Born in Dublin on July 7, 1943, Thomas Christopher Garvin was the second of three children in the family of senior civil servant and James Joyce expert John Garvin and his wife Kathleen. Educated by the Jesuits at Belvedere College, young Tom’s favourite subjects were English and History and he also developed a love of languages, including French, Greek, Irish and Latin.
Going on to attend University College Dublin at Earlsfort Terrace (now the location of the National Concert Hall) he acquired a BA in History and Politics which was followed by a Master’s degree in Politics.
It was at UCD that he met his future wife Máire Tuomey — who was studying German and Irish — when she gave him her place in the crowded college library as she was leaving for a lecture. The couple later got engaged in the less academic environment of a public house.
Initially working in the Institute of Public Administration and the civil service, Garvin was appointed as a lecturer in the Department of Ethics and Politics at UCD in 1967 where he impressed students as an original thinker with a mind of his own.
Garvin was a strong supporter of academic independence
He received a doctorate from the University of Georgia in 1974 for his thesis, titled Political Parties in a Dublin Constituency: A Behavioural Analysis. In 1991 he was appointed as Professor of Politics and Head of Department at UCD. In 2003 he was elected as a Member of the Royal Irish Academy (MRIA). He was also an alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC.
Garvin was a strong supporter of academic independence and an opponent of excessive managerial bureaucracy.
He retired from UCD in 2008 but continued researching in libraries and archives as well as having a pint with friends in Doheny & Nesbitt’s on Baggot Street and Grogan’s on South William Street.
One of his best-known books, 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy, published by Gill & Macmillan in 1996, was, as he put it himself “a preliminary reconnaissance” of documents from the Civil War period which had been recently released by the Irish Government as well as other material acquired by academic archives.
Internal animosities among the opposing sides in that bitter conflict are highlighted by an anecdote regarding Éamon de Valera and Michael Collins where Ernest Blythe allegedly quoted Kevin O’Higgins as saying in late 1921: “That crooked Spanish bastard will get the better of that pasty-faced blasphemous f**ker from Cork.”
The book makes a strong case that Dev wasn’t the driving force behind the anti-Treaty rebellion which was mainly led by IRA militants. In a review for The Irish Times, Garvin’s fellow-academic Dermot Keogh, who passed away last year, wrote: “This is the best book I have read on the Civil War in Ireland.”
A more recent book, The Lives of Daniel Binchy, published by Irish Academic Press in 2016, covers the wide and varied career of a respected academic and diplomat who served as Irish ambassador to Germany from 1929 to 1932, when fascism was on the rise.
Binchy was previously a student in Munich where he encountered a young Adolf Hitler at a public meeting in the city. The former soldier’s appearance, particularly his “toothbrush” moustache, made him look insignificant but when Hitler began speaking “he seemed to take fire” and there were “traces of foam at the corners of his mouth”.
Tom was a brilliant teacher in UCD and a friend and guide over the years
Binchy remarked to a friend that Hitler was “a harmless lunatic” but his friend replied that “no lunatic with the gift of oratory is harmless”.
Later, in his role as ambassador, Binchy wrote in one of his final dispatches to Dublin at the end of January 1932 that Hitler’s expressed concern for democratic and legal principles was completely hypocritical because the Nazi leader was quite obviously looking for a dictatorship.
Another one of his books Judging Lemass: The Measure of the Man, published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2009, is a well-illustrated 300-page biography of the Easter Rising participant who went on to become Fianna Fáil Taoiseach from 1959 to 1966.
Garvin writes of how Lemass led an economic revolution by dismantling protectionism and reversing the old policy of discouraging foreign investment in Ireland: “The results were, to the people of that time, magical. The Irish economy doubled in size between 1957 and 1977, mainly due to this historic change of policy.”
Lemass also took an innovative approach on the partition issue and Garvin writes: “His dramatic and unheralded visit to the Prime Minister of Northern Ireland, Terence O’Neill, at Stormont in January 1965 ended a sterile cold war between the two Irish states.” A photo spread across two pages shows Lemass and O’Neill laughing merrily as they walk the grounds of Stormont, with officials including the legendary TK Whitaker in the background.
The book doesn’t shy away from other issues, such as the fate in late 1923 of Lemass’s older brother Noel who was “tortured, mutilated and murdered by Irish government agents” on the Featherbed Mountain in Co Wicklow after the Civil War.
There are also photographs of Seán Lemass meeting John F Kennedy during the US President’s visit to Ireland in June 1963 and later in the same year at the White House in Washington, just over a month before Kennedy’s assassination.
Garvin’s other books include The Evolution of Irish Nationalist Politics (1981); Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858–1928 (1987); Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so Poor for so Long? (2004); News from a New Republic: Ireland in the 1950s (2010).
About two-and-a-half years ago he developed symptoms of dementia and epilepsy and eventually moved into Newtownpark House nursing home. His condition improved sufficiently for him to return to his own home in the Dublin suburb of Dundrum. However, his health declined recently and he passed away peacefully after a short illness on October 17.
Following repose in Fanagan’s Funeral Home, Dundrum, Professor Garvin’s funeral mass took place at the Church of the Holy Cross, Dundrum, followed by cremation at Mount Jerome, Harold’s Cross.
Mourners at his funeral included Minister of State for European Affairs and Defence Jennifer Carroll MacNeill, Chancellor of the National University of Ireland Maurice Manning, former UCD President Art Cosgrove, academic colleagues John Coakley and Clíona de Bhaldraithe-Marsh, economist Colm McCarthy, author and broadcaster David McCullagh, journalists Stephen Collins, Simon Devilly and Paul Gillespie and artist Tom Mathews.
In a tribute online, Stephen Collins wrote: “Tom was a brilliant teacher in UCD and a friend and guide over the years. His penetrating insights into politics, not to mention his wit, made for exhilarating company.”
Tom Garvin will be deeply missed by his wife Máire, daughters Cliona and Anna, son John, sons-in-law Tony and John, daughter-in-law Liz, seven grandchildren, brother John, sister Catriona as well as other relatives, friends and neighbours.
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