De Valera's Irelands (9 page)

Evidence for this last critical line is not cited in the volume. It remains undocumented. Did the authors simply make that surmise based on their reading of the documents? It must also be asked whether that last line was added following discussion with de Valera while the book was being written? The answer to those questions would have a critical bearing as to how that particular sentence ought to be interpreted. This points to the great difficulty of using the Longford/O'Neill life in a classroom or as a source.

Both authors describe de Valera's great dilemma in March 1922. They interpret his refusal to condemn the use of arms as an effort to preserve the fragile unity of the republican side. Both authors also argue that de Valera's failure to denounce the leading militant anti-Treatyite Rory O'Connor's repudiation of the authority of Dáil Éireann as being ‘for reasons alike of honour and prudence'. Longford and O'Neill continue:

He was, in fact, in a nightmarish position, with little influence on events in practice. On the one hand the pro-Treaty government authorities held the initiative. On the other, the republican section of the army, composing probably more than half the Volunteers, were taking independent action.

They argued that de Valera, apart from a few meetings with Liam Mellowes and Rory O'Connor, ‘had little relationship with republican members of the army and little information about them.' The occupation of the Four Courts on 14 April came as a complete surprise to him: ‘He had no part whatever in this step. But he felt that the dispute was a matter for the Minister for Defence and any interference by him would be unwelcome to either party.'
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None of those statements are footnoted and must have been the memories of an elderly de Valera.

Longford and O'Neill quote de Valera as writing towards the end of the Civil War to Ms Edith M. Ellis in London on 26 February 1923:

Alas! Our country has been placed in a cruel dilemma out of which she could be rescued only by gentleness, skill and patience, and on all sides a desire for justice and fair-dealing. Instead we find ourselves in the atmosphere of a tempest – every word of reason is suppressed or distorted until it is made to appear the voice of passion. I have been condemned to view the tragedy here for the last year as through a wall of glass, powerless to intervene effectively. I have, however, still the hope that an opportunity may come my way.
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Opportunity did come his way in the mid-1920s after the closure of a civil war that was low in casualties by comparative international standards but that left a legacy of bitterness with which de Valera had to struggle throughout his political life. One must be grateful to Longford and O'Neill for helping to construct – over forty years after the end of hostilities – Eamon de Valera's perceived record of the Civil War and of the part that he played in it. Therefore, having read that biography, the historian is equipped with a highly personalised and very subjective account of the origins and development of the Irish Civil War.

When the biographies of de Valera are assembled together, as I have done above, it becomes very clear that much remains to be done in order to address the most basic questions about his life and times. Despite the many tens of thousands of words written about the most important political figure in twentieth century Ireland, a critical mass of scholarship is still missing to explain the role of this enigmatic personality in the development of the history of twentieth century Ireland. De Valera awaits his biographer. The first task facing such a person will be to deconstruct the work of earlier historians, political scientists, journalists and popular writers. I am convinced that the historian must begin work on de Valera and the Civil War by questioning the reliability of every printed source until proved otherwise.

Let me draw attention to the manner in which, for example, the un-footnoted Bromage biography is used to build an historical narrative. The most substantative problem with this work and with other early biographies is the degree to which the narrative is woven from a series of quotations not based on primary sources. This technique has the effect of placing the unsuspecting and uncritical reader close to the events. It is like listening to live radio coverage of the Civil War. The microphone or short-hand taker always appears to have been there at the critical moment to capture the contemporary reaction of Eamon de Valera. Many of those quotations – if they are to continue to be used – require to be sourced with the greatest of care.

There is another problem associated with the study of de Valera and the Civil War. Contemporary anti-Treatyite commentary on de Valera was robust and that remained the case throughout the early decades of the young state. His supporters wrote ‘corrective' narratives and biographies, helped considerably by his arrival in power in 1932. Now, in the early twenty-first century, over eighty years later, de Valera's Ireland has become synonymous with social deprivation, economic stagnation, high unemployment, emigration, censorship and sexual repression.

In the wake of the popular success of the Michael Collins film in the 1990s, the climate of prevailing political correctness has become even more unfavourable than before to the personality and the political career of Eamon de Valera. The dashing Michael Collins, after all, was the hero of the hour. De Valera was the villain. Hollywood has spoken, and very powerfully so in Neil Jordan's fine film. But cinema is not necessarily reliable history. It will be difficult to replace such an emotionally satisfying interpretation of the Civil War. But the task of doing so requires to be tackled in a comprehensive manner.

There is not the space here to review the new historical scholarship based on archival work in Ireland and abroad. Books by Hopkinson, Garvin and Regan among others are providing a range of new questions that throw light on the world of Eamon de Valera in the Civil War years.
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Excellent work is being done and usually in less than ideal circumstances, as I found when I went to research this article. Key archival collections remain closed to researchers. In the case of one collection, it was withdrawn without warning and remains closed as this article goes to print.
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What follows is an attempt to raise a series of questions about de Valera and the Civil War.

One theme dominated de Valera's discourse throughout the early months of 1922 – his unshakeable belief that the Treaty was not the best possible settlement on offer to the Irish government. In a private session of Dáil Éireann on 14 December, he used an interesting mixed-metaphor to describe his disappointment at a job only half-completed:

I was captaining a team and I felt that the team should have played with me to the last and that I should have got the last chance which I felt would have put us over and we might have crossed the bar in my opinion at high tide.
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His imagery was more biblical when writing to his close friend and unofficial adviser, the rector of the Irish College, Mgr John Hagan, on 13 January 1922:

A party set out to cross the desert, to reach a certain fertile country beyond – where they intended to settle down. As they were coming to the end of their journey and about to emerge from the desert, they came upon a broad oasis. Those who were weary said: ‘Why go further – let us settle down here and rest, and be content.' But the hardier spirits would not, and decided to face the further hardships and travel on. Thus they divided – sorrowfully, but without recriminations.
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But there were recriminations aplenty between January and June 1922 and de Valera's role during those months has been described as ambiguous at best and devious at worst.

Maurice Moynihan, a critical admirer and friend who came to know de Valera very well as a senior civil servant from the mid-1930s to the end of the 1950s, edited the collection of his speeches and statements referred to above. But Moynihan, in his work as editor, also undertook to write an informative personal introduction to each document or collection of documents. His observations on those critical months in early 1922 are particularly interesting.
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De Valera's rhetoric, particularly in March, is very familiar to many informed readers. The words that he spoke in the months following the acceptance of the Treaty on 6 January 1922 by Dáil Éireann returned to haunt him throughout his long political career.

Moynihan has gone to great lengths to trace some of his most controversial speeches to their sources. I have covered this above in another context. But I wish now to address the matters raised in greater detail. Moynihan writes that ‘those historians and commentators who tend to lay on him the major blame for the outbreak of the Civil War tend to place a heavy reliance for their proof on that cluster of speeches from March 1922.'
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On 16 March de Valera was quoted as saying in Dungarvan, County Waterford: ‘the Treaty did not make the way to independence easier; it barred the way to independence, so far as one generation can bar another.' He was opposed to the Treaty ‘because it barred the way to independence with the blood of fellow-Irishmen.' He was quoted as saying further that ‘it was only by civil war after this that they could get their independence.' On 17 March, de Valera spoke at three venues – Waterford, Carrick-on-Suir and Thurles. In Carrick-on-Suir, Moynihan quotes him as having said that ‘if the Treaty was accepted, the fight for freedom would still go on, and the Irish people, instead of fighting foreign soldiers, would have to fight the Irish solidiers of an Irish government set up by Irishmen.' He added, according to what Moynihan quotes, that ‘if the Treaty was not rejected perhaps it was over the bodies of the young men he saw around him that day that the fight for Irish freedom may be fought.' In Thurles, Moynihan quotes de Valera's most famous remarks from those months, that if the Volunteers of the future tried to complete the work the Volunteers of the previous four years had been attempting, they ‘would have to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government, and through, perhaps, the blood of some of the members of the government in order to get Irish freedom.'

Moynihan took each of the above quotations from the
Irish Independent
. That paper carried editorials on 18 and 20 March condemning the content of those speeches. The
Irish Times
spoke of de Valera's ‘gospel of hatred'. De Valera, in a letter published in the
Irish Independent
on 22 March, described as ‘villainous' the interpretation of him as ‘encouraging' and ‘preaching civil war' and of engaging ‘in the language of incitement' and ‘violent threats'. The editor of the paper added a note to the end of the de Valera letter. He vigorously denied that his

newspaper had made an attempt to distort the plain meaning of Mr De Valera's speeches, and, taken with certain concurrent circumstances, we believe it is the construction which would be placed on them by thousands of others … We hope that in view of the above letter Mr de Valera will use his best efforts to discountenance any attempt at civil war in the future.
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