De Valera's Irelands

by Dermot Keogh

  I believe that it [partition] cannot be solved, in any circumstances that we can now see, by force, and that if it were solved by force, it would leave a situation behind it which would mean that this state would be in an un­stable position.

  And he went on to observe that the problem was one primarily between north and south, and that Britain was not the ultimate obstacle to a solu­tion – something now very generally understood in Ireland, although still not grasped by some Irish-Americans in the United States:

  In order to end this [partition] you will have to get concurrence of wills be­tween three parties – we here who represent the people of this part of Ire­land, those who represent the majority in the separated part of Ireland, and the will of those who are the majority for the time being in the British parlia­ment. It is true, I think, that if there were agreement between the peoples of the two parts of Ireland, British consent to do the things that they would have to do could be secured.

  At one period Britain’s emotional and strategic commitment to Northern Ireland was, of course, a major additional obstacle to a united Ireland, but with the diminution in importance of this factor, the result has been to reveal in all its stark reality that, as de Valera implicitly recognised in that 1947 speech, the fundamental obstacle to the political unity of Ire­land is the attitude of the unionist population. And this is a problem that the irredentist policies pursued by de Valera long after he made that speech in 1947 – policies that from 1949 until at least 1969 came to be pursued also by other parties in the Irish state in the period up to 1969 – served to intensify, rather than to moderate.

  A pluralist or a mono-cultural state?

  From the outset, the new state had a clear choice between two ap­proaches to the definition of its identity. The state could have founded it­self on the tradition of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1798 and 1848 who, influenced by the French and American revolutions, had proclaimed that the national objective must be to unite Catholic, Protestant and Diss­enter in the common name of Irishman. This would have entailed adopt­ing an overtly pluralist approach, both in religious and in cultural matt­ers, plac­ing the different religions on a genuinely equal footing, and rec­ognising the Irish and English languages as equally valid alternative means of ex­pressing the Irish identity.

  However, the path actually chosen by the new state in these matters was a very different one. In relation to the language, a clear policy had already begun to emerge during the period of office of Cumann na nGae­dheal, at a time when de Valera was still in unconstitutional opp­osition. The language policy then adopted was determined by the sense of in­debtedness felt by the leaders of the national political movement that had begun in the late nineteenth century, towards the language move­ment in which so many of them had found their inspiration – and had in many cases (including that of my own parents) found each other.

  The pursuit of the objective of Irish language revival had led, even before the First World War, to the introduction of an Irish language re­quirement for entry to the colleges of the new National University of Ire­land, to which the Catholic majority in the greater part of the island al­most exclusively went, in search of university education until the 1960s. This had a profound influence on the teaching of the language at secon­dary level. But in the early days of the new state, W. T. Cosgrave’s Cum­ann na nGaedheal government decided to make the Irish language a basic, required subject at primary level and to make it also a required sub­­ject in the national intermediate-level school certificate examinations taken at age 15-16.

  De Valera, when he came to power, went on to make the Irish lan­guage an essential element in the school Leaving Certificate itself, taken at age 17-18, which was the qualification traditionally used by most em­ployers as the educational test especially for clerical employment. More­over, as mentioned earlier, in his speeches de Valera elevated the revival of the Irish language to the status of the first national aim, taking prece­dence even over national re-unification.

  By thus making Irish an essential requirement for so many pur­poses, and by requiring a knowledge of Irish for entry to and promotion within the public service, in the hope of reviving a language which had been moving towards extinction for several centuries before the state was founded, successive governments were effectively making a choice against a culturally pluralist society. For this process involved a de facto – though unintended – discrimination against people of the Protestant tradition, north or south, whose culture had effectively always been ex­clusively English-speaking. And this was of course also true of other sub-cultures that had developed amongst those who maintained their adherence to Roman Catholicism but who in the cities and towns and throughout most of the province of Leinster and parts of other provinces had been English-speaking for several centuries.

  By the 1950s the removal of this Irish language requirement for the purposes of school examination certificates and entry and promotion within the public service had started to become a political issue, provok­ing controversy, but during the long continuous period in office of the Fianna Fáil party from 1957 to 1973 no change was made. De Valera’s successors as Taoiseach after his elevation to the constitutional presidency in 1959, Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch, were unwilling to tackle this prob­lem, during his lifetime at least. It was left to the National Coalition gov­ernment of 1973–1977, led by Liam Cosgrave, the son of W. T. Cos­grave, whose government had initiated this policy in all good faith in the 1920s, to make the changes that eliminated discrimination in examina­tion and public employment against Irish people whose cult­ural tradi­tion is not Gaelic, although the Irish language remains one of the three core subjects in all primary schools and is still taught through­out the sec­ond-level cycle to all pupils. It also remains a requirement for matricu­lation to the four NUI universities.

  Religious pluralism is a somewhat different issue. Just as he intensi­fied the divisive impact of the language policy formulated by his pre­decessors, so also did de Valera’s religious policy drive a second wedge between north and south. The 1922 constitution had at least proclaimed a form of separation between Church and State, forbidding the endow­ment of religion by the state, although this did not, however, inhibit state support for an educational system that had always divided along reli­gious lines – at all levels including the state’s own primary school sys­tem. Nor did it prevent some of the state’s leaders from addressing the Holy See in terms of what was described as ‘filial piety’.

  But de Valera had an additional concern over and above that of his predecessors. He had to dispel lingering suspicions amongst the Catho­lic Church authorities about his party – suspicions that derived from pro­nouncements by the Catholic hierarchy of the early 1920s against those who had opposed the Treaty in arms during the Civil War. And he also had reason to fear that triumphalist attitudes prevalent in the Catho­lic Church in the 1930s might lead the institutional Church to oppose his new constitution unless he gave some kind of formal recognition to that Church.

  This led him to include in that constitution the provisions already referred to in relation to the specific position of the Catholic Church as the guardian of the faith of the great majority of the people, as well as a con­stitutional ban on legislation for divorce and other provisions in rela­tion to education and private property, to all of which he then added non-judiciable provisions on social policy which derived directly from Catholic social teaching of that period.

  All these must, of course, be seen in the context of a situation where he was under considerable pressure from Rome to declare Ireland a Ca­tho­lic state (a constitutional proposal which de Valera firmly resisted) al­though oddly enough, in speeches he often, in referring to the state, used this phrase loosely himself.

  It must be said that these constitutional provisions were not objected to by the Protestant Churches at the time they were enacted, and that de Valera, a fervent Catholic like his predecessor, W. T. Cosgrave, subse­quently gained t
he respect of the leaders of the Protestant community in the Irish state and also at various stages in his career showed a measure of independence vis-à-vis the Catholic Church authorities.

  Although he can be criticised in the light of hindsight for not having sustained religious pluralism in its fullest sense, like most of his sup­porters, and also his opponents, he was inevitably influenced in this by the climate of opinion of his time.

  Economic development

  De Valera’s autarkic economic policies also proved divisive vis-à-vis North­ern Ireland, for they involved imposing restrictions on imports from that part of the island.

  In fairness, it must be said that almost none of those who emerged from the struggle for independence and survived the Civil War on either side had any deep interest in or understanding of economic or social questions – de Valera himself certainly did not have such an interest. Nevertheless, when he came to power in 1932, the cabinet that he led initiated significant economic changes that profoundly influenced the future economic development of the Irish state.

  There are several ironies here. First, the policy of industrial protec­tion which he implemented in the autarkic climate of the early 1930s had in fact been proclaimed as a nationalist dogma by Arthur Griffith, the leader of the pro-Treaty government who died during the Civil War. But Griffith’s successors in the Cumann na nGaedheal government from 1922 to 1932 had not felt able to pursue a policy that would have been in such sharp conflict with the free trade spirit of the 1920s. Such a policy might, they feared, have provoked from other states retaliatory measures which could have been very damaging to a small, and export-dependent, economy.

  In hesitating to initiate such a radical policy, so out of tune with the temper of the 1920s, that government had also been influenced by a more general consideration, vis. its concern with the establishment of the new state’s credibility and credit vis-à-vis the outside world, a consideration to which it attached an over-riding importance.

  Although de Valera almost certainly did not realise the impact a pro­tectionist policy was going to have on Irish politics, the fact is that, by im­plementing in the quite different conditions of the 1930s the protect­ionist policy of Griffith, he laid the foundations of two new classes – protected industrialists and industrial workers – whose consequent support for Fianna Fáil across the class barrier supplemented the supp­ort of most small farmers which it had held from the outset. From this combination of sectoral groups that party thereafter derived its remark­able strength, both financial and electoral, which enabled it to secure between 44% and 51% of the popular vote at a score of general elections during the first sixty years of its existence.

  De Valera envisaged protection as a means of making Ireland more self-sufficient and less dependent on trade and on exchanges with an outside world, which he regarded as ultimately dangerous to the Irish sense of identity. Yet ironically, the consequences of his protection policy were in fact to reduce Ireland’s self-sufficiency sharply as materials for industrial processing flowed in and as the new class of industrial work­ers spent much of their wages on imported goods. By the time protection was firmly in place, around 1950, the share of external trade in Ireland’s economy had consequently risen by almost a third, leaving the state much less self-sufficient than when de Valera had come to power!

  However, the protection policy secured the establishment of many small and generally unspecialised industries. Their efficiency was rel­a­tively low because of the very high level of protection afforded to them, but they eventually provided an industrial base that was capable of being converted – albeit painfully and at great cost – to a structure over half of which survived the freeing of trade with Britain after 1965, and with other EC countries after 1973.

  But, despite such moves as the establishment by the anti-Fianna Fáil Inter-Party Government in 1949 of the Industrial Development Authori­ty (which then had a little-exercised tariff review function), this process of re-orientation of industry towards export markets was delayed long after the time it should have been undertaken in the early 1950s. This delay, for which de Valera’s continued leadership of Fianna Fáil beyond the age of 70 was almost certainly largely responsible, contributed sub­stantially to the economic stagnation of the Irish state during the 1950s, when in most other countries national output was expanding rapidly.

  If de Valera had contested the constitutional presidency in 1952, his elevation to that position might have left the way clear for his eventual energetic successor, Seán Lemass, to tackle this problem when Fianna Fáil were in office at that time. In the event action was delayed until Octo­ber 1956, when a subsequent coalition government started to chall­enge the traditional economic policies of protection and hostility to foreign in­vestment, a policy reversal that was then vigorously expanded and de­ve­loped by Seán Lemass, when he became Taoiseach following de Valera’s eventual election as President at the age of almost seventy-seven.

  Social objectives

  De Valera was a natural conservative; he venerated the past and wished to keep ‘the old ways’. Frugal in his own way of life, like many of his generation who had entered politics through an idealistic national move­ment, he was unambiguously anti-materialist. In his conservatism he did not differ much from most of his political opponents. They had all become engaged before or during the First World War in a nationalist movement that, despite James Connolly’s participation in the 1916 Ris­ing, had for the most part little about it that was revolutionary.

  De Valera’s social philosophy was expressed in a St Patrick’s Day broadcast during the Second World War, which has often been made the subject of humorous comment, and the language of which certainly re­sounds strangely in our ears, but which should be seen as the simple but sincere aspiration of a romantic conservative, talking in the kind of terms that may have been common enough during his childhood a century ago.

  However, in the mid-twentieth century, and in the course of the most destructive war in history, these aspirations were so far removed from any reality that they served only to highlight the difficulty of posing any realistic alternative to the growth of materialism in an in­creasingly ur­banised society.

  In this respect, de Valera outlived his own era, and became irrele­vant as an ideologue for the new generations that were growing up in the middle decades of this century. Ireland was moving on beyond him, to become an industrialised society with increasingly materialist values.

  Conclusion

  De Valera’s most enduring achievement lies, I believe, in the manner in which he made the assertion of sovereignty not merely an end in itself but also the means of securing assent by the vast bulk of those who with him had challenged that legitimacy in arms in the Civil War to the legiti­macy of the state established by his predecessor W. T. Cosgrave.

  However, he does not seem himself to have articulated this objective clearly. Perhaps he recognised that he could not do so without endanger­ing its achievement and that it could best be secured by subtleties and stealth. Nevertheless he dedicated an important part of his political ca­reer to it.

  The dissonances of party politics have perhaps hidden from sup­porters of both of the political traditions of the Irish state the extent to which its first two governments, and their leaders, Cosgrave and de Va­lera, were successively responsible in different ways for establishing that state on a rock-like and enduring foundation.

  The two aims to which de Valera himself gave priority in his utter­ance were, of course, quite different: the revival of the Irish language and the re-unification of Ireland. But he – and others – failed to stop the long-term decline of the Irish language as a natural means of communication, and he may even have contributed to some degree to the rate of this de­cline by endorsing and extending increasingly unpopular meas­ures taken by his predecessors in office to make the language an essential element in the educational system and in public employment.

  At the same time the methods he found it n
ecessary to employ in or­der to secure his objectives of sovereignty and legitimisation of the state in the eyes of all but a dissident handful of its citizens helped to under­mine seriously, perhaps fatally, the prospect of making progress with the second national aim, of political re-unification.

  And his intensification of the language revival policy, together with the concessions he felt it necessary to make to the institutional Catholic Church when drafting his constitution, raised formidable additional ob­stacles to Irish re-unification – to which, on his own admission, he never gave a high priority.

  The price we have had to pay for de Valera’s successful post-Civil War stabilisation of our state has thus been substantial, and enduring.

  In the economic sphere he sought self-sufficiency through indust­rialisation, but achieved industrialisation with a reduction in self-suffi­ciency. In the social sphere his influence was extremely limited because his conservatism – to which in the materialist society of Ireland today a small minority still look back with nostalgia – was too much a product of the nineteenth century to make an effective impact on the Ireland of the mid-twentieth century.

  However, in the world outside Ireland, he added to his country’s stature. A controversial figure at home, and for much of the time in his relations with Britain, he became known world-wide as an apostle of nationalism, but he was also an exponent in the 1930s of other values, such as the concept of collective security, which he sought, in vain, to have established through the League of Nations.

  Many facets of his character and career will for long remain enigmas to historians, for he was an enigmatic man. Deeply concerned about the historical judgments that would be made on him, he sought to influence these consciously both through an ‘authorised biography’ and by calling together a group of historians to hear his answers to prepared questions on his career. Even today judgments on him are bound to be no more than provisional, both because we are too close to the man himself – barely two decades after his death – and because much research remains to be undertaken, and many veils remain to be removed, before the achievements and failures of this remarkable Irishman can be evaluated in a definitive way.