4 Eamon de Valera

There are many things for which Eamon de Valera might plausibly be blamed. The thing is that he is nearly always blamed for the wrong things.

Dev was, undoubtedly, the leader of the ‘second XV’ who took to the field after the first team had been shot in the wake of the 1916 Rising. He subsequently led Ireland into a period of cultural introspection and economic isolation, with arguably catastrophic consequences in the continuance of emigration and the failure of the Irish economy to operate.

There is a delicious story of Dev at Croke Park in the 1950s – the darkest period of the Irish economy until 2008. Dev was throwing in the ball to start an important football fixture, when, in the silence that fell as the ball hung in the air, a voice rang out from the midst of the crowd: ‘Good man, Dev, why not throw in your own two as well and make a pawnshop of the match like you have of the country?!’

Perhaps the greatest damage Dev did to his country, though, related not to his actions but his words, in particular the delivery, on St Patrick’s Day 1943, of a speech that has come to define Ireland’s sense of itself, albeit in a wholly negative way.

The speech, delivered in a radio broadcast on the national feast day, was really formulated to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the founding of the Gaelic League, the organization which had, with a high degree of success, spearheaded the effort to restore the Irish language and native culture, and reawaken national self-confidence, following the disgrace and death of the great nationalist leader, Charles Stuart Parnell. The main theme of the speech was the importance of continuing the revival of the Irish language. Mr de Valera began his speech in Irish, and then continued in English.

‘That Ireland which we dreamed of,’ he intoned, ‘would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age. It would, in a word, be the home of a people living the life that God desires that man should live.’

This passage is at once the most remembered and misremembered excerpt from what is certainly the most famous speech in recent Irish political history. Known as the ‘Dream’ speech, or the ‘Comely Maidens’ speech, or the ‘Dancing at the Crossroads’ speech, the hold it continues to have over the Irish imagination is extraordinary. For, in a sense, the entire edifice of modern Ireland is constructed as a reaction to everything that is contained in the passage quoted above.

As readers may already have noted, there is nothing in that passage about comely maidens, or dancing at the crossroads. And yet, most Irish people would stake their lives on the belief that it contains a mess of verbiage about both of these concepts. Although the phrase ‘comely maidens’ did appear in the official text, the recording of the speech as broadcast has Mr de Valera saying ‘happy maidens’. But ‘comely maidens’ adds much more than ‘happy maidens’ to the caricature that successive generations have created out of the de Valera dream. And so, it has been necessary for us to ‘forget’ that Mr de Valera, before delivering his speech, drew his pen through the word ‘comely’ and replaced it with ‘happy’. And, of course, Dev disobligingly appears to have omitted any reference to crossroads from this or any other oration.

The speech has been used, again and again, to summon up disrespect and contempt for the values to which de Valera was giving mere passing lip-service. Setting out to define what we might become, de Valera might in retrospect be said to have succeeded only in listing all the things we would no longer wish to be. As a result, the name of de Valera, mentioned in today’s Ireland, provokes, almost invariably, snorts of derision. Anyone seeking to mount any serious criticism of the way Irish society has drifted into a ham-fisted version of modernity will eventually find themselves face to face with a caricature based on ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, which they will allegedly be trying to rehabilitate.

Taken in context, for what it was, Dev’s speech was an innocent product of its time. But appropriated in retrospect, by a different age, it became, with a little judicious tweaking, a highly effective weapon of derision. The result of all this is that everything Eamon de Valera ever uttered, stood for or dreamt about is now not simply taboo – it is downright wrong. The correct course in any given situation is therefore as near as possible to the opposite of whatever Dev might have proposed. And this, more than anything else, is what has led us into perdition.

De Valera became a kind of national scapegoat in our pursuit of modernization and prosperity. Because he embodied and represented so much of what we had been, he became a convenient symbol in the demolition of the past and the construction of a future that was eventually to disintegrate under our shoes. He was, of course, highly suitable in this regard. He was old, even when he was young. He was tall and austere and somewhat blind. He had a fascination with boring things, like history and mathematics. He was an archetypal father-figure, and therefore an easy target for Oedipal rage.

But he was, perhaps most importantly, a Catholic who had perceived the importance of spiritual cohesion to an emerging nation and had taken careful steps to stitch the ethos of Catholicism into the fabric of the State. Having evaded the firing squads of 1916, he lacked the complex vision of the revolutionaries who had died. He had a literal view of reality, and was given to flowery rhetoric without much substance.

Because he was such an easy target, he made the assault on pre-existing values much easier than it might otherwise have been. Everything he brought within his embrace – the land, frugality, community, even the family – became fair game in the ideological war that would dominate Irish culture for the last three decades of the twentieth century. By paying them homage in one speech, de Valera ensured that they too became easy targets for those who, inspired by the sibling revolution that had swept European universities in the late 1960s, had decided to kick Ireland into a new shape.