Part of Eamon de Valera's legacy was the unique party system in the Republic, which inhibited the emergence of political divisions along classical lines - liberal/conservative, socialist and capitalist, the former Taoiseach and Fine Gael party leader, Dr Garret FitzGerald, said at a weekend conference. Addressing a conference at University College Cork, on "de Valera's Irelands" at the weekend, Dr FitzGerald said that de Valera's great achievement was the highly successful restabilisation of a state, in particular, through the enactment of the 1937 Constitution. "To this restabilisation we have owed our ability to survive in peace both the second World War and the early traumatic period of violence in Northern Ireland . . . It is to that achievement that we owe the preservation of peace within this State during the last war, when the IRA lacked the support needed to create conditions of unrest that might have attracted German invasion, and again in the early 1970s, when the cohesion of our political system was strong enough to resist the efforts of a handful of misguided politicians to embroil our State in the violence that engulfed Northern Ireland. His unexpected decision to oppose the Treaty had severely destabilised the State at the moment of its foundation, greatly increasing the difficulty of mastering the inevitable resistance by extremists to a compromise settlement with Britain. He spent an important part of his life putting together again - successfully - the Humpty-Dumpty he had helped to push off the wall in December 1921," Dr FizGerald said.
However, he went on, a price had to be paid for this restabilisation in more than one way. "While in part he was building upon the work of his predecessors, for example, in relation to the Irish language in the new State, his efforts to solidify the people of the Irish State around a Gaelic, Catholic ethos, proved deeply divisive vis-a-vis Northern Ireland, helping to make permanent a political division of the island which many unionists had initially seen as temporary."
Dr FitzGerald said de Valera's influence on economic development was negative because it was based on the unsustainable belief that a small, open economy could be made self-sufficient.
He continued: "And his concept of the kind of society that could be built in Ireland in the middle and later decades of this century was unrealistic to the point of absurdity. By the end of the World War, his contribution to Irish statebuilding had been completed. Like many other politicians, he stayed around too long."
Prof Owen Dudley Edwards of the Department of History at Edinburgh University, said that talk of America during de Valera's infancy in Bruree, Co Limerick, including news of that country's support for the Parnell movement, planted it firmly in his consciousness not simply as the land of opportunity, but as a cornucopia. The blessings were likely to flow from the United States. It was an alternative identity to that of Britain.
American procedures, alien to so many inhabitants of the United Kingdon and Ireland, were natural to him, including the written Constitution, the identification of head of State with head of Government, a separation of Church and State, a cult of the yeoman farmer and of the sanctity of rural life," Prof Edwards said.