Madam, - In Éamon Ó Cuív's letter of April 26th, in response to an article of March 29th by Steven Collins, he states that Fianna Fáil did not take an oath in order to enter the Dáil, but "simply signed a book in which the words of the oath were written".
From reading this letter, you would be forgiven for thinking that de Valera, by signing, had deviated only slightly from his previously held position. However, F.S.L. Lyons in his weighty tome Ireland Since The Famine writes that at this period de Valera could lay claim to being the "constitutional Houdini" of his generation. De Valera himself, despite all his guff about an "empty formula" admits: "What we did was contrary to all our former actions...our disclosed policy".
So Mr Ó Cuív may be correct in the arid legalistic sense of the word when he says that Fianna Fáil did not swear an oath, but in doing so he is engaging in the kind of sophistry beloved of his grandfather, when in practice and in terms of its outcome, what FF did in signing amounted to the same thing.
Mr Ó Cuív, with his formula of words, undermines and underplays the historical significance of what took place on that momentous morning of August 11th, 1927, more so in view of the part the words of the oath played in the "split" on the Treaty that hurled us headlong into that calamitous conflict that was the civil war.
Mr Ó Cuív asked that you print his letter in the interests of "historical accuracy". I beg your indulgence in the interests of probity and historical illumination. - Yours, etc,
JIM O'CONNELL, The Paddock, Blackhorse Avenue, Dublin 7.