A local Kilkenny hero with an international outlook

Hubert Butler was born in a very small place, Bennettsbridge in County Kilkenny, yet his outlook was utterly international. Born to an Irish Protestant family on October 23 in 1900, he arrived with a new century that would be tumultuous and see immense changes in the world. Hubert Butler would be directly  involved in some of the most dramatic events of that century both internationally and in Ireland.

Born into a minor branch of the Butlers of Ormonde, the family was nevertheless wealthy by the standards of the day. Butler was therefore educated in the English public school system going  to Charterhouse and later to Oxford followed by the School of Slavonic Studies in London, where he learned Russian and Serbo Croat. On graduation he taught English in Soviet Russia in Leningrad and translated the major Russian writers including Chekov. 

Meeting young Serbs and Croatians in college had sparked his interest in the region so he travelled to Central and Eastern Europe in the 1930s. While the early part of these travels was idyllic, they later awoke Butler to the rising tide of antisemitism in Europe. 

In 1938 after the Night of Broken Glass when Jewish communities across the Third Reich were attacked, he travelled to Vienna to help hundreds of Jews to escape Nazi persecution. There he worked with the Quaker community in the city, using his Anglo Irish charm and manners to woo embassy officials and obtain exit visas for the people he was trying to save. 

Some of these Jewish families he brought to Bennettsbridge, giving them temporary shelter before they moved on to new lives in other locations.  

After World war II, Butler returned to Croatia to investigate what had happened to the hundreds of thousands of victims who had died in Nazi death camps there. At the time it was evident to Butler that no other Western person had been there before him to investigate these appalling war crimes. He discovered evidence of ethnic cleansing of the Orthodox Serbs with the complicity of the local Catholic Church. When he subsequently tried to make this knowledge public, it made him deeply unpopular with the Irish authorities and the Irish Catholic hierarchy. 

Butler exposed the behaviour of Ante Pavelic, the leader of a puppet regime in Croatia during WWII when he was the head of the Ustashe, a fascist militia who began a programme of death and persecution mere weeks into their rule. Hubert wrote extensively about what had happened in the concentration camp Jasenovac, where the Ustashe clinically slaughtered thousands of people, mostly Serbs, but also Jews Roma and political opponents.

This ruthless campaign was carried out to make Croatia ‘racially and spiritually pure’ by forcibly converting Orthodox Serbs to Catholicism with the tacit support of the Catholic hierarchy. Local Cardinal Aloysius Stepinac gave his blessing to the Ustashe and Ante Pavelic when they assumed power, although he later condemned their murderous campaign. He was  arrested by Marshall Tito when the communist assumed power in Yugoslavia after the war and was sentenced to 16 years imprisonment. Hubert attended some of the war trials in Zagreb and even interviewed Stepinac briefly on one occasion. 

In Ireland Stepinac became a cause celèbre due to his incarceration, so when Butler sought to inform a meeting in Dublin about the forced conversion campaign and the Papal Nuncio  to Ireland walked out in protest, it was a major controversy. Butler was subsequently ostracised by the national and local Kilkenny establishment. He was forced to resign as Secretary of Kilkenny Architectural Society, the society he had revived and suffered accusations that he was a communist sympathiser and a spy. 

Ireland, then dominated utterly by the Catholic Church, was not a place that tolerated dissent, and Butler paid dearly for his honesty. He resigned from KAS despite surviving a motion to expel him, was shunned in the street and was condemned by a Kilkenny Council motion. Butler later said that he had been unaware of the nuncio’s presence at the meeting and had no intention to cause offence. 

Undeterred, Butler continued to write, later investigating how Pavelic’s fugitive Interior Minister Andrija Artukovic  managed to live in Ireland for a year between 1947 and 1948 on false Irish papers that subsequently allowed him to enter America.

When the full extent of the Nazi Holocaust was revealed, Butler was vindicated but was never fully appreciated in Ireland. He received a posthumous apology from the Mayor of Kilkenny in 2000 for the events of the past. 

Kilkenny Archaeological Society lecture celebrates local historian

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Butler was married to Peggy Guthrie, the sister of Tyrone Guthrie and in 1941 after his father’s death they had returned to make their marital home at Maidenhall, his family home in Bennettsbridge. The couple made the house a centre for intellectual debate and discussion, founding the Kilkenny Lectures to encourage dialogue between the people of Northern Ireland and the Republic. In 1944 he revived the Kilkenny Architectural Society and was particularly proud of its role as a place where people of both traditions could meet. Today the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny is named in his and Peggy’s honour. 

Although born into the Protestant Anglo Irish class, Butler as he matured became a passionate nationalist and Wolfe Tone was his personal hero. Throughout his life and in his writings he sought to explore how the identities of Ireland’s two traditions could be reconciled and live respectfully in harmony. The themes of freedom of thought, the origins of nation states and the violence of totalitarianism defined his work. He also sought to draw attention to the contribution of the Anglo Irish community to Ireland. 

He continued to travel and write: in the late ‘60s he travelled to the Deep South to meet the nascent Civil Rights movement, in 1956 he aided refugees from the Soviet invasion of Hungary and in 1973 explored a US coup d’état in Chile. He also remained active in Irish civil rights, campaigning on the pro-choice side in the 1983 8th Amendment to the Constitution campaign. 

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Butler Gallery encouraging people to join them for a 12 week printmaking course by Michelle McMahon

In his eighties, Hubert found a delayed recognition and appreciation for his writing when the Lilliput Press began to publish his essays in volume form. His unique insights into Eastern Europe and his recognition of the corrupting power of totalitarian states had made his perspective years ahead of his time in the ‘40 and ‘50s but now struck a very relevant note. Titles including Escape from the Anthill, The Children of Drancy and The Invader Wore Slippers won him a loyal and devoted readership. 

He died aged 91 in 1991. Ironically Butler never considered himself a writer although Roy Foster, the historian said of him that  he was ‘one of the great Irish writers’. His lessons are still utterly relevant today, particularly those about the aggression of  totalitarian empires, the suppression of free speech and the ugly face of extreme nationalism. 

His life and his work combined the personal with his devotion to a belief in the need for a more pluralist society. The marginalisation of Hubert Butler for so long meant that Ireland lost the benefit of his wisdom and intellect as the country emerged as an independent nation. Fortunately his books still survive to promote the unique insights of this remarkable man.