Eamon de Valera died peacefully in Linden nursing home in Stillorgan thirty years ago this week. In Saturday's Irish Times Diarmaid Ferriter has written an article entitled "Time to consider the positive aspects of de Valera's legacy". No doubt further pieces will appear during the week. Ferriter argues that we should be now moving towards a more sophisticated understanding of the man and that maybe "it is time to reconsider positive aspects of the de Valera legacy". I have been waiting for some time for the arrival of a book that would be widely seen as a post-revisionist, scholarly treatment of 20th century Ireland and, while I haven't got around to reading it yet, it would seem that Ferriter's lengthy tome The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 fits the bill.
Tim Pat Coogan's 1993 biography was of course deeply critical of de Valera but its appearance was hailed as much as a political intervention as an act of scholarship. It could hardly have been otherwise given Coogan's time in the editorial chair at the Irish Press. Of course now we know much more about the peculiar ambiguities of the de Valera family and its founder in relation to that to that particular newspaper company. Ferriter on the other hand is a much younger historian and, importantly, is not parti pris.
Ferriter refers to the consensus view that de Valera "stayed too long" and was a blind relic of a bygone age, thus allowing his critics "to reduce him to a one-dimensional embodiment of the negative aspects of Irish independence-the economic stagnation, the emigration, the failure of the language to thrive and the continued partition of the country." Ferriter says that Fianna Fáil voters and all of his colleagues were happy for de Valera to remain at the helm of party and state and that, furthermore, Seán Lemass was in no hurry to take over. He contends that there is no reason at all to believe that the move towards the embrace of free trade would have come if Lemass had taken over the leadership in say 1948 as T.K. Whitaker was only appointed Secretary of the Department of Finance in 1956. But Bew and Patterson in Sean Lemass and the Making of Modern Ireland (Dublin,1982) have gathered sufficient evidence that Lemass was grappling with the notion of a shift in economic policy in the years after 1945 and it's reasonable to assume that a policy change might have taken place earlier.
Referring to the famous "comely maidens" speech, Ferriter argues that though it's easy to mock, there is nothing wrong with "an emphasis on a country at ease with itself, with an elevated sense of community, rights and responsibilities between the different generations, healthy children and scepticism that wealth would solve everything". Well, when you put it like that...
The trouble is that certainly at the end of the de Valera era Ireland might well have been a sovereign democratic republic but it was a failed economic entity and the population was marked by demoralisation produced by social and cultural stagnation. De Valera's upright patriotism and personal rectitude cannot absolve him his part in such failure. Tom Garvin, in his recently published Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long? is much more critical of the mindset which he regards as responsible for Ireland's appallingly poor levels of economic development during the first few decades of independence:
A bucolic quietus was to be the solution to Ireland's incoherent yearnings towards individual freedom, self-realisation, equality, individualism and authenticity as expressed dramatically in the writings and deeds of the revolutionaries and poets.
Garvin is convinced that the agonising reappraisal that eventually led to a shift towards a more developmentalist model was put off far longer than it should have and it only began properly when "de Valera as Fianna Fáil's lay archbishop, mysterious and remote in demeanour, was replaced by men of a distinctly non-charismatic stripe, managerial in style rather than romantic or pseudo-heroic". However Ferriter is on much firmer ground when he rightly praises de Valera's contribution to the maintenance of democracy in the 1930s - "a hugely dangerous decade for democracy". Also, de Valera did not shirk from confronting his ex-republican comrades who sought to bypass the need for any sort of democratic mandate.
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