De Valera's Irelands (15 page)

In Ireland, the bones of the Civil War dead were rattled for forty years. Noel Browne remembered as a young politician in Leinster House (in 1948):

I recall my shock at the white-hot hate with which that terrible episode had marked their lives. The trigger words were ‘77', ‘Bally­seedy', ‘Dick and Joe' and above all ‘the Treaty' and ‘damn good barg­ain'. The raised tiers of the Dáil chamber would become filled with shouting, gesticulating, clamour­ing, suddenly angry men.
10

It is often lamented that the Civil War deprived Ireland of conven­tional European ‘left versus right' politics, in favour of two factions based on ancestral hatreds. I would suggest that even without a civil war, Irish society did not naturally lend itself to this kind of polarisation. To ima­gine the impossible, had there been no civil war and had Collins suc­ceeded in uniting both wings of the army as one force and had accepted that it could not be used to destabilise Northern Ireland, presumably Sinn Féin under Griffith, Collins and de Valera would have governed as a centre-right party, with farmers on the right and Labour on the left. Sinn Féin would have probably divided into two main groups, the one more republican and separatist, the other more ‘commonwealth' and rightist. Both groups would have been rather loose and perhaps un­disciplined. Irish politics would have been deeply centrist, although in a different form than was eventually to emerge under a centrist Fianna Fáil after 1937.

A likely contrast with our reality would have been the failure of a Sinn Féin government ever to forge the kind of internal solidarity which Fianna Fáil did succeed in forging eventually. Fianna Fáil was the child of the Civil War; it was created in the prison camps of the Free State, much as Sinn Féin had been reinvented a few years earlier in British prison camps. The bitterness of the split and the comradeship of the defeated made possible the creation of an extraordinary political party under de Valera, whose unwritten motto might have been ‘Never Split'. No mat­ter what disagreements there might be within the party, Fianna Fáil gene­rally has shown a bland face to its external public. Divisions be­tween left and right, between industrialisers and traditionalists, between localists and national interest politicians, Catholics and secularists all have been consistently subordinated to the overall interests of the party, or national movement. Intellectual discussion suffered because its poten­tial for divi­sion was seen. An almost Soviet habit of solidarity and intellectual con­formity, combined with a great practical political skill, characterised in­dependent Ireland's greatest political party.

Fianna Fáil could almost be characterised as the anti-Treaty IRA in civilian form. Old local commanders were converted into cumann secre­taries and other key figures, aiming to rule Ireland by ballots rather than bullets. The seed of Fianna Fáil lay in the surprisingly large vote the re­publicans got in 1923. The voters seemed to be saying: ‘If you accept the Treaty, there are those among us who like much of what you stand for. Act accordingly.' The vote tended to be in poorer and more remote areas, and in places where IRA presence had been strong. In particular, areas that had seen Black and Tan atrocities seemed particularly symp­athetic.
11

Republican prisoners in jail in 1923 were fascinated by the mechan­ics of proportional representation and were, in a grudging way, impress­ed by the pedantic fairness of the PR-STV system of voting devised by the Free State Government. The possibilities of Free State democracy were a shock to many republicans, persuaded as so many of them were by de Valera and Frank Gallagher that electoral democracy in the new polity was corrupt either in the sense of the ballot being interfered with or in the voters themselves being venal or cowardly.

In Newbridge military camp prisoners were being taught courses in constitutional law, local government, and Irish history, under the aegis of Dan O'Donovan, a well-known Dáil civil servant who went anti-Treaty, by September 1923. He and other lecturers suggested that the military victory of the Free State could be reversed by peaceful means. Non-vio­lent penetration of the local government apparatus would, in the long run, deliver the new polity into the hands of its enemies. Local organisa­tional centres were already being set up all over the twenty-six counties. This mixture of the military and the political, a central charact­eristic of Fianna Fáil, was a prime result of the Civil War. If there had been no con­flict, Irish party politics would have been very different, almost certainly even more localist than it actually became.
12

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.

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.
2
To 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.'
3
To 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 personal 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'.
4
As 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.
5
The 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.
6
For 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'.
11
Any such fantasy was swept aside at the general election of December 1918 when de Valera roundly defeated Dillon in East Mayo.
12
Dillon 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.'
14
A 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.
16
In April, the prime minister planned to deal direct with Col­lins, ‘the head and front of the movement'.
17
Others 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,
18
a principle upon which he acted by making what de Valera later called ‘the first important contact between the British and ourselves' a month later.
19
These 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.'
20
De 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 complete 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.'
22
The second pronoun was as significant as the first: the British elite had come to see Smuts as their own miracle worker.

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.
23
This 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.
25
A 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.
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