Courtney McGrailÉamon de Valera: A Will to power
by Ronan Fanning
(Faber & Faber, £20.00)
Felix M. Larkin
The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche wrote about the “will to power” as a basic impulse of the human species, and Ronan Fanning appropriates these words for the subtitle of this new biography of Éamon de Valera (but, perhaps surprisingly, he does not acknowledge his debt to Nietzsche).
Power is the prism through which Fanning seeks to explain his subject, and even to excuse – or at least make the best case for – some of the more contentious of de Valera’s actions. He thus describes his book as a “meditation on power”.
Dev’s attitude to power, Fanning suggests, was quasi-military: in other words, the leader invested with power must always be obeyed without question. As a Volunteer both before and during the Easter Rising, his obedience to the orders of senior officers was absolute. When he emerged as the leader of the independence movement after his release from prison in 1917 and for the rest of his long life, he expected – to quote Fanning – “deference, loyalty and obedience” by virtue of his status as leader, and generally he got it.
His rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 had its roots in what Fanning refers to as “his legitimate complaint” that the plenipotentiaries had signed the Treaty without first referring it back to Dublin for approval as they had been instructed to do. Fanning argues that Dev opposed the Treaty not because it was a compromise, but because it was a compromise that he had not authorised. Indeed, he immediately rejected the Treaty without reading it – on the grounds that the plenipotentiaries had flouted his authority.
The civil war that followed was catastrophic, and Fanning holds de Valera responsible for “the dimensions, if not for the fact, of the civil war”. The military men – the anti-Treaty IRA – may have been calling the shots, but Fanning argues that, by lending his support to those who took up arms against the Treaty, he conferred respectability on their cause. On the other hand, the anti-Treaty IRA was actually doing no more than the 1916 rebels had done: as Fanning observes, their resort to arms evoked “echoes of the minority decision that launched the 1916 Rising”.
De Valera atoned for his sins of 1921-23 by later recruiting the bulk of the anti-Treatyites into the Fianna Fáil party, which he founded in 1926, and persuading them to work within the political framework established by the 1921 Treaty – albeit with the aim of dismantling it. When in 1932 he entered government by the will of the people, he set about eliminating those elements of the Treaty that he opposed – and he did so with a touch of genius.
The process culminated in the new 1937 constitution which, Fanning argues, effectively brought the Irish “quest for sovereignty” to an end. By and large, Dev’s constitution has served us well for over three-quarters of a century. These were undoubtedly the days of his greatest achievements and his greatest glory.
Fanning gives us an interesting perspective on the now infamous Article 44 of the 1937 constitution, inter alia recognising the “special position” of the Catholic Church. By the standards of that time, the fact that other religions were also recognised was courageous. The demand of the Catholic hierarchy in Ireland was for exclusive recognition, but this was firmly resisted by de Valera.
To forestall any public criticism from the hierarchy, he sought the approval of the Vatican for the article as proposed. Their response was that they neither approved nor disapproved, but would maintain silence. That was enough to snooker the Irish bishops.
The success of Dev’s “quest for sovereignty” in the 1930s enabled him to pursue a policy of neutrality during the Second World War. This policy – to quote Fanning – seemed “singularly unheroic in Whitehall and in Washington”, but Fanning shows that it allowed for very substantial covert assistance to the Allies. Dev never got credit for that. Fanning is scathing in his criticism of those historians who have deprecated Ireland’s neutrality as a moral failure that served to isolate us from the rest of the world, and instead praises de Valera for protecting us from the horrors of war.
Likewise, Fanning dissents from the consensus view that de Valera should have retired earlier. While characterising his career from 1948 to 1959 as “marking time”, Fanning nonetheless feels that de Valera’s continued presence in political life – though not in government in the periods 1948-51 and 1954-57 – provided a necessary element of stability at a time of economic crisis. In this, as in so many other instances, this biography is resolutely sympathetic to its subject.
De Valera’s reputation has suffered greatly in recent years, largely because of the very hostile treatment of him in Neil Jordan’s 1996 film, Michael Collins. Too many people learn their history from such sources. Ronan Fanning’s biography will, if it attracts the big readership that it deserves, help to correct that misrepresentation of de Valera. He wasn’t a saint, but – with O’Connell and Parnell – he was one of the three most notable Irish leaders of the modern era.