Mick Clifford: 50 years after his death, what is Éamon de Valera's political legacy?
A colourised photo of then taoiseach Éamon de Valera inspecting a guard of honour in August 1940 at Collins Barracks, Cork. Picture: Irish Examiner Archive
Some had wondered whether he was beyond mortality, but the bell tolled for Éamon de Valera on August 29, 1975.
He was 92 when he died in Linden House nursing home in Blackrock, Co Dublin. His wife Sinéad, predeceased him by eight months.
For once, the term “end of an era” was entirely fitting.
“The nation now mourns the death of one of its greatest sons,” Des O’Malley, a youthful TD who had already served as justice minister, told Limerick county council the following week.
“We have lost a man who was the equal of all the world leaders in his day and a man who also ranks equal with the greatest figures in Irish history.”
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de Valera had commanded a unit in 1916 and later served as taoiseach for over 16 years before graduating to the role of president for another 14. The state he helped form, nurture, and govern was known for a time as ‘Dev’s Ireland’.
British politician, social reformer, and de Valera biographer Frank Pakenham (Lord Longford) said the deceased man’s contribution to the freedom of Ireland was unrivalled in Irish history.
“I have said more than once that Mr de Valera was the greatest man I have ever met. I feel that more intensely at this moment when he has passed to a better world than this.”
There was respect for the recently-deceased leader from all quarters, including a balanced editorial in the .
“Whatever else may be said about Éamon de Valera, his personal contribution to the making of today’s Ireland — for good or ill — can hardly be underestimated.”
Dev’s one-time political opponent, John A Costello, who had led the interparty governments of the 1950s, was generous in his assessment. There were many, Costello noted, “who feared that once Mr de Valera came to power, he would turn into a dictator and abuse the institutions of democracy.
“But let me pay him this tribute — he went the other way and adopted completely all the forms of democracy, and always to a logical conclusion.”
de Valera was born in New York in 1883. His father was Spanish — or possibly Cuban, Éamon never got to know him — his mother Irish. He was sent to live with his grandparents in Bruree, Co Limerick. After national school, he attended Blackrock College, where he played rugby and developed a passion for the game. Afterwards he trained to be a teacher.
His decision to take part in the 1916 Rising was to shape his destiny. He commanded a garrison at Boland’s Mill and was condemned to death afterwards, one of 90 rebels who initially received such a sentence.
On May 4, in his cell, he wrote to a friend, Michael Ryan, a rugby international with whom he had played.
“Just a line to say I played my last match last week and lost. Tomorrow I am to be shot. Pray for me, an old sport who unselfishly played the game.”
The death sentence, like those for all but the 15 who were elevated into immorality, was commuted and he was sent to prison in England. His status as effectively the last leader standing propelled him to the frontline of the nationalist movement and in time to be the most consequential Irish leader of the 20th century.
Author Colum Kenny in his book muses on what might have been had Dev’s luck turned sour as the British hauled out leaders for the firing squad.
“Had de Valera been executed after the Easter Rising that year who would have remembered him? He opted to join a minority of the Irish Volunteers in rebellion, while other men joined the British army to fight Germany. He believed armed revolt was desirable or necessary in 1916. The public soon forgot the names of many who died then, whether combatants or civilian casualties — and many were indeed civilians, the usual ‘collateral damage’ of warfare.”
He was released in 1917 and locked up again the following year as nationalist fervour spread across the country.
Michael Collins organised his escape and soon after Dev set sail for the USA to tour and raise funds.
There he stayed for 18 months through the bloodiest phase of the War of Independence. Again, luck was on his side.
Once the truce was called, the man they called the long fellow was expected to lead negotiations on a treaty. He met Lloyd George in the summer of 1921, and immediately copped that there was no way that the Republic proclaimed in 1916 was going to come into being.
His decision thereafter to skip the treaty negotiations was highly controversial and would always snarl at his legacy. The British were led by prime minister Lloyd George. The Irish, unpractised in the ways of diplomacy, had to travel without the president of the Republic and all the personal attributes and authority he would bring to the table.
There can be little argument but that his decision to reject the Treaty, and effectively support armed resistance to it, greatly inflated the brutality of the Civil War.
His language in the run-up to the outbreak of that war was highly inflammatory.
At one speech in Thurles he warned that those intent on establishing a republic, “would have to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of some of the members of the government in order to get Irish freedom”.
What drove him to transmogrify into an extremist, believing that the cause he claimed to espouse was more important than the will of the people?
One strand of opinion that has persisted over the last century is that it was informed principally by ambition. Collins was emerging as a natural leader, and Dev was never going to play second fiddle to him.
Irrespective of how he conducted himself, there would have been armed resistance to the Treaty. Equally, without his imprimatur it would have been a much less bloody and savage affair.
He signed up as a private to his old, nominal, unit and spent much of the conflict hidden away, his influence over the military men for a long time sidelined. Had he been captured, particularly in the aftermath of Collins’ killing, there is every possibility he would have faced a firing squad.
When it was over he was finally arrested and spent a year in prison, much of it in solitary confinement.
In his book , Diarmaid Ferriter points out that it was time well spent.
“He had to reflect on what road he should take in the future and formed, it is fair to assume, a determination not to make the same mistakes again in terms of political management and strategy.
“His incarceration at this stage of his career was arguably of crucial importance in making him the astute politician he became on his release.”
A long arc of redemption followed. Within four years, he had entered the Dáil under a new party flag and the same conditions that pertained before the Civil War. How different would the new state’s baby steps have been had he accepted then what he now stomached?
In 1932, he was elected taoiseach and began his long career as statesman and democratic leader.
His record thereafter has been the subject of much discussion and plenty of revision.
A speech he delivered on St Patrick’s Day 1943 is often referenced and misquoted.
He spoke of the ideal Ireland that would be “the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit”.
The Ireland of his dreams would be “bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens”.
The crossroads, at which said maidens were reputedly urged to dance, were not mentioned by Dev in that speech.
So went the philosophy, in spirit if not practice, of Dev’s Ireland.
Would Collins’ Ireland, or Cosgrave’s Ireland or Pearse’s Ireland have been any different? Who knows.
There were some serious contradictions inherent in the long fellow’s public persona.
Material wealth was well down his list of priorities, yet he appropriated for his own family huge sums of money raised in the USA for the birth and nurturing of an Ireland free from Britain.
The money was used to establish the as a pro-Fianna Fáil newspaper after he founded the new party in 1926, an investment that could in some circumstances be cast as justifiable.
But the organ itself fell not into the ownership of the party, but the personal coffers of the de Valera family. The emigration and grinding poverty that was to blight much of the country in Dev’s Ireland would never be a problem for his own kith and kin.
The other major contradiction concerned the North.
From the outset, he cast Fianna Fáil as “the Republican party” which would strive tirelessly to reclaim the fourth green field.
However, once in power, he did next to nothing to make it happen.
Not just that, but he had a selective view of the IRA which he had left in the wake of the Civil War.
When two IRA men were sentenced to death for a 1939 bombing in Coventry which claimed five lives, Dev appealed a number of times, publicly and privately, for clemency. The British didn’t listen. The men were hanged in February 1940.
Six months later, two IRA men gunned down two detectives in a raid on a house in Rathgar in Dublin. Patrick McGrath and Thomas Harte were sentenced to death. McGrath was a veteran of the Rising and the War of Independence, a former comrade of the Taoiseach’s. No matter.
Within a month of the verdicts, both men were executed by firing squad. Killing civilians in a British city was one thing, but order had to be ruthlessly enforced when IRA men killed members of An Garda Síochána.
Throughout his time in power, and for long afterwards, Dev kept advocating for a United Ireland. His refusal to pursue it through killing was sound but, beyond that, de Valera’s Ireland largely abandoned northern nationalists. He kept up appearances.
In 1949, when the inter-party government moved to declare the free state a Republic, then taoiseach John A Costello generously invited Dev to join him on a broadcast to the nation to mark the event.
Dev turned down the offer.
“When the constitution came into operation in 1937, we decided that celebrations such as those now proposed ought to be reserved until the national task which we have set ourselves is accomplished,” he said at the time.
The national task was to the forefront of his imagination, where it could safely reside without upheaval.
There has, over the years, been much revision on his economic and cultural impact on the nation. Protectionism was certainly a blind alley, but when it finally was dumped by TK Whittaker, Dev, on his way out the door, didn’t offer any resistance.
Catholic Ireland was a dark, lonely, and sometimes savage place for some and de Valera is often accused of ceding power to the church. The charge is valid but again it might be a moot point to suggest he could have done things differently in this respect.
He does deserve credit, as Costello acknowledged, for maintaining democracy and all its institutions, particularly in the 1930s when the drift towards totalitarian regimes of the left and right were afoot across the globe.
His decision to maintain neutrality during World War II was well made and executed. It could be posited that in comparison with some national leaders today he was the paragon of what a statesman should be.
In the decades following his death, his star declined. Some of this was inevitable. More was attributable to what began to emerge about the worst crimes against the most vulnerable in the time of Dev’s Ireland. And yet more was associated with the subsequent development of the economy and society, eliciting comparisons with the austere and frugal exemplar of an earlier time.
An example of how he was viewed during the Celtic Tiger years was on display at one of the annual Cáirde Fianna Fáil dinners at that time.
This was a celebration of the party he had started and for so long personified. It was now at height of its power, just before the big fall. And the prominent image on display was not the chief himself but Pádraig Pearse, who had died a decade before Dev founded the party. It was a ludicrous misappropriation of the 1916 leader, but drove home how the party preferred to forget the man who had been the party.
Ultimately, his years in power had the customary credits and debits. Ferriter, in his book, posits that Dev was a unique and noble politician.
“The caricature of him as stern, remote, and technocratic is a myth,” the author writes. “He also displayed exceptional physical and mental stamina and endurance.”
All very true. There are also many who find it difficult to see beyond Éamon de Valera’s decision to skip the treaty negotiations and his role in the run-up to what was a vicious and pointless civil war.
Whether or not he ever redeemed himself thereafter, or even if that were possible, remains a central issue in a legacy that endures to this day.
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