DR CONOR DALY - WINNER OF THE 2024
HUBERT BUTLER ESSAY PRIZE

“It is a great honour to have been awarded this year’s Hubert Butler Essay Prize.  Were it not for this prize, another decade or so might have elapsed before I ever encountered the maverick and impish kindred spirt of Hubert Butler, whose life path echoes uncannily in so many ways with my own. 

“Just as ‘a cat may look at a king’, so I will risk listing a few of those similarities here…

“Like Butler I grew up with feelings of ambiguity or ambivalence about my identity: where was ‘home’? and what did ‘home’ really mean?  Whereas Butler was a ‘Protestant Republican’, I was an ‘Irish English boy’.  As a child born and educated in England, I might have found myself during a typical day playing conkers in the school playground, a poppy pinned to my lapel, and yet would come home that same evening to a house where a framed facsimile of the 1916 Proclamation took pride of place in the hallway.  For Butler that early home was in Maiden Hall, Co. Kilkenny.  For me it was in Maidenhead, Co. Berkshire.

“With Hubert Butler I have in common the later experience of English boarding schools, our study of ‘the Classics’ at university, as well as official invitations from government agencies in post-war Yugoslavia to visit that country (in my own case in the early 1980s, to study Macedonian in Ohrid and Albanian in Prishtina). Above all I like to think that I share with Butler some aspects of a lifetime exploring and contemplating the fault lines of empire, religion, language and identity in that region of intense cultural-political seismological activity that is Central and Eastern Europe, with its elusive and ever-shifting fault lines and those huge collisions between armies and ideologies – where a kaleidoscope of labels have tussled insistently for attention: Communism, Fascism, social democracy, Christianity, Islam, Judaism and Jewishness… And where we have witnessed war, famine, ethnic cleansing, terror and genocide on an unprecedented scale.

“If Butler’s major insights came through his practical activism and advocacy for Austrian Jews in the late 1930s and his later discovery and courageous exposure of the insidious rule of the Catholic Church in glossing over the Vatican’s connivance at – and the direct participation of Croatian clergy in – the massacre of Serbs and other minorities at Jasenovac after 1941, in my case it was Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s meticulous chronicling of the Soviet prison camp system in The Gulag Archipelago which first brought me to a flickering awareness of how any all-powerful and unchecked establishment or ideology could wield an intimidating, overwhelming, unaccountable and ultimately merciless power over individuals.

“Butler knew that we can never become complacent about the threats from totalitarianisms of one kind or another – religious or secular.  Like the wart or herpes virus in humans, the authoritarian totalitarian germ can lie dormant for decades in a population before becoming reactivated. The warnings throughout Butler’s essays – on both Irish and ‘other European’ subjects – about the contagion and poison that can result from any all-too-literal interpretations of that terrible triad of nationalism, patriotism and empire ring particularly loudly today.  Maurice Craig, in his introduction to Butler’s essay collection ‘Escape from the Anthill’ (1985) singles out this prescient sentence written by Butler in 1941: “A nation cannot be created negatively by elimination or strategic retreats into the past”.  For Butler any authentic concept of nation and patriotism must be about the here-and-now, and must be in tune with the imperative to ‘bloom where you are planted’.  Butler is impatient with simplistic narratives of origin. His essays always foreground the present, the human perspective, the role of the individual, of dialogue and of neighbours (however awkward).  And this is the single idea which – in Butler’s own words – “skewer together” his essays and present them, for all their apparent heterogeneity, as coherent parts of a single whole.

“These essays are not an easy read, because Butler can be acerbic company.  He was particularly dismissive, for example, of the Jesuits, accusing them – in his essay with the tongue-in-cheek title A Prayful Project (1960) – of cynical and self-serving motives in their indiscriminative support of all secessionist independence movements in the Soviet Union of that time – be they ‘White Russian’, Ukrainian, Cossack or any other. “You will be dazzled”, writes Butler of two Jesuits of the American province, “by the fresh lustre which they give to that faded adjective Jesuitical”.

“But I think there may be at least one Jesuit that Butler might have approved of – Fr. Michael Bossy SJ, the headmaster of the school I attended in my teens, now in his nineties and living in London. I remember him delivering a particular punchline, in his deliberate but deadpan manner at one particular student assembly nearly 50 years ago. One proactive history teacher had issued an invitation to the Soviet ambassador to visit the school and Fr. Bossy was explaining to us his reasons for ‘uninviting’ him. Having aired some concerns around prisoners of conscience in Soviet jails at the time, Fr. Bossy proceeded to contemplate whether the feelings of the Soviet Ambassador might have been hurt by the inconsistency and discourtesy shown him.  He did not spend too long on this contemplation. I remember that his eyes did not blink as he surveyed us all: “You are nice, all of you.  Nice. Yes indeed. But niceness is not enough”. 

“A sentiment which I think Hubert Butler would endorse – as he proves over and over again in these jewels of essays.

“On behalf of all the contestants for this year’s Hubert Butler Essay Prize, I would like to thank Prof. Roy Foster and his team of judges for their careful consideration of our entries.  I would like to thank Anthony Farrell and his Lilliput Press for their pioneering work in first collating Butler’s essays over 40 years ago. If not for Lilliput Press Butler’s words might well have been scattered to the four winds, forever unheard.  And all of us – contestants and reader alike – owe a huge debt of gratitude to Jeremy O’Sullivan, who founded the Hubert Butler Essay Prize in 2018.  As a result of his initiative and his sheer enthusiasm for Hubert Butler, new generations of readers will continue to experience these gems of creativity, spirit and authenticity for many years to come.

“In my own case, I can promise that no reading list I give to my students in future will ever be lacking the name of Hubert Butler.” - Conor Daly

Conor Daly is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin (Russian and Ancient Greek; Theoretical Linguistics).  He has a PhD in Slavic Languages and Literatures from the University of California, Berkeley. His doctoral dissertation was in the field of cultural semiotics (the development of Russian scholarly prose) but his research interests include the history of the Russian language in Alaska, Jewish intellectual life in the Russian Empire and the image of the dissident in Soviet culture. 

Since 2019 Conor has been a Visiting Research and Teaching Fellow at Trinity College Dublin where  he lectures and tutors on Central and East European area studies, translation, literature and film. He organised the weekly public lecture series Understanding Europe's East, held at TCD in the spring of 2024. He has chaired sessions on Russia and Ukraine at the MacGill Summer School in Glenties, Co. Donegal. As ‘Conchubhar Ó Dálaigh’ he is a regular contributor on Eastern European affairs for Raidió na Gaeltachta.  He is currently learning Ukrainian.

DR NIAMH CULLEN - JOINT RUNNER-UP

“I am grateful for the opportunity that the Hubert Butler Essay Prize gave me to think both deeply and widely about our European past and what it might mean for the challenges we face as a society today: to think not just about history, but with history and what it might mean for our shared future. As a firmly European minded citizen of Ireland, Hubert Butler's example is more needed than ever at a time when nationalism and xenophobia are on the rise again almost everywhere. It is an honour to be recognised for this prize.” - Niamh Cullen

Niamh Cullen teaches modern European history at Queen's University Belfast. She is working on a creative biography of Darina Silone and a novel. Her essays and stories have appeared in the Dublin Review, the Tangerine Magazine and the London Magazine. Her most recent book is 'Love, Honour and Jealousy: An Intimate History of the Italian Economic Miracle' (Oxford, 2019; Milan, 2024). 

DR MAURICE FITZPATRICK - JOINT RUNNER-UP

"I go to the Tyrone Guthrie Centre in Monaghan every chance I get. I can think more clearly there than anywhere else and get more written. I love its borderland location and ecumenical composition. It was on a shelf in the Tyrone Guthrie Centre that I first encountered Hubert Butler. His books have stayed with me ever since. The essays seem to be renewed through each new phase of our island’s complex evolution. ‘Boycott Village’, for example, while rooted in Ireland in the 1950s, nevertheless asserts an important moral and political need in Ireland today. As Butler wrote in that essay: ‘A great common gesture would have given us courage and confidence and arrested the sad, slow Protestant decline. It would have reminded the northern Protestants that we belong together and that they belong to Ireland’. Our common heritage and the island we share are fundamental concerns in Butler’s work. That spirit encouraged me when I attempted my essay. I am highly honoured that it has been chosen as a runner-up in this year’s Hubert Butler Essay Prize. I wish to thank the Butler family, the judges and everyone involved in this competition." - Maurice Fitzpatrick

Maurice Fitzpatrick is a filmmaker and an academic. He was a Visiting Professor of Irish Studies at the University of Tübingen, Germany, in 2022/23. In 2020, he held the Heimbold Chair of Irish Studies at Villanova University, Philadelphia, and he was a Poynter Fellow at Yale University in 2019. He has made several documentary films for RTE and the BBC including The Boys of St. Columb's and Translations Revisited. In 2017, he wrote, directed and produced a documentary feature film, John Hume in America, on the political life of Nobel Peace Prize laureate John Hume, which has screened in over 30 countries. He is also the author of The Boys of St. Columb’s (The Liffey Press, 2010; University of Notre Dame Press, 2020) and John Hume in America: From Derry to DC (Irish Academic Press, 2017; University of Notre Dame Press, 2019).