De Valera's Irelands

by Dermot Keogh

  ‘I liked de Valera,’ Lloyd George had commented after alternately cajoling and threatening him in Downing Street thirty years earlier.106No doubt outsiders who met de Valera were bound to some extent to be favourably impressed, simply on discovering that he lacked the horns and forked tail of British mythology. Yet, it is clear that the positive im­pressions of Eamon de Valera the man went far beyond modest surprise at his mere humanity. The question arises: could the positive elements of de Valera’s personality have been mobilised more effectively on behalf of Ireland’s interests in dealing with Ireland’s neighbours?

  Two of the most controversial aspects of de Valera’s behaviour be­tween 1916 and 1921 remain his eighteen-month absence in the United States during 1919–20, and his refusal to head the delegation sent to London that signed the Treaty in December 1921.107It would be a contra­diction in terms to condemn de Valera for having declined to make mol­lifying the British his first priority. Yet, paradoxically, with the British throughout the Troubles searching for a Parnell whom they might con­vert into a Smuts, de Valera might have found his enemies bolstering his position against his rivals. Haldane’s testimony suggests that by 1921 en­lightened opinion in Britain was moving towards direct negotiation with the leader of Irish republicanism. De Valera’s decision to decamp to the United States cast understandable doubt on the extent of his control over the movement. It was especially unlucky that the British chose as their miracle-working persuader in June 1921 the one man whose own politi­cal image could be discredited by de Valera’s refusal to accept his assign­ed role, Jan Smuts. None the less, by the middle of the year, the British government had swung back to regarding de Valera as the leader of southern Ireland. Had he taken part in the negotiations leading to the Treaty, he might have dispelled some British misunder­standings about his naïvety, and would probably have been able to enforce more effective and obvious control over his delegates.

  As a might-have-been, the strategy of dealing more frequently and openly with the British is open to one obvious riposte: what, beyond his intriguing smile, would de Valera have had to offer? A persuasive inter­pretation of his later career sees his emphasis upon partition as a cover for a general retreat after 1923 from the substantive case against the Treaty, whose provisions he either tamed or accepted as the years went by.108The problem with this interpretation is that while British observers found de Valera’s obsession with the border tedious and impenetrable, they never doubted the sincerity with which he harped upon the issue. It can be argued that Smuts, if somewhat brutal, was correct in contend­ing that Ulster had ceased to be a practical obstacle by the summer of 1921. Yet while we can see how Griffith would embrace a compromise agreement with the British for reasons of principle and Collins would support him on tactical grounds, it is hard to imagine a more flexible de Valera under any circumstances.

  It is just possible that de Valera might have exploited his charm to conduct a more subtle campaign against partition from the 1930s, not head-on but by concentrating on the practical grievances of the northern nationalist minority. While British politicians of all parties were formally committed to preserving the link with Northern Ireland, it would be easy to over-estimate the closeness of relationships between Westmin­ster and Stormont, as Menzies discovered in Belfast in 1941.109The civil rights move­ment of the mid-1960s suggested that Northern Ireland could be destabi­lised far more effectively by Catholics trying to get into the north­ern state than had ever been the case with their campaigns to get out of it. How­ever, to hold the British responsible for any aspect of northern adminis­tration would have been, for de Valera, too close to recognising the legi­timacy of their position. In any case, the war ensured that North­ern Ire­land had a political credit balance on which it drew for two somnolent decades, while the principled stand of neutrality ruled out even such small favours as the return of Casement’s bones.110

  Fundamentally, then, we come face to face with de Valera, not the ogre that many imagined, nor the amiable companion that a surprised few discovered, but as that republican symbol that he conceived himself to be. ‘Some said of de Valera that he had the well springs of greatness,’ wrote Grattan O’Leary. ‘No one meeting him and looking into his eyes as I did could doubt that statement.’ O’Leary never forgot de Valera’s ‘hawk like face’, even though they met only once.111Yet, de Valera him­self dis­counted the personal factor in diplomacy. In 1938, he was a guest at Mal­colm MacDonald’s country home. While his host busied himself with traditional diplomatic courtesies, even to removing Northern Irish whis­key from his drinks tray, de Valera chilled the American ambassad­or by dismissing personal factors altogether: ‘the individual who project­ed the cause was merely an instrument’.112It was probably for this reason that Malcolm MacDonald concluded that de Valera’s ‘greatness as a leader’ was ‘confined to certain limits’.113One of those limits may have been that he kept too close a rein on his own humanity. Eamon de Valera towers over twentieth-century Ireland, and it is right that scholars should study him as something more than a passing figure in a historical cartoon strip. Yet in the last resort there is little reason to think that Irish history would have been notably different if de Valera’s personality had been as promi­nently engaged as his principles.

  1 Quoted in Lee, Joseph and Ó Tuathaigh, Gearóid, The Age of de Valera, Ward River Press, Dublin, 1982, p. 206. I have taken the spelling of MacLennan’s surname from his entry in Who’s Who.

  2 Coogan, Tim Pat, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow, Hutchinson, London, 1993, pp. 246–8; Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Republic, with preface by de Valera, Corgi, London, 1968 edition, first published 1937.

  3 Lord Garner, former British diplomat, quoted in Lee, Joseph and Ó Tuathaigh, Gearóid, The Age of de Valera, p. 203.

  4 Article in the Sunday Express (London), 21 August 1921, quoted in Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, Cork University Press, Cork, 1996, p. 562.

  5 MacDonald, Malcolm, Titans and Others, Collins, London, 1972, p. 55.

  6 Lee, J. J., Ireland 1912–1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1989, p. 75.

  7 Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, p. 563.

  8 ibid., pp. 538, 563. In private letters, Healy usually wrote of ‘Valera’.

  9 Quoted in Lyons, F. S. L., John Dillon: a Biography, Routledge and Keegan Paul, London, 1968, p. 423.

  10 Quoted in Wilson, Trevor (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, 1911–1918, Collins, Lon­don, 1970, p. 349.

  11 Quoted in Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, p. 538.

  12 The veteran MP braced himself for a defeat first by a thousand votes, then by ‘about two thousand’ and was finally swept away by a majority of well over four thousand, in a two-to-one landslide. Dillon attributed his defeat in large measure to organised intimi­dation, overlooking the inconvenient point that de Valera had been equally heavily defeated challenging Joseph Devlin in West Belfast. Wilson, Trevor (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, pp. 362–3; Lyons, F.S.L., John Dillon: a Biography, pp. 451–3.

  13 Lyons, F. S. L., John Dillon: a Biography, p. 467.

  14 Responsible for the welfare of British prisoners of war in 1917, Newton had found him­self in the odd position of indirectly negotiating with the Germans. His visit to Ireland in April 1919 did not persuade him to extend the same approach to Sinn Féin. He was also puzzled by the fact that ‘I do not remember seeing a single pig’. Lord Newton, Retrospection, John Murray, London, 1941, p. 269.

  15 Quoted in Sommer, Dudley, Haldane of Cloan: His Life and Times 1856–1928, Allen & Unwin, London, 1960, p. 363.

  16 Quoted in Lord Riddell’s Intimate Diary of the Peace Conference and After 1918–1923, John Murray, London, 1933, p. 260.

  17 ibid., p. 288.

  18 Quoted in Churchill, Randolph S., Lord Derby ‘King of Lancashire’, Heinemann, London, 1959, p. 405.

  19 ibid., p. 420.

  20 Quoted in Self, Robert (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters, Cam
bridge University Press, Cambridge, 1995, Camden Fifth series, p. 161.

  21 Earl of Midleton, Records and Reactions 1856–1939, Oahspe, Herts., 1939, pp. 258–62.

  22 Quoted in Hancock, W. K., Smuts: II The Fields of Force 1919–1950, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1968, p. 51. For his early career see Hancock, W. K., Smuts: I The Sanguine Years 1870–1919, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1962.

  23 Hancock, W. K., Smuts: II The Fields of Force 1919–1950, chap. 9.

  24 One of the 1914 rebels, Jopie Fourie, had been shot by firing squad, refusing a blindfold as he met his death. Smuts was widely blamed for the sentence. Davenport, T. R. H., South Africa: a Modern History, Pal­grave, London, 1977, pp. 184–6; Hancock, W. K., Smuts: I The Sanguine Years 1870–1919, pp. 392, 406.

  25 Taylor, A. J. P., English History 1914–1945, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1965, p. 82.

  26 For the mythic version see ibid., p. 156; Hancock, W. K., Smuts: II The Fields of Force 1919– 1950, pp. 51–5; Murphy, John A., Ireland in the Twentieth Century, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1975, p. 25–6. The government’s control over the speech is made clear in Self, Robert (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters, p. 161 and Rose, Kenneth, King George V, Phoenix, London, 1984, p. 238. According to Chamberlain, the positive response to the speech persuaded the king that the initiative had been his own idea.

  27 Quoted in Hancock, W. K., Smuts: II The Fields of Force 1919–1950, pp. 55–6.

  28 ibid., pp. 50–56.

  29 For the letter of 4 August 1921, Van Der Poel, J. (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers: V September 1919–November 1934, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1973, pp. 100–105, and p. 106 for his unease at the use Lloyd George might make of it. De Valera protested at its publication, Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Republic, pp. 446–7.

  30 Hancock, W. K., Smuts: II The Fields of Force 1919–1950, p. 56.

  31 Gogarty, Oliver St John, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street, Rich & Cowan, London, 1937, chapter 21.

  32 Quoted in Van Der Poel, J. (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers: V September 1919– Novem­ber 1934, p. 96 (from a Buckingham palace memorandum of Smuts’ report to the king, 7 July 1921).

  33 ibid., p. 102 (letter of 4 August 1921).

  34 ibid., p. 97.

  35 ibid., p. 96. Griffith had organised perhaps the most unlikely event in the pantheon of Irish historical commemoration, the 1798 centenary celebrations in Johannesburg.

  36 Dangerfield, George, The Damnable Question: a Study in Anglo-Irish Relations, Quartet, London, 1977, p. 209. The whole strategy was best summed up by Healy: ‘To enlist the great Boer statesman to string the government proposals into nursery rhymes set to African lullabies for Irish ears was crudely inartistic.’ Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, p. 562.

  37 Quoted in Van Der Poel, J. (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers: V September 1919– November 1934, p. 94.

  38 Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Republic, p. 434. Afrikaners formed the majority of the white population of the Cape Colony, and so sympathised with the former Boer Republics. Natal settlers were intensely pro-British, but in 1910 they numbered fewer than 100,000, barely larger than the Protest­ant population of Tyrone and Fermanagh. Natal whites were outnumb­ered ten-to-one by an African majority over which they had come close to losing control in 1906. Durban, Natal’s principal port, depended upon the Transvaal for much of its trade. Northern Ireland had been delineat­ed to ensure that there would never be a nationalist majority. Unionists needed nobody’s support to maintain internal control, and Belfast looked outwards for its prosperity.

  39 Quoted in Van Der Poel, J. (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Papers: V September 1919– November 1934, p. 113 (letter of 23 February 1923).

  40 Quoted in Wilson, Trevor (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, p. 391. In fairness, it should be added that Scott received precisely the same report from A. D. Lindsay, the Oxford don who also tried to contact the Sinn Féin leadership. ‘He shared Smuts’ view of de Valera as a man without much sense of reality and obsessed by a sort of poetic vision of an ideal Ireland.’ ibid., p. 392.

  41 Taylor, A. J. P. (ed.), Lloyd George: a Diary by Frances Stevenson, Hutchinson, London, 1971, pp. 227–8 (17 July 1921). The Welsh word for ‘people’ is ‘pobl’.

  42 Wilson, Trevor (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, p. 395.

  43 From Lloyd George’s letter of 24 June 1921. In a speech on 14 July, he called de Valera ‘the Chieftain of the vast majority of the Irish race’. Macardle, Dorothy, The Irish Re­public, pp. 431, 439.

  44 Meeting of 17 July 1921, reported in Taylor, A. J. P. (ed.), Lloyd George: a Diary by Frances Stevenson, p. 229.

  45 Calton Younger describes this as ‘the error of an honest man who believes other men are as honest as he’. Younger, Calton, Arthur Griffith, Gill & Macmillan, Dublin, 1981, p. 109.

  46 Quoted in Wilson, Trevor (ed.), The Political Diaries of C. P. Scott, pp. 392, 394. De Valera had taken a similar line to Smuts, Van Der Poel, J. (ed.), Selections from the Smuts Pap­ers: V September 1919–November 1934, pp. 97–8.

  47 uoted in Nicolson, Harold, King George V: His Life and Reign, Constable, London, 1952, p. 358. Austen Chamberlain similarly dismiss­ed de Valera as ‘a dreamer’, adding that Griffith was ‘a poet’, Barton ‘a small solicitor’ and Stack ‘a crooked-faced solicitor’s clerk and gunman’. Self, Robert (ed.), The Austen Chamberlain Diary Letters, p. 163.

  48 Churchill, Winston S., The Aftermath: Being a Sequel to the World Crisis, Macmillan, Lon­don, 1941, p. 309. Poyning’s Law dated from 1494. Tales of de Valera’s historical dis­quisitions soon passed into popular legend (e.g., Gunther, John, Inside Europe, Harper, New York, 1938, p. 310). Malcolm MacDonald thought it promising evidence of de Valera’s ‘pres­ent practical mood’ at a meeting during the 1936 British-Irish negotia­tions that ‘he never mentioned Oliver Cromwell’ or any other episode prior to 1921. When a draft communiqué describing talks in 1938 referr­ed to an opening statement of the Irish position, de Valera ‘beamed a smile’ and suggested that the press would report ‘that by the end of a long harangue I was still describing the wrongs done to Ireland by Oliver Cromwell’. The draft was amended. Quoted in Harkness, David, ‘Mr de Valera’s Dominion: Irish relations with Britain and the Commonwealth 1932–38’, Journal of Commonwealth Political Studies, vol. 8, 1970, p. 217; MacDonald, Malcolm, Titans and Others, pp. 75–6.

  49 Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, pp. 558, 584–5.

  50 ibid., pp. 586, 588.

  51 ibid., pp. 607–10.

  52 Healy was using the term ‘half-breed Spaniard’ by February 1923, Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, p. 606, and see p. 625 for the 1928 newspaper interview and p. 736 for Devoy. De Valera denied Jewish ancestry: Dwyer, T. Ryle, Eamon de Valera, Gill and Macmillan, Dublin, 1980, p. 90. Coogan, Tim Pat, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow, pp. 4–10 suggests that de Valera may have been illegitimate, but sees no reason to doubt his parentage. Lady Lavery spread the story that the decision not to renew Healy’s ap­pointment as governor-general in 1928 was taken ‘with an idea to make things easier if de Valera should come in’. Barnes, J. and Nicholson, D. (eds), The Leo Amery Diaries I: 1896–1921, Hutchinson, London, 1980, p. 538. Callanan, Frank, T. M. Healy, pp. 622–4 does not mention the story but supplies practical reasons for getting Tim out of the Viceregal Lodge. Nor was there any cause for Cosgrave to make life easier for his opponents.

  53 Ethnic abuse of de Valera is scattered through Gogarty, Oliver St John, As I was Going Down Sackville Street. These examples are taken from chapter 4, where Gogarty com­mented that de Valera ‘is more Irish perhaps than any of us, seeing that he looks like something uncoiled from the Book of Kells’.

  54 MacDonald, Malcolm, Titans and Others, p. 55.