De Valera recast by history as dictator, conference told

Historians here have distorted the historical record for the past 30 years by propagating the State's "reinterpretation" of its foundation which involved Eamon de Valera being painted as "a dictator" and Michael Collins as a constitutionalist protecting democracy, a leading Scottish historian has argued.

This reinterpretation was propagated "not because it was good history but because it was politically expedient to do so", said Dr John Regan of the University of Dundee.

The imposition of a democratic narrative on the formation of the State demanded the generation of a historiography venerating the State and sometimes indulging in the rhetoric of achievement "without fully bringing to bear rigorous historical faculties". The modernisation of Irish history had faltered after 1970.

Addressing a conference at University College, Dublin, marking the 30th anniversary of the death of Eamon de Valera, Dr Regan said the degree of consensus on approach and interpretation which exists here on some of the most contentious of historical issues was "both striking and alarming".

He said the problem with Eamon de Valera was that, until his death, he personified, if not the "republic" of Easter 1916 then at least the aspiration to its fulfilment.

He said de Valera had traded on that view for most of his life and had skilfully employed the rhetoric of eventual unification despite being a southern Irish nationalist who accepted the political reality of the Border.

However, the metaphor of de Valera as the republic had proved most enduring and his reputation had only begun to decline in the public imagination when that metaphor no longer met the needs of national identity here.

He believed it was the onset of violence in the North in 1969 that began to challenge the illusory nature of post-independence nationalism in the South.

Dr Regan said the parameters of the Northern conflict - defined by the mid-1970s on the issue of militant republicanism's lack of a political mandate and the State's defence of democracy - were projected on to the southern civil war and southern state formation of the 1920s. Collins became a constitutionalist protecting democrats, and de Valera a dictator.