De Valera's Irelands (38 page)

And even if de Valera were to attempt to lead the republicans of the post-Civil War era along such a constitutional path, how many would be willing to follow him? Would that number be sufficient to ensure stab­i­lity and peace under the new dispensation, or would too many remain outside the system, continuing to challenge its legitimacy and to claim the right, if a suitable opportunity arose, of using arms against it?

It is for the historians to give their verdicts in due course on the man­ner in which de Valera tackled this problem. In particular it will be in­teresting to see to what extent historians eventually judge the events of the period 1926 to 1937 – from the decision to found a constitutional party, Fianna Fáil, in 1926 and to bring it into the Dáil in 1927, to the enactment of the new constitution of 1937 – to have been the result of a plan thought out from the outset, or to have been the product merely of a process of groping forward towards a goal perhaps only imperfectly defined, even in de Valera's own mind.

For the observer of contemporary Ireland it is sufficient to remark that the outcome of the process started in 1926 included a very sub­stan­tial achievement, in the form of a largely successful conversion of the 1922 constitution (the verbal formulation of which – although not its real con­tent – had necessarily been determined in a number of key res­pects by the outside force of the Anglo-Irish Treaty provisions), into a docu­ment expressed in the language of nationalism to a degree that rendered it ac­ceptable to the vast majority of those who had rejected the Treaty.

Although the resultant reconciliation with extreme republicanism was incomplete – witness the amount of blood spilt in Ireland, north and south, in the following fifty years and especially in the past twenty-five years – it would be wrong to under-estimate the seminal importance of this process of establishing within the new state a national consensus – one that soon secured the acceptance by all but a tiny handful of irrecon­cilables of the legitimacy and authority of the institutions of the state.

It is to that achievement that we owe the preservation of peace with­in this state both during the last war, when the IRA lacked the support needed to create conditions of unrest that might have attracted German invasion, and again in the early 1970s when the cohesion of our political system was strong enough to resist the efforts of a handful of misguided politicians to embroil our state in the violence that engulfed Northern Ireland.

The fact that even today the extent of the potential dangers we faced on those two occasions remains largely unappreciated by public opinion is itself a tribute to the success of de Valera's stabilisation policy. His un­expected decision to oppose the Treaty had severely destabilised the state at the moment of its foundation, greatly increasing the difficulty of mas­tering the inevitable resistance by extremists to a compromise settle­ment with Britain. But he spent an important part of his life putting to­gether again – successfully – the Humpty-Dumpty he had helped to push off the wall in December 1921.

The accession to power of Fianna Fáil under de Valera in 1932, only nine years after the defeat of the republicans in the Civil War, was a seis­mic event for all those who were politically active at the time. It involved what appeared to apparent contemporaries to be a sharp discontinuity in public policy, and especially in the state's relations with Britain – rela­tions that immediately deteriorated into an Economic War centring on both constitutional and financial issues.

But in a historic perspective this discontinuity can be seen to be an illusion. The events between 1932 and 1937, when the new constitution was enacted, can now be seen to have been rather a continuation under a different leadership of the policy of seeking a separation of the new Irish state from Britain that Cumann na nGaedheal had been under­tak­ing through successful diplomatic action. The difference lay in the fact that the new government was not committed to the terms of the 1921 Treaty and felt free to disregard some of its elements.

It was in this light, indeed, that the officials of the Department of Ex­ternal Affairs, as it was then, seem to have viewed the change of govern­ment, despite personal ties they had naturally formed with members of the Cumann na nGaedheal government that had appointed them and had built up the department.

Certainly within days of taking over the reins of government, de Va­lera's initial suspicion of that department (which he chose to head him­self in addition to leadership of the government) had dissolved, encour­aged by what today reads as a cloyingly sycophantic letter from its per­manent head, Joe Walshe. This suspicion was replaced by a conv­iction that the External Affairs officials saw their role as helping him to pursue the achievement of the nationalist aim beyond the limits that had been imposed on the former government by their moral obligation to honour the Treaty.

The extent to which members of that first government had felt that this sense of moral obligation tied their hands in moving outside the Treaty obligations cannot be over-estimated; nor should the extent to which this sense of moral obligation was felt by them as a burden in­hibiting the rea­lisation of an aspiration which they largely shared with their anti-Treaty opponents. But, unhappily, having achieved sovereign independence with­in the commonwealth through the Statute of West­minster, their judgement of de Valera's effort to go further became ser­iously distorted. This reflect­ed continuing bitterness at what they saw as his role in the initiation of the Civil War – a role, in their view, motivated by personal vanity and pique, rather than by principle.

The fact that complete continuity of public administration was pro­vided after 1932 by the civil service, army and police that had served the Cumann na nGaedheal government during and since the Civil War was an achievement, the credit for which must be widely shared by: the pub­lic service itself, which thus established its political neutrality in the most difficult circumstances; the outgoing government which had consciously prepared the way for the change-over, including in particular W. T. Cos­grave and my own father whom he appointed as Minister of De­fence with the task of taking tough steps to ensure that the army would be loyal to a future Fianna Fáil government; and, of course, by de Valera himself who effectively resisted great pressure to purge the army, the police, and the administration that he had inherited.

Apart from the removal of several police officers, he resisted this pres­sure – which paralleled very closely the pressures which the Cum­ann na nGaedheal government had faced from its supporters in 1923 (documented in minutes of party meetings), to purge its new adminis­tration of people who had served under the British government.

The constitution of 1937 came to provide the basis for a consensus on which the modern Irish state has been built. It represented an asser­tion of sovereignty in terms more acceptable to nationalists than those of the Statute of Westminster six years earlier. That statute had secured sovereign independence for the dominions, including the Irish state. In international law this independence clearly included the right to remain neutral in a conflict involving Great Britain. But many British politicians cherished the illusion that the member states of the common­wealth, while independent, must necessarily join with Britain in any major war in which she was engaged – relying in some cases upon the abstract concept of the indivisibility of the crown.

But for many Irish people, and particularly for de Valera himself, the right to remain neutral, and the assertion of that right, was the ultimate test of sovereignty and independence. A practical obstacle to the exercise of this right was the continued occupation and use of certain port faci­lities in the Irish state by British forces under the terms of the Treaty. In 1938, as part of the settlement that ended the Economic War, de Valera negotiated the return of these facilities and the departure of British for­ces, and despite discussion of a possible defence pact during these nego­tiations, eventually this was secured without any commitment to make these bases available again in time of war.

This obstacle to neutrality having been removed, de Valera, by that time disillusioned by the collapse of collective security under the League of Nations, first in the case of Manchuria and later in the case of Italy's invasion of Abyssinia, declared Irish neutrality, and maintained formal neutrality throughout the war – while at the same time secretly working closely with the British authorities.

This policy commanded the full support of the political opposition, with a single outstanding exception. James Dillon, who in 1942 retired from the position of deputy leader of the principal opposition party, Fine Gael, and became an independent member of the Dáil on an issue which he saw as one between good and evil – but significantly only after the USA had joined the war.

While the assertion of sovereignty was the primary motivation of neutrality it would be wrong to suggest that it was the sole consideration for de Valera, or indeed that it played any part in the ready acceptance of this policy by his political opponents. Amongst all political parties there was, I believe, the further, powerful, albeit for obvious reasons un­spoken, consideration that to have entered voluntarily into the conflict on the allied side within sixteen years of the end of a civil war would have created the danger of a revival of that bitter conflict. This perceived danger had been increased by the IRA's immediate pre-war decision to ‘declare war' on Britain and to set off bombs in British cities. As was very clear in Spain during the closing period of Franco's rule, a people who have experienced a civil war will go to immense lengths to avoid a re­currence of it.

The significance of this factor in securing all party support for neut­rality, has, I believe, been under-estimated by historians because during the war it was never explicitly stated by any politician of any party – for obvious reasons. But it was, I believe, subsequently mentioned in retro­spective interviews by two senior Fianna Fáil politicians, Seán Lemass and Seán McEntee, and I believe that explains my own father's support for neutrality despite his deep commitment to the allied cause.

Of course de Valera also used another argument for neutrality; vis., that so long as Ireland remained politically divided, with part of the is­land under British sovereignty, the Irish state should not engage in hos­tilities as an ally of Britain. The employment of this argument, largely per­haps for tactical reasons at the time, laid the ground for a decision of a later Irish government, led by de Valera's opponents, and in which Mr Seán McBride was Minister for External Affairs, not to join NATO in 1949 – a decision that subsequently hardened into a commitment to neutrality that has survived until the last decade of this century.

This commitment has since been strongly held by many who have forgotten the ‘partition' factor that had been presented as the initial ra­tionale of this policy, and who know nothing of the pragmatic basis for war-time neutrality – the fear of a renewal of civil war. There are indeed many today who would wish Irish neutrality to be maintained even if north and south were to be brought together politically.

What is more generally recognised by historians, however, is the extent to which the consensus on neutrality (as well as the entry to the army of many children of the leading members of both political parties) healed the divisions of the Civil War, uniting all in a common cause.

The Northern Ireland question

But, to return to de Valera's concern to legitimise the Irish state in the eyes of republicans, there was a price to be paid for this, for it was in­evitable that the single-mindedness with which de Valera felt it nec­es­sary to pursue this goal would impinge unfavourably on the attain­ment of certain other objectives.

First of all, by pressing ahead to remove the crown from the con­stitution – while avoiding at that stage declaring the state to be a Repub­lic – and by the insertion in the new constitution of certain provisions designed to secure the assent of as many republicans as possible, and of other provisions designed to head off any potential opposition from the Roman Catholic Church, de Valera certainly made the resolution of the problem of Northern Ireland more difficult – to an extent greater than he himself perhaps recognised.

From the outset, the Northern Ireland entity had been based on shaky foundations. First of all, its boundaries were, of course, arbitrary – chosen to maximise the territory involved within the limits imposed by a con­cern to limit the Catholic, nationalist minority to one-third of the popu­lation.

And second, whatever may have been said publicly at that time there is, I believe, evidence that the most that many unionists then hop­ed to secure out of this arrangement, was a temporary postponement of the united Ireland that had been clearly envisaged as an outcome in the British act establishing a Northern Ireland parliament in 1920.

The survival of Northern Ireland for eighty years, and the determi­na­tion of the majority of its unionist population today to resist unifica­tion, obscures the possibility that if the Irish state had evolved differently, the north-south relationship might also have turned out dif­ferently dur­ing this period. Even in 1937, when de Valera presented his new constitu­tion to the people, the sense of the temporary character of the arrange­ment under which Northern Ireland remained part of the United King­dom was still an underlying feature of northern unionist opinion – des­pite the rhetoric of ‘no surrender'. This is, I believe, an under-research­ed element of the history of this island – partly, of course, because it is not docu­mented, belonging as it does more to the minds rather than to the words and actions of those involved.

The constitution of 1937 helped to harden northern unionist atti­tudes in three respects.

First, the elimination of the crown from the constitution offended the monarchist sentiments of most northern unionists.