Studying de Valera - Hanafin step just the first

EDUCATION Minister Mary Hanafin would have known the reactions that would be provoked by the decision to distribute 2,000 books on Éamon de Valera to 720 secondary schools.

One would have been of congratulations and the other of condemnation. The second would have insisted that she was trying to influence our children’s understanding of their bitter history; that she was “trying to put their (Fianna Fáil’s) stamp on history”, and that the move “smacked of the kind of one-party state view that Fianna Fáil has of themselves”.

Of course all of this is true, just as it is true that anyone with the slightest ambition to understand our past and present — must come to grips with Éamon de Valera’s role in the development of our Republic.