by Dermot Keogh
Although the resultant reconciliation with extreme republicanism was incomplete – witness the amount of blood spilt in Ireland, north and south, in the following fifty years and especially in the past twenty-five years – it would be wrong to under-estimate the seminal importance of this process of establishing within the new state a national consensus – one that soon secured the acceptance by all but a tiny handful of irreconcilables of the legitimacy and authority of the institutions of the state.
It is to that achievement that we owe the preservation of peace within this state both during the last war, when the IRA lacked the support needed to create conditions of unrest that might have attracted German invasion, and again in the early 1970s when the cohesion of our political system was strong enough to resist the efforts of a handful of misguided politicians to embroil our state in the violence that engulfed Northern Ireland.
The fact that even today the extent of the potential dangers we faced on those two occasions remains largely unappreciated by public opinion is itself a tribute to the success of de Valera’s stabilisation policy. His unexpected decision to oppose the Treaty had severely destabilised the state at the moment of its foundation, greatly increasing the difficulty of mastering the inevitable resistance by extremists to a compromise settlement with Britain. But he spent an important part of his life putting together again – successfully – the Humpty-Dumpty he had helped to push off the wall in December 1921.
The accession to power of Fianna Fáil under de Valera in 1932, only nine years after the defeat of the republicans in the Civil War, was a seismic event for all those who were politically active at the time. It involved what appeared to apparent contemporaries to be a sharp discontinuity in public policy, and especially in the state’s relations with Britain – relations that immediately deteriorated into an Economic War centring on both constitutional and financial issues.
But in a historic perspective this discontinuity can be seen to be an illusion. The events between 1932 and 1937, when the new constitution was enacted, can now be seen to have been rather a continuation under a different leadership of the policy of seeking a separation of the new Irish state from Britain that Cumann na nGaedheal had been undertaking through successful diplomatic action. The difference lay in the fact that the new government was not committed to the terms of the 1921 Treaty and felt free to disregard some of its elements.
It was in this light, indeed, that the officials of the Department of External Affairs, as it was then, seem to have viewed the change of government, despite personal ties they had naturally formed with members of the Cumann na nGaedheal government that had appointed them and had built up the department.
Certainly within days of taking over the reins of government, de Valera’s initial suspicion of that department (which he chose to head himself in addition to leadership of the government) had dissolved, encouraged by what today reads as a cloyingly sycophantic letter from its permanent head, Joe Walshe. This suspicion was replaced by a conviction that the External Affairs officials saw their role as helping him to pursue the achievement of the nationalist aim beyond the limits that had been imposed on the former government by their moral obligation to honour the Treaty.
The extent to which members of that first government had felt that this sense of moral obligation tied their hands in moving outside the Treaty obligations cannot be over-estimated; nor should the extent to which this sense of moral obligation was felt by them as a burden inhibiting the realisation of an aspiration which they largely shared with their anti-Treaty opponents. But, unhappily, having achieved sovereign independence within the commonwealth through the Statute of Westminster, their judgement of de Valera’s effort to go further became seriously distorted. This reflected continuing bitterness at what they saw as his role in the initiation of the Civil War – a role, in their view, motivated by personal vanity and pique, rather than by principle.
The fact that complete continuity of public administration was provided after 1932 by the civil service, army and police that had served the Cumann na nGaedheal government during and since the Civil War was an achievement, the credit for which must be widely shared by: the public service itself, which thus established its political neutrality in the most difficult circumstances; the outgoing government which had consciously prepared the way for the change-over, including in particular W. T. Cosgrave and my own father whom he appointed as Minister of Defence with the task of taking tough steps to ensure that the army would be loyal to a future Fianna Fáil government; and, of course, by de Valera himself who effectively resisted great pressure to purge the army, the police, and the administration that he had inherited.
Apart from the removal of several police officers, he resisted this pressure – which paralleled very closely the pressures which the Cumann na nGaedheal government had faced from its supporters in 1923 (documented in minutes of party meetings), to purge its new administration of people who had served under the British government.
The constitution of 1937 came to provide the basis for a consensus on which the modern Irish state has been built. It represented an assertion of sovereignty in terms more acceptable to nationalists than those of the Statute of Westminster six years earlier. That statute had secured sovereign independence for the dominions, including the Irish state. In international law this independence clearly included the right to remain neutral in a conflict involving Great Britain. But many British politicians cherished the illusion that the member states of the commonwealth, while independent, must necessarily join with Britain in any major war in which she was engaged – relying in some cases upon the abstract concept of the indivisibility of the crown.
But for many Irish people, and particularly for de Valera himself, the right to remain neutral, and the assertion of that right, was the ultimate test of sovereignty and independence. A practical obstacle to the exercise of this right was the continued occupation and use of certain port facilities in the Irish state by British forces under the terms of the Treaty. In 1938, as part of the settlement that ended the Economic War, de Valera negotiated the return of these facilities and the departure of British forces, and despite discussion of a possible defence pact during these negotiations, eventually this was secured without any commitment to make these bases available again in time of war.
This obstacle to neutrality having been removed, de Valera, by that time disillusioned by the collapse of collective security under the League of Nations, first in the case of Manchuria and later in the case of Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia, declared Irish neutrality, and maintained formal neutrality throughout the war – while at the same time secretly working closely with the British authorities.
This policy commanded the full support of the political opposition, with a single outstanding exception. James Dillon, who in 1942 retired from the position of deputy leader of the principal opposition party, Fine Gael, and became an independent member of the Dáil on an issue which he saw as one between good and evil – but significantly only after the USA had joined the war.
While the assertion of sovereignty was the primary motivation of neutrality it would be wrong to suggest that it was the sole consideration for de Valera, or indeed that it played any part in the ready acceptance of this policy by his political opponents. Amongst all political parties there was, I believe, the further, powerful, albeit for obvious reasons unspoken, consideration that to have entered voluntarily into the conflict on the allied side within sixteen years of the end of a civil war would have created the danger of a revival of that bitter conflict. This perceived danger had been increased by the IRA’s immediate pre-war decision to ‘declare war’ on Britain and to set off bombs in British cities. As was very clear in Spain during the closing period of Franco’s rule, a people who have experienced a civil war will go to immense lengths to avoid a recurrence of it.
The significance of this factor in securing all party support for neutrality
, has, I believe, been under-estimated by historians because during the war it was never explicitly stated by any politician of any party – for obvious reasons. But it was, I believe, subsequently mentioned in retrospective interviews by two senior Fianna Fáil politicians, Seán Lemass and Seán McEntee, and I believe that explains my own father’s support for neutrality despite his deep commitment to the allied cause.
Of course de Valera also used another argument for neutrality; vis., that so long as Ireland remained politically divided, with part of the island under British sovereignty, the Irish state should not engage in hostilities as an ally of Britain. The employment of this argument, largely perhaps for tactical reasons at the time, laid the ground for a decision of a later Irish government, led by de Valera’s opponents, and in which Mr Seán McBride was Minister for External Affairs, not to join NATO in 1949 – a decision that subsequently hardened into a commitment to neutrality that has survived until the last decade of this century.
This commitment has since been strongly held by many who have forgotten the ‘partition’ factor that had been presented as the initial rationale of this policy, and who know nothing of the pragmatic basis for war-time neutrality – the fear of a renewal of civil war. There are indeed many today who would wish Irish neutrality to be maintained even if north and south were to be brought together politically.
What is more generally recognised by historians, however, is the extent to which the consensus on neutrality (as well as the entry to the army of many children of the leading members of both political parties) healed the divisions of the Civil War, uniting all in a common cause.
The Northern Ireland question
But, to return to de Valera’s concern to legitimise the Irish state in the eyes of republicans, there was a price to be paid for this, for it was inevitable that the single-mindedness with which de Valera felt it necessary to pursue this goal would impinge unfavourably on the attainment of certain other objectives.
First of all, by pressing ahead to remove the crown from the constitution – while avoiding at that stage declaring the state to be a Republic – and by the insertion in the new constitution of certain provisions designed to secure the assent of as many republicans as possible, and of other provisions designed to head off any potential opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, de Valera certainly made the resolution of the problem of Northern Ireland more difficult – to an extent greater than he himself perhaps recognised.
From the outset, the Northern Ireland entity had been based on shaky foundations. First of all, its boundaries were, of course, arbitrary – chosen to maximise the territory involved within the limits imposed by a concern to limit the Catholic, nationalist minority to one-third of the population.
And second, whatever may have been said publicly at that time there is, I believe, evidence that the most that many unionists then hoped to secure out of this arrangement, was a temporary postponement of the united Ireland that had been clearly envisaged as an outcome in the British act establishing a Northern Ireland parliament in 1920.
The survival of Northern Ireland for eighty years, and the determination of the majority of its unionist population today to resist unification, obscures the possibility that if the Irish state had evolved differently, the north-south relationship might also have turned out differently during this period. Even in 1937, when de Valera presented his new constitution to the people, the sense of the temporary character of the arrangement under which Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom was still an underlying feature of northern unionist opinion – despite the rhetoric of ‘no surrender’. This is, I believe, an under-researched element of the history of this island – partly, of course, because it is not documented, belonging as it does more to the minds rather than to the words and actions of those involved.
The constitution of 1937 helped to harden northern unionist attitudes in three respects.
First, the elimination of the crown from the constitution offended the monarchist sentiments of most northern unionists.
Second, they were upset at the inclusion in this constitution of provisions which had found no place in the 1922 constitution, which seemed to involve a claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland on behalf of the government and parliament elected in the truncated Irish state – albeit a claim that was accompanied by an abrogation in practice of this claim to sovereignty.
And third, the inclusion of a provision recognising ‘the special position of the Catholic, Apostolic and Holy Roman Church as the guardian of the faith of the great majority of the people’ (a provision which, however, also recognised a list of named Protestant Churches and the Jewish community, and which was eliminated from the constitution in 1972 by an overwhelming majority in a popular referendum), served to confirm northern unionist prejudices about the predominantly Roman Catholic character of the Irish state.
This, incidentally, found further confirmation in their eyes in another new provision banning legislation for the dissolution of marriage, for, while most Protestants in Ireland at that time did not personally favour divorce for religious reasons, they saw this constitutional provision as evidence of influence by the Catholic Church on the government of the Irish state.
Finally, the policy of neutrality in the Second World War, designed both to proclaim Irish sovereignty and to maintain the consensus painfully brought about over the preceding years on the legitimacy of the Irish state, had the effect of further alienating unionist opinion in Northern Ireland, and of greatly increasing British sympathy with the unionist position. This was a further inevitable but unintended consequence of the policy to which de Valera had in practice given priority since the immediate post-Civil War period – vis., the achievement of a more complete separation of the Irish state from Britain.
Thus, in pursuing the unspoken objective of establishing the Irish state on a solid domestic foundation that would command the loyalty of all but a handful of its people, de Valera had found it necessary to pursue a course that divided this state more deeply from Northern Ireland and made re-unification more difficult, more distant and more problematic.
This was paradoxical, because he himself frequently publicly proclaimed the re-unification of Ireland as one of the two major national aims – the other, and prior, aim being the revival of the Irish language. His real order of priorities was, however, disclosed in a speech in reply to a debate in the Senate on 7 February 1939. There, in his customary rather tortured style, he said:
Although freedom for a part of this island is not the freedom we want – the freedom we would like to have – this freedom for a portion of it, freedom to develop and to keep the kernel of the Irish nation, is something, and something that I would not sacrifice, if by sacrificing it we were to get a united Ireland and that united Ireland was not free to determine its own form of government, to determine its relations with other countries, and amongst other things, to determine for example, whether it would or would not be involved in war.
The relationship he saw between neutrality and sovereignty is there suggested, as well as the priority he always in practice accorded to the achievement and maintenance of sovereignty of the partitioned Irish state, as against political re-unification of the island.
In that same speech he even made it clear that re-unification came third and not even second in priority in his mind, for he emphasised that the object of restoring Irish as the spoken language of the majority of the people also took priority over re-unification:
For instance, speaking for myself – I am not talking about government policy in the matter, which has been largely embodied in the constitution – I would not tomorrow, for the sake of a united Ireland, give up the policy of trying to make this a really Irish Ireland – not by any means. If I were told tomorrow: ‘You can have a united Ireland if you give up your idea of restoring the national language to be the spoken language of the majority of the people’, I w
ould for myself, say no. I do not know how many would agree with me. I would say no, and I would say it for this reason: that I believe that as long as the language remains, you have a distinguishing characteristic of nationality which will enable the nation to persist. If you lose the language, the danger is that there would be absorption.
On the issue of partition itself, as distinct from the priority that he accorded to it, it is evident from the many oscillations in the position he took up in relation to Northern Ireland that de Valera himself shared to a high degree the ambivalence and confusion of thought about the nature of Irish nationhood which has been a feature of Irish nationalism throughout the present century.
Even in the brief period between 1917 and 1921 his ideas on this subject seem to have gone through several phases. As John Bowman has pointed out in de Valera and the Ulster Question, in 1917–1918 he advocated the expulsion or coercion of northern unionists. In 1919–1920, when in the United States, he modified this position to one of proposing that such unionists should be assimilated into the new Irish-Ireland. And in 1921, when the issue had to be faced in a practical way in preparing for the Treaty negotiations, he shifted his position to one of accommodating the unionists within a federal Ireland, externally associated with the British Commonwealth. Indeed at that time he even went so far as to propose that individual Ulster counties should have the right to opt out of the new Irish state.
There were further changes of approach later, through which it is not easy to detect any consistent pattern. However, it is possible that the view to which he ultimately came – and one which is in fact strikingly relevant to the problem as it is now seen by many people in both parts of Ireland after two decades of continuous violence – was expressed in a speech made towards the end of his first sixteen-year term of office as head of the Irish government. On 24 June 1947 he rejected as so often before the use of force as a solution: