Holy Irish, partly French – Frank McNally on 800 years of St Laurence O'Toole

Irish Times

06-05-2025

I'm indebted to several readers who, in response to my ruminations about 'full professors' last week, pointed out that there is at least one other career where that adjective is used.
In the Army, they sometimes refer to 'full colonels' to avoid confusion with mere lieutenant colonels, and 'full generals' to differentiate from the lieutenant, major, and brigadier variety.
Charles de Gaulle, Tim Dixon tells me as an aside, was only a brigadier general, despite being frequently promoted in casual usage.
But speaking of France, a milestone being commemorated there this coming weekend suggests another vocation in which the f-word might be useful.
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On Sunday (May 11th), ceremonies will mark 800 years since Archbishop Laurence O'Toole became only the second Irish person ever canonised.
Yes, there had been countless Irish saints before him, including Patrick and Brigid and the myriad others who once made Ireland the land of saints and scholars.
But those weren't full saints, or at least official ones. In earlier centuries, canonisation was by popular acclaim (a bit like internet polls now). Only in 1170, responding to some controversies, did the Vatican take the process under its control.
What has Laurence O'Toole, aka Lorcan Ua Tuathail, got to do with France, I hear you ask?
Well, although he was Archbishop of Dublin and had spent most of his life dealing with the complicated politics of Ireland before and after the Anglo-Norman invasion, he ended his days in Normandy.
He had gone first to England in 1180, on a diplomatic mission to Henry II. Discovering that the king had left for France, O'Toole then followed him there. But en route, the archbishop was struck down with fever, and died within days of arrival at a place called Eu, in November 1180.
From there on, as Jesse Harrington writes in the latest issue of History Ireland, 'Laurence's French afterlife was every bit as rich as his Irish life'.
Local recognition of his sainthood followed rapidly. He was soon promoted to a better tomb in a bigger church. His carved, recumbent effigy was then added, one of the first of its kind in France and now of major importance to art historians.
Devotees, meanwhile, made six formal attempts to have him canonised, a campaign to which Pope Honorius finally acceded in 1225, only 45 years after O'Toole's death.
The Archbishop of Dublin thereby followed Malachy of Armagh, who had become Ireland's first official saint in 1190, also with French support.
O'Toole's cult was such that the shrine at Eu credited him with 256 miracles in subsequent centuries. He has also earned the unusual distinction of a mention in Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (In Search of Lost Time).
Mind you, the author clearly struggled with the surname. During a discussion of placename etymologies and the many errors of interpretation by one supposed expert, Proust has a character saying: 'But his biggest blunders are due not so much to his ignorance as to his prejudices. However loyal a Frenchman one is, there is no need to fly in the face of the evidence and take Saint-Laurent en Bray to be the Roman priest, so famous at one time, when he is actually Saint Lawrence 'Toot, Archbishop of Dublin.'
Oh well, that was close (ish). And Proust's familiarity with ''Toot's' ethnic origin, at least, justifies the claim by Harrington (a research fellow at the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies and adviser to the octennial commemorations): 'As this year's celebration may show, for the last eight centuries Dublin's patron saint has arguably ... been better remembered in France than he has been in Ireland.'
If most of O'Toole ended up in Normandy, his heart is still in Dublin – literally, in a reliquary at Christ Church Cathedral. It did, however, go missing from there for several years, after a strange theft in 2012.
The person responsible is thought to have hidden in the cathedral overnight while prizing open the wood-and-iron box and walking out with its contents next day.
Six years later, just as mysteriously, it was found undamaged in the Phoenix Park by gardaí. Reports suggested that, based on some bad luck, the thief decided it was cursed.
It was not the first time O'Toole had been held hostage. As a child, he was temporarily handed over to his father's political rival, Diarmait MacMurchada, as a guarantee of peace.
His harsh experience in captivity seems only to have encouraged a religious vocation, in which he was known for hair shirt-wearing ascetism.
This reminds me of another reader's response to the 'full' debate. George Harding wrote to say he was recently asked by a friend (Professor Des McHale) to come up with some Cork slang words not included in Sean Beecher's 1985 dictionary of the genre.
My suggestion that the term 'full professor' evoked 'an academic who has eaten too much' reminded George that in Cork, 'full' also means drunk (aka 'langers').
If Laurence O'Toole can be called a full saint, it was never in either of those senses. He abstained from meat, ate bread mixed with ashes, and fasted on Fridays. He drank in company but only to be sociable, and so diluted his wine that it was 'little more than tinted water'.