by Dermot Keogh
Next came 1916. The then Castle students, now reduced in numbers, mixed with the Sherwood Foresters as these consulted their obsolete maps looking for Williamstown Avenue, demolished in 1906, as a suitable stopping place. They were on their way to face Commandant de Valera’s men at Mount Street Bridge. When the fighting was over and it was learned that de Valera was among those condemned to death, Fr Downey, then President of the college, contacted the attorney general, Sir James O’Connor, who happened to be a past student of the college, to pass on the word that de Valera was American-born. He passed the same message on to James McMahon, secretary of the GPO, another past pupil of the college.
Fr John T. Murphy, who was then provincial superior, wrote just after the Rising to inform the superior general in Paris on what had happened in Dublin. In his report he deplored the imprudence of the leaders of what he considered a misguided rebellion but paid tribute to their sense of honour and their Christian piety. He had of course known de Valera as a student and Thomas McDonagh as a prefect in Rockwell (1896–1901).
When de Valera was elected President of Dáil Éireann in 1919, it was decided that he should go to the United States as soon as possible in that capacity. Very shortly after his secret arrival, and before he made his first public appearance at the Waldorf Astoria, Fr William O’Donnell, CSSp, who knew him personally and was deeply involved in the Irish movement in the United States, arranged that he should visit the Holy Ghost community at Cornwells Heights, Pennsylvania, composed as it was of past Blackrock and Rockwell men known to the President. Realising that it was a historic occasion they improvised a battery of lamps to take a time-exposure photo of the group that night. Seated beside the youthful looking President is one of Blackrock’s earliest students, Fr William Healy, CSSp. He it was who was responsible away back in 1865 for erecting the first (home made) green flag over the college, on St Patrick’s Day 1865. He was described by his French director as ‘outre en politique, comme arch-Irlandais’. As he sports his Irish colours here again, for the last time as it transpired, one can imagine him saying that he could well sing his ‘Nunc demittis’, now that Ireland seemed to be on the threshold of being a Nation once again.
After his return to Ireland, the residence provided for the President was at ‘Glenvar’, just across the road from Clareville. It was in an outhouse in Clareville that Eoin MacNeill’s men were screening the intercepted mail-bags. In an effort to trace them down, a military cordon was thrown around the area. The college and Clareville were searched with no result, but de Valera was accidentally arrested at ‘Glenvar’. When his identity was confirmed at the Bridewell the news was flashed to London and the instructions from there were that he was to be released immediately. He was released, much to his surprise, at Portobello Barracks. Having procured an old bicycle he cycled back to Blackrock. He ran in to his old friends Fr Larry Healy and Fr James Burke, who were amazed to see him again. As he ate a hasty meal they tried to puzzle out the reason for his sudden release. In the event of his being around on Sunday it was arranged that he and his secretary, Miss O’Connell, could have mass and dinner at the college. They both arrived and at dinner with Fr Downey and Fr Burke, de Valera produced an envelope with a special seal that had been handed to Miss O’Connell the previous day by Bishop Mulhern on behalf of Lloyd George. The letter signalled the start of the Truce negotiations. That was Sunday 26 June 1921.
Eamon de Valera and the Civil War in Ireland, 1922–1923
Dermot Keogh
Eamon de Valera, unlike most members of his political generation, has not lacked biographers. They range greatly in quality, objectivity and professionalism. As a general comment, I have long since come to hold the view that de Valera is more in need of being rescued from the uncritical prose of his admirers than from the vituperative attacks of his most ardent critics. Even hyper-critical work has not done nearly as much damage to de Valera’s reputation as the perfumed praise of his hagiographers.
Broadly speaking, it is possible to divide such works into categories, one of which comprises studies that move from hagiography to the warmly positive. This work ought not to be dismissed as being of little scholarly use. The studies vary greatly but many of them make indispensable reading.1
A benign view of de Valera’s role during the Civil War is to be found in Bromage, Macardle, MacManus and both of Seán Ó Faoláin’s two biographies. The latter was a veteran of the War of Independence and an anti-Treatyite during the Civil War, who rejected the view that de Valera could be blamed for 1922:
But in his case it is most cruelly unjust to blame him for the events of 1922. He was not then the leader of the people, but the leader of a minority, and a political minority at that. Over the militarists he had no control, and they avoided or rejected his influence, so that when he issued his Cease Fire Order in May 1923 he only did so because the chastened militarists were only too glad to accept his control that they once rejected, and to accept his magnanimous offer to try to pull together the scattered remnants of republicanism in Ireland. There is not another man in Ireland who would have so unselfishly taken up the Lost Cause, with all its opprobrium and all its associations of defeat. But this man would go, and has gone, to almost any length to bring about the unity of his people, so woefully divided in the hour of apparent triumph.2
In O’Faoláin’s second biography in 1939 – as hostile as the first was idolatorous – he maintained that interpretation of de Valera’s impotence during the Civil War:
De Valera lived in those days through his Inferno. Like Dante he descended into Hell, and his face began to show the marks of his journey. All that he had fought for, all to which he had devoted his life, was in ruins. He was now forty years old – an age at which a man knows that the next round figure will put him among the elderly men. He was powerless. To use his own despairing words he watched from ‘behind a wall of glass’. He was repudiated as leader by the majority of his people, not acknowledged as leader by the remainder. Not until the soldiers began to realise that the game was up did they think about him, or turn to him and then they turned to him only to give him the task of announcing defeat.3
M. J. MacManus, who published his biography in 1944, proved to be an even more vigorous defender. He wrote: ‘The biographer of de Valera is not required to linger over the actual period of the Civil War. De Valera had tried to prevent its coming and he had failed; he was equally powerless to shape its course.’4MacManus entered into the most vigorous defence of his subject of study. He provides the following portrait of de Valera on the eve of civil war in June 1922:
Once again, because de Valera had not taken the easy way out, because he had had the moral courage to do the hard and the bitter thing, he was made the chief target for opprobrium and abuse. He, and almost he alone, was held up to the people of the two islands and to the outside world as the man who had plunged Ireland into civil war. He was stigmatised as vain, fanatical and obstinate, as a man who had broken all the rules of fair dealing, as one who should be outlawed forever from the councils of statesmen. In Britain, the old jibe, applied in other years to Parnell and O’Connell, was revived: ‘He doesn’t know what he wants and won’t be happy till he gets it’, and that in spite of the fact that no leader had ever stated what he wanted more consistently or more lucidly. Such attacks were the measure of his enemies’ fear. They dreaded lest he should succeed in re-uniting the forces of the Republic and in giving public opinion the sense that resistance to the new oppression was morally right.5
That view is very much out of favour at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Criticism of de Valera has grown. The range and quality of the work on the adversarial side of the argument also ranges greatly in quality and in professionalism. Many of the texts are very hard-hitting. A minority, I regret to say, might be described in modern-day popular language as ‘hatchet jobs’.6But, as with the other category, the work is worth examining in detail.
1932 Cumann na nGaedheal election poster
The flavour of the writing of those historians most hostile to de Valera and to his reputation may be judged by quoting from the work of Tim Pat Coogan. He has written perhaps the most popular and widely-read biography in recent years. Coogan is merciless in his criticism. In relation to de Valera’s failure to lead the Irish negotiating team to London in autumn 1921, he writes: ‘The question which will forever hang over his reputation in Irish History is: would he have been on that road if his rivalry with Collins and his fatal streak of “cute hoorism” had not made him shirk the responsibility of going to the London negotiations.’7Coogan presents him as being myopic and strangely resilient to accepting the inevitable: ‘The policy he said he intended to pursue was, in the conditions of the time, akin to the captain of the Titanic deliberately deciding to ignore the existence of the iceberg.’8
One of de Valera’s favourite disguises during the Civil War was, according to Coogan, the garb of a priest which, he argues, was ‘symptomatic of the atmosphere of intrigue and unreality in which he increasingly operated during those tragic days.’9 Coogan writes of ‘de Valera speak’10 and of a ‘de Valera fact’11. In other words truth, to him, was relative. He was also a man of exaggerated self-importance, according to the same author: ‘His American-inflated ego made him impervious to the feelings of the majority of the Irish people, whose wishes he professed to be able to divine through his own unique process of vascular oracularity.’12He is depicted by the same source as being a disciple of Machiavelli13 who was always in quest of ‘extremist support’14 during the Civil War. There is even a reference to a rumour of gossip concerning his relationship with his secretary, Kathleen O’Connell.
In fine, the thesis presented in Coogan’s volume argues that the ‘cute hoor’ de Valera – a pupil of Machiavelli – partially driven by jealousy of Michael Collins fomented and then prolonged the Civil War. That thesis does not diverge significantly from the cruder versions of Cumann na nGaedheal propaganda of which the election poster in 1932 given on the next page is an example.
There is a middle ground of professional scholarship. This is a growing corpus, some of which is cited in the endnote. It is by far the most useful category of work on de Valera’s life and times.15
There is a fourth category of publications that is indispensable for the study of de Valera: collections of his speeches, statements and sayings have been published since the 1920s. There is a reference to the publication of his early correspondence on Anglo-Irish relations in 1922.16As a student at UCD in the late 1960s, I discovered under the direction of Dr Maureen Wall a pamphlet entitled The Hundred Best Sayings of Eamon de Valera. Published in 1924, it had collected together in abbreviated form a range of political observations and comments. The editor of the pamphlet was not identified.17When de Valera came into office in 1932, the first collection of his speeches to the League of Nations was published in book form.18A selection of his speeches for the war years was also published.19Maurice Moynihan has produced by far the most impressive and comprehensive compendium to date of de Valera’s speeches and writings. This is useful for scholars not only for the texts chosen but also for the commentary that Moynihan has added in introducing many categories of documents. These are critical notes carrying with them the authority of one who worked closely with de Valera in office for over two decades. Moynihan is a fair-minded observer/participant.20Proinsias Mac Aonghusa has both written about de Valera and published a collection of quotations.21
Although I would place de Valera’s officially sanctioned biographers, Lord Longford and Professor T. P. O’Neill in the first category – the sympathetic/partisan – I feel that this choice may require further explanation. In the first line of their acknowledgements, they write: ‘This book could not have been written without the co-operation of President de Valera himself.’ They record that he had ‘steadfastly refused to write an autobiography, but once he had agreed to the suggestion that an authoritative biography be written, he could not have been more helpful.’ The work was not an official biography. It was to be, in their own words, ‘an authoritative biography’. In the completion of their task, both authors expressed their gratitude to de Valera ‘not only for making his huge library of private papers freely available to them, but giving them the benefit of his personal recollections of the great events in which he has played so prominent a part.’ He was President of Ireland at the time and those consultations took place in the official residence in the Phoenix Park.
There was a further important fact recorded in the acknowledgements. De Valera interacted with the two authors in the writing of the text: ‘But he made it clear at a very early stage that, if they ever found a discrepancy between his memory of events and contemporary documents, it was the documents that must be trusted.’ But for a man who was thirty-three years old when the 1916 Rising took place, the next line in the acknowledgements is of great methodological significance: ‘The authors would like to record that such discrepancies were almost non-existent.’22There was an almost perfect match between de Valera’s personal memory and what was in the archives. The ‘almost non-existent’ phrase is not explained. Neither is there an explanation as to what the ‘almost non-existent’ might have been. Was it the case that the discrepancies between memory and documentation – no matter how marginal – were recorded in the footnotes?
Other sources reveal that Lord Longford, who had been an admirer of de Valera since the 1930s, was only brought into the writing of the biography late in the proceedings. O’Neill, with a considerable advance from Hutchinson, had been in a position to work on the research and writing for three years.23There was also a parallel process. De Valera’s biography was being written in Irish by O’Neill and Fr Pádraig Ó Fiannachta. The only two volumes to appear were published in 1968 and 1970.24Covering the period until 1937, and encompassing the Treaty negotiations and Civil War, it was designed to be a very detailed life of its subject. The tragedy was, however, that the much more detailed multi-volume biography in Irish never materialised. Read side-by-side with the relevant section in the single-volume English edition, the historian may speculate on what might have been. In the English edition, 344 pages, out of 474 in total, are devoted to the period of de Valera’s life up to 1939. Some 50 of those pages focus on the Civil War (pages 181–234) and are given the chapter titles: ‘The Drift to Disaster’ (January–June 1922), ‘The War of Brothers’ (July–October 1922), ‘The Emergency Government’ (October 1922–February 1923), ‘The Darkest Hour’ (March–May 1923) and ‘De Profundis’ (May 1923–July 1924). Both authors provide the reader in these pages with a minimalist interpretation of de Valera’s ability to influence events during the lead-up to the Civil War and during its progress. Rather than allow the documents in the de Valera archives to reveal the tortuous path to Civil War, the ‘authoritative biography’ seeks to defend his actions. His series of speeches in March 1922, referred to below, receive thirteen lines to describe their content. Longford and O’Neill continue:
These awful warnings were quickly seized upon by the Irish Independent and others, not as prophecies but as incitements. Mr de Valera described the paper’s editorial as villainous and went on: ‘You cannot be unaware that your representing me as inciting to civil war has on your readers precisely the same effect as if the inciting were really mine.’ For fear of future misrepresentations, however, he left aside this argument in later speeches.25
Evidence for this last critical line is not cited in the volume. It remains undocumented. Did the authors simply make that surmise based on their reading of the documents? It must also be asked whether that last line was added following discussion with de Valera while the book was being written? The answer to those questions would have a critical bearing as to how that particular sentence ought to be interpreted. This points to the great difficulty of using the Longford/O’Neill life in a classroom or as a source.
Both authors describe de Valera’s great dilemma in March 1922. They interpret his refusal to condemn the u
se of arms as an effort to preserve the fragile unity of the republican side. Both authors also argue that de Valera’s failure to denounce the leading militant anti-Treatyite Rory O’Connor’s repudiation of the authority of Dáil Éireann as being ‘for reasons alike of honour and prudence’. Longford and O’Neill continue:
He was, in fact, in a nightmarish position, with little influence on events in practice. On the one hand the pro-Treaty government authorities held the initiative. On the other, the republican section of the army, composing probably more than half the Volunteers, were taking independent action.
They argued that de Valera, apart from a few meetings with Liam Mellowes and Rory O’Connor, ‘had little relationship with republican members of the army and little information about them.’ The occupation of the Four Courts on 14 April came as a complete surprise to him: ‘He had no part whatever in this step. But he felt that the dispute was a matter for the Minister for Defence and any interference by him would be unwelcome to either party.’26None of those statements are footnoted and must have been the memories of an elderly de Valera.
Longford and O’Neill quote de Valera as writing towards the end of the Civil War to Ms Edith M. Ellis in London on 26 February 1923:
Alas! Our country has been placed in a cruel dilemma out of which she could be rescued only by gentleness, skill and patience, and on all sides a desire for justice and fair-dealing. Instead we find ourselves in the atmosphere of a tempest – every word of reason is suppressed or distorted until it is made to appear the voice of passion. I have been condemned to view the tragedy here for the last year as through a wall of glass, powerless to intervene effectively. I have, however, still the hope that an opportunity may come my way.27