De Valera's Irelands (39 page)

Second, they were upset at the inclusion in this constitution of provi­sions which had found no place in the 1922 constitution, which seemed to involve a claim to sovereignty over Northern Ireland on behalf of the government and parliament elected in the truncated Irish state – albeit a claim that was accompanied by an abrogation in practice of this claim to sovereignty.

And third, the inclusion of a provision recognising ‘the special pos­ition of the Catholic, Apostolic and Holy Roman Church as the guardian of the faith of the great majority of the people' (a provision which, how­ever, also recognised a list of named Protestant Churches and the Jewish community, and which was eliminated from the constitution in 1972 by an overwhelming majority in a popular referendum), served to confirm northern unionist prejudices about the predominantly Roman Catholic character of the Irish state.

This, incidentally, found further confirmation in their eyes in anoth­er new provision banning legislation for the dissolution of marriage, for, while most Protestants in Ireland at that time did not personally favour divorce for religious reasons, they saw this constitutional provision as evidence of influence by the Catholic Church on the government of the Irish state.

Finally, the policy of neutrality in the Second World War, designed both to proclaim Irish sovereignty and to maintain the consensus pain­fully brought about over the preceding years on the legitimacy of the Irish state, had the effect of further alienating unionist opinion in North­ern Ireland, and of greatly increasing British sympathy with the unionist position. This was a further inevitable but unintended consequence of the policy to which de Valera had in practice given priority since the im­mediate post-Civil War period – vis., the achievement of a more com­plete separation of the Irish state from Britain.

Thus, in pursuing the unspoken objective of establishing the Irish state on a solid domestic foundation that would command the loyalty of all but a handful of its people, de Valera had found it necessary to pursue a course that divided this state more deeply from Northern Ireland and made re-unification more difficult, more distant and more problematic.

This was paradoxical, because he himself frequently publicly pro­claimed the re-unification of Ireland as one of the two major national aims – the other, and prior, aim being the revival of the Irish language. His real order of priorities was, however, disclosed in a speech in reply to a debate in the Senate on 7 February 1939. There, in his customary rath­er tortured style, he said:

Although freedom for a part of this island is not the freedom we want – the freedom we would like to have – this freedom for a portion of it, freedom to develop and to keep the kernel of the Irish nation, is something, and some­thing that I would not sacrifice, if by sacrificing it we were to get a united Ireland and that united Ireland was not free to determine its own form of government, to determine its relations with other countries, and amongst other things, to determine for example, whether it would or would not be involved in war.

The relationship he saw between neutrality and sovereignty is there sug­gested, as well as the priority he always in practice accorded to the achieve­ment and maintenance of sovereignty of the partitioned Irish state, as against political re-unification of the island.

In that same speech he even made it clear that re-unification came third and not even second in priority in his mind, for he emphasised that the object of restoring Irish as the spoken language of the majority of the people also took priority over re-unification:

For instance, speaking for myself – I am not talking about government policy in the matter, which has been largely embodied in the constitution – I would not tomorrow, for the sake of a united Ireland, give up the policy of trying to make this a really Irish Ireland – not by any means. If I were told to­morrow: ‘You can have a united Ireland if you give up your idea of re­storing the national language to be the spoken language of the majority of the people', I would for myself, say no. I do not know how many would agree with me. I would say no, and I would say it for this reason: that I be­lieve that as long as the language remains, you have a distinguishing charac­teristic of nationality which will enable the nation to persist. If you lose the language, the danger is that there would be absorption.

On the issue of partition itself, as distinct from the priority that he ac­corded to it, it is evident from the many oscillations in the position he took up in relation to Northern Ireland that de Valera himself shared to a high degree the ambivalence and confusion of thought about the na­ture of Irish nationhood which has been a feature of Irish nationalism throughout the present century.

Even in the brief period between 1917 and 1921 his ideas on this subject seem to have gone through several phases. As John Bowman has pointed out in
de Valera and the Ulster Question
, in 1917–1918 he advocat­ed the expulsion or coercion of northern unionists. In 1919–1920, when in the United States, he modified this position to one of proposing that such unionists should be assimilated into the new Irish-Ireland. And in 1921, when the issue had to be faced in a practical way in preparing for the Treaty negotiations, he shifted his position to one of accommodating the unionists within a federal Ireland, externally associated with the Brit­ish Commonwealth. Indeed at that time he even went so far as to pro­pose that individual Ulster counties should have the right to opt out of the new Irish state.

There were further changes of approach later, through which it is not easy to detect any consistent pattern. However, it is possible that the view to which he ultimately came – and one which is in fact strikingly relevant to the problem as it is now seen by many people in both parts of Ireland after two decades of continuous violence – was expressed in a speech made towards the end of his first sixteen-year term of office as head of the Irish government. On 24 June 1947 he rejected as so often be­fore the use of force as a solution:

I believe that it [partition] cannot be solved, in any circumstances that we can now see, by force, and that if it were solved by force, it would leave a situation behind it which would mean that this state would be in an un­stable position.

And he went on to observe that the problem was one primarily between north and south, and that Britain was not the ultimate obstacle to a solu­tion – something now very generally understood in Ireland, although still not grasped by some Irish-Americans in the United States:

In order to end this [partition] you will have to get concurrence of wills be­tween three parties – we here who represent the people of this part of Ire­land, those who represent the majority in the separated part of Ireland, and the will of those who are the majority for the time being in the British parlia­ment. It is true, I think, that if there were agreement between the peoples of the two parts of Ireland, British consent to do the things that they would have to do could be secured.

At one period Britain's emotional and strategic commitment to Northern Ireland was, of course, a major additional obstacle to a united Ireland, but with the diminution in importance of this factor, the result has been to reveal in all its stark reality that, as de Valera implicitly recognised in that 1947 speech, the fundamental obstacle to the political unity of Ire­land is the attitude of the unionist population. And this is a problem that the irredentist policies pursued by de Valera long after he made that speech in 1947 – policies that from 1949 until at least 1969 came to be pursued also by other parties in the Irish state in the period up to 1969 – served to intensify, rather than to moderate.

A pluralist or a mono-cultural state?

From the outset, the new state had a clear choice between two ap­proaches to the definition of its identity. The state could have founded it­self on the tradition of the leaders of the Rebellion of 1798 and 1848 who, influenced by the French and American revolutions, had proclaimed that the national objective must be to unite Catholic, Protestant and Diss­enter in the common name of Irishman. This would have entailed adopt­ing an overtly pluralist approach, both in religious and in cultural matt­ers, plac­ing the different religions on a genuinely equal footing, and rec­ognising the Irish and English languages as equally valid alternative means of ex­pressing the Irish identity.

However, the path actually chosen by the new state in these matters was a very different one. In relation to the language, a clear policy had already begun to emerge during the period of office of Cumann na nGae­dheal, at a time when de Valera was still in unconstitutional opp­osition. The language policy then adopted was determined by the sense of in­debtedness felt by the leaders of the national political movement that had begun in the late nineteenth century, towards the language move­ment in which so many of them had found their inspiration – and had in many cases (including that of my own parents) found each other.

The pursuit of the objective of Irish language revival had led, even before the First World War, to the introduction of an Irish language re­quirement for entry to the colleges of the new National University of Ire­land, to which the Catholic majority in the greater part of the island al­most exclusively went, in search of university education until the 1960s. This had a profound influence on the teaching of the language at secon­dary level. But in the early days of the new state, W. T. Cosgrave's Cum­ann na nGaedheal government decided to make the Irish language a basic, required subject at primary level and to make it also a required sub­­ject in the national intermediate-level school certificate examinations taken at age 15-16.

De Valera, when he came to power, went on to make the Irish lan­guage an essential element in the school Leaving Certificate itself, taken at age 17-18, which was the qualification traditionally used by most em­ployers as the educational test especially for clerical employment. More­over, as mentioned earlier, in his speeches de Valera elevated the revival of the Irish language to the status of the first national aim, taking prece­dence even over national re-unification.

By thus making Irish an essential requirement for so many pur­poses, and by requiring a knowledge of Irish for entry to and promotion within the public service, in the hope of reviving a language which had been moving towards extinction for several centuries before the state was founded, successive governments were effectively making a choice against a culturally pluralist society. For this process involved a de facto – though unintended – discrimination against people of the Protestant tradition, north or south, whose culture had effectively always been ex­clusively English-speaking. And this was of course also true of other sub-cultures that had developed amongst those who maintained their adherence to Roman Catholicism but who in the cities and towns and throughout most of the province of Leinster and parts of other provinces had been English-speaking for several centuries.

By the 1950s the removal of this Irish language requirement for the purposes of school examination certificates and entry and promotion within the public service had started to become a political issue, provok­ing controversy, but during the long continuous period in office of the Fianna Fáil party from 1957 to 1973 no change was made. De Valera's successors as Taoiseach after his elevation to the constitutional presidency in 1959, Seán Lemass and Jack Lynch, were unwilling to tackle this prob­lem, during his lifetime at least. It was left to the National Coalition gov­ernment of 1973–1977, led by Liam Cosgrave, the son of W. T. Cos­grave, whose government had initiated this policy in all good faith in the 1920s, to make the changes that eliminated discrimination in examina­tion and public employment against Irish people whose cult­ural tradi­tion is not Gaelic, although the Irish language remains one of the three core subjects in all primary schools and is still taught through­out the sec­ond-level cycle to all pupils. It also remains a requirement for matricu­lation to the four NUI universities.

Religious pluralism is a somewhat different issue. Just as he intensi­fied the divisive impact of the language policy formulated by his pre­decessors, so also did de Valera's religious policy drive a second wedge between north and south. The 1922 constitution had at least proclaimed a form of separation between Church and State, forbidding the endow­ment of religion by the state, although this did not, however, inhibit state support for an educational system that had always divided along reli­gious lines – at all levels including the state's own primary school sys­tem. Nor did it prevent some of the state's leaders from addressing the Holy See in terms of what was described as ‘filial piety'.

But de Valera had an additional concern over and above that of his predecessors. He had to dispel lingering suspicions amongst the Catho­lic Church authorities about his party – suspicions that derived from pro­nouncements by the Catholic hierarchy of the early 1920s against those who had opposed the Treaty in arms during the Civil War. And he also had reason to fear that triumphalist attitudes prevalent in the Catho­lic Church in the 1930s might lead the institutional Church to oppose his new constitution unless he gave some kind of formal recognition to that Church.

This led him to include in that constitution the provisions already referred to in relation to the specific position of the Catholic Church as the guardian of the faith of the great majority of the people, as well as a con­stitutional ban on legislation for divorce and other provisions in rela­tion to education and private property, to all of which he then added non-judiciable provisions on social policy which derived directly from Catholic social teaching of that period.

All these must, of course, be seen in the context of a situation where he was under considerable pressure from Rome to declare Ireland a Ca­tho­lic state (a constitutional proposal which de Valera firmly resisted) al­though oddly enough, in speeches he often, in referring to the state, used this phrase loosely himself.