The writer and then taoiseach corresponded about a film project, writes Alison Healy.
George Bernard Shaw engaged in lengthy correspondence with Eamon de Valera in the 1940s in an attempt to set up an Irish film company to which Shaw would give the film rights of his plays.
However, the State and private investors missed out on the potential windfall when the fundraising efforts amounted to just £41,000, which may as well be 41,000 farthings, according to Shaw.
The Dublin-born writer discussed his "Irish Pictures Ltd" project with the then taoiseach between 1945 and 1947. The papers have just been released by the National Archives, as the file was closed 30 years ago when a researcher for Shaw's biographer, Michael Holroyd, sought access to the letters.
Considering the request by researcher Rosemarie Doyle, a Department of the Taoiseach official, Richard Stokes, said there was a difficulty in releasing the letters as the correspondence would show that the government of the day appeared to have "missed the bus, especially when one bears in mind the film rights of the Shaw plays would have been a valuable input into the project".
He said "there could be recrimination, admittedly of a hindsight nature, that the bonanza of royalties accruing from the My Fair Lady adaption of Pygmalion was lost". My Fair Lady was a major box office success and won eight Oscars.
However, Stokes came down in favour of releasing the files to Doyle, partly because the letters showed "Shaw's very strong Irishness and his nationalism as well as his personal munificence towards Ireland. This is an aspect which has been glossed over in Britain".
He said the British had primarily seen Shaw "for his Fabian socialism, for his agnosticism, as an English dramatist", but the current reassessment was "revealing him as a more enduring and universal playwright with a strong pro-Irish image and an Irish background of which he was extremely proud".
The letters show a warm and easy correspondence between Shaw and de Valera with the writer regularly addressing de Valera as "my dear Taoiseach". In a July 1945 letter to de Valera, Shaw drew an arrow to highlight his signature and wrote: "Note how legible my signature is at 89. Yours is utterly inscrutable. I don't know whom I am writing to. Up the Republic!"
In another letter, Shaw told de Valera that his late wife Charlotte "was devoted to you, holding you to be the greatest living Irishman except one". In that letter, he had been discussing the need for legislation to allow the bequeathing of gifts to local authorities. He had wanted to donate some property in Carlow to the local authority but had encountered problems. Shaw wrote that such legislation would be "the best available cure for the jobberies of the gombeen men and for the way in which local councillors who have never handled large sums of money sit dumb and helpless before items of £20,000 and hold all-night sittings wrangling over 18 pence for refreshments".
His suggestion led to the enactment of new legislation. On hearing that this was proceeding, Shaw replied from Britain that "it would have taken 30 years to get as far in this unhappy country".
When there was a suggestion the proposed Irish film company be named after Shaw and his colleague, film producer Gabriel Pascal, Shaw told de Valera "the name of a living man must not be attached to a permanent institution, as you can never be sure that he will not be hanged". But fundraising plans were not successful, with de Valera noting it seemed a high-risk venture for investors. "The State, on the other hand, could hardly engage in a project of this sort, although before this project was mooted at all we were considering the provision of a national studio," he told Shaw.
TD and War of Independence veteran Dan Breen was trying to raise funds from investors and Shaw remarked that he would get the money "if he prays for it and pays for Masses for the souls of all the policemen he shot".
However, by December 1947 Shaw wrote that the film company project had "fizzled out" as a "derisory amount" of capital had been raised. "To start with less than a million and a half in certain prospect and a quarter of a million in the bank would be financial folly." De Valera sympathised with Shaw, saying "if the end has had to come, all concerned will probably feel happier that it has come early rather than late". Shaw died less than three years later.