The recent presidential election (not yet decided at the time of writing) put me in mind of the first election I can remember—Dev’s narrow victory over Tom O’Higgins in 1966. It is not widely known, but I actually campaigned in that election—for Dev. Other eight-year-olds and I ran around the schoolyard tearing up the glossy election leaflets of our Blueshirt opponents (who did likewise). How could people, I reasoned, even consider voting for anyone other than the only surviving commandant of the 1916 Rising, so piously commemorated only a few months before? By the time of his death nine years later, however, my enthusiasm had faded to teenage indifference (I had other things on my mind); and by the 1980s, as a student activist in the culture wars of that decade, I had renounced de Valera and all his works, as had most of my peers.
But where stands Dev 50 years after his passing? This was the obvious question to pose at this year’s Hedge School at the Electric Picnic, which fell precisely on the anniversary of his death. Turnout in our tent was reasonable, considering that our time-slot had pitted us against the biggest draw of the weekend—Kneecap on the Main Stage. (Surely Dev would have approved—three young lads from Belfast rapping as Gaeilge and taking a moral stand on a matter of international importance.)
One point made was that ‘de Valera’s Ireland’, and all the negativity that it conjures up, was ‘our’ Ireland, or rather the Ireland of our parents and grandparents; it was not the creation of one man, a point also made by Brian Hanley in his review of David McCullagh’s TV documentary Dev: Rise and Rule (pp 54–5). While Dev is rightly criticised for the divisive role he played in the disastrous Treaty split and subsequent civil war, he gets less credit for his role in building a unified national movement from disparate factions after 1917, nor for successfully keeping Ireland as front-page news in the US in 1919–20, which greatly stayed the counter-insurgency hand of the British in Ireland. And whether one agrees or disagrees with his policies in government, the fact is that he was democratically elected again and again, unlike most other European leaders at the time. But perhaps Dev’s most enduring achievement was in building a coherent foreign policy based on national sovereignty and international solidarity through the League of Nations and other international organisations. It’s an approach that we could do with a bit more of in today’s unsettled world.
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