De Valera's Irelands

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© Dermot Keogh & Gabriel Doherty, 2003

Ebook edition, 2011

ISBN: 978 1 85635 414 1

Epub ISBN: 978 1 85635 895 8

Mobi ISBN: 978 1 85635 917 7

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For my Mother, Helena Doherty

‘But, Doctor,' said Caspian, ‘why do you say my race? After all, I suppose you're a Telmarine too.'

‘Am I?' said the Doctor.

‘Well, you're a man anyway,' said Caspian.

‘Am I?' repeated the Doctor in a deeper voice …

‘So you've guessed it in the end,' said Doctor Cornelius. ‘Or guessed it nearly right. I'm not a pure Dwarf. I have human blood in me too. Many Dwarfs escaped in the great battles and lived on; shaving their beards, and wearing high-heeled shoes and pretending to be men … But never in all these years have we forgotten our own people and all the other happy creatures of Narnia, and the long-lost days of freedom.'

‘I'm – I'm sorry, Doctor,' said Caspian. ‘It wasn't my fault, you know.'

Aslan said nothing.

‘You mean,' said Lucy rather faintly, ‘that it would have turned out all right – somehow? But how? Please, Aslan! Am I not to know?'

‘To know what would have happened, child?' said Aslan. ‘No. Nobody is ever told that.'
1

‘I am deeply honoured,' said President John Fitzgerald Kennedy to the Teachtaí Dála and (Irish) Senators in Leinster House on 28 June 1963, ‘to be your guest in the free parliament of a free Ireland. If this nation had achiev­ed its present political and economic stature a century or so ago, my great-grandfather might never have left New Ross, and I might, if fortunate, be sitting down there with you. Of course, if your own Presi­dent had never left Brooklyn, he might be standing up here instead of me.'

Kennedy was being light-hearted: it was one of his greatest gifts. The speech contained much that was his own work, this passage almost cer­tainly.
2
It needed a touch of nerve, thus to speculate half-irreverently, half-admiringly, as to the alternative life of Eamon de Valera, and we may doubt whether his speechwriters would have known enough to risk it. His Irish visit was in any case unpopular with his court.
3
Every­one, including the Irish Department of External Affairs, had assumed before his election that he would be a little colder to Ireland than his predecessors, to show his credentials were American, not Irish-American. They thought it from their knowledge of his father.
4
But John Kennedy's Irish identity sat easily within himself, and he had been at variance with his father's social and political attitudes from his earliest published his­torical writing:
Why England Slept
, with its formidable critique of the dip­lomatic unfitness of Joseph P. Kennedy's patron and idol, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain.
5
And he knew Ireland, and even Irish history, rather better than any of his servants seem to have done: he certainly knew de Valera better.

Both de Valera and Kennedy knew the wisdom of allowing myths to accumulate about them without gratifying their pedantry (of which each had his share) by correcting every record. For instance, Kennedy's entourage assumed that his only previous visit to Ireland had been in 1947 as the guest of his sister Kathleen, Marchioness of Hartington and her Cavendish in-laws of the Devonshire Dukedom.
6
But he had wit­nessed his father's honorary NUI degree conferred by de Valera in 1938. He had flown out of Foynes to resume his studies at Harvard in Septem­ber 1939. He had visited Ireland and interviewed de Valera on the eve of the Potsdam Conference (where his father wangled his attendance) in July 1945. His chosen profession was not politician but journalist: he reluctantly accepted the political career because of the death of his eldest brother Joe (who would have been a predictable echo of his father as far as we can judge). His first newspaper story appeared in William Ran­dolph Hearst's
New York Journal-American
for 2 February 1941.
7
It was an exceptionally fair-minded statement of the UK case against Irish neu­trality, and of the Irish case for its maintenance, stressing that US evalu­ations were the more urgent if its own security depended (as Franklin Roosevelt said) on British survival and ‘if Ireland's present policy weak­ens Britain's chances'. He stressed British fears of German seizure of Ire­land with ‘the Norway experience ever before them'. The story's head­line declared that the Treaty ports were ‘IRISH BASES VITAL TO BRI­TAIN' but Kennedy affirmed that the Irish ‘presented an equally im­pressive case … to give the British these bases would mean the involve­ment of Ireland in a war for which they are completely unprepared. The Irish government feels that its first and fundamental duty is to its own people. Except for extremists, of course, the Irish are completely sym­pathetic to the British cause.' This last depended on one's interpretation of ‘extremist' but the article made a very friendly case both for Britain and for Ireland, in a journal whose proprietor's bitter Anglophobia had hitherto abominated sympathy for ‘England' either from Ireland or from the US. And it concluded with a shrewd estimate of realities of anti-partitionism as a motive of the de Valera government:

Of course it must be pointed out that de Valera reportedly has stated that Neutrality for Ireland is now more important than Union. That he should reject an opportunity to fulfil his life-long ambition is, his supporters say, conclusive evidence of his deep sincerity.

When Robert Fisk reached the same conclusion in his
In Time of War
,
8
re­viewers expressed a surprise which involuntarily paid tribute to Ken­nedy's hard youthful head (not that they knew of it).

War service took Kennedy away from both Ireland and journalism, but four years later he reported in the same paper on the anti-partition cause in July 1945. He singled out Dillon as the heart of ideological dis­sent from de Valera, but while seeing in him an advocate of ‘co-operating and the building of mutual trust' with Britain, Kennedy diagnosed hope of pickings across the Irish spectrum if de Valera could be forced into a corner: ‘Dillon is attempting to pin de Valera to being completely in or completely out of the British Commonwealth and thus make political capital, no matter what decision he makes.'
9
Evidently, Kennedy foresaw the possibility of unity across the board among de Valera's opponents, hopes of revenge and sweets of office outweighing ideological hostili­ties. He also noted that de Valera saw it too:

De Valera's elaboration of his remarks left the situation to many observers as misty as this island on an early winter's morning. ‘Ireland,' said de Valera, ‘was an independent Republic associated as a matter of external policy with the states of the British Commonwealth' … De Valera, realising how subtle his position is and not wishing to alienate those who advocate a complete break with Britain, yet conscious of the fact that only with Britain's support can partition be ended, is skating along thin ice successfully with his enig­matic reply.

Apart from interviews with Dillon, de Valera, and what pot-luck he could make of Dublin and other journalists, Kennedy's sources for the second story may well have been his obvious ones for the first: the Irish diplo­matic corps. He had first encountered these islands as an appendage of US diplomacy or, as the Irish External Affairs officials termed embassy progeny in those days, ‘a diplomatic brat'.

However we may evaluate Kennedy as President, he seems to have been a good journalist. His presidential zest for the press conference with its hazards of unexpected tripwires from old colleagues arose from that. And he evidently saw in de Valera a pragmatist operating amid ethnic totems and taboos. The obvious question he would have put to fellow-journalists at the time – a particularly natural question from an officer recently in war service – was why de Valera had expressed condolences to the German Embassy on the death of its head of state, Adolf Hitler. The most authoritative answer he would have received would have been that in this gesture, widely unpopular outside Ireland, he strengthened his political flank inside it against attack from Anglophobe republicans such as Seán MacBride. And in that cool, half-mocking, half-celebrating exchange of destinies with de Valera in 1963, President Kennedy was pay­ing an informed tribute to the skills of the first head of government he had had a chance to assess at close quarters since the fall of his father's friend, Chamberlain. (Kennedy admired Churchill from afar, but had no chance for close encounter). This Irish eye of the young journalist might be forgotten by everyone else, but he might be expected to remember, with advantages, what deeds he had done in assessment of de Valera. And as a young aspirant for presidential office who read books and at­tended seminars on political power, he had more means of judging the success of de Valera's performance than that of any other comparable fig­ure. He continued to read in Irish history, presumably some of it cover­ing the twentieth century, such as the American writer Mary Bromage's life of de Valera.
10
What de Valera's influence on Kennedy may have been we cannot say: at all events it was more than that Edwin O'Connor al­lowed for the Irish in Ireland as far as Jimmy Kinsella, based on Joseph P. Kennedy, was concerned: ‘I'm about fed up with these home-grown Micks: there's not a quarter in the crowd.'
11
Lord Longford briefly cast de Valera for Kennedy's alternative father.
12

There was little more than a quarter (by Kennedy standards) in the crowd of de Valera's immediate relatives when he was born on 14 Octo­ber 1882, in Manhattan rather than Brooklyn (still a city in its own right). The confusion may have arisen from Kennedy's own birth in Brookline, Massachusetts: the slip may perhaps be called Freudian. The birthplace qualified de Valera as eligible for the Presidency of the United States. Curi­ously enough the incumbent at his birth, Chester A. Arthur, was saluted by the Dublin
Nation
as ‘America's Irish President', but is assumed by some historians to have been born in Canada (and hence ineligible) al­though he always assigned himself a birthplace in Vermont.

De Valera, excluded by his mother from her American home and her second marriage,
13
grew up dependent on his Irish relatives, without much status in the neighbourhood. In a famous passage, he declaimed on 6 January 1922, amid the Treaty debate: ‘I was reared in a labourer's cottage … the first fifteen years of my life that formed my character.'
14
An illuminating anecdote with which Pauric Travers begins his dispassion­ate and briefly comprehensive life of de Valera and shows his subject as the boyhood friend and fellow-folklorist (amateur) of tinkers.
15
It cer­tainly increased his credentials to speak for ‘the people of Ireland'. It also left him firmly at the bottom of the social heap.

His upbringing seems to have been increasingly loveless with the emigration of his aunt, the death of his grandmother, and the late court­ship of his Uncle Pat. In all of this the USA lay westward, a beacon to so many (especially those who never went there), for him perhaps a para­dise, his mother at its centre and himself left like Peri at its closed gate. His recollection of the parish priest of Bruree, whose masses he served, the Rev. Eugene Sheehy, was that the Land League priest had taught him love of country. Sheehy had campaigned in the United States on behalf of Parnell, then imprisoned in Kilmainham. On 1 December 1881 (less than a year before de Valera's birth) he had thrilled a Chicago reception with: ‘Nothing good – nothing great has ever been purchased without sacrifice. No birth – above all that of freedom – has been without pain' and: ‘We wish to destroy landlordism only as the stepping-stone to a great­er and higher end.'
16
America was the most obvious common ground be­tween the two of them, and the most obvious place for that instruction on love of country to begin. It was the apogee of Sheehy's career: there, he was lionised as the spiritual father of his people; back in Ireland he had been thrown into jail before his departure, and thrown into ecclesi­astical recrimination afterwards.

In Blackrock, de Valera was reprimanded for reading
Deadwood Dick
after hours. He would have heard some fragments of American news. In 1897, for instance, ex-Congressman Joseph McKenna of California, a Catholic, was appointed Attorney-General of the United States by Presi­dent William McKinley: there was some controversy about it from anti-Catholic agitators who were annoyed at finding McKinley did not share their sentiments, and hence Irish news reports would have picked it up. It was a time of particular sensitivity to supposed job discrimination against Catholics in and out of Ireland; the outcry would have drawn Irish Catholic attention and the President's fidelity to his word would have strengthened American standing. The Tories were in power and the chances of Catholic appointment to such posts in Ireland had disappear­ed with the Liberal defeat in 1895.

McKinley sent the Kilkenny-born Archbishop John Ireland of St Paul, Minnesota, to represent the United States in France at a commem­oration of Lafayette, and on the return journey Ireland spoke on 9 Oct­ober 1900 to the boys of Blackrock, where de Valera was now a pupil. As a result of Ireland's visit, a prize for religious knowledge was instit­uted, which de Valera won: it was a Douai bible in which he entered what little he knew of his parents' history. He must thus have been deeply aware of the implication of the American constitutional separation of Church and State, meaning that an archbishop could be chosen as the envoy of a secular state, in contrast to what would obtain in his Catholic-filled but Protestant-ruled island bearing the archbishop's name. The prize was awarded by the President of Blackrock, the Rev. John T. Murphy, a friend of Archbishop Ireland from his own long pastorate in Pittsburgh. There he had gained experience of the St Vincent de Paul Society and intro­duced it to Blackrock, de Valera becoming President of the Vincent de Paul Conference.
17
The lesson would have been that ethnic and relig­ious groups see to their own welfare (on which many US urban political mach­ine bosses would have heartily agreed, having seen their machines fat­ten on such principles): it also bred suspicion of state charity or welfare obligations. The philosophy was better suited to a wealthier society with stronger traditions in organised private charity than Irish Catholicism had known. It also bred in de Valera the vocational ideal, the sense of citizenship as obligation more than right, once the state was representa­tive in its government.