Life
1894-1975; b. on small farm at Ballymacward, Co. Galway; awarded travelling
studentship to UCD; classics at Sorbonne, Athens, and Berlin; dept. of
Classics, UCD, 1915; Prof. of Greek, 1923; Cumann na nGaedheal, TD for
N. Mayo, 1925; NUI TD, 1927-32; elected to Senate, 1938; vice-chairman
of Senate, 1939-44; president of UCD, 1947-1964; leading apologist for
the Blueshirts (Irish fascists), with Dr J. J. Hogan; contrib. to United
Ireland and The Blueshirt; published article in Studies
debunking George Russell, 1934; also ‘Nationalism and Revolution’
(Studies, June 1939); covered European politics from a slightly
pro-Axis standpoint in Studies from 1940; gave shelter to Peter,
son of Dr. Hugo Friedjung, who with his wife were exterminated by the
Nazis; wrote A Tribute to Newman (1945); Daniel O’Connell
(1949); also Eoin MacNeill, ed. [with] F. X. Martin (1981); ed.
Euripides’s Hecuba (1946); took part in the controversy surrounding
O’Faolain’s life of Daniel O’Connell originating in Studies
(1938). DIB FDA
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Works
Some Aspects of the Social Structure of a Corporative State [Fine Gael Policy Ser.] (1934), 18pp.; Tribute to Newman: Essays on aspects of his Life and Thought (Dublin:
Browne & Nolan 1945); with others, Daniel O’Connell: Nine
Centenary Essays (Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1949); Newman’s
Doctrine of University Education (UCD 1952); Struggle with Fortune,
a Miscellany for the Centenary of the Catholic University of Ireland 1854-1954
(Dublin: Browne & Nolan 1954); contrib. to F. X. Martin, ed., Eoin
MacNeill, Scholar and Man of Action 1867-1945 (OUP 1980). Also ‘Politics
and Culture: Daniel O’Connell and the Gaelic Past’, Studies,
27 (Sept. 1938), pp.353-68.
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Criticism
Martin Tierney, A Classicist’s Outlook: Michael Tierney, KSG,
MA, DLitt 1874-1975: A Life and Essays (Marlborough Rd. [the author]
2002), 252pp., ill.
Notes
Seamus Deane, gen. ed., Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing
(Derry: Field Day 1991), Vol. 3, p.532; [Tierney, with Costello and McQuaid,
arranges stipend for annual lectures at UCD]; p.684 [attraction to Italian
fascism represented by extract below.] Intro.: Tierney among those
who attempted to apply ideas in Quadragesimo Anno, the papal corporatist/
fascist document, to Irish conditions, in “Ireland the Corporate
State”, in United Ireland, 16 (Dec. 1933): ‘From the
philosophic standpoint there could be nothing funnier than the spectacle
of a piebald and, in general, unintelligent and uneducated assembly of
public representatives, chosen by most defective methods, claiming, or
having thrust upon it, the whole enormously complicated and very subtle
task of conducting the march of a complicated and subtle civilisation
[...] It is a complete mistake to suppose that Italian fascism is merely
a crude individual or party dictatorship’; quotes directly from QA
of Pius XI (‘the aim of social legislation must therefore be the
re-establishment of vocational groups’); ‘the whole civilised
world is being driven to face the necessity of some third course between
the individualism which produces Kreugers and he Communism which produces
Lenins [...] the Corporate State must come in the end, in Ireland as elsewhere’
[...] fearlessly and intelligently undertake its cause’, 760-62. BIOG. & WORKS, p.811.
COPAC lists Michael Tierney, Education in a free Ireland (Dublin: Martin Lester [1920]), 98pp., 8o
Account of his triumphalist addition to Trinity College, Dublin (TCD)
given in Denis Donoghue, We Irish: The Selected Essays, I (London:
Brighton: Harvester Press 1986), p.173 (cited in Edna Longley, The
Living Stream: Literature and Revisionism in Ireland, Newcastle-Upon-Tyne:
Bloodaxe 1994, p.14-15.)
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Princess Grace Irish Library (Monaco)