Page 10 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

CREATING A NEW STATE

The most important connection that I had with the legacy of
David La Touche is that as a public official I twice worked in his
former town house, No. 52, St. Stephen’s Green, first of all on an
upper floor when I was a First Secretary in the Economic/EEC
Division of the Department of Foreign Affairs in the late 1970s,
and then between 2008 and early 2011 as Minister of State with
special responsibility for OPW. The ministerial office and outer
office were in two of the fine high ceiling first floor reception
rooms attributed to Angelika Kaufmann, a pioneering Swiss
woman artist, who worked in Ireland in 1771, and a friend of
David La Touche. He would have figured in the famous print of
Grattan’s Parliament that the OPW art adviser Jacquie Moore
recommended for my office walls, representing the beginnings
of a constitutional nationalist tradition and honoured by ’82 men
up to the time of Arthur Griffith. We also put up a picture from the
1830s of the Obelisk marking the Williamite victory at the battle
of the Boyne, primarily because of my involvement in the project
to restore and open the battlefield site, where then Taoiseach
Bertie Ahern met twice with Dr Ian Paisley, but it is also the case
that the founder of the La Touche dynasty in Ireland, the
Huguenot refugee, David Digues La Touche, fought at the
Boyne. The largest painting in the room was one by Seán
Keating, 1921. An IRA Column, probably based like Men of the
South on a Cork flying column led by Seán Moylan. If only for
geographical reasons, they were unlikely to have been the unit
which blew up the Boyne Obelisk on the opposite wall. So there
was something for every Northern visitor, regardless of tradition.

I came across an 1801 letter in the Public Record Office of
Northern Ireland, today an enviably fine facility in Belfast’s
Titanic Quarter, relating to the election of Robert La Touche as
member for Kildare, from one Lewis Mansergh in Athy, which
throws light on how electoral politics was conducted in other
days. It is an apology for not being able to fulfil a voting pledge

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