Sir, – Diarmaid Ferriter’s reprise of de Valera’s life was even-handed (Our Father, Weekend, August 23rd) and that’s the problem. Writers on Irish history feel an obligation to be “responsible”, to enfold within the all-encompassing story of the so-called “Irish Revolution” those who inflicted a pointless and mad Civil War on the new state and crippled it at birth.
Our inability to call a spade a spade was honed by Dev himself, facilitated by his friend Frank Pakenham who wrote two influential if poorly-sourced volumes (one an official biography and one an earlier account of the treaty negotiations) that slyly justified the rejection of a treaty agreement that was signed by all five Irish plenipotentiaries in London and was then approved by a majority of the cabinet, of Dáil Éireann and ultimately of the Irish people in the election of 1922.
Again, in Ferriter’s article, we find Pakenham’s influence, as he is cited quoting de Valera that “it was the signing of the Articles of Agreement [in December 1922] without reference to the Cabinet in Dublin that alone threw every thing out of joint”.
To believe this requires one ignoring the fact that three days before that signing all five plenipotentiaries subjected themselves to a gruelling overland and over sea race to Dublin for a cabinet meeting to discuss the draft agreement, a meeting demanded by Griffith to the irritation of de Valera; that the agreement was signed by all five and then only conditionally on cabinet and Dáil approval – and signed simply because the British four times refused Griffith’s request for an adjournment and threatened immediate and outright war unless they signed. With de Valera’s bizarre refusal to go with them to London to confront Lloyd George, what else could they have done?
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De Valera perhaps played the second half of his career to the benefit of Ireland. But he is at least partly to blame for the deaths of Griffith and Collins in 1922, for the complete failure of the boundary commission that the latter pair were convinced would have at least meant Tyrone and Fermanagh join the Free State, and for widespread economic damage. The fact that he later used the treaty itself and its winning of dominion status for the new State to undo some of the damage is scarcely to his credit. Can we still not recognise such culpability without fear of being accused of perpetuating or taking sides in Civil War politics? – Yours, etc,
COLUM KENNY
Professor Emeritus, Dublin City University
Bray
Co Wicklow
