De Valera’s finest hour came after Churchill’s post-war attack on him

SIXTY years ago the country was waiting for Eamon de Valera to respond to Winston Churchill’s stinging criticism of his wartime conduct.

When it came, the response was masterful, and those who heard the speech never forget where they were when they heard it.

Vincent Massey, the Canadian High Commissioner in London, thought it was in reaction to the Taoiseach’s condolence gesture following the death of Hitler that Churchill lashed out at de Valera during a victory address over BBC on May 13, l945. In fact, it was more likely that the prime minister was seizing the chance to contrast the loyalty of Northern Ireland with what he considered de Valera’s rancid indifference. This would weaken any attempt the Taoiseach might later make to cause trouble over partition.

Churchill pulled out all the stops in referring to the Long Fellow with dismissive contempt. He actually emphasised the different syllables of de Valera’s name in such a way as to conjure up a subliminal suggestion of the Taoiseach as the personification of the devil, evil, and Éire by pronouncing the name as if it were ‘D’evil Éire’.

“Owing to the action of Mr de Valera, so much at variance with the temper and instinct of thousands of Southern Irishmen who hastened to the battlefront to prove their ancient valour, the approaches which the southern Irish ports and airfields could so easily have guarded were closed by the hostile aircraft and U-boats,” Churchill said. “This was indeed a deadly moment in our life, and if it had not been for the loyalty and friendship of Northern Ireland we should have been forced to come to close quarters with Mr de Valera or perish forever from the earth.

“However, with a restraint and poise to which, I say, history will find few parallels, His Majesty’s Government never laid a violent hand upon them, though at times it would have been quite easy and quite natural, and we left the de Valera government to frolic with German and later with the Japanese representatives to their hearts’ content.”

It was a gratuitous swipe, and there was an air of anticipation in Ireland as people waited for a response. It was generally assumed de Valera would answer in kind, and expectations mounted over the next three days. Then on May 16, 1945 he went on Radio Éireann to deliver what was generally considered by Irish people to be the best and most effective speech of his long career.

He began by thanking God for sparing Ireland from the conflagration, which had left much of Europe in ruins. Next he expressed gratitude to the various people who had contributed to the successful efforts to keep the country out of the war.

And then he turned to Churchill’s speech.

He knew what many people were expecting him to say and what he would have said 25 years earlier, but the occasion now demanded something else.

With an exquisite touch of condescension, he explained that Churchill could be excused for being carried away in the excitement of victory, but there would be no such excuse for himself.

“Mr Churchill makes it clear that, in certain circumstances, he would have violated our neutrality and that he would justify his action by Britain’s necessity,” de Valera said calmly. “It seems strange to me that Mr Churchill does not see that this, if accepted, would mean that Britain’s necessity would become a moral code and that, when this necessity was sufficiently great, other people’s rights were not to count. It is quite true that other great powers believe in this same code - in their own regard - and have behaved in accordance with it. That is precisely why we have the disastrous successions of wars - World War Number 1 and World War Number 2 - and shall there be World War Number 3?”

The Taoiseach then praised Churchill for resisting the temptation to violate Irish neutrality. “It is, indeed, hard for the strong to be just to the weak. But acting justly always has its rewards,” he said. “By resisting his temptation in this instance, Mr Churchill, instead of adding another horrid chapter to the already bloodstained record of relations between England and this country, has advanced the cause of international morality an important step.”

THE public reaction to the address in Ireland was overwhelming. “With little exception,” John D Kearney, the Canadian High Commissioner reported, “Mr de Valera’s broadcast is regarded in Ireland as a masterpiece, and it is looked upon as probably his best effort. It has served to almost still the criticism which his visit to the German minister provoked and, in so far as I can judge, on balance, Mr de Valera now stands in higher favour in Ireland than he did before his visit to the German minister.”

“We had him on a plate,” Kearney told Sir John Maffey, the British Representative to Ireland, the morning after the Taoiseach’s speech. “We had him where we wanted him. But look at the papers this morning!” Churchill’s remarks were a great mistake, according to Maffey, because they gave de Valera the opportunity to escape from the consequences of his condolence gesture following Hitler’s death. In the last analysis, Maffey said, it was not Churchill’s speech, but de Valera’s reply “which bore the stamp of the elder statesman”.

Maffey was particularly critical of the suggestion that it would have been natural for Britain to seize Irish bases.

“I felt that something was lost in the moral plane by suggesting that we might have seized them,” he explained. “However, where we lost most tricks in the rubber here was in the fact that after five-and-a-half years of war the British prime minister, in a historic speech, gave prominence to Mr de Valera, attacked him personally and thereby introduced him to the spotlight and a world radio contest.”

The Dominions Office noted, however, that the international perspective of this so- called “radio contest” was quite different. Unlike Churchill’s address, which was broadcast around the world, only the people at home in Ireland heard de Valera’s response on Radio Éireann.

Thus his international standing remained seriously damaged by the Hitler condolence gesture. The San Francisco conference to establish the United Nations Organisation (UNO) was going on at the time. Reports from there suggested that de Valera’s condolence gesture had “inflicted a profound and enduring shock on the American people”. As a result Churchill’s “severe remarks were therefore accepted and even applauded as a salutary rap over the knuckles”.

“On balance,” the Dominions Office concluded, “we have certainly gained in the eyes of the world, whatever may be the effect in Éire itself.” Among the bulk of the Irish people, however, de Valera had redeemed himself. “For the Irishman in the homeland and overseas,” Maffey wrote, “it is once again a case of ‘Up Dev!’”