Diarmuid II of Odann

Diarmuid II
Diarmuid II: this photograph from 1985.
Defender of Odann
Reign	1972 - 1988
Predecessor	Rónán II
Successor	Ultan II
Born	19 Conservene 1940 Ráth, Odann
Died	20 Metrial 1988 (aged 47) Ráth, Odann
House	House of Clairháin
Father	Liam, Crown Prince of Odann
Mother	Dúil uí Mhaor

Diarmuid II, born Diarmuid mac Clairháin (1940–1988), also known as an Tógálaí or “the Builder”, ruled as Defender of Odann between 1972 and 1988, taking the throne in extraordinary circumstances as successor to his grandfather Rónán II. During his time as Defender he presided over – and in many respects helped to drive – a marked shift in the country’s policies towards the rest of the Cairan world and the world more generally, and a lifting of the often smothering sense of internal oppression and push towards conformity most often associated with the Dark Years in the Sacred Kingdom.

Early life

Diarmuid mac Clairháin was born on 19 Conservene 1940 at the Teach Cloiche Sean, the private residence of the Odannach royal family at Dun Eógain, to the north of Ráth, the state capital. He was the eldest of three children born to Liam, duke of Fiodharta, the eldest son of Defender Rónán (he received the title of Prince of Laora, then given to the heir-apparent, in Dominy 1941), and his wife Dúil uí Mhaor.

With Savamese forces advancing steadily on Ráth, the royal family were firmly advised to flee the capital towards safer havens in the country’s coastal north. While Liam and his father remained in the capital, Dúil and her children were dispatched to Clachán, and would remain there until the end of the war.

With some reasonable distance between him and the prospect of his becoming Defender, Diarmuid had greater leeway to follow his own interests and abilities as he continued his education. His interest in architecture and construction had been sparked in his teen years by Bríne ní Dhubhuir, one of his tutors, who was a lay worker with a city-centre temple and an accredited cairon engineering master; and he studied civil engineering at the University of Clachán between 1959 and 1962, graduating seventh in a class of almost seventy. It was during his time at UC that he met Síle na Fháilta, the daughter of one of his tutors, to whom he was married in 1966. The relationship excited concerns among traditionalists who expected the prince to marry a noblewoman as his forebears had usually done, but at a time when much of day-to-day life in Odann was markedly colourless, the obvious delight of the young couple in each other – to the extent that it was known in public – was well-received by the public at large, many of whom saw it as almost a cinematic ceolscéal production brought to life. As was usual in such circumstances, Diarmuid was given a title of his own just before the wedding, in this case that of Duke of An Croi, the traditional home of the Clairháin family near Cairn in the country’s south-east.

The couple’s first child, Muireann, was born in 1969, and they were delivered of twins, Ardal and Gráinne, in 1971. This second pregnancy, though, was fraught with difficulty; the children were born a startling two months prematurely and both weighed less than two kilogrammes (4.4 pounds) at birth. They were placed in intensive care almost immediately, but while Gráinne responded well to treatment, her brother was not so fortunate, dying after only three weeks of life. Court physicians conducted tests on the duchess and advised that the couple should not try for more children.

The unexpected monarch

Rónán II died in 1972 at the age of 82 years; his health had been declining for some years, at least in part from the strain of holding the country together through the turbulence of the Dark Years. With his death, it was expected – even assumed – that Liam, his eldest son, would become the new Defender; the Crown Prince had increasingly shadowed his father in affairs of state over the previous decade, and was as familiar with the responsibilities of the crown as anyone could reasonably expect. However, Liam shocked a nation by announcing that he was declining the throne, citing a necessity for Odann to examine itself and make a clean break with the legacy left to the country by its defeat in the Gaste War and the bleakness of the Dark Years. Instead, he stated, he was vacating his position in the line of succession and passing the Defender’s crown to Diarmuid the elder of his two sons. While the decision was virtually without precedent in Odann – and came as a surprise to the general public given that the Crown Prince was in obviously robust physical and mental health – it must be said that Liam’s concerns over the wisdom of his succession had been flagged well in advance within court and government circles, and Diarmuid had been kept well-informed.

However, the new Defender had no real experience of the demands of statecraft. His distance from the throne had allowed him much more freedom to pursue a career for which he had real training and aptitude, and after completing his degree he had begun work with a Ráth-based firm of civil engineers – this, rather than any particularly visible Cairan piety, would be responsible for his soubriquet of an Tógálaí – with some reasonable success; while he was undoubtedly an intelligent and thoughtful man, informed parties were nonetheless concerned as Diarmuid ascended the throne.

Brand new day

Such fears would prove to be ill-founded; even if Diarmuid was being thrown into the pool of state at the deep end, he did not come to the role wholly unprepared or without some clear ideas of his own about what his country needed as it looked into the future. He had been Defender for less than a month when he prorogued all three chambers of the state parliament, insisting that every member should seek a fresh mandate from his own electorate before continuing within the house. The ensuing election in Sation 1972 became the only example in modern times – and the first anywhere in Messenia in almost 200 years – of a “general election”. While arguably not as successful as Diarmuid might have wished in clearing out the dead wood from the three chambers, the election did seat over a hundred new delegates and bring a much-needed transfusion of new blood to the parliament. With the new houses in place, Diarmuid went a step further by appointing as his Chief Advisor Liam Sagart, a Ráth-based member of the Council of the People, in the first such appointment since that house was established in 1887, citing a belief that this chamber had the widest electorate and thus the greatest legitimacy across the country as a whole.

Understandably, a reforming agenda could not help but bring Diarmuid the opprobrium of long-serving politicians and others who had prospered under the existing system and saw no reason to bring it down – a group whom the Defender often referred to among close friends as na huafásachaí or “the deplorables”. One of the most prominent among this group was Íonacht an Dhonn, the director of the Oifig Slándála an Chreidimh, Odann’s internal security service. The feeling was certainly reciprocated – an Dhonn was one of a select few people within the “Black Templars” who had access to “above top secret” files on Odannach whom a less institutionally paranoid organisation would have regarded as beyond suspicion, including Diarmuid, his brother Ultan and – it was reputed – the late Rónán II himself.

It would not be until 1974 that Diarmuid turned his sights onto an Dhonn, but there is strong evidence to suggest that he actually ordered an investigation into the OSC very soon after taking the throne and that it was not until the first quarter of 1974 that an unambiguous case against an Dhonn could be brought. The director, not surprisingly, fought hard against the allegations, and was backed by character testimony from several prominent figures in government and public life – although it would emerge much later that an Dhonn made use of OSC files on the activities of some of these “supporters” to coerce them into weighing in on her side. Diarmuid and crown prosecutors saw through these testimonials very quickly; but an Dhonn – possibly through the intervention of her friend Sinead an hÉadrom, the Holy Mother of Odann – gained enough notice of her impending arrest to flee the country, eventually settling in Yfirland. The local government, standing on its dignity against its sometime ally, declined to extradite her to Odann, prompting fierce diplomatic protests from Ráth.

While Diarmuid had been minded to remove the OSC from the remit of the Argan of Odann, where it had traditionally rested, he was persuaded to allow the organisation to clean its own house as a more secular body, which would report to an oversight committee formed by Diarmuid himself and members of all three parliamentary houses.

Diarmuid’s determination to drive reform (if not Reformation) within Odann naturally led him to push for a re-engagement with the rest of the Cairan world, and particularly with Savam, the old wartime foe and the central pillar of Reform Cairony. His visit to Quesailles in Floridy 1978 was in some respects the climax of his efforts in this direction, marking as it did the first visit of an Odannach monarch to Savam since the foundation of the present Savamese Empire in 1798. He also sought to mend fences with the neighbouring Daelic states, and in particular to quell residual concerns in Laora and Fiobha – severed from the Odannach body politic at the end of the Gaste War – over the possibility of their reannexation.

In this work he was given substantial support by Mairín ní Thuathail, an hÉadrom’s successor as Holy Mother, who was driving a similar process within the Argan of Odann, and the two consulted regularly on areas of mutual concern. Their working relationship was mostly productive, allowing for some understandable differences of opinion, particularly as regards the acceptability of non-Cairan religious practices, public displays of which have been illegal in Odann since 1950; although scrupulously Orthodox Cairan in his own practices, Diarmuid was much more inclined to leniency against Sirians and Arlaturi who wished to publicly follow the ways of their own faiths, and some of the relevant laws were discreetly and unofficially relaxed for much of his reign.

Diarmuid, although not a natural extrovert, made a deliberate effort to position himself as a symbol for the kind of open, outgoing country which he sought for Odann to be; over the course of his reign he became probably the most travelled monarch in Odannach history, even to the extent of becoming the first Defender to visit the country’s Seranian territories since their initial acquisition in the later 18th century. While the first of his two visits to Odannach Serania was alongside ní Thuathail, herself Seranian-born, in 1977, he made an extended tour of the territories in the southern hemisphere summer of 1984-85, visiting Trá Bhuí and Inisholmer as well as touring the territorial mainland.

Brothers at arms

However, there was now emerging a marked difference in the philosophies of Diarmuid and his brother which could not be ignored, given the importance of Ultan to the kingdom as heir-apparent (since Diarmuid’s two daughters were barred from the succession under Odannach law). While some degree of military service was generally expected of Odann’s male royalty – Diarmuid himself being a rare exception to this practice – Ultan had made the army a career, finding it an excellent fit to his personality; he formally re-enlisted in 1971 and refused to resign his commission after his brother took the throne in the following year. At the same time he was accepted for a place in the Cór Cogaíochta Speisialta, the army’s special forces unit.

In common with a sizeable number of the service’s senior ranks, Ultan leaned strongly to an opinion that Odann had been defeated in the Gaste War not by failure on the battlefield as much as by weakness on the home front, and that the country had been actively hindered by the other great powers of Messenia in the post-war period, for fear that it become a threat to them once more. At a time when Diarmuid was pressing an agenda of re-engagement with the continent, this was hardly a supportive position; and the gulf contributed to a growing rift between the brothers during much of the 1980s. For his part, Ultan could fairly claim a measure of hypocrisy from his brother – Ultan had himself been a key player in the orchestration of a coup in Nation 105 in 1979 which ousted that country’s moderate and pro-Siursk government, and Diarmuid had willingly supported Odann’s push to acquire metacosmic weaponry in the wake of the successes of Savam and Zeppengeran, who had made this advance in the mid-1970s, as well as sanctioning research into improved chemical weaponry as a cost-effective alternative to conventional weapons.

However, in constitutional terms Ultan was untouchable; and unless he voluntarily withdrew from the succession as his father had done – or were to predecease Diarmuid – then he would take the throne in due time. The Defender’s own concerns were echoed by those of his father – who, as Prince-Emeritus, was still active as a royal adviser – but both men privately despaired of a solution.

Illness and death

Diarmuid had been suffering from a marked decline in health from the summer of 1987 when a medical examination determined that he was now suffering from leukaemia. The case was, doctors advised, particularly virulent and failed to respond to treatment despite the best available medical care; by the beginning of 1988 it had become clear that Diarmuid could not be cured and had a matter of months remaining to him. He entered a precipitous decline at the end of Empery and died on 20 Metrial 1988 in the Ospidéal an Chompáis Naofa in central Ráth, where most of his treatment had been conducted, at the age of only 47 years. His final words were reported as “A Thiarna Tógálaí, cuidígí ár dtír” (“Lord Builder, help our country”).

Legacy

Diarmuid at present is unusual in having a more positive reputation outside his own country than within it. To some extent this has been deliberately fostered by his brother; while Ultan has not been openly disrespectful of Diarmuid and his actions, the late king’s actions clearly do not fit comfortably into the narrative which Ultan wishes to project, which draws much more strongly on an intrinsic sense of Odannach – even pan-Daelic – patriotism and the reflection of Odann’s past glories as a kingdom; and it has been argued that Diarmuid’s actions as Defender have been downplayed as a result.