Did de Valera get it wrong in his handling of partition?

IN the past week we had posthumous pronouncements from both Judge Seán O’Leary and the late US President Gerald Ford.

Their views might be considered contentious but they are mild compared to Seán MacEntee’s scream from the grave about de Valera’s handling of partition in the latest volume of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy.

Published jointly by the Royal Irish Academy, National Archives, and Department of Foreign Affairs, the book has a number of fascinating documents covering the years 1937 to 1939.

Pride of place must go to a previously unpublished letter that Seán MacEntee drafted to Eamon de Valera during the Anglo-Irish negotiations of 1938.

De Valera asserted that ending partition was always his main goal in politics, but MacEntee accused him of having no policy to do so in 1938.

For MacEntee, a Belfast Catholic and founder member of Fianna Fáil, to accuse the Long Fellow of surrendering to a bigoted element within his own government comes like a real blast from the past.

Opponents had accused de Valera of splitting the Irish in America, fomenting the civil war here, and provoking the Economic War with Britain. But WT Cosgrave’s Cumann na nGaedheal had more to do with the Economic War. In 1926 they secretly agreed to pay the land annuities to Britain, even though the British had — possibly unwittingly — agreed to cancel them the previous year. Cumann na nGaedheal leaders also secretly pleaded with the British to resist de Valera on the annuities issue, and this led to the Economic War.

By 1935 the British wanted to end the Economic War. They tried to get de Valera, then President of the Executive Council, to negotiate a settlement, but he stalled, because he wanted to implement a new constitution first. Seán Murphy, Assistant Secretary of the Department of External Affairs, informed the Irish High Commissioner in London that “it is essential that the President should be able to say, if the question is asked, that the Constitution has been framed without any consultation with the British Government and that the latter are not in any way responsible, whether by way of suggestion or otherwise, for anything that appears in the Constitution.”

De Valera might have been prepared to ignore the British but he was not about to ignore the hierarchy. The next report in Documents on Irish Foreign Policy was an account from Joseph P Walshe, Secretary of the Department, of his Vatican discussions about the Constitution with Pope Pius XI and Secretary of State Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli (later Pius XII).

Some now decry de Valera as a craw-thumping Catholic, but the clause in the 1937 Constitution recognising the “special position” of the Catholic Church as the religion of the great majority of the Irish people, was a means of overcoming pressure from the hierarchy, which was trying to insist that the Constitution should specifically recognise the Catholic Church as the one true Church of Christ.

Pacelli and the Pope also hoped for such a declaration, but Walshe realised that this would make a mockery of the all-Ireland pretensions of the Constitution. At one point, Pacelli also suggested that, instead of recognising the existence of other religions in Ireland, the Constitution should stipulate that it “tolerates” those religions.

Walshe essentially got the Pope to adopt a hands-off stance on the Constitution. “I do not approve, neither do I not disapprove; we shall maintain silence,” the Pope diplomatically explained.

Once the Constitution was ratified, de Valera set about negotiating a settlement with the British.

The main issues of contention were partition, the Economic War, and the defence clause of the 1921 Treaty, which gave the British three Irish ports and any other facilities they might want in time of war.

Joe Connolly, a Northerner and a member of the first Fianna Fáil Government, argued strongly that there should be no agreement without the ending of partition. Seán MacEntee, who was a member of the four-man Irish delegation, disagreed profoundly with those views.

Ironically, unlike de Valera, MacEntee was one of a handful of deputies who had denounced the partition clauses during the 1921 Treaty debate.

“I feel that the Partition problem cannot be solved except with the consent of the majority of the Northern non-Catholic population,” MacEntee wrote in January 1938. “It certainly cannot be solved by their coercion. Hitherto, we as the Government here have done nothing of our selves to secure a solution, but on the contrary have done and are doing certain things which have made a solution more difficult.

“We must resist temptation to invoke coercion directly or indirectly whenever the circumstances appear to us to favour it, as they do now, otherwise we shall only intensify the distrust of the people in the North whose confidence we wish to win,” MacEntee continued. He felt they had allowed themselves to be manoeuvred into a situation in which they were spurning a chance to settle the Economic War on practical terms.

“In regard to partition we have never had a policy,” MacEntee added. The government consistently maintained that it did not wish to coerce Northern unionists into a united Ireland, but it did nothing to try to win them over. “With our connivance every bigot and killjoy, ecclesiastical and lay, is doing his damnedest here to keep them out,” he argued. Some of the government were “subordinating reason to prejudice.” On the matter of defence, such prejudice might “be blameless on the part of an individual,” but it had no place among statesmen. Yet some people were “raising the partition issue now to coerce their colleagues to defer to their prejudices,” he wrote. “I feel the essential unity and confidence of the Cabinet has been destroyed.”

“I have no desire to remain in the Government, and therefore my resignation as Minister for Finance is at your disposal whenever you deem it advisable to accept it,” he added. But he did not intend to go public with his objections.

“I am willing to follow this equivocal course in regard to a plan in which I do not believe because I feel that in the position in which we now find ourselves to manifest open disagreement would be disastrous to whatever chance you have of bringing your plans to a successful issue.

“But beyond silent acquiescence in the plan I cannot go. I am not prepared to defend it for instance at a General Election and accordingly will not stand again for the Dáil if it still remains our policy.”

The British essentially capitulated to de Valera by abrogating the Treaty’s defence clauses and giving in on the Economic War. He could undoubtedly have improved the lot of Northern nationalists, but he was more intent on preserving nationalist grievances, so that partition would remain a festering sore.

He begrudgingly signed, giving the British no real credit for the agreement that paved the way for Ireland to stay out of the second world war. This would become the real proof of our independence.

Of course, there were still fears that the British would not respect Irish independence but Joe Walshe advised de Valera on December 12, 1938, that dominion status was Ireland’s greatest protection. “Solidarity with the members of the British Commonwealth is a much greater protection against that happening than the good will of the United States.” he contended.

This was one of Collins’s main arguments during the Treaty debate 85 years ago tomorrow when he and Arthur Griffith persuaded the Dáil to accept the Treaty. Ironically, de Valera proved that Collins was right.