The Nuncio and The Writer, RTÉ One, Tuesday 8 August at 10.35pm
Hubert Butler (1900-91) is arguably Ireland’s greatest human rights voice of the 20th century. In the words of John Banville and Roy Foster, interviewed for this film, he is also “one of the great Irish writers”.
However, he has been more or less ignored beyond his home city of Kilkenny, the centre of his international operations. These operations include his writings which have earned him the description of “Ireland’s George Orwell”, his human rights work in pre-war Vienna where as Fintan O’Toole recently wrote he almost single-handedly saved Ireland’s shameful reputation in the face of the crisis faced by European Jews and minorities.
Post World War II, he became the most important exponent in the English language of the genocide of half a million Orthodox Serbs, Jews and Roma in the Nazi puppet Independent State of Croatia. Ireland was in denial about the entanglement of leading clerics such as Zagreb’s Archbishop Stepinac and Hungary’s Cardinal Mindzenty and when, on the May 1st, 1949, 150,000 marched through Dublin in support, Butler was one of a handful who stood in opposition.
At a meeting of the International Affairs Association in Dublin’s Shelbourne Hotel on the October 31st, 1952, he was deemed to have insulted “a prince of the Tribe” when the Papal Nuncio Gerald O’Hara stormed out of the meeting as Butler outlined his version of events in war-time Croatia. A media storm followed and, unbeknownst to him, he was effectively black-listed by the Irish President Sean T. O’Kelly who invoked a secret “caveat” against the writer.
For this and for other reasons which The Nuncio and The Writer explore, we might never have heard about Hubert Butler if it hadn’t been for the intervention of a young aspiring publisher, Antony Farrell. Farrell was working at Wolfhound Press as a reader in the early 1980s and pulled Butler’s work off the slush pile. He left Wolfhound to set up The Lilliput Press and – while Butler was still alive – published three collections of his work and hooked Butler up with New York, London and Paris publishers. Butler, aged 85+, received the recognition he deserved. More importantly, Butler’s European work in particular, has continued to resonate.
Shooting for this film took place in Kilkenny, Dublin, Oxford and various locations in Croatia including Dalmatia, Zagreb and Jasenovac Concentration Camp.
Contributors
Julia Crampton (nee Butler) – Hubert and Peggy Butler’s only daughter, now in her early 80s, splits her time between Charlottesburg, Virginia and the Butler’s home-place of Maidenhall, Bennettsbridge, County Kilkenny.
Suzanna Crampton – Grandaughter of Hubert Butler. She farms and maintains the home-place at Maidenhall County Kilkenny and previously seen on RTÉ on programmes such as Ear To The Ground.
Joe Hone – Foster son of Hubert and Peggy Butler was interviewed for this film shortly before his death in the summer of 2016. Joe Hone, a celebrated author in his own right is the author of Wicked Little Joe in which he discusses in depth his at times troubled relationship with the Butlers.
Olivia O’Leary – former BBC Newsnight presenter, broadcaster and writer has a family connection to the Nuncio Affair. Her grandfather John O’Leary, “a baker from Graiguenamanagh”, was President of the Kilkenny Archaeological Society which became the focus for the local shunning of Butler in the heat of the Nuncio Affair. Her grandfather was spared having to cast the deciding vote on Butler’s expulsion. She describes the impact of reading Butler on the appearance of the first collection Escape from the Anthill (1985): “this man was fifty years ahead of his time”.
Fintan O’Toole – Irish Times Literary Editor who wrote the foreward to the most recent Butler collection The Appleman and the Poet (2014). He captures Butler’s significance as an exponent of international reputation of the essay form. He also gives the cultural and historical background to the key events of Butler’s life. While researching Butler he uncovered official attempts to block the renewal of Butler’s passport in the mid 1950s as well as the secret caveat (“warning”) invoked against Butler by Sean T. O’Kelly in 1952.
Chris Agee – is a poet as well as publisher and editor of The Irish Pages Press, the Belfast-based literary journal which last year published Butler’s Balkan Essays. Agee organised the the centenary celebrations of Butler’s birth in Kilkenny in the year 2000. He sees Butler as the most significant writer in the English language on the Balkans in the twentieth century.
Antony Farrell – founder and publisher of The Lilliput Press, Dublin. Farrell was working in Wolfhound Press in the early 1980s when he pulled some of Butler’s submitted essays from “the slush pile”. He recognised in Butler’s writing someone who expressed “the bi-furcated world” of his own Anglo-Irish background. He set up The Lilliput Press to publish Butler (and Tim Robinson). Five hundred publications later, The Lilliput Press is going strong.
Roy Foster – Recently retired from his position as Carroll Professor of Irish History at Oxford University and author of a range of celebrated work: W.B. Yeats: A Life, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 and many more. He recently appeared in the Yeats RTE/BBC double-bill Fanatic Heart. Foster edited the Penguin Butler collection The Sub Prefect Should Have Held His Tongue.
John Banville – celebrated Irish author John Banville edited the Notting Hill Editions Irish and European Butler collections The Eggman and The Fairies and The Invader Wore Slippers (Notting Hill Editions, 2012).
Dr. Michael Kennedy – works for the Royal Irish Academy and is an expert in the archive of Ireland’s Dept. of Foreign Affairs. In the documentary he explains to Chris Agee the machinations around the Artukovic Affair, an early wariness on the part of Foreign Affairs to allow Croatian emigres into Ireland from the Vatican post WW2, an attitude which changed after the imprisonment of Archbishop Stepinac.
Lara Marlowe – The Irish Times France correspondent delivered the annual Butler Lecture at the Kilkenny Arts Festival (August, 2015). Previous speakers have included Samantha Power, Robert Fisk and philosopher John Gray. She gives the historical context to one of Butler’s most celebrated essays The Children of Drancy.
Slavko Goldstein – With Butler, the most important writer in English on the Independent State of Croatia in his “magisterial work” 1941: The Year That Keeps Returning. Goldstein, aged 14, joined Tito’s Partisans after the disappearance of his father at the hands of the Ustashe. A celebrated publisher in Former Yugoslavia, he was also responsible for setting up the first independent political party in Yugoslavia. In this documentary he testifies to the accuracy of Butler’s writings and his take on Archbishop Stepinac.
Christopher Fitz-Simon – Former Artistic Director of The Abbey grew up in Maidenhall with the Butlers in the years of the Second World War. He has also written and lectured widely on Tyrone Guthrie whose friendship with Hubert Butler introducing him to his sister Peggy Guthrie, Butler’s future wife.
Peggy Guthrie was a talented artist – a painter – in her own right, but did not pursue her career. The Butlers were key to the decision of Tyrone Guthrie to hand what is now known as The Tyrone Guthrie Centre over to the Arts Councils of Ireland and Northern Ireland.
Director/Producer/Cinematographer – Johnny Gogan
Has directed and produced twenty broadcast films through his Leitrim-based company Bandit Films, including the feature films Black Ice, The Last Bus Home and Mapmaker. His feature version of this film Hubert Butler Witness To The Future, enjoyed a successful Irish and British tour with sell-out screenings at venues as diverse as Kilkenny’s Set Theatre, the RDS for Dublin Books Festival, ICA London among some 25 venues throughout Ireland and Britain.
Johnny Gogan was founding editor for Film Base of Film Ireland magazine in 1987. He set up Bandit Films to make his debut short in 1989 which received four broadcasts on RTE. On moving to the North West in 1997 he established Cinema North West, Adaptation Film Festival and the internet channel Studio North West tv. He was a director of the Irish Film Board 2009-2013.