De Valera's Irelands by Dermot Keogh, Keogh Doherty Read Free Book Online Page B

circumstances that brought these two parties into existence lingers on and while virtually none of their members have any direct recollections of these events, even the youngest voters continue to assoc­iate these two parties vaguely with their historical origins. Because of this, many Irish people still have difficulty in seeing the two parties in question as they actually are today, with their current policies and diff­erent styles of leader­ship and organisation. To many Irish people, and especially to those who support other parties or none, they remain the two ‘civil war parties’.
    In a very real sense, therefore, de Valera’s influence still pervades the Irish political system as it is perceived by those outside it, even though to the vast majority of those within the system, the active practical poli­ticians, the divisions that led to their parties coming into existence are almost totally irrelevant and long forgotten.
    Thus in twenty-seven years in active politics, I cannot recall a single disagreement or argument with an active politician of the Fianna Fáil party founded by de Valera that related to that distant past – the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 or Civil War of 1922–23, or indeed to the other events of the 1920s and early 1930s that provided the original basis for the main divide in the party system that we know today. Consequently I – and I believe most other active Irish politicians of these two parties – are often frustrated, and indeed irritated, to hear people outside politics referring to ‘the perpetuation of civil war politics’ in our party system. Yet in so far as this is the external perception of so many outside politics it is, like all myths that are still believed, a reality we have to face.
    I have made this point at the outset for several reasons. First, in so far as our existing political party system owes its origins to divisions eighty years ago in which de Valera played a crucial role, this represents a signi­ficant part of his influence on contemporary Ireland.
    Second, because however anachronistic – in the eyes of active poli­ticians at least – may be the common public perception that what divides the parties and their political representatives in parliament today is still ‘civil war politics’, this belief is a reality of modern Ireland that is equally a product of the controversial events eighty years ago.
    And, third, because having made these two points I do not feel that it is necessary, or indeed, relevant to contemporary Ireland to discuss the controversial role of de Valera in those historical events, except where in very specific, but relatively limited, ways that role may impinge indirect­ly upon the contemporary scene.
    What is, I think, more relevant is to consider how the actions and policies of de Valera in the period after the Civil War that ended in May 1923 have left their mark upon the institutions, and possibly in some res­pects upon the character, of contemporary Ireland. In attempting even a provisional assessment of this influence one must have regard, first, to the problems that faced the new Irish state in the aftermath of the Civil War, and, second, to the condition of Ireland today eighty years later. What has been achieved, what has been left undone, and what has been made worse over this period? And in relation to each of these ques­tions, what was de Valera’s role?
    Legitimacy
    The most fundamental problem facing the Irish state after the Civil War of 1922–23, in which those who wished to continue the struggle with Britain for an independent republic rejected dominion status within the British Commonwealth, was the stability of the state itself.
    A substantial proportion of its people – at least one-third, on the evi­dence of the general election of summer 1923 called in the immediate aftermath of the Civil War – withheld their consent from the new