Dev showed them how to run a republic, but they’ve betrayed it

BY pleading the poor mouth before completing his second term as President in 1973, Eamon de Valera had his pension increased by a fraction over 475%.

It was a massive hike, but only because he had effectively refused any increases in his salary in over 30 years.

He had opportunities to have it raised in the 1960s when, as Minister for Finance, Charlie Haughey accorded a massive salary increase to politicians. But Dev's salary was not touched at his own request. As he approached retirement in 1973, the President's salary was still the same as it was when the office was set up in 1937.

He was in his 90s and was worried about the pension which would only be £1,200 to support himself and his wife in nursing homes. At his behest his pension was raised to £5,706.

Compared with the 112,000 that Mary Robinson enjoys without serving even one full term, de Valera's pension was a paltry sum after 14 years as President and over 40 years as a Dáil deputy.

When de Valera came to power in 1932, one of his first acts was to cut his salary by 40% from £2,500 to £1,500 a year, and he cut the other ministerial salaries by a third, from £1,500 to £1,000 a year.

He recognised that the salaries were incongruous when the people they were serving were plagued by unemployment and deprivation in the midst of the Great Depression.

De Valera promised to implement policies to ensure that the country was a republic in fact, so that the day that a republic was declared it would merely involve a change of names.

At the time the governor general was being paid a fortune the previous year he got £28,000 in salary and expenses for representing the British king as head of state.

When the governor general, James McNeill, a great-uncle of Minister for Justice Michael McDowell, defied the instructions of the government, de Valera had him removed, and promptly downgraded the office.

Under the constitution of 1937 an elected president replaced the governor general with a salary of £5,000 a year. One of the president's functions was to receive the credentials of foreign diplomats serving in Ireland.

In July 1945, when asked if Ireland was a republic, de Valera suggested that James Dillon would find that the country was a republic by any definition or description of a republic to be found in "any standard book of reference". He then proved this by quoting from six different dictionaries and encyclopedias.

Four years later Dillon was a member of the inter-party government that formally declared the Republic of Ireland. It only amounted to a change of names. Everything else remained the same, because the country was already a republic in fact, as de Valera had promised in 1933.

The first person to challenge the republic was Archbishop John Charles McQuaid in October 1949 when Dr Ettore Felici replaced Dr Paschal Robinson as papal nuncio in Dublin.

The archbishop upstaged the presentation of the nuncio's credentials with a liturgical reception on the day after Dr Felici's arrival, which was a couple of days before he was due to present his credentials to President Seán T O'Kelly.

"The president thought that this procedure was incorrect or at any rate that it was incorrect to describe Dr Felici as apostolic nuncio, as was done in the invitations to the liturgical reception," noted Joseph P Walshe, the Irish ambassador to the Vatican.

Dr Felici would only become nuncio officially after he had presented his credentials to the President.

Archbishop McQuaid was symbolically establishing a precedent that the nuncio was primarily accredited to the hierarchy rather than the State. He essentially invited the nuncio to accord precedence to himself ahead of the President.

"The arrangement went through as envisaged (by Dr McQuaid), ie, liturgical reception first, presentation of credentials afterwards but the President although he, like the members of the government went to the pro-cathedral, did not, by contrast with them, meet the nuncio immediately afterwards," Mr Walshe added.

FROM a symbolic standpoint Archbishop McQuaid upstaged the President and within a couple of years he brought the country's republican status into question during the Mother and Child controversy of April 1951.

In a republic the people are supreme and government is answerable to them, but Taoiseach John A Costello allowed himself to be summoned by McQuaid to his Drumcondra palace, where he learned of the difficulties between the bishops and Minister for Health Noel Browne.

The Taoiseach actually asked the archbishop for permission to speak to Browne, his own minister.

"I asked his grace to permit me to try to adjust the matter with my colleague," Costello told the Dáil.

"His grace readily gave me that assignment and that authority. All of us in the government who are Catholics are, as such of course, bound to give obedience to the rulings of our Church and of our hierarchy," Seán MacBride, the Minister for External Affairs, told the Dáil only minutes later.

Members of that government were not answering to the people they had betrayed the republic and were deferring to the Catholic bishops instead.

The following month Dr Felici died suddenly. By the time his replacement as nuncio was announced, de Valera was back in power.

We do not yet know what role he played behind the scenes, but the documents released recently indicate that the Vatican secretary of state, Msgr Battista Montini (later Pope Paul VI) was not about to allow Archbishop McQuaid to upstage the President again.

He instructed that Dr Felici's replacement should present his credentials to the President before accepting any invitation from Dr McQuaid.

"The issue was therefore solved as far as we are concerned in the manner desired by the President," according to Ambassador Walshe.

"Notwithstanding the strong reasons on which they had based their original decision," he explained on November 18, 1951, that Msgr Montini said, "they now thought it better to give precedence to the presentation of credentials."

It was the first step towards reclaiming the government from the hierarchy and re-establishing a true republic.

In a republic, citizens are supposed to be equal under the law but we have the disgraceful situation in which the current Government has accorded themselves pensions after just two years in office.

They draw those pensions immediately, without having to retire, while everybody else must quit a particular job before getting a pension from the State.

The same Government is proposing that anybody who henceforth enters the civil service will not be entitled to a pension until they reach 70 years of age. This is an outrage.

It may be trendy in some quarters to ridicule de Valera, but he did provide leadership and he did keep his election promises in marked contrast with the way the current crop have lied and gouged the public purse for their own personal gain.

They have accorded themselves rights that the country could not afford to accord to the people they supposedly serve. In the process they have shamelessly betrayed the republican ideal and the republic itself.