Fanning Éamon de Valera

A Will to Power
Main
ISBN: 978-0-571-31207-8
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 400 Seiten

Éamon de Valera is the most remarkable man in the history of modern Ireland. Much as Churchill personified British resistance to Hitler and de Gaulle personified the freedom of France, de Valera personified Irish independence. From his emergence in the aftermath of the 1916 rebellion as the republican leader, he bestrode Irish politics like a colossus for over fifty years. On the eve of the centenary of the Irish revolution, one of Ireland's most eminent historians explains why Eamon de Valera was such a divisive figure that he has never until now received the recognition he deserves. This biography reconciles an acknowledgement of de Valera's catastrophic failure in 1921-22, when his petulant rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty shaped the dimensions of a bloody civil war, with an appreciation of his subsequent greatness as the statesman who single-handedly severed the ties with Britain and defined nationalist Ireland's sense of itself.

Ronan Fanning is a Member of the Royal Irish Academy, and Professor Emeritus of Modern History at University College Dublin. Among his books are the definitive history of the Irish Department of Finance and a remarkable biography (co-written with Michael Lillis) of Eliza Lynch, lover of the nineteenth-century Paraguayan dictator Francisco Solano López. More recently, he has been one of the chief editors of the Dictionary of Irish Biography.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Fanning, Ronan

Leseproben

2

The Greening of Edward de Valera

The Edward de Valera who finally moved out of Blackrock College in 1908 had little in common with the Éamon de Valera who won fame as the leader of the Irish nation in 1917 when he first became the colossus of the Irish political landscape. Indeed neither the studious and religious scholarship boy in Blackrock nor the rugby-playing and totty-twigging Dev in Rockwell seems to have evinced any interest in politics. Even his address to the Blackrock debating society on the university question was reflective of his engagement in education rather than of any political aspirations.

From his teenage years de Valera had meticulously retained papers and documents of all sorts bearing on every aspect of his life; the letter from the curate in Bruree saying that he had won a place in Blackrock is a case in point. The voluminous collection of de Valera’s private papers includes all kinds of papers from his early years – even such ephemera as dance cards, tickets and programmes for concerts and sports days. What is remarkable about the collection in the light of his subsequent career is that it is utterly devoid of any document relating to politics in any shape or form. There is no evidence to suggest he was not part of the broadly quiescent nationalist majority that aspired to domestic self-government embodied in the home-rule programme of the Irish Parliamentary Party, led by John Redmond since 1900. But in de Valera’s case it was a low-intensity aspiration and he was to remain markedly averse to any personal participation in politics until after 1916.

Nor do his papers contain any documents earlier than 1908 that indicate that he had taken the slightest interest in the Irish language. His authorised biographers refer to his having ‘heard the old people, including his grandmother, converse in Irish’ but there is no evidence that he was ever minded to join in their conversation. Nor is their claim remotely persuasive that ‘he was inspired with an interest in the Irish language’ by Father Eugene O’Growney’s Irish-language lessons, published from 1896 in the weekly edition of the Freeman’s Journal, the leading nationalist newspaper. Initially ‘Pat Coll and his nephew thought they would study them week by week’ but, given de Valera’s remarkable capacity for self-help and for studying on his own, their contention that, because his uncle’s interest collapsed after the first lesson, ‘de Valera was unable to continue the studies alone’1 is utterly implausible. Although his later expressions of regret that he had not studied Irish earlier in life were doubtless genuine, there are not even the faintest signs that he felt any such regret before 1908.

Edward de Valera’s decision to leave the Castle and take lodgings in the outside world inaugurated the transformation. For a decade after his escape from Bruree, Blackrock and Rockwell Colleges had shaped his view of his place in the world. He was content, indeed understandably proud, of his achievements in state examinations, in the debating society, on the rugby field and as a budding teacher. But his career prospects were dramatically constricted on 28 October 1904 when the Royal University awarded him a mere pass degree. Although his intellectual ambitions were unimpaired, the lack of an honours degree crippled his chances of ever obtaining the university teaching appointment for which he had hoped. Nor, despite his enquiring about applying for a scholarship at Trinity College Dublin,2 did he ever acquire a postgraduate degree in mathematics. He applied for the chair of mathematics in University College Galway in 1912, the year his appointment at Carysfort came to an end, but withdrew his application before the appointment was made, and he was also an unsuccessful applicant for the chair of mathematical physics in University College Cork in 1913. But in October 1912 he got a part-time and temporary appointment as lecturer in mathematics and mathematical physics in St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, the main seminary for Catholic priests, a pontifical university since 1896 and, since 1910, a recognised college of the National University of Ireland. This Maynooth connection was ‘of great value to him in subsequent years’ as his colleagues on the staff included some of the brightest priests in Ireland destined for elevation to the hierarchy, notably Joseph MacRory, a future Cardinal Archbishop of Armagh.3

In the meantime Edward de Valera had begun plugging a gap that threatened to jeopardise his career prospects as a teacher. The first decade of the twentieth century saw two major changes in the Irish education system: the dramatic advance of Irish as a subject at all levels of education and the establishment in 1908 of the National University of Ireland (NUI). The campaign for the revival of the Irish language was a key element in the resurgence of the Irish-Ireland movement and the Education Act of 1900 (de Valera’s last year at secondary school) so encouraged the study of the Irish language that by ‘1904 almost 30 per cent of all secondary students taking examinations took Irish … by 1908 this had risen to almost 50 per cent’. Controversy over the evidence presented to a royal commission on university education ‘making the case for the enhanced study of Celtic/Irish … had given an enormous fillip to the public standing and the morale of the Gaelic League … That the League had the public support of leading figures in the … Irish Parliamentary Party, and of a broad spectrum of Catholic clergy (including bishops) was a further boost to its confidence.’ The introduction of the Irish Universities Bill, which established the NUI, in March 1908 provided the backdrop for the League’s insistence that ‘the new university would be “an intellectual headquarters for Irish Ireland”’.4

‘We take it for granted that from the outset Irish would be a compulsory subject at the Matriculation Examination,’5 wrote Patrick Pearse, the editor of An Claidheamh Soluis, the League’s newspaper, on 8 February 1908, a week after the bill’s introduction. This was but the opening salvo in a ‘remarkable propaganda blitz’ in the months before and after the bill’s enactment on 1 August 1908. ‘The decisive turn in the controversy came when a number of county councils, galvanised by the League,’ resolved that the scholarships they awarded students entering the NUI be conditional on the university’s insisting that Irish be a matriculation requirement; these resolutions were forwarded to the inaugural meeting of the Senate of the NUI on 17 December 1908; the Senate duly adopted a resolution to that effect by 21 votes to 12 on 23 June 1909.6

The national ferment about the role of Irish in education created pressure for its inclusion in the Carysfort syllabus and de Valera was also aware of the provision in the Universities Act that degrees would henceforth be awarded only to students attending the recognised colleges of the NUI (in Dublin, Cork, Galway and Maynooth) would restrict his opportunities to supplement his income by teaching elsewhere. So it was scarcely coincidental that, when he finally took the plunge of abandoning the comforts of the Castle in Blackrock in the autumn of 1908, he moved into lodgings with a native Irish-speaking landlady, Mrs Russell, in the adjacent Merrion View Avenue. But his opportunities for learning Irish there were limited since it could be spoken only when her husband, a Scot who had no Irish, was not at home. Then and only then did Edward de Valera, conscious that ‘he could not afford to ignore the potential effect of the language on his future career’,7 decide to take Irish lessons in a branch of the Gaelic League in Leinster College in Dublin’s Rutland (now Parnell) Square.

Falling in love with his teacher immediately intensified an interest in the Irish language, initially rooted in anxiety about his career. Jane Flanagan, an ardent language revivalist who had already gaelicised her name as Sinéad Ní Fhlannagáin, was red-haired, pretty, petite and four years older than de Valera.8 A primary-school teacher and amateur actor, she was talented, intelligent and had been teaching Irish in her spare time for some years, winning the gold medal in the Oireachtas teaching competition in 1907. The attraction was mutual and immediate: they agreed to marry in June 1909 only months after they met, although Sinéad did not wear her engagement ring in public until just before their marriage. Having first passed the intermediate examination in Irish, de Valera spent his summer holidays that year in Tourmakeady, an Irish-speaking district in County Mayo where Sinéad was attending an Irish college. Their engagement was short – ‘We hardly knew each other until we were engaged,’ she later recalled – and if an impatient de Valera, who wanted to get married in August, had got his way, would have been even shorter.9 The wedding ceremony, in St Paul’s Church on Dublin’s Arran Quay on 8 January 1910, was conducted in Irish by a priest who did not know the language but to whom de Valera had taught the formulaic sentences; after a short honeymoon at a hotel in Woodenbridge, County Wicklow, they began married life in Vernon Terrace, Booterstown, Blackrock, but soon moved into 33 Morehampton Terrace, Donnybrook, where they lived until 1916 (see plate 7).

Edward de Valera’s foreign surname had the advantage of not requiring de-anglicisation, but by now Edward had become ‘Éamonn’ – ‘Éamonn’ became ‘Éamon’ in...