In 2011, I was asked by a local history society to deliver a lecture under the title, “Is de Valera turning in his grave?” I found it intriguing that amid the economic, social and political turmoil Ireland was enduring because of the collapse of the Celtic Tiger, Éamon de Valera (“Dev”) was being resurrected as a touchstone.
The lecture title captured the despair and dislocation apparent in 2011; it was also the year that Fianna Fáil (FF) – the party Dev established in 1926 and which promised, in his words, to promote “a programme for the common good, not a class programme” – seemed to be collapsing.
In the 2011 general election it lost more than half its previous vote and almost three-quarters of its seats. It obtained just 17.45 per cent of first-preference votes and 20 seats, while Fine Gael (FG) surged to 36.1 per cent and 76 seats, and the Labour Party pushed FF into third place, receiving 19.45 per cent of first preferences and 37 seats. At the previous general election, in 2007, FF received 41.56 per cent of first-preference votes and 78 seats.
The 2011 result was especially humiliating for a FF that had always prided itself on being a national movement rather than just a political party. Historically, it has been one of the most successful political parties in the world, securing an average first-preference vote of 44 per cent in the general elections from 1927-2007.
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At its helm as leader from 1926 until 1959 was the indomitable Dev, who died 50 years ago this week in August 1975. My generation, reaching adulthood in the 1980s, had little reason to see Dev as an inspirational figure, associating him with economic stagnation, civil war and a Catholic state for a Catholic people; the suffocations, as we saw it, we wished to escape from.
But I was well aware that many of my grandparents’ generation had revered him, immensely proud of a man, the sole surviving commandant of the 1916 Rising, they saw as encapsulating Irish independence; the architect of Irish neutrality who refused to bend to Churchillian bullying and a leader who commanded international respect.
David Gray, the US diplomat in Dublin in 1940, who detested Dev, told US president Franklin D Roosevelt that Dev “is probably the most adroit politician in Europe and he honestly believes that all he does is good for the country. He has the qualities of martyr, fanatic and Machiavelli. No one can outwit him, frighten him or brandish him.”
Yet it was also true that a lot of my grandparents’ generation despised him, critical of his refusal to attend the London negotiations that led to the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921 and holding him personally culpable for the Civil War. That Michael Collins attended the negotiations, signed the Treaty and was subsequently shot dead in the Civil War compounded the resentment. That Dev/Collins divide was often the prism through which loyalties were measured and vocalised.
[ The drama behind the Anglo-Irish TreatyOpens in new window ]
Dev not only survived the calamities of 1922 and 1923 but built a broad base of support for his post-Civil War party. From the very earliest days of its existence FF masterminded the securing of locally built allegiance; within a year of its establishment more than 1,000 cumainn (branches) were in existence. FF diehards came to see the Irish political world as revolving around their party; their preferred description was “the party of the nation” and it insisted there was no need for the Labour Party because it was the real Labour Party. Dev even invoked the rhetoric of James Connolly.
The party maintained it was the duty of the state to provide work, and it went about creating new layers of support in addition to its rural, small farmer base, by pushing eastward into urban areas and gaining the support of the industrial bourgeoisie and the urban working class.
Land redistribution, house building and welfare payments cemented its appeal. The slogan “Up Dev” galvanised enough from the early 1930s to keep him and his party dominant, and he was still in public life 40 years later, his second term as president finishing in 1973.
But as with all political iconoclasts, his reputation and standing were diluted over time; more than that, the knives came out. The poet Paul Durcan gave marvellous expression to the new irreverence in 1978 in one of his best-known poems: Making Love Outside Áras an Uachtaráin:
“Often I wondered what de Valera would have thought
Inside in his Ivory Tower;
If he knew that we were in his green, green grass,
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin
I see him now in the heat-haze of the day
Blindly stalking us down;
And, levelling an ancient rifle, he says “Stop
Making love outside Áras an Uachtaráin”
[ Paul Durcan: ‘Poetry was a gift that he loved to give others’Opens in new window ]
Or consider the assessment of the novelist John Banville, writing about 1950s Ireland and living under “A demilitarised totalitarian state in which the lives of the citizens were to be controlled not by a system of coercive force and secret policing, but by a kind of applied spiritual paralysis maintained by an unofficial federation between the Catholic clergy, the Judiciary and the Civil Service.
Essential to this enterprise in social engineering was the policy of intellectual isolationalism that de Valera imposed on the country ... as far as the de Valeran state is concerned, there are no adults”.
The more I studied modern Irish history, the more apparent it became that using the description “De Valera’s Ireland” as a shorthand for all that went wrong was too reductive and partial. Why had Dev mobilised so many to his cause? What was possible and feasible in the few decades after the creation of the Free State? Was there a danger in reading history backwards to the point where we thought in terms of what Dev did to us instead of what he did for us?
Some of his political opponents were mindful of the dangers of their own preferences or prejudices skewing balanced assessments. After Dev died, economist Alexis Fitzgerald, as someone who “was born in the tradition which always voted against Dev” paid him tribute. Any portrait of Dev, he suggested “involves regard for the Irish political achievement since self-government. It has been real and substantial. It has been the achievement of politicians ...[and] the legitimation of Irish democratic institutions”.
While praising Dev’s dignity and courtesy, the methods by which he practised his political craft, and his prudence and fortitude, Fitzgerald acknowledged there were defects but that such failings “will not eliminate his greatness for there will still remain a substantial net asset worth”.
What were the defects? He was often infuriatingly arrogant and pedantic and in 1922 allowed his ego to triumph more than his political responsibilities. He told his biographer Frank Pakenham in 1963 “the reasons for the decision that I should not go to London [in 1921] were overwhelming, and that it was the signing of the Articles of Agreement without reference to the Cabinet in Dublin that alone threw everything out of joint”.
As historian Ronan Fanning put it, he had been “swaddled in the comfort blanket of four years of deference and obedience” and spoke to political colleagues “in a manner reminiscent of a schoolmaster talking to a class of dim pupils”.
He had little grasp of economics and his assertion about emigration in the Dáil in 1934 – “no longer shall our children, like our cattle, be brought up for export” – was made a mockery of by the 1950s. The “Ireland we dreamed of”, he famously said in 1943, looking back on 50 years of the Gaelic League, would be the home of a people “who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit”.
He may have been voicing a noble aspiration towards a contented rural idyll, but they were also the words of someone whose vocabulary was, as historian Joe Lee suggested, “that of one of the last of the great Victorians”.
Dev and his peers also facilitated too many of the power networks that did great damage to people, especially women and children; too many of what should have been the State’s obligations were abrogated to entrenched vested interests, sustaining a culture of abuse and institutionalisation. In 1936, Lucy Kingston, honorary secretary of the National Council of Women of Ireland, reminded Dev that his vision for the women of Ireland was “not in keeping with the spirit of the Republican Proclamation of 1916”.
And what of his positive traits? Initially an admirer, Cork writer Seán O’Faoláin became hostile to him, but still wrote in 1939 that “nobody will deny that one of his greatest qualities – and it contributes greatly to his influence – is dignity”. The importance of that should not be underestimated.
His greatest achievement in the 1930s was to maximise Irish sovereignty through skilled diplomacy, dismantling the Anglo-Irish Treaty, removing the British crown from Irish affairs and moulding a Constitution that in 1937 made southern Ireland a republic in all but name. It dispersed power across independent institutions and was a significant human rights document. He crushed the IRA, faced down the fascist Blueshirts, and rejected the demand that he constitutionally enshrine Catholicism as the state religion or the “one true Church”.
In an address to the 16th assembly of the League of Nations in 1935 he insisted the league could not “permit the sovereignty of even the weakest state among us to be unjustly taken away”. In keeping Ireland out of the second World War, he sought to prove that the real test of Irish sovereignty was the capacity to implement an independent foreign policy. But it was also revealing that he did not incorporate neutrality into the Irish Constitution; a recognition that his foreign policy could not be pursued by ignoring the interests of Ireland’s stronger neighbour.
The dominance of the Catholic Church associated with de Valera’s era has been diluted, but its patronage and control, especially of education, endures
He was not as absolutist as his critics sometimes portrayed him. Neutrality was pragmatically selective behind the scenes and about self-interest but was carefully and firmly projected by Dev in public. As noted during the war by novelist Elizabeth Bowen, “It may be felt in England that Éire is making a fetish of her neutrality. But this assertion of her neutrality is Éire’s first free self-assertion: as such alone it would mean a great deal to her. Éire (and I think rightly) sees her neutrality as positive, not merely negative”
Dev had a cause – winning and protecting sovereignty- and this generated respect and support as well as resentment. One of the reasons for that lecture title in 2011 was the absence in contemporary politics of a cause or a vision; of some sense of where we were going.
This did not mean Dev’s fixity of purpose was radical. Collectively, his statements and speeches are testament to the degree to which, in the words of Maurice Moynihan, his principal private secretary, “he came to embody continuity and stability when the rest of the world was in turmoil.”. He was careful about language, aims and limits, but had a sense of nationhood, an astute sense of timing and an ability to communicate his political ideas effectively.
Nonetheless, he stayed too long as leader. Surrounded by impressive political peers and civil servants, he dominated them to an unhealthy degree. He did not fulfil his aim of making Ireland an Irish-speaking island despite his assertion “there is no use in talking of Irish nationality if you talk of it in terms of the English language”
He also, like many of his contemporaries, exhibited a lack of emotional intelligence when it came to the Border and settled on rhetorically beating the anti-partition drum by focusing exclusively on British culpability. He declared in the Dáil in 1935 in relation to ending partition, “we have no plan” that could “inevitably bring about the union of this country”. This remained the case.
The skill and confidence he brought to the quest for sovereignty for southern Ireland however, embodied a dignity and resoluteness that deservedly secured for him an elevated place in the history of Irish nationalism.
The legacy of de Valera is by no means irrelevant today. The political party he founded has regained its status as the largest vote getter in the Republic, albeit at a level of first preference votes (21.8 per cent in the general election of 2024) far removed from its halcyon days, and with a share of the vote requiring participation in coalition government to make its leader Taoiseach. De Valera was critical of coalitions, maintaining in 1957 that they led to weak governments with “rickety foundations” and that “when coalitions are formed behind people’s backs after the election is over, all the policies and promises made by the individual parties are thereby thrown overboard”. But in time, his party adapted to a more fractured political landscape to ensure its continuing relevance and role in government.
The foreign policy de Valera championed also continues to resonate; indeed, in recent years, debate about neutrality and how to define it has intensified, generating impassioned disagreements about a common European foreign policy and the deployment of Irish army soldiers abroad. Two thirds of Irish voters today support maintaining the current model of neutrality.
The dominance of the Catholic Church associated with de Valera’s era has been diluted, but its patronage and control, especially of education, endures. So too does the 1937 constitution. In the Dáil in 1937, de Valera maintained, relating to the status of women, “we state here that mothers in their homes give to the State a support which is essential. Is there anybody who denies it? Is it not a tribute to the work that is done by women in the homes by mothers?”
There are many today who hold that view, and do not see themselves as antediluvian, as revealed in the result of the constitutional referendums on family and care in March 2024, when voters rejected the proposed deletion of wording regarding women in Article 41.2.1. The passage of time inevitably exposed weaknesses and ambiguities in the Constitution, but its robustness and adaptability, and the sophisticated legal thinking of its drafters, have also been apparent.
Diarmaid Ferriter is professor of modern Irish history at UCD
