Hannan, Edward Joseph (1836–1891), catholic priest, was born 21 June 1836 on the family farm in Ballygrennan, near Ballingarry, Co. Limerick, the second son of eleven children of John Hannan, tenant farmer, and his wife Johanna (née Sheehy). A dairy farmer with ninety acres, John Hannan was a poor law guardian in the Croom union, so the family was relatively well-off in an area that was ravaged by famine when Edward was in his early teens. By the age of seventeen he was attending St Munchin’s College, Limerick, where he was an outstanding student. In 1855 he joined the seminary at All Hallows, Drumcondra, just outside Dublin, through the sponsorship of the vicar apostolic of the Eastern District of Scotland, Bishop James Gillis, who badly needed priests for the growing Irish community in his district. Ordained a priest on 13 May 1860, Hannan initially remained as a director of All Hallows, but in the summer of 1861, Gillis insisted that he move to Edinburgh due to the poor health of several local priests.
EARLY CAREER AND THE CATHOLIC YOUNG MEN’S SOCIETY
After a two-month acclimatisation at Edinburgh’s future cathedral, St Mary’s, in October 1861 he became a curate at the nearby St Patrick’s church in the Cowgate, home to the Irish immigrant population and known as ‘Little Ireland’. This deprived and ghettoised community lived in overcrowded, disease-ridden tenements with little or no sanitation, several families packed into one room, unemployment rife, and alcohol the default remedy. From his arrival, he focused on improving the lot of his parishioners and on integrating them into their wider protestant milieu by way of education and responsible citizenship. His constant visits to the poor and the sick left him stricken by typhus in 1864, but he survived, unlike his fellow curate and All Hallows colleague, Fr William Corbett, who succumbed to fever in 1868. Parishioners appreciated his geniality, wit and extraordinary generosity – he was described as always being poor – yet he readily issued rebukes and helped the authorities to suppress shebeens.
Hannan initially focused on re-energising the work of the society of St Vincent de Paul in Edinburgh. Then, in October 1865, he established a local branch of the Catholic Young Men’s Society (CYMS), with attendees at the opening including the founder of the CYMS movement, Dean Richard O’Brien (qv), whom Hannan had known as a staff member at All Hallows. Initially based in an old hall in Horse Wynd, the St Patrick’s CYMS sought to meet the educational and cultural needs of parishioners. With its rules prescribing monthly confession and attendance at mass, abstinence from alcohol and a strict code of conduct for members, together with the provision of adult education and access to sporting activities, the society had an immediate positive effect. He was its indefatigable spiritual director, variously serving also as secretary and treasurer.
Over the next several years, Hannan sought appropriate accommodation for the society, which had 800 members by 1869. The foundation stone of that accommodation, the Catholic Institute, was laid in 1869 by the protestant lord provost of Edinburgh, who praised the society for improving its members and reducing the extent of law-breaking and drunkenness. Featuring a library, reading room, lecture room, games room and a main hall, the Institute opened in February 1870 at a cost of over £6,000; it hosted lively Irish music performances and talks on religion and on Irish history, culture and politics. Hannan took a dim view of overlong lectures or speeches and of the (mis)use of the hall for events, including those that involved dancing.
The venue was also kept busy by the CYMS’s many offshoots, including a Sick and Burial society, and the Holy Family Association. The Penny Savings Bank, which was established in 1871, having 3,826 active accounts by 1878, while the Total Abstinence Society had administered the pledge to nearly 6,000 members within five years of its foundation in 1872. Hannan was involved in all these bodies either as the chaplain or in an important administrative capacity: everything revolved around him.
In 1873 the Society decided to clear the £5,300 that it still owed from building the Catholic Institute through a subscription sale. After a year’s preparation and with tickets sold and prizes having been exhibited, Hannan and his team were on the point of completing the scheme when, in April 1874, the authorities warned that it was in breach of the Lottery Act. Attributing this development to misrepresentations from anti-catholic elements, Hannan argued (to no avail) that the prizes were genuine and that no one was profiting from the scheme. In what was a significant setback the lottery was cancelled; while many ticketholders waived his refund offer, a substantial debt remained.
FOUNDATION OF HIBERNIAN FC
In 1875 Hannan and an Irish-born local football enthusiast, Michael Whelahan, founded Hibernian Football Club (FC), which was brought formally under the auspices of St Patrick’s CYMS in early 1877. The club’s harp and shamrock crest and its motto (‘Erin go bragh’) were almost identical to the markings on the college bell at Hannan’s alma mater, All Hallows. He eventually became the club’s honorary president. Hannan saw Hibernian FC as a means of diverting young men from anti-social activities: every player had to be a society member and abide by its rules under threat of expulsion. The Scottish Football Association (SFA) rejected Hibernian’s application for membership on the grounds that it catered for Scotsmen, not Irishmen, leaving the club without anyone to play against. That December, however, Hannan’s patient canvassing of the other Edinburgh football clubs bore fruit when Heart of Midlothian agreed to a fixture, after which other teams followed suit in early 1876 and the SFA grudgingly relented.
Hibernian’s first matches were played in the Meadows, an open space south of the city centre used by numerous football teams. Carrying their goalposts, the Hibernian players and their supporters would claim the pitch early in the morning, primed to literally beat off hostile teams arriving later. From late 1877 Hibernian played its home matches at enclosed grounds at Mayfield and Powburn, about a mile south of the Meadows, and at Powderhall to the north, and began charging spectators for admission. In 1880 Hannan secured a more suitable site at Easter Road, close to where the modern ground stands. As the first visibly Irish soccer club in Scotland (or anywhere else), Hibernian attracted Irish support nationwide and regularly drew crowds of up to 4,000, enjoying a following that could not be matched by any other Scottish club. The Cowgate-born James Connolly (qv), one of the leaders of the 1916 Easter rising, was a devotee; so too were many hard-drinking Irish navvies from other towns, whose rowdiness mortified Hannan. His denunciations from the pulpit had no effect, and crowd trouble became a feature at matches.
The bumper gate receipts nonetheless sustained not just the CYMS in its myriad charitable endeavours, but many non-catholic causes too, reflecting Hannan’s belief that Hibernian should use its popularity to help the wider community. The club found itself in great demand, playing charity matches across Scotland and England. Regular winners of the Edinburgh Cup from 1879, Hibernian began to recruit players from outside its immediate catchment area from the 1882/3 season, tapping into the wealth of Irish catholic football talent in the west of Scotland. In 1887 Hibernian won the Scottish Cup, becoming the first team from the east of Scotland to do so, following this up by beating the English Cup holders Preston North End in a ‘world championship’ match.
POLITICS
He had become priest in charge of St Patrick’s (with the largest congregation in the east of Scotland) in 1869 before being made a canon of the newly reconstituted cathedral chapter of the archdiocese of St Andrews and Edinburgh in 1885; he was also on the archdiocese’s finance committee. Mentoring the stream of young curates who passed through St Patrick’s (many from Ireland, including his younger brother Joseph), he spent his tenure gradually adorning, reconstructing and adding to his church, also completing an adjoining presbytery for himself and his fellow priests in 1876. Likewise, he raised funds for various local catholic schools and for the construction of St Ann’s School in South Gray’s Close, within a few yards of his church.
Active in Edinburgh’s civic affairs, he was a member from 1877 of the City Parochial Board (with responsibility for the poor and homeless), where he was valued for his practical advice, derived from his ministry in the Cowgate. Edinburgh’s geographically concentrated Irish catholic vote saw him re-elected repeatedly to the Parochial Board and from 1885 to the Edinburgh Schools Board also, topping the poll in his ward in the 1885, 1888 and 1891 school board elections; he was the deputy chairman from the late 1880s. A vocal critic of the secular system of state education established in 1872, he pressed for state funding for catholic schools. Nonetheless, he insisted that he represented the entire population, the poor especially, rather than just catholics. Although his determined advancement of catholic interests made him enemies, he disarmed the suspicions of moderate protestants and is credited with contributing to the decline in religious tensions in Edinburgh during the late nineteenth century. In 1890 thirteen of the twenty-eight honorary members of St Patrick’s CYMS were protestant.
Politically, Hannan was a moderate Irish nationalist who supported home rule without alienating too many of his unionist neighbours. He was almost certainly a member of the Irish National League, since he presided over some of its meetings at the Catholic Institute – held after CYMS meetings with largely the same participants. The Scottish hierarchy was uneasy about some of its priests’ close association with Irish nationalism, and Hannan’s politics likely precluded his promotion to a bishopric. In summer 1888 his archbishop, William Smith, of Scottish aristocratic lineage, instructed him to dismiss the St Patrick’s CYMS president Michael Flannigan for refusing to condemn boycotting and the plan of campaign, per a recently issued papal decree. Although no other bishop in Ireland or Britain took such action and the decree was addressed to the Irish bishops alone, Hannan was forced to dismiss his friend and collaborator of twenty-five years, doing so reluctantly and only following prolonged attempts at brokering a compromise.
THE DECLINE OF ST PATRICK’S CYMS
The threatened mass resignations from the CYMS did not materialise, but there were some defections which hastened the gradual decline which had been evident since its high-water mark of around 1,000 members in 1880. Then, in early February 1889 the secretary and acting treasurer of the CYMS savings bank absconded to America having embezzled £360 worth of depositors’ money. As the nominal treasurer, Hannan took personal responsibility for making good the loss out of his private resources, though in practice he received financial help, including from Hibernian FC and a local (protestant) MP. He had many strengths, but money management and bookkeeping were not among them; having flirted with bankruptcy in early 1888 when a £4,500 bond on the Catholic Institute was called in, the Society was in financial crisis.
From 1888 Hibernian’s capacity for generating revenue for St Patrick’s CYMS was steadily eroded by the emergence of an Irish soccer club in Glasgow. Unlike Hibernian, which only picked catholics for its teams and was strictly amateur with a focus on charitable fundraising, the more commercially run Celtic FC fielded protestant footballers too and aggressively practised ‘shamateurism’, allowing it to poach Hibernian’s best players with offers of jobs. Eclipsed as Scotland’s foremost Irish team, Hibernian lost much of its spectator appeal, with matters unravelling further as the club lost the lease on Hibernian Park and failed to apply in time for membership of the Scottish Football League upon its inauguration in 1890.
Hibernian briefly ceased to exist in 1891, as did St Patrick’s CYMS for about a year later that decade, but Hannan was spared this experience. He caught influenza in the spring of 1891, which developed into pneumonia after he refused to convalesce sufficiently. He withdrew to the purer air of Dunfermline where he died on 24 June 1891. Some 2,000 mourners reportedly attended his funeral, including prominent politicians and church officials (catholic and protestant), with thousands lining the route from Little Ireland to the Grange Cemetery, not far from the Meadows. He is buried alongside his younger brother Joseph (1852–1903), who also became a canon of the Edinburgh cathedral chapter in 1899. Edward left a mere £134 in his will, mostly to family members and to the Industrial School in Tranent which the archdiocese had founded.
In 1893 Hibernian FC was revived independently of the CYMS as a professional, non-denominational club with a local support base that was predominantly, but not exclusively, of Irish catholic descent; it went on to establish itself as one of Scotland’s leading football clubs. Memorials to Hannan can be found inside St Patrick’s Church, Cowgate; at the home of Hibernian FC at Easter Road, Edinburgh; and (since September 2022) at the home of Ballingarry Association Football Club, Co. Limerick.