Just a stone’s throw from the government buildings, in the Georgian-terraced section of Dublin, stands the headquarters of the Grand Lodge of Ireland, in Molesworth Street. There I met Michael Walker, 62 years old, from farming stock and, since 1981, Grand Secretary of the Grand Lodge of Ireland. Not, you will observe, the United Grand Lodge of Ireland, for Freemasonry in Ireland has always been united, born before the separation of north and south and still administering to some 35,000 brethren in Ireland as a whole.
    Michael Walker is a staunch defender of Freemasonry, entering into many media debates to champion the cause. He has been outspoken against the British Home Affairs Select Committee’s dealings with the Craft, writing in the Irish Times over the British judiciary’s being required by the Lord Chancellor to make record of masonic membership, that : “...it rings warning bells of the fascism in Nazi Germany, Italy and Spain in the 1930s. How about for ‘Freemason’ substituting ‘Jew’ or ‘Gypsy’ or any other class or classes of individuals which are deemed to be politically incorrect by the powers that be? Freemasons first, apparently - who next?”

The Grand Lodge of Ireland

The Grand Lodge of Ireland’s official birth was St John’s Day, 24 June 1725, although it is known that there were “time immemorial” lodges before that time. Freemasonry spread initially around the coast, the earliest lodges appearing to have been established around the southern seaports from Dublin to Limerick and Galway. There was a very strong link with maritime Bristol and perhaps this is whence Irish ‘speculative’ Freemasonry derived. Lodges in Munster still use the famous “Bristol Working”.
    Irish Freemasonry’s beginnings in southern Ireland soon extended inwards and northwards and today it is Northern Ireland which contains a majority of lodges. Papal Bulls from 1738 to the 1820s expressly forbade Roman Catholics from being Freemasons (before this time at least 50 per cent of masons were Catholics). Freemason Daniel O’Connell (of whom more later) tried to get the penal laws against Catholics repealed and during the days when the government of Ireland was a Protestant oligarchy, and Catholics were suppressed, the only place where Protestants and Catholics could meet on equal social terms was in a masonic lodge.
    Today, more Catholics are joining again. There are no purely Catholic or Protestant lodges and the Grand Secretary informed me, “We do have a law that disapproves of class lodges that could be religious or anything else (although there is a Press Lodge and a mainly clerical lodge, and there used to be Jewish lodges, but these have been decimated because of the young people moving to Israel). I am very keen to see all sections of the community represented in the lodges. We do not want cliques, and by and large we have never had a problem there - certainly not in my time.”
    Irish Freemasonry has many famous names associated with it, not least Arthur, the first Duke of Wellington, a member of Lodge No 494 from 1775. And of course, any visitor to Dublin cannot fail to walk along O’Connell Street, named after the aforementioned Daniel O’Connell, “The Liberator”, who was initiated into Lodge No 198 in Dublin in 1799. He was later affiliated to Lodge No 13 Limerick, and to Lodge No 886 Tralee, and acted as a junior counsel for Grand Lodge in an 1805 court case.
    O’Connell was born in County Kerry in 1775. Called to the Irish Bar in 1798, he founded the Catholic Association in 1823 to help bring about the Catholic emancipation which was achieved in 1829. Henceforth he concentrated his efforts on the repeal of the Act of Union. In 1814, O’Connell defended Freemasonry, “the basis of which” he described as “philanthropy, unconfined by sect, nation, colour or religion.” It is uncertain when he withdrew from the Craft, but in a letter to The Pilot newspaper in 1837, he explained that his withdrawal was the result of Archbishop Troy’s informing him that it was no longer permissible to belong to the Order.
    Freemasons’ Hall, built in 1863 on the site of the former town house of Richard the first Earl of Rosse (the first Grand Master), is a listed building within a splendid terrace and was undergoing extensive decorating when I visited it in August. Michael Walker is rightly proud of the building and its contents and, as we walked around ladders, avoiding pots of paint, he pointed out the original tiled floor which has been ‘listed’, before we entered his office : an elegant room of fine proportions.
    I asked him if Freemasonry in Ireland had changed since he became Grand Secretary. He replied that the Irish Craft had become “more pro-active with regard to the public’s perception of us. Instead of responding to nothing, we respond to anything. Any attack we stand up and say we agree, disagree or whatever.”

Are Freemasonry and the Orange Order connected?

I asked the Grand Secretary about why some people are wont to confuse the two Orders. “It’s a common perception, particularly amongst journalists, that Freemasonry is part of, or at least partly the same thing as the Orange Order. We get this partly because the Orange Order is so much to the fore in Ireland, and they use our traditional regalia and emblems, which they took when they formed the society. And people find it very difficult, naturally, who have not much knowledge of Freemasonry or the Orange Order, not to confuse the two and think they are the same thing.”
    Did he have any idea why Freemasonry was copied? “Well, of course, I suppose the early Orangemen saw the masonic situation and simply felt it was a suitable pattern to copy. There is no connection, and in fact we have no correspondence. We do not correspond or have any connection whatsoever. As far as we are concerned, the Orange Order has totally different aims and principles, being the preservation of the Protestant ethos, whereas the Masonic Order is non-sectarian or multi-denominational, whichever way you want to look at it. Freemasonry admits men of any religion, provided they can profess a belief in God.”
    Has this caused Freemasonry in Ireland any problems? “Only insofar as it affects the public perception of us and creates suspicion &c in the minds of some sections of the community as to our aims and aspirations. But we are doing all we can nowadays to amend the public perception - not to twist it in any way, but to correct it, so they understand that Freemasonry is a fraternal organisation with a charitable ethos.”

Discrimination

We went on to other matters, one of them being the call which came from Chris Mullin MP and the Home Affairs Select Committee on Freemasonry that all members of the judiciary be requested to indicate whether or not they are masons for the purpose of a public register (alluded to earlier). The Irish dimension of this issue should be of interest to all masons. The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, Mo Mowlam, has recently been in correspondence with the Grand Lodge of Ireland. The Grand Secretary explained : “The Secretary of State for Northern Ireland did write to us recently in connection with the Royal Ulster Constabulary, where a report has been brought out suggesting that a register of members be established, and asked for our attitude to this before she made her full response to the report. So I submitted our attitude that basically indicated that we felt this was discriminatory against a single section of the community, and that it was repugnant in a way, insofar as any section of the community could be chosen at random, or at will, and be asked to list their members for public or other scrutiny.” The debate over registration (with regard to the re-organisation of the Royal Ulster Constabulary) is, at the time of going to press, still pending.
    It is certainly worth noting that the reasons given for registration of members of the United Grand Lodge of England by the Lord Chancellor was that there was “public concern” over the presence of Freemasons in the judiciary. While no serious efforts have been made to relate precisely what this ‘public concern’ amounts to or whence it derives, the Grand Lodge of Ireland, in an effort to locate the nature of public perception of Freemasonry in Dublin, commissioned a market survey. The result was, according to Michael Walker, that “the general public was not in the least worried about it, and there was nothing to suggest the idea that the public perceived Freemasonry as a harm to anyone.” In fact, he reckoned, the idea of a negative public perception appeared to exist only in the minds and fears of some masons. There was simply no cause for alarm.

The Troubles

With such a model of non-sectarian membership as the Grand Lodge of Ireland represents, I felt it natural to ask whether Freemasonry in Ireland has been able to make any positive contribution to alleviate the pain of The Troubles?
    “Well, I think that would be stretching things a bit, but any organisation which has membership from the entire island of Ireland is bound to have an effect on a north-south basis, just like the Irish national rugby team, which is drawn from the entire island of Ireland and very often there are as many if not more north of Ireland players as south, and they get on fine. And I think it is bound to have an effect for good when you have people from the entire island of Ireland in the one organisation. It is bound to be a form of bridge-building exercise, and I think it is true to say that because of this, because we are an all-Ireland organisation, we are hoping to have a visit here in Freemasons’ Hall from the President (Mrs McAleese) in November, when she is coming to visit the Hall, and specifically to visit the museum where we have a small exhibit of the masonic involvement in the United Irishmen rising in 1798 - this being the bi-centenary year.
    “With regard to the Omagh bombing, the Grand Master immediately sent a donation from his discretionary fund to the disaster fund. I think this may have been the first time money had been sent to a fund solely on account of something that had happened in The Troubles. I can’t remember whether there was an Enniskillen fund, but one of our members there, Gordon Wilson, who died a few years ago, his daughter was one of those who was killed in the Memorial Day bombing.
    “One of the criticisms that is always levelled against the Masonic Order is that it helps its own members and not the public in general, and we have been addressing this situation for some considerable time now, and every now and again we run what we call the Grand Master’s Charity Festival, and the entire proceeds from these have been directed into areas which benefit the community as a whole.
    “The first festival we directed we turned the entire funding into what we termed The Freemasons of Ireland Medical Research Fund and hopefully therefore, any positive research findings will benefit all of mankind, as opposed to any single section of it, like ourselves. The second Grand Master’s festival raised just over half a million pounds, all of which was spent within Ireland on ways of relieving the sufferers of Alzheimer’s Disease, and to reduce the stress on those who care for people.”

Morality

On Monday 14 October 1996, the Irish Grand Secretary was in a hospital bed when Tony Blair, then Leader of the Opoosition, proclaimed in a speech made in South Africa, that what was urgently needed was the promotion of “a new social morality”. No sooner had this recipe for the solution to society’s ills been announced than Prime Minister John Major made this theme the tenor of a speech to the Conservative Party. Later in the month, Mrs Frances Lawrence, widow of the murdered headmaster, announced that she intended to campaign to instil the principles of morality in the minds of youth today; King Albert of the Belgians called for “a moral rebirth”; the Catholic Bishops conference referred to “widespread abandonment of fundamental moral principles”, and the Archbishop of Canterbury agreed that it was necessary to enforce moral values on children, stating that morality starts in the family “when parents bring up their children with firm boundaries.”
    The Grand Secretary commented : “These calls amounted to no less than a Charter for Freemasonry, for the quintessential definition of Freemasonry, as stated in the Charge to a newly-made Brother, is “the practice of social and moral virtue”. Freemasonry has, in fact, been both preaching and practising these precepts in an organised context for not far short of 300 years.” Michael Walker put pen to paper and produced a leaflet entitled Freemasonry Vindicated, which has been circulated worldwide, and which may be obtained from the Grand Lodge of Ireland.
    As the visitor walks up the stairs of Dublin’s Freemasons’ Hall, the eye cannot avoid the depiction of Faith, Hope and Charity in stained glass. These virtues, to be found in the hearts and actions of people throughout the country, also sum up the essential identity of Irish Freemasonry in its undivided entirety : a precious stone, and like so many treasures of life, in need of men of clear vision such as Michael Walker to help us to see it, and to value it.