       |
Life
1889-1936; mbr. of Gaelic League; fought in Anglo-Irish War, 1919-21; UTGWU official; TD, short stories include “The Unmarried Daughter”; appt. Minister of Agriculture in Cumann na nGaedheal govt., and author of the Agricultural Bill of 1927; introduced second reading of govt. Bill on Censorship, and featured in Irish Statesman interview conducted by Simone Téry, Oct. 1928); he died in a car accident; there is an obituary by George O’Brien in Studies (Sept. 1936 - as infra). IF2 DIB
[ top ]
Commentary
Stephen Gwynn: ‘After self-government [had been] a few years at work, creating order out of the chaos which had been handed over, I saw with pleasure a letter from Plunkett declaring that the Irish Free State had produced in Patrick Hogan the best Minister of Agriculture in Europe.’
See also George O’Brien, ‘Patrick Hogan: Minister for Agriculture 1922-1932’, Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, 25:99 (Sept. 1936), pp.353-68 [available in JSTOR - online; accessed 22.11.2023. Note quotations from and remarks on the article are given in Joe Lee, The Modernisation of Ireland (1973), quoted under O’Brien - as infra.]
Nicholas Allen, ‘Free Statement: Censorship and the Irish Statesman’, in Last Before America - Irish and American Writing, ed. Fran Brearton & Eamonn Hughes (Belfast: Blackstaff Press 2001), remarks that a interview with Patrick Hogan, minister for Agriculture, was conducted for the Irish Statesman (27 Oct. 1928) by Simone Téry - Russell’s French confidante - and that Hogan later declared in the Dail debate on Censorship that it would be extremely difficult [in this country] to get anyone ... fit to censor books’. Hogan’s Agricultural Bill, passed without division in 1927, had been praised by the Irish Statesman. (Allen, op. cit., p.92.)
Further: Allen (2001) quotes Hogan’s witty attack on Fianna Fail during the debate: ‘I listened to this debate very carefully. We were all very virtuous and anxious to make the other fellow virtuous ... I suppose the next time we are taking an oath we will call it an empty formula and pust the Bible two feet away.’ According to the Statesman’s ensuing issue, Hogan was one of the ministers who listened to the Minister for Justice’s defence of the Censorship Bill in ‘scornful silence’. (Idem.) Also records the speculation that Hogan was charged with introducing the second reading of the Censorship Bill in October in an attempt to appease its literary critics (ibid., p.211, n.29).
[ top ]