De Valera's Irelands

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by Dermot Keogh


  Yet, in one respect de Valera may have prevented Irish fascism by diverting anger in a specific direction. Anglophobia may have been the safety-valve which enabled Ireland to escape other forms of nativism. The Irish Press pumped it up day after day. The wrongs of Ireland, real and imaginary, were forever paraded through its columns and those of its stable-mates. Akin to these themes was an unconcealed celebration of physical force over constitutionalism, which duly yielded its crop of IRA activists. Its sensationalism appears small by today’s lack of standards, and even in its time it probably compared favourably to the Daily Mirror. But its inspiration is obvious: William Randolph Hearst, whose repre­sentative John Kennedy we met at the beginning. Hearst had been at the height of the anti-Treaty demagoguery during de Valera’s eighteen-month stay in 1919–20. He was busily at work, for instance, denouncing Herbert Hoover as a British agent, and he had five million readers to whom to do it. De Valera, driven from his natural sympathy for Wilson’s ideas, was forced to accept the alliance of the Hearst lynch-mob against him. It might be the better part of wisdom to make oneself the Irish Hearst, but it prov­ed a Frankenstein monster, and it proved a long fuse with effects in creat­ing the thirty years’ war in Northern Ireland at the end of the century. All the more did de Valera see the need for such support in his future poli­tical career when the Civil War was over and his jail term had been serv­ed. He had learned what unscrup­ulous former supporters could do to his reputation when John Devoy started operations in his Gaelic Ame­rican. He had seen something of the power of William Martin Murphy in questioning the Catholic credent­ials of his enemies, and Mur­phy’s Inde­pe­­ndent would be his implacable enemy after 1922. Hence the Irish Press, and hence also the decision to have it out-Herod Hearst.

  De Valera was Irish. His American origins, his American yearning, and – in 1919–20 – his American education made him wear his Irishness with a difference. It increased his sense of the effectiveness of public opin­ion and the marshalling of international sentiment. It showed him how to beware so-called friends of his country (the Devoy-Cohalan public fund­raising body was the Friends of Irish Freedom) with their own agenda (its funds went to finance their Republican party choices for office). It gave him a civic code in some respects superior to that on offer from the Unit­ed Kingdom whence he hoped Ireland would escape. It supplied him with friends and funds, and sympathetic indignation from Americans as valuable as Collins’ military victory. Although the greatest single factor in the Lloyd George government’s discomfiture was the Sinn Féin news­paper briefing in London, from the richly English voices of Desmond Fitz­­Gerald and Erskine Childers, probably the most insidious propaganda the UK ever faced in its own capital.

  And it demands much further study.

  1 Lewis, C. S., Prince Caspian, Harper Collins, New York, 1951. Editions are so numerous that one can only indicate chapters: respectively 4 and 10. This book seems to me the one where Lewis most directly confronted problems of his Irish identity (pre-Catho­lic, Synge-Yeats style), although the sequel, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Harper Collins, New York, 1952, draws more on Celtic legend. The aged ape in The Last Battle, Harper Collins, New York, 1956, is evidently a relic of his Belfast Protestant youth, being an impression of Leo XIII. This is somewhat at variance with de Valera’s ‘nothing disgusts me so much as an analogy’: I can only plead that my epigraphs mix symbols rather than pretending to exact parallels.

  2 Schlesinger, Arthur, A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Hough­ton Mifflin, Boston, 1965, says that ‘the State Department drafts’ of speeches for the Euro­pean trip in June 1963 ‘were discarded’ (London edition, p. 754). This is certainly not true of the speech to Dáil Éireann since it included much historical detail taken down from me by the Irish desk in the State Department, including one mistake reproduced by Kennedy and later corrected (the date of the battle of Fredericksburg, whose accu­rate citation was given by Basil Peterson in the Irish Times a few days after delivery). But Pierre Salinger in an interview the following day told me that ‘you guys are going to be surprised by how much Irish history the President has read’ and we were. Much of the humour in the Irish speeches was characteristic of Kennedy’s off-the-cuff style at press conferences, rather than the rounded periods of Ted Sorenson’s ‘brilliant mind and pen’ to which Schle­singer ascribes the speeches.

  3 Earl of Longford, Kennedy, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1976, p. 151. Kenny O’Don­nell opposed the visit on the grounds that he already had the Irish vote. Mc­George Bundy opposed it on grounds unknown, but in view of Bundy’s char­acter, that was not a bad compliment for Ireland.

  4 Aedan O’Beirne, then counsel at the Irish Embassy in Washington, DC, con­veyed this opinion to me in late 1959. Joseph P. Kennedy was remembered in August 1960 by Ambassador John Belton at Stockholm as having flown to Ire­land in the autumn of 1939 to berate de Valera at a private but formal dinner in his honour, for his failure to enter the war in support of his friend Neville Cham­berlain.

  5 Brogan, Hugh, Kennedy, Longman, London, 1996, pp. 15–19 contains good perceptive comment on Why England Slept from a clever son of the shrewdest British commenta­tor on mid-twentieth century USA. Joe Kennedy sent out many copies of the book long before he read it (if he ever did).

  6 Reeves, Richard, President Kennedy – Profile of Power, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993, p. 537: ‘On the flight from Germany, Kennedy told Powers and O’Don­nell about his only other trip to the land of his ancestors.’ Admittedly Reeves then refers to Kathleen as ‘Lady Hartigan’ which would have been appreciated by the UCD History Depart­ment in the early 1960s. McTaggart, Lynne, Kathleen Kennedy: Her Life and Times, Double­day, London, 1983, is interesting if gossipy on the family member who most suc­cess­fully bridged the Atlantic (and made Ken­nedy Harold Macmillan’s nephew-in-law’s brother-in-law). Hamilton, Nigel, J. F. K.: Reckless Youth, Century, London, 1992, is the most useful if not faultless on Kennedy’s early years.

  7 Mitchell, Arthur, J. F. K. and his Irish Heritage, Moytura Press, Dublin, 1993, is an admir­able rescue operation on crucial documents by a distinguished Ameri­can historian of Irish politics, carrying the first Kennedy journalism (pp. 100–104) with the advertise­ment ‘Why Ireland Clings to Peace’ on p. 89. See also Hennessy, Maurice N., I’ll Come Back in the Springtime – John F. Kennedy and the Irish, Washburn, New York, 1966.

  8 Fisk, Robert, In Time of War, Andre Deutsch, London, 1983.

  9 Mitchell, Arthur, J. F. K. and his Irish Heritage, pp. 105–7. Kennedy ended his story with the magnificent tongue-in-cheek: ‘At this weekend, the problem of partition seems very far from being solved’. The use of ‘mist’ for symbolic pur­poses in celebrating Ireland stayed with Kennedy to 1963.

  10 Bromage, Mary C., De Valera and the March of a Nation, New English, London, 1956.

  11 O’Connor, Edwin, All in the Family, Sphere edition, London, 1970, p. 83. A neglected classic.

  12 Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, Hutchinson, London, 1970, p. 454. O’Neill insisted that Longford did not write a word of the book, his name being re­quired on it by the London publishers, but the quotation from ‘a guest at the large re­ception who watched the two presidents’ seems to mean Longford, whose own book on Kennedy tells the same story with himself as the informant and de Valera now ‘like a benignant uncle’; Earl of Longford, Kennedy, p. 4. It was of course Kennedy’s extra-marital reputation which had become a little live­lier in the interval, but Long­ford was tactful when he saw need of it. The Irish version of O’Neill’s biography is fuller than the English but only goes up to 1937. O’Neill, Thomas P. & Ó Fiannachta, Pádraig, De Valera, 2 vols, Cló Morainn, Baile Átha Cliath, vol. 1, 1968, vol. 2, 1970.

  13 I have gone into the implications of this in my Eamon de Valera, GPC, Cardiff, 1987. Subsequent to its appearance, Tim Pat Coogan, formerly as editor of the Irish Press, de Valera’s hierophant-in-chief, now turned on his former employers to denigrate d
e Va­lera in every remotely plausible way in his biography. Pauric Travers in his Eamon de Valera, Historical Association of Ireland, Dundalgan Press, Dundalk, 1994, pp. 6, 52 comments that Coogan’s ‘intensive rootings’ have not proven his allegation of de Va­lera’s illegitimacy. Certainly Coogan has tried to go the whole hog throughout.

  14 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1980, p. 93. In common with every other student, my debt to this work is endless, but in my case a personal debt of gratitude to a kind family friend from my childhood is even greater.

  15 Travers, Pauric, Eamon de Valera, p. 3.

  16 O’Connor, T. P. & McWade, Robert M., Gladstone, Parnell and the Great Irish Struggle, Hub­bard, Boston, 1886, p. 506. For a good specimen of Sheehy’s anti-clericalism in sermon see O’Brien, Conor Cruise, States of Ireland, Panther edition, London, 1974, pp. 22–3.

  17 Farragher, Seán P., Dev and his Alma Mater – Eamon de Valera’s Lifelong Association with Blackrock College, 1898–1975, Paraclete Press, Dublin, 1984, pp. 32, 51–4.

  18 ibid., p. 58.

  19 Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, pp. 7, 50; Travers, Pauric, Eamon de Valera, p. 13. Both works rather uniquely insist there is no ‘evidence’ or ‘surviving records’ suppor­ting the thesis of American intervention. The US Consul was equally clear that there was, and his record survives. See Dudley Edwards, Owen, De Valera, GPC, Cardiff, 1987, p. 58 and ‘American Aspects of the Rising’ in Dudley Edwards, Owen & Pyle, Fergus (eds), 1916: The Easter Rising, MacGibbon & Kee, London, 1968, p. 162.

  20 Clarke was shot so quickly after the Rising that no diplomatic intervention was pos­sible, especially as the consulate could not be reached by its staff until well over a week beyond it.

  21 Dinneen, Revd Patrick S., SJ, Foclóir Gaedhilge agus Béarla, Irish Texts Society, Dublin, 1927, p. 145.

  22 Yeats, W. B., ‘Remorse for Intemperate Speech’ in The Winding Stair and Other Poems, Macmillan, London, 1933. Yeats dated this poem 28 August 1931. It is written as though self-reflective but in spite – or perhaps because – of its con­fessional status it could be read in allusion to de Valera, whose advent to power was clearly imminent. Brown, Thomas N., Irish-American Nationalism 1870–90, Lippincott, Philadelphia, 1966, applied it to Devoy (and his colleagues and rivals) appositely but in our context ironi­cally.

  23 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, p. 93; Far­ragher, Seán P., Dev and his Alma Mater, pp. 23–4, 26. D’Alton reminisced that de Va­lera was ‘good at mathematics but not outstanding otherwise’ (ibid., p. 35). This might be modesty or judicious amnesia as to de Valera’s defeating him successively in Chris­tian Doctrine and Religious Instruction. De Valera is unlikely to have shar­ed amnesia on the point: it was a useful recollection in Church-State debates of later years.

  24 Ó Faoláin, Seán, De Valera, Penguin, London, 1939, p. 10.

  25 Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, p. 52.

  26 Dwyer, T. Ryle, De Valera’s Darkest Hour 1919–1932, Mercier, Cork, 1982, title of Chapter One. This most important book with many invaluable quotations well merits re-issue, as does its successor De Valera’s Finest Hour 1932–1959, Mercier, Cork, 1982.

  27 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, p. 6.

  28 The Declaration of Independence was using the formula in part for the ac­quisition of a French alliance. De Valera’s ambitions in that direction for Ire­land at this juncture were certainly centred on the USA. Much later he would prove the most effective resistance to an American alliance in Irish political life, but that was in recognition of the dan­gers such an alliance must pose to the fulfilment of Wilsonian neutrality for Ireland.

  29 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, p. 6.

  30 . Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, p. 67.

  31 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, p. 8.

  32 ibid., p. 14.

  33 . ibid., pp. 64, 74, 233–4, 465; Dwyer, Ryle T., De Valera’s Finest Hour 1932–1959, pp. 79–80, 139, 152; Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917– 73, pp. 64, 74, 233–4, 465.

  34 See Clemenceau, Georges, American Reconstruction 1865–1870, Dial Press, New York, 1928. This point is almost invariably overlooked.

  35 John Mitchel’s devotion to slavery and to the Confederacy is the extreme case. But Wil­liam Smith O’Brien is another. A. M. Sullivan, editor of the Nation, no doubt acquired much such sentiment from his wife, late of New Orleans, and his popularisation of the term ‘Home Rule’ was connected to its post-war Ameri­can use in 1870 and there­after as an expression to cover ex-Confederate resump­tion of rule having ousted the republicans from political power.

  36 Library of Congress, The Impact of the American Revolution Abroad, Library of Congress, Washington, 1976, my chapter on Ireland.

  37 Moynihan, Maurice (ed.), Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917–73, pp. 14–5; Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, p. 80.

  38 Ishmael, as commentators on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick need to remem­ber, sur­vived against all odds, even when his mother turned aside from him in the desert.

  39 Professor Cormac Ó Gráda misinterprets this in his preface to the recent reissue of the work in question, Dudley Edwards, R. & Williams, T. Desmond (eds), The Great Famine: Studies in Irish History 1845–1852, Browne and Nolan, Dublin, 1956; reprinted with new introduction and bibliography, Lilliput Press, Dublin, 1994.

  40 De Valera’s refusal to make the first move of reconciliation with Churchill for fear of a snub shows the same situation (Earl of Longford & O’Neill, T. P., Eamon de Valera, pp. 435–6, 441–3). Churchill made the move with congratulations on de Valera’s seventi­eth birthday, to de Valera’s delight.

  41 . Keogh, Dermot, Twentieth Century Ireland: Nation and State, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1994, pp. 4–22. A textbook based on primary research is a beacon of free­dom for his­torians.

  42 Travers, Eamon de Valera, p. 31.

  43 Keogh, Dermot & O’Driscoll, Finín, ‘Ireland’ in Buchanan, Tom & Conway, Martin (eds), Political Catholicism in Europe 1918–1965, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1996. It wants an article on Austria.

  44 Lee, Joseph, Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cam­bridge, 1989, p. 203.

  45 . Keogh, Dermot & O’Driscoll, Finín, ‘Ireland’, p. 290, but see also Tierney, M., ‘Ireland and the Corporate State’, United Ireland, 16 December 1933 in Deane, Seamus, et al (eds), Field Day Anthology of Irish Writing, Field Day, Derry, 1991, vol. iii, pp. 760–62. In an analysis of Irish writers in favour of the corporate state and/or Catholic Ac­tion, on the pro-Treaty side my student Thomas Villis found only one whose thought could be termed fascist, but there was no doubt about him: Tierney.

  46 Briscoe’s invaluable autobiography (with Alden Hatch but unmistakably Briscoe in tone), For the Life of Me, Little, Brown & Co., Boston, 1958, is a rich and beautiful cele­bration of de Valera’s Jewish sympathies. But for all of its excellent humour it does not disguise the intolerance of the physical force men for Jews. The notable advocate of physical force in Irish nationalist thought who identi­fied with the causes of non-whites was Patrick Ford, owner-editor of the Irish World, flourishing in New York 1870–90.

  9

  Eamon de Valera and Blackrock 1898–1921

  Seán Farragher, CSSp

  The School Journal for 14 August 1898 has this entry: ‘Fr Superior return­ed considerably refreshed by his holiday in Clare.’ That holiday, in the plans of Providence, proved a deciding factor in Eamon de Valera’s ca­reer, as the Superior in question, Fr Laurence Healy, spent his holiday at Lisdoonvarna in the company of Fr James Liston, curate at Bruree. When the intermediate results were published on 30 August, young Edward de Vale
ra, as he was then known, learned that he had secured a £20 exhi­bition – or scholarship – in junior grade. As he had to travel seven miles to the nearest secondary school, namely the Christian Broth­ers’ school at Charleville, necessitating much expenditure of time and energy, he hoped to be accepted at a boarding school on the strength of this £20 scholar­ship. He had lived with his uncle Edward Coll in a labourer’s cottage since his return from New York in 1885, where he had been born of an Irish mother and a Spanish father. His uncle could not be expected to con­tribute much to the £20. As no reply was received from the colleges in the south to whom he had applied, Fr Liston advised him to write to Fr Healy. He was immediately accepted on the strength of his exhibition alone.

 

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