De Valera's Irelands (18 page)

While Churchill privately denounced de Valera as ‘that wicked man',
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he jovially advised Archbishop Spellman of New York that a dressing-down that he planned to administer to de Valera would ‘give the poor man a fit'. Spellman grimly replied that ‘if Almighty God should wish that De Valera should lose his life on hearing the truth, I shall say many masses for his soul.'
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Grattan O'Leary found himself cast in the role of emissary from an angry Cardinal Hinsley, demanding an explanation for the suppression of one of his sermons in Catholic Ireland.
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For once, princes of the Church found themselves in agreement with Russian com­munists. Ivan Maisky, Stalin's ambassador in London, dismissed de Va­lera as ‘very narrow' and ‘rather stupid'.
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In reality, there was another side to Irish neutrality and de Valera's dilemma. For all his later denunciation of an Irish government deter­mined ‘to frolic' with Axis diplomats,
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even Churchill recognised in 1940 that ‘the implacable, malignant minority can make so much trouble that de Valera dare not do anything to offend them.'
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When de Valera arg­ued that it was in Britain's interests to have a neutral neighbour rather than a weak ally, Malcolm MacDonald felt that there was ‘quite a lot of sense in what he said.'
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In Dublin in 1942 Professor Daniel Binchy of UCD coun­­selled Harold Nicolson that ‘a visiting Englishman is apt to be taken in by blarney and to imagine that the feelings of this country towards us are really friendly.' Neutrality was seen as a positive asser­tion, something that few had believed would be possible at the outbreak of war, an achievement which many ‘attributed to the genius of de Valera, who has thereby gained enormous prestige'. Others regarded neutrality as an ex­ample of divine providence, so that it had ‘taken on an almost religious flavour … something which Ireland is not ashamed of, but tremendously proud'.
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De Valera himself assured Menzies that his fellow citizens had a ‘passion for neutrality', an emotion that the Austral­ian prime minister had failed to detect among those of Irish descent in his own country.
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The arguments were complex but none the less neut­rality added a new layer of negative incomprehension to outsiders' per­ceptions of Eamon de Valera.

In his memoirs, Robert Menzies was disingenuous about his mo­tives for visiting Dublin in April 1941. In many respects, the Menzies visit was a pastiche of the Smuts mission two decades earlier. The Australian prime minister was on an extended visit to Britain, which with poetic justice weakened his hold on Canberra politics and brought about his own downfall at the end of the year. In London, however, Menzies con­nived with Churchill's critics, and may even have seen him­self as an alter­native consensus prime minister. At one level, a visit to Dublin would generate photo-opportunities likely to please Irish-Aust­ralia. At another, it might just enable Menzies to pull off a coup for the allied cause by talking de Valera out of his neutral stance.
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Menzies flew to Belfast, where he encountered the suspicion that Churchill was ‘going to sell us out to the south', and travelled onto Dub­lin by train. De Valera met him at the station. ‘He was a striking figure, tall and spare and ascetic.' Wearing a dark overcoat and broad-brimmed hat, ‘he looked positively saturnine'. In the talks that followed, Menzies found de Valera ‘vastly interesting', ‘a scholar, and in a quiet way, pas­sionately sincere'. There were ‘blind spots occasioned by prejudice' and ‘a failure to realise the facts of life' of a world at war, but ‘he grew on me'. Given the failure of his machinations in London, and his post-war identi­fication with Churchill as a fellow elder-statesman of the common­wealth, it suited Menzies to portray himself as naïve tourist. He was allocated a senior Irish civil servant to show him around Dublin, a man who could scarcely disguise his irritation with a colonial monarchist who innocently enquired if he might visit Sackville Street. In similar vein, he portrayed an exchange with de Valera over his own discussions in Belfast. When the Taoiseach spoke ‘pleasantly' of the Stormont prem­ier, J. M. Andrews, Menzies asked ‘whether he saw him frequently', and was astonished to be told that the two had never met. Menzies subseq­uently argued that a senior minister should be sent on a mission to Dublin, a step which Churchill resisted.
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In fact, Churchill had already despatched Malcolm MacDonald to Dublin for secret and fruitless talks in June 1940.
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When the United States entered the war in December 1941, another cabinet minister was despatched to de Valera. Lord Cran­borne reported ‘a long, friendly, but fruitless talk', mainly about partit­ion.
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Personal diplomacy might modify negative preconceptions of the Irish leader, but it was not going to change Irish policy.

Harold Nicolson was a writer and shrewd diarist, who moved in the inmost circles of power and had briefly held minor government office under Churchill. As with so many visitors, his preconceptions were shat­tered when he met de Valera in March 1942. He had expected ‘a thin sal­low man' with ‘lank black Spanish hair'. De Valera was neither thin nor sallow, although there was an unhealthy puffiness about his smooth face, while his hair was ‘soft and almost brown'. In place of the ‘huge round black spectacles' of photographs, there were ‘benevolent cold eyes behind steel-framed glasses'. It was not de Valera's ‘soft Irish accent' that intri­gued Nicolson but his ‘admirable smile … lighting up the eyes and face very quickly, like an electric light bulb that doesn't fit and flashes on and off'. Nicolson saw happiness and sincerity in de Valera's smile. ‘He is a very simple man, like all great men … Deep spiritual certainty under­neath it all, giving his features a mark of repose.' The two men talked about the war, with de Valera, fully aware that his remarks would be re­ported back, speaking sympathetically of the chall­enges facing Churc­hill. He criticised the British press for hostility to Ireland. Nicolson deflect­ed the complaint by saying that since his recent appointment as a gover­nor of the BBC, he had become equally convin­ced that every newspaper devoted columns of unfair criticism to the organisation. ‘He is amused by this, and the faint flash of his smile lights up his porridge-coloured face.'
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As the tide of war turned in favour of the Allies, Ireland and its mys­t­erious leader could once again be left alone. Britain's post-war Labour government had problems enough, and did not turn its attention seri­ously to Ireland until 1949, when it was necessary to respond to the final secession from the commonwealth, carried out by a coalition of de Va­lera's opponents who had unexpectedly ousted him from power in 1948.
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As a result, there remained one notable figure who had not succ­umbed to de Valera's charm. Churchill's victory broadcast of 13 May 1945 had contained an ‘envenomed attack'
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on de Valera's policy of neut­rality, so much so that when the two men first encountered each other at a Coun­cil of Europe meeting four years later, de Valera took care to avoid a for­mal introduction to avoid the risk of being snubbed.
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Yet one of Churc­hill's more intriguing characteristics was a desire to reach out to former enemies, as he had shown in South Africa after 1906 and with less be­nign consequences in his eager endorsement of the Free State in 1922. By fortunate coincidence, the two veterans returned to office in 1951, neither in good health and each mellowed by the ravages of time. The British prime minister was touched by de Valera's message of sym­pathy on the death of George VI in February 1952, even if the gesture was perhaps of no more significance than the notorious offer of condol­ence to the Ger­man ambassador on the death of Hitler. Churchill's res­ponse, of ‘sincere goodwill' to Ireland through all its many difficulties, can be read as a reply to the appeal that de Valera had made for British generosity in the battle of the broadcasts in 1945. The two men finally met over lunch at 10 Downing Street in September 1953. De Valera noted that his host ‘went out of his way to be courteous'. In private talks, de Valera as al­ways raised the issue of partition, and then suggested the return to Ire­land of the body of Sir Roger Casement. Churchill seemed sympathetic, although Whitehall second thoughts ensured that Case­ment's remains stayed in Pentonville for another decade.
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‘A very agreeable occasion,' was Churchill's verdict. ‘I like the man.'
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‘I liked de Valera,' Lloyd George had commented after alternately cajoling and threatening him in Downing Street thirty years earlier.
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No doubt outsiders who met de Valera were bound to some extent to be favourably impressed, simply on discovering that he lacked the horns and forked tail of British mythology. Yet, it is clear that the positive im­pressions of Eamon de Valera the man went far beyond modest surprise at his mere humanity. The question arises: could the positive elements of de Valera's personality have been mobilised more effectively on behalf of Ireland's interests in dealing with Ireland's neighbours?

Two of the most controversial aspects of de Valera's behaviour be­tween 1916 and 1921 remain his eighteen-month absence in the United States during 1919–20, and his refusal to head the delegation sent to London that signed the Treaty in December 1921.
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It would be a contra­diction in terms to condemn de Valera for having declined to make mol­lifying the British his first priority. Yet, paradoxically, with the British throughout the Troubles searching for a Parnell whom they might con­vert into a Smuts, de Valera might have found his enemies bolstering his position against his rivals. Haldane's testimony suggests that by 1921 en­lightened opinion in Britain was moving towards direct negotiation with the leader of Irish republicanism. De Valera's decision to decamp to the United States cast understandable doubt on the extent of his control over the movement. It was especially unlucky that the British chose as their miracle-working persuader in June 1921 the one man whose own politi­cal image could be discredited by de Valera's refusal to accept his assign­ed role, Jan Smuts. None the less, by the middle of the year, the British government had swung back to regarding de Valera as the leader of southern Ireland. Had he taken part in the negotiations leading to the Treaty, he might have dispelled some British misunder­standings about his naïvety, and would probably have been able to enforce more effective and obvious control over his delegates.

As a might-have-been, the strategy of dealing more frequently and openly with the British is open to one obvious riposte: what, beyond his intriguing smile, would de Valera have had to offer? A persuasive inter­pretation of his later career sees his emphasis upon partition as a cover for a general retreat after 1923 from the substantive case against the Treaty, whose provisions he either tamed or accepted as the years went by.
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The problem with this interpretation is that while British observers found de Valera's obsession with the border tedious and impenetrable, they never doubted the sincerity with which he harped upon the issue. It can be argued that Smuts, if somewhat brutal, was correct in contend­ing that Ulster had ceased to be a practical obstacle by the summer of 1921. Yet while we can see how Griffith would embrace a compromise agreement with the British for reasons of principle and Collins would support him on tactical grounds, it is hard to imagine a more flexible de Valera under any circumstances.

It is just possible that de Valera might have exploited his charm to conduct a more subtle campaign against partition from the 1930s, not head-on but by concentrating on the practical grievances of the northern nationalist minority. While British politicians of all parties were formally committed to preserving the link with Northern Ireland, it would be easy to over-estimate the closeness of relationships between Westmin­ster and Stormont, as Menzies discovered in Belfast in 1941.
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The civil rights move­ment of the mid-1960s suggested that Northern Ireland could be destabi­lised far more effectively by Catholics trying to get into the north­ern state than had ever been the case with their campaigns to get out of it. How­ever, to hold the British responsible for any aspect of northern adminis­tration would have been, for de Valera, too close to recognising the legi­timacy of their position. In any case, the war ensured that North­ern Ire­land had a political credit balance on which it drew for two somnolent decades, while the principled stand of neutrality ruled out even such small favours as the return of Casement's bones.
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Fundamentally, then, we come face to face with de Valera, not the ogre that many imagined, nor the amiable companion that a surprised few discovered, but as that republican symbol that he conceived himself to be. ‘Some said of de Valera that he had the well springs of greatness,' wrote Grattan O'Leary. ‘No one meeting him and looking into his eyes as I did could doubt that statement.' O'Leary never forgot de Valera's ‘hawk like face', even though they met only once.
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Yet, de Valera him­self dis­counted the personal factor in diplomacy. In 1938, he was a guest at Mal­colm MacDonald's country home. While his host busied himself with traditional diplomatic courtesies, even to removing Northern Irish whis­key from his drinks tray, de Valera chilled the American ambassad­or by dismissing personal factors altogether: ‘the individual who project­ed the cause was merely an instrument'.
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It was probably for this reason that Malcolm MacDonald concluded that de Valera's ‘greatness as a leader' was ‘confined to certain limits'.
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One of those limits may have been that he kept too close a rein on his own humanity. Eamon de Valera towers over twentieth-century Ireland, and it is right that scholars should study him as something more than a passing figure in a historical cartoon strip. Yet in the last resort there is little reason to think that Irish history would have been notably different if de Valera's personality had been as promi­nently engaged as his principles.