by Dermot Keogh
One could indeed argue that one of the reasons for the extraordinary tolerance which the activities of Charles Haughey and others received within Fianna Fáil was a long-term effect of the conflict. The party’s internal solidarity was taken advantage of, and its internal discipline metamorphosed, for some, into a mechanism of intimidation and the enforcement of conformity. The party’s most central strength was used against it by its own leaders.
Social culture and social control
A consequence of the conflict, it could be argued, was an effort to intensify Victorian aspects of Irish social culture. In particular, women, partially mobilised by the suffragette and nationalist movements, found themselves thoroughly subordinated by the events of 1922–23. The allegedly extravagant and extremist behaviour of many women leaders was used as an excuse to discourage the participation of women in political life after 1923. Although many women were politically effective in trade unions and professional associations, by and large Irish politics remained very much a man’s world until the 1970s. Similarly, young boys and men were subjected to a neo-Victorian discipline of Spartan proportions in the schools of the Christian Brothers and similar orders in the decades after the Treaty. The genies of adolescent sex and violence had been let out of the bottle in 1919–23. The stopper was firmly put back again afterward, not to be taken out again until the 1960s.
The conflict also probably strengthened the power of the Catholic Church, at least temporarily. The Church had supported the Treaty, but rather conveniently many individual clerics had been vehemently anti-Treaty. The Church came to be seen as the only organisation capable of taming the animal instincts of Irish people. Film and book censorship, laws against dancing and policies designed to segregate the sexes were vigorously pursued by Church and State. The puritanism and repression of Irish society may have been aggravated by the aftermath of the conflict.
A less quantifiable cultural consequence was the death of idealism. The Irish state was founded in a wave of genuine idealism and enthusiasm that survived the Black and Tans and the British campaign. It did not survive undamaged the devastating psychological impact of the Civil War. Enthusiasm for the Irish language dried up and the task of reviving the old language was put on to the children. Many old revolutionaries later wondered privately whether the whole business had been really worth it. These questioners included such diverse people as James Dillon, David Neligan and Eamon de Valera. The perceived failure of revolutionary enthusiasm made many sceptical of all political action, and impelled many to enter the religious life in part, perhaps, seeking the fulfilments of the next world in reaction from the disappointments of this one. Others emigrated, some being effectively pushed out of the country because of their non-conformist political or religious views.
The structure of public policy
The split and the Civil War also strengthened the hand of the public service, central to Irish politics since at least the 1870s and now to be more central still. William Cosgrave leaned heavily on the wisdom of civil servants after 1922, and it is striking how quickly de Valera was to evolve a similar relationship with them in the 1930s. The systematic subordination of police and army to the central civil service, which still exists, is a direct legacy of the state-building process that was rushed through in 1922–23. Civil service ‘conservatism’ has been blamed for many policy failures since independence, but it could be argued that civil service prudence also prevented some wilder experiments dear to the hearts of old revolutionaries. The present-day Irish Republic is, perhaps, the most centralised of the older western democracies; this is in part a result of the British colonial inheritance, but is also a consequence of the Civil War; local government in particular was seriously weakened by the conflict, as central government came to see local councils as rivals for political authority rather than allies in government.
A little-commented-on effect of the conflict was the delivery of the main universities into the hands of the pro-Treatyites. Fine Gael had, for a long time, a preponderance of power inside UCD and the other NUI colleges. This had the unfortunate effect of alienating the natural governing party, Fianna Fáil, from much of what existed of academic intelligence in the new country. What price, if any, was paid for this divorce between dons and politicians is hard to say. I would guess that Irish anti-intellectualism and public philistinism, always likely to be strong in the early decades of independence, was mightily strengthened by the conflict. A certain anti-rationalism of style, always noticeable in Irish public policy, may have been aggravated.
Conclusion
The Irish Civil War had a profound effect on Irish political development, in ways that have been so pervasive and deep as to be taken for granted by we Irish who grew up in the world created by that war. North-south relations, relations with Britain and the commonwealth, attitudes toward veterans of the Great War, Church-State relations and the entire fabric and quality of public life were affected by the conflict to an enormous extent. While a superficial recovery occurred between 1932 and 1945 under de Valera, it was in many ways a hollow thing, a pretence that the events of 1922–23 had not really happened. A crippling of Irish public political culture occurred which necessitated an exaggerated reliance on Church and central State structures for the supply of political and cultural coherence. The historical dependence on the overarching structures of the Church, the State, the Fianna Fáil party and the GAA only began to fade in the 1960s, as a general social pluralism began to melt the sociological glaciers generated by the Great Freeze of the post Civil War period. This historical crippling is one which, I believe, we are still trying to overcome.
1 Garvin, Tom, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1996, pp. 27–62.
2 Garvin, Tom, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1987, pp. 139–66.
3 Pyne, Peter, ‘The Third Sinn Féin Party, 1923–26,’ Economic and Social Review, vol. 1, 1969– 70, pp. 29–50, 229–57.
4 Garvin, Tom, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, pp. 139–66.
5 The standard works are Hopkinson, Michael, Green against Green, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1988; Litton, Helen, The Irish Civil War, Wolfhound, Dublin, 1995.
6 Garvin, Tom, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy, pp. 119–20.
7 ibid., p. 183 and passim.
8 Mansergh, Nicholas, The Unresolved Question, Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 1991.
9 Litton, Helen, The Irish Civil War, p. 132.
10 ibid.
11 Pyne, Peter, passim.
12 Garvin, Tom, 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy, pp. 135–6.
De Valera imagined and observed
Ged Martin
When Sir Ian MacLennan became British ambassador in Dublin in 1960, his mental picture of Ireland’s President, Eamon de Valera ‘was not necessarily attractive’. The ‘trepidation’ that he had felt at meeting such an ogre was swept away as soon as he presented his credentials:
I was completely taken by him as a personality. He is one of the few people I have ever met whom you are convinced from the beginning that he is, was a great man, quite irrespective of what his beliefs or philosophy or politics were.1
As Tim Pat Coogan has pointed out, de Valera defined himself as ‘the symbol’ of the Irish Republic that struggled to emerge after 1919, a status admiringly conferred in several hundred pages of Dorothy Macardle’s narrative of its history.2To his admirers, de Valera could do no wrong. To his antagonists, especially those associated with the British government, the official de Valera with whom they had to negotiate was ‘austere, rigid, obstinate and very much with a one-track mind.’3To assess de Valera’s role in Irish politics, both friend and foe had to commence by imagining him. Outsiders, at least, could be pleasantly surprised to find the man himself infinitely more attractive than both the principles that he embodied and the personality they had pictured.
Unfortunately, the discovery of a persona
l de Valera by cross-Channel and overseas visitors does not seem to have occurred until the 1930s. In the crucial period between 1916 and 1921, observers tended to project and impose a de Valera shaped by their own requirements. The ‘de Valera devil’, Tim Healy remarked in August 1921, was one of the ‘inevitable products of political romance’.4As a result, there were in fact two contradictory but overlapping imagined de Valeras. One was a strong man in ruthless charge of an incomprehensibly wicked war against Britain, ‘an unscrupulously mischievous enemy of my country’ as Malcolm MacDonald put it.5The other was an idealistic schoolmaster, caught up in events that he could not control and dangerously out of his depth. The shortest way to solve the Irish problem was to construct de Valera as both simultaneously: the naïve de Valera might be moulded and tamed, so that the satanic de Valera would command the wild men to compromise. De Valera’s rejection of the Treaty did not resolve the conflict between innocent and devil, but it did remove the man himself from the forefront of Irish politics for a decade, and so rendered it possible for outsiders to ignore him. Poor relations between Dublin and London during the first years of Fianna Fáil government merely extended the period of chill to the eve of the Second World War.
According to J. J. Lee, no fewer than four Irish political elites were swept away in the six years after the Easter Rising, although de Valera remarkably survived both the firing squad in 1916 and the Civil War of 1922–3.6For British political leaders, the Irish Question had acquired not only a new intensity but a new and puzzling practical aspect: with whom could they deal to reach a solution? Their two-fold reaction was characteristic of major powers dealing with either sudden revolution or mass colonial nationalism: they listened to the familiar old-guard nationalists who were being brushed aside, and hoped to identify a large-spirited superman in the emerging leadership. Dillon and Healy were to be their guides; de Valera was to be the Nehru or Kaunda, although in the short-term he proved to be a cross between Lumumba and Khomeini.
Unfortunately, Dillon and Healy did not know de Valera and both were tempted to fill the vacuum of their own ignorance by using him as a weapon in the mutual character assassination endemic to old-style nationalist politics. Healy admitted in 1921 that he had met de Valera just once, in 1918, when they had both taken part in the anti-conscription conference at the Mansion House.7 At the time, Healy had privately described him as ‘a fine fellow’, but three years later he could not resist the side swipe that ‘it was easy to discern that in his nature there is a strain of simplicity quite lacking in the Irish politicians with whom Mr Lloyd George was familiar’.8
Dillon had been a shade more generous. Although ‘unacquainted with Mr de Valera,’ he wrote in August 1917, and fervently disagreeing with his republican principles, Dillon took him ‘to be a brave and honourable man’, to be admired for having ‘risked his life and suffered imprisonment for the cause of liberty’.9 It is tempting to suggest that Dillon rarely spoke well of anyone whom he regarded as a serious political rival. The withdrawal of the old-style nationalist MPs from the House of Commons in protest against conscription in 1918 – a manoeuvre that dangerously conceded the electoral initiative to Sinn Féin – made it all the more necessary for politicians like Dillon to lay claim to superior political skill and mediating wisdom in their dealings with the British. ‘The Sinn Féin leaders were not nearly so dangerous as they seemed,’ Dillon assured C. P. Scott of the Manchester Guardian in August 1918. De Valera ‘was a schoolmaster pitch-forked into a position of extraordinary prominence and power and nervously conscious of his own inadequacy’.10
It may not have been only the British elite that Dillon hoodwinked into believing he could manage the new dispensation. In May 1918, William O’Brien had described de Valera as ‘personally a charming man, but he is too good for this rough world’, predicting that he ‘will no doubt subside into a meek instrument of Dillon’s’.11Any such fantasy was swept aside at the general election of December 1918 when de Valera roundly defeated Dillon in East Mayo.12Dillon continued to believe, as he assured T. P. O’Connor in May 1921, that de Valera was ‘not a strong man’, and that although ‘very much alarmed at the situation’ and ready to compromise, he was ‘completely under the control of the secret executive’.13
British politicians were always inclined to simplify Irish complexity; whether favouring concession or repression, they found it easier to assume that de Valera was indeed in control of his own movement. After a visit early in 1919, the minor conservative peer, Lord Newton, acknowledged that each time he had visited Ireland, ‘I have come away feeling that I understand the country less.’ He did, however, interpret the republican movement in highly personal terms. ‘I never cease to wonder why we tolerate the persistent hostility of de Valera, as if we were in a perfectly helpless position.’14A former Liberal cabinet minister, Lord Haldane, placed a similar emphasis but drew a diametrically different conclusion. Invited to advise by the Lord Lieutenant, Lord French, Haldane abandoned the Viceregal Lodge to discuss the possibility of dominion status with Eoin MacNeill. He concluded that the Sinn Féin leaders were fanatical idealists whose principles were ‘tempered by a shrewd recognition of realities and of what is practically possible.’ Haldane proposed that French establish a triumvirate through which both sides in Ireland could determine a constitution. He agreed to serve as chairman, provided that ‘my nationalist colleague should be de Valera himself … de Valera would certainly be prime minister in an Irish parliament and was indispensable if the plan were to go through.’15
De Valera’s eighteen-month American mission coincided with the country’s slide into guerrilla warfare and counter-terrorism. His prolonged absence led some British politicians to question the extent of his control over the republican movement. Lloyd George concluded in January 1921 that de Valera had returned ‘because he felt that the militant Sinn Féiners had been beaten’ and he sought to claim credit for a political settlement.16In April, the prime minister planned to deal direct with Collins, ‘the head and front of the movement’.17Others took a different view: ‘there is only one man to see and that is de Valera’, wrote the influential conservative, Lord Derby in March 1921,18a principle upon which he acted by making what de Valera later called ‘the first important contact between the British and ourselves’ a month later.19These initial feelers were not encouraging. In late June 1921, Austen Chamberlain commented that ‘de Valera is a child without any experience of the world, without courage and without judgement.’20De Valera’s judgement might be open to criticism, but denigration of the courage of one of the most notable commanders of 1916 presumably reflected a pejorative assessment of his absence from Ireland throughout the worst of the Troubles.
Among the confused multiple contacts that followed was an approach by de Valera to the southern unionists in June 1921. On receiving a telegram inviting him to peace talks, Lord Midleton at first assumed that it was ‘a hoax, as I had never had any dealings with Mr de Valera and did not suppose that he even knew my name.’ The assumption that the President of the Irish Republic might not know the name of one of the most prominent southern unionists reflected an unusually unworldly construction of de Valera, but Midleton and his associates equally subscribed to the satanic view of the Sinn Féin leaders. ‘It was with difficulty we could bring ourselves to meet de Valera or Collins at all.’ None the less, at the urging of Lloyd George, the unionist delegation arrived in Dublin on 3 July. ‘As it was doubtful at what hour we were meeting the next morning’, the delegation called to the Mansion House and were given to understand that the Lord Mayor’s secretary would see them. They received a friendly welcome from ‘a tall spare man with spectacles’ who shook hands warmly on their departure and thanked them for agreeing to participate. When formal talks began the next day, the unionists were surprised to find that the helpful secretary had in fact been de Valera himself. Midleton decided to put to the test de Valera’s claim ‘that he had co
mplete command of the rebel forces, and that General Collins would respond to any order he gave’ by insisting on the release of the Earl of Bandon, who had been taken hostage in County Cork. Lord Bandon was duly freed, and Midleton noted that de Valera ‘showed a business-like and reasonable spirit’ throughout the negotiations.21
By this stage, the priority for the British was to persuade de Valera to come to London. Their chosen means of persuasion was the South African prime minister, Jan Christiaan Smuts, who had just arrived in Britain to take part in an Imperial Conference. Smuts had begun his career as state attorney of the South African Republic (Transvaal) on the eve of the Boer War of 1899–1902, in which he was a distinguished military commander. His political responsibilities had included the marshalling of propaganda against the British, and the title of his 1899 pamphlet, A Century of Wrong, had distinct Irish overtones. However, he had accepted defeat in 1902, and worked for reconciliation of South Africa’s white communities within an enhanced commonwealth. Rewards came quickly. The conquered Transvaal Colony acquired self-government in 1906, and Smuts took a leading part in drafting a constitution to unite the defeated republics with Natal and the Cape Colony in the Union of South Africa that came about in 1910. When war broke out in 1914, Smuts fought for the empire, helping to over-run Germany’s African territories. In 1917, he represented South Africa at the Imperial War Conference, and Lloyd George drafted him into the small executive body called the Imperial War Cabinet that had assumed temporary control over the British war effort. It was not surprising that when he returned to England in June 1921, he found ‘that people of many points of view are looking to you to help us about Ireland.’22The second pronoun was as significant as the first: the British elite had come to see Smuts as their own miracle worker.
