De Valera's Irelands

by Dermot Keogh

  In relation to de Valera, this was a dangerous assumption. Like de Valera, Smuts was a formidable intellectual, but their mental processes were markedly different. Although detractors charged both with mask­ing personal advantage under analytical complexity, Smuts saw himself as a philosopher, espousing a system of ‘holism’, through which appa­rent opposites were reconciled on a higher plane, a theory which lesser minds associated with his personal project of accommodating Afrikaner nationalism and imperial loyalty within the evolving structure of the British Commonwealth.23This was not an approach to the cosmos that was likely to chime with the mathematical mind of Eamon de Valera. Nor indeed, was it universally shared by his fellow Afrikaners, some of whom had risen in armed revolt in 1914 seeking to recapture their re­publican independence.24

  Indeed, the strange personal ascendancy that Smuts had established within British politics was something of a smoke and mirrors exercise manipulated by Lloyd George. A radical liberal, Lloyd George had be­come prime minister in December 1916 in an unlikely alliance with the conservatives. A. J. P. Taylor unkindly suggested that Lloyd George brought Smuts into the Imperial War Cabinet because he had once run rings around the British generals who were now failing to defeat the Germans.25A more likely explanation is that a prime minister who lack­ed a firm party base himself had an interest in adding to the political plot a player who was even more disembodied than himself. An example of the role attributed to Smuts was George V’s speech inaugurating the Parli­ament of Northern Ireland in Belfast in June 1921. It was Smuts who draft­­ed the royal appeal for peace, thereby further adding to his stature as a problem-solver. Of course, the well-known story obscures the basic fact that the king spoke with the approval of his prime minister: Lloyd George, the first occupant of 10 Downing Street to adopt a presidential style, was not the man to allow his sovereign free rein in a major constit­utional issue. The Belfast speech enabled Lloyd George to open talks with Sinn Féin in a manner to which his conservative followers could not object, by implying that responsibility for the olive branch rested with two great institutions, Smuts and the crown, the one beyond and the other above domestic politics.26

  Naturally, it seemed a short step from Belfast to Dublin. ‘If de Valera won’t come over, I hope Smuts will go to him and make him come,’ not­ed the king, in a typically bluff simplification.27The problem was that if de Valera refused to be cast as a second Smuts, he would by impli­cation be discrediting the original, an outcome that the South African states­man could only accommodate by denigration. Moreover, it was all too easy, especially after the triumph of the Belfast speech, for Smuts to see himself as the true authority on Ireland’s destiny, and mentally to mar­ginalise de Valera as the impractical school-master in need of in­struction by superior wisdom. His comrade in the East African cam­paign, Tom Casement, brother of the executed Sir Roger, lobbied him on behalf of the nationalist cause, acting with the unofficial approval of de Valera, while Horace Plunkett assured him that a solution on Dominion lines was possible.28Significantly, Smuts refused to travel to Dublin until he could claim to have been invited in his own right, and not as a British re­presentative, although to the South African leader’s embarrassment, Lloyd George subsequently published his correspondence with de Va­lera to put further pressure on the Irish leadership to come to terms.29The talks immediately followed the Mansion House conference with Lord Midleton.

  Although the mission was widely reported in the press, Smuts trav­elled under the unlikely incognito of ‘Mr Smith’.30On arrival, he evaded St John Gogarty who had been commissioned by Arthur Griffith to col­lect him from the ferry, apparently because Gogarty was the only person known to the Provisional Government to be in legal possession of a Rolls-Royce.31It was an appropriately unpromising prelude to talks with de Valera.

  Smuts had been a student in Cambridge in the early 1890s, and the Second Home Rule Bill remained his implicit starting point for evaluat­ing any Irish settlement. The major complications to the Irish ques­tion that had emerged since 1893, Ulster separatism and the proclam­ation of the Republic, could easily be brushed aside. Ireland had not been part­itioned at all; it was ‘merely that Ulster, which has always proved the obstacle, is now out of the way.’32The only credible interpretation of this curious statement is that Smuts assumed that unity would be maintain­ed by the Council of Ireland. In his subsequent letter to de Valera, Smuts shifted his ground. ‘Ireland is travelling the same painful road as South Africa’; self-government for southern Ireland would be the first stage, ‘and the inclusion of Ulster and the full recognition of Irish unity will be the last.’33Not only would the British people never agree to an Irish Re­public, but South African experience proved that it was not a good idea anyway. While theoretically independent, the Transvaal had been bound to accept British supervision by the 1884 Convention of London, and it had been from disputes over its interpretation that war had arisen. Thus Smuts directly challenged de Valera’s favourite ploy of an Irish Republic bound by Treaty to respect Britain’s interests. ‘We in the Trans­vaal have worked both systems, and look at the result … As a friend, I cannot ad­vise you too strongly against a republic.’34

  On a less elevated plane, the South African analogy created political problems for de Valera. Smuts felt that Griffith was sympathetic to his argument,35and Griffith was not only temperamentally inclined to sub­sume the Republic within a commonwealth solution, but had worked for a time in the Transvaal himself. Although de Valera left Smuts with the impression that he would put an offer of dominion status to the Irish people, he had no personal motive for shifting the basis of debate to­wards the ideas of Arthur Griffith. His own position as the symbol of the Republic owed much to the mystique of executed leaders of 1916. Among them had been John MacBride, who had fought against the empire in the Boer War, and had memorably dismissed his death sent­ence with the comment that he had looked down the barrels of British guns before.36

  Smuts had travelled to Dublin backed by George V’s confidence that ‘you of all men will be able to induce Mr de Valera to be reasonable.’37The outcome of the Smuts mission is summarised by Macardle in a typically bleak sentence: ‘President de Valéra [sic] explained to him how the position of Ireland differed from that of South Africa.’38Smuts was not used to being on the receiving end of other people’s explanations. He reacted by belittling de Valera for undermining the myth of his own om­niscient wisdom. ‘A big man in Ireland will pull them through, but I did not see him in my negotiations with the Irish leader.’39With de Valera on the point of accepting Lloyd George’s invitation to London, it was an un­lucky moment to have so influential a voice denigrating him in the corri­dors of power. C. P. Scott recorded Smut’s account of the Dublin talks. ‘Was not impressed by any of them. No big man among them. De Valera was a romantic, lacking in practical sense and capacity of hand­ling af­fairs. Very difficult in consequence to deal with.’40

  The Smuts mission was thus an unhelpful preliminary to de Valera’s visit to London ten days later, in mid-July 1921. Frances Stevenson, Lloyd George’s secretary and mistress, had never seen the prime minister ‘so excited as he was before de Valera arrived’ at Downing Street. His nego­tiating strategy owed more to brainwashing than to diplomacy: de Va­lera found himself alternately wooed with the prospect of a seat at the imperial top table and threatened with renewal of repression. Lloyd George’s conclusion that his visitor ‘was the man with the most limited vocabulary he has ever met!’ must be ranked as a highly unusual view of de Valera, but in the intimidating circumstances it was an under­standable response; every time Lloyd George felt that he was getting through ‘& De Valera appeared to be warming, he suddenly drew back as if frightened and timid.’ The voluble Welshman complained that de Valera ‘was very difficult to keep to the point – he kept going off at a tangent, & talking in formulas and refusing to face facts.’ One of the few moments of thaw in their talks came when Lloyd George, deduced by analogy from his native Welsh that ‘P
oblacht’, the term used in the Proc­lamation of 1916 for ‘Republic’, simply meant ‘people’. ‘Isn’t there an­other word?’ he asked, and de Valera supplied ‘Saorstát’. Why insist upon ‘Republic’, Lloyd George demanded, when Saorstát was ‘good enough’. De Valera saw the funny side of the intrusion of Celtic ling­uistics into the politics of the island group and ‘simply roared with laughter’.41

  ‘I liked de Valera’, Lloyd George told C. P. Scott.42Unfortunately, the warm personal impression did not oust the image, so determinedly en­dorsed by Smuts, of a naïve visionary. Invited to London as ‘the chosen leader of the great majority in southern Ireland’,43de Valera found him­self expected to conduct himself as just another element in British do­mes­tic politics. Smuts, for instance, sought to impress upon de Valera the government’s ‘great difficulty with Ulster’, only to find that de Valera ‘doesn’t really appreciate that the gov. have any real difficulty, & thinks that they are just using Ulster to frighten him.’44It was rather that de Valera saw himself as a head of state negotiating with a foreign power, and that the internal political difficulties of that power were none of his business. This may have been an unrealistic stance, but Arthur Griffith’s subsequent promise not to rock the British political boat over Ulster rob­bed the nationalist cause of some freedom of manoeuvre.45There was a similarity of approach between the tough-minded Smuts and the more pacific C. P. Scott. The Manchester Guardian abhorred all violence. When he interviewed de Valera at a London hotel, Scott found the Irish leader aggrieved ‘that we had denounced some of the Sinn Féin outrages as murders on a par with the murders committed by the agents of the gov­ernment’. De Valera’s position was that killings authorised by the Re­public were legitimate, while those of the British were not. Scott was hor­rified and concluded that de Valera had ‘a closed mind’.46When de Va­lera terminated the first phase of talks in August 1921 with an insistence on complete separation, the king summed up the British view that he was simply ‘a dreamer & visionary’.47Thus when de Valera declared against the Treaty, the British were neither very surprised nor conscious of any special need to understand his point of view. Church­ill’s view of the anti-Treaty case was that ‘Mr de Valera was still maund­ering about Poy­nings’ Act, and that his view of Anglo-Irish relations and of the griefs of Ireland had not yet reached the sixteenth-century part of the story.’48In British eyes, the devil and the dreamer had fused into one.

  For Tim Healy, the split was ‘something out of dreamland’, and he clung to his notion that de Valera was an earnest citizen of that realm. Still anxious to carve a political role for himself, in late December 1921, Healy tried to speed up the appointment of the promised Boundary Com­­mission, seeking to persuade de Valera through the Archbishop of Dub­lin that Carson could not object to the appointment of ‘an Impartial Colo­nial Statesman’, that any such arbitrator was bound to make substantial territorial transfers to the Free State and that the necessary outcome had to be that ‘the Belfasters are burst’. The archbishop despairingly reported that he had seen de Valera but ‘cannot even understand the dialect he speaks.’49De Valera’s refusal to bow to Healy’s superior political wisdom merely confirmed that he was out of his depth. ‘Poor man,’ Healy wrote patronisingly, ‘I think he has done his country more harm even than Par­nell, with the very best intentions.’ Surrounded by the wild men and women of extreme republicanism, ‘he resents too touchily the supposed slur on his position.’50

  The Civil War only gradually destroyed the new governor-general’s view of de Valera as an innocent out of his depth. ‘I can’t believe the fel­low as cracked as your informants seem to think’, Healy wrote to his brother in February 1923, speculating that de Valera was perhaps ‘brow­beaten and bullied by Lynch’. When Lynch’s death failed to liberate de Valera’s strain of simplicity, Healy concluded that he was ‘an unscrupu­lous man, prepared to sanction any mischief to gain his ends’. While con­demning de Valera’s ‘futile wickedness’, Healy was inclined to take the philosophical view that by removing de Valera from Irish politics, the Civil War had been a blessing in disguise.51Unfortunately for Healy, the Civil War proved to be only a brief setback, and de Valera was soon back in the Dáil, and Healy himself eased out of the Viceregal Lodge.

  The Civil War encouraged a new construct of de Valera, one which unfavourably emphasised his American birth and Spanish origins. If the responsibility for opposition to the Treaty could be solely attributed to de Valera, and if de Valera could be re-classified as ‘a half-breed Spaniard’, then the Civil War could be explained away as an alien aberration and Ireland itself acquitted of the sin of fratricidal conflict. In an interview with a British journalist in 1928, Healy denounced the leader of Fianna Fáil as ‘a barren impostor’ with a foreign father, ‘a vain, shallow man with­­out a shred of ability’, motivated solely by jealousy. One of St John Gog­arty’s cronies referred to de Valera as ‘the Dago’, while John Devoy dis­counted the claimed Hispanic parentage and referred instead to ‘a Jew­ish bastard’.52Gogarty himself retorted that because the Irish refused to be ruled by one of their own, they were ‘culture-beds for any political microbe’. The fact that de Valera was ‘unreckonable’ merely added to his mystique.53

  To outsiders, who had less need to explain away the innate violence of the Irish Civil War, de Valera’s origins merely added a bizarre touch of the exotic: to Britain’s outspoken Dominions Secretary, Jimmy Thomas, he was ‘the Spanish onion in the Irish stew’.54In noting that ‘Eamon de Valera was not born a citizen of the country he rules’ the American jour­nalist John Gunther drew a parallel with two other outsid­ers by birth, Hitler and Stalin.55On one occasion, de Valera himself rescu­ed an over-enthusiastic visitor from an embarrassing moment. The Canadian jour­nalist Grattan O’Leary had been reared in a remote part of Quebec by a father who lived exclusively for the politics of the distant homeland. O’Leary himself was not only intensely proud of his heritage, but sub­scribed to the fashionable myth that the essence of Irishness was to be combative. When the Taoiseach greeted him in Dublin in 1941 with the words, ‘I presume you’re of Irish descent’, O’Leary was moved to a reply more notable for pride than discretion. ‘Mr de Valera,’ he pro­claimed, ‘there isn’t one drop of blood in my veins that isn’t Irish.’ ‘Well,’ replied his host, ‘you have the advantage of me there’, good-naturedly putting his visitor at ease by thanking him for ‘a story to amuse his colleagues’.56

  The more genial side of de Valera’s personality only became appar­ent to outsiders very gradually during the decade after Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932. Smuts was almost certainly not alone in continuing to brand de Valera as ‘a mad fellow’.57It was not simply that Ireland had largely fallen off the British political agenda, but rather that the country and its new rulers no longer figured large in British social itineraries. At a personal level, the commonwealth framework had helped some Brit­ish leaders to get to know O’Higgins and McGilligan in the 1920s, but murder and electoral defeat had put an end to these contacts. In 1932, personal relations had to begin all over again.58

  When John Maynard Keynes lectured on ‘National Self-Sufficiency’ at UCD in 1933, he was in full retreat from the Victorian ideology of lais­sez-faire, and shocked some of his audience by expressing sympathy for Fianna Fáil economic policies. Although privately regarding the new gov­ernment’s drive to grow more wheat as ‘insane’, Keynes was attract­ed to its other developmental plans. He met de Valera ‘who impressed me distinctly favourably’, and helped pave the way for a visit by Josiah Stamp, a retired senior British civil servant who was an expert of debt negotiations. Stamp in turn found de Valera ‘very charming’.59

  It is ironic that it was the abdication crisis of 1936 that formed a land­mark in the improvement of British assessments of de Valera. By Novem­ber 1936, Baldwin’s government was privately facing the fact that Ed­ward VIII would have to go. Among the many sensitive elements in the situation was the complication that the Statute of Wes
tminster of 1931 had given the dominions a right of veto over any change in the succes­sion to the throne. Thus de Valera, who fifteen years earlier had refused to accept the crown, now found his consent required to get rid of the king. Naturally, a desire to oblige the British formed little or no part in de Valera’s handling of an issue that he found an ‘acute embarrassment’.60However, the abdication provided a direct opportunity to distance Ire­land from the crown by passing the External Relations Act, and eased the way for the adoption of the 1937 constitution. Given the gains on offer, there could be little incentive for de Valera to muddy him­self in the technical handling of issues as alien as monarchy and divorce. Securing Irish acquiescence was the responsibility of Sir Harry Batterbee of the Dominions Office. Not surprisingly, it required a personal visit to con­firm that de Valera would agree to ratify Edward VIII’s departure, if only to prevent Wallis Simpson from becoming queen of Ireland. In his des­peration, the British prime minister, Stanley Baldwin, had refined the ideal­istic headmaster into yet another de Valera: ‘he is such a gentleman he won’t kick an enemy when he is down.’61Baldwin was full of gratitude when Batterbee returned with the news that Dublin would co-operate. According to Whitehall folklore, Batterbee suggested that the prime minister should direct his thanks to divine providence. ‘De Valera has always counted on winning any argument by towering over his adver­sary. As you know he is 6 feet 1. But the good God made me 6 feet 4!’62As an analysis of British-Irish relations, the story was otiose, but it does suggest the beginnings of a view of de Valera as a personality in his own right.