of whom I was one, and the Protestants, who were as remote and different from us as if they had been blacks and we whites. We were not acquainted with Protestants but we knew that they were there.' ¹ And later he wrote: 'Considering that I rarely met and never mingled with Protestants and only saw them when they paraded on Sunday mornings in great style to Findlaters' Church—the Presbyterian Church in Rutland Square—it is strange that from earliest childhood I seem to have been aware of their presence and influence in the community.'²

Contrary to Andrews' impression, 'Protestants' were not a single type, but extremely varied. Tony Farmar, in his history of Craig Gardner, probably hit the nail on the head: 'Protestants did not however form the homogenous social and political group imagined by Catholic polemicists. There was a considerable difference in political and social attitudes between the Church of Ireland's adherents and other groups.' There was the unionist, land-owning, Church of Ireland tradition, there were the Presbyterians, staunch defenders of their position against both Catholics and Church of Ireland, leading participants in 1798, not to mention numerous other groups such as Methodists, Quakers and Moravian Brethren.³And their range of occupations was as wide as their beliefs: they were farmers, merchants and commercial men, labourers, soldiers and police—any stereotype, however well loved, is bound to be a simplification. I have written this book partly to show how different one group of Protestants, the merchant and professional class, was from the pre-conceived image.

I only deal with issues that come naturally into the text. This means that, for example, the Ne Temere decree of 1907, which caused intense stress in other Protestant families, does not arise. Under that decree, both partners in a Roman Catholic–Protestant marriage had to give an undertaking that all children of the marriage would be brought up Roman Catholic. The book illustrates that the lot of the southern Protestants since independence has, in many ways, been a happy one. There was surely a lot of insecurity as they moved from being part of a British Isles religious majority to an island minority. This is illustrated by the delegation dispatched by the General Synod of the Church of Ireland on 12 May 1922 to wait on Michael Collins to inquire: 'if they were permitted to live in Ireland or if it was desired that they should leave the country'.⁴

This sensitivity caused the vast majority of Protestants to keep their heads well below the parapet and refrain from stating any views on Church and State, even in the privacy of the family. We were mum about the great power of the Catholic Church in the middle of the 20th century and did not have any strong political allegiance. As a result the research into this book has been a voyage of discovery. For instance, I had no idea that Billy Findlater, when MP for Monaghan, had supported Gladstone in formulating the Land Act 1881 giving the tenant-farmers rights of tenure, nor that his cousin Adam had played a part in securing local government for the country. It was a total surprise to find a letter from Michael Davitt suggesting that should Adam stand for the Nationalists in the 1906 election, he would doubtless win. I was interested to discover that my maternal grandfather took the surrender from both Michael Collins and Seán Lemass, as well as most of the Rising leaders in 1916, and none of the family had any idea that my father Dermot had helped the anti-TB league to get its voice heard in 1943.

I am the product of my history. It has shaped me and it is recorded here. I have presented the events as they appeared to me. My Aunt Sheila, at ninety-eight the senior member of the family, and my mother Dorothea, have fully supported me in this task. I hope that it acts as an encouragement and an inspiration to the readers and in particular to my nine nephews and nieces and my many cousins.

Alex Findlater
June 2001