Ireland's Uncrowned King
RORTY, JAMES
WRITERS and WRITING Ireland's Uncrowned King Reviewed by James Rorty Author and poet; contributor, "Commonweal" "Harper's" De Valera and the March of a Nation. By Mary C. Bromage. Noonday. 312...
...On the whole, Mrs...
...When the Gaelic League was split between the followers of Pearse and the adherents of the non-political Dr...
...In 1913 he married Seanadh Flannigan, a talented actress and dancer...
...I will meet you wherever you wish...
...This writer thought so at the time and said as much in a wartime pamphlet...
...Although one of its heroes, De Valera, as he has himself acknowledged, had no responsibility for the Easter Rising, the blood of whose martyrs became the seed of the Republic...
...At the age of 16, he entered Black Rock College, operated by the Holy Ghost Fathers just outside Dublin, and at 22 he was graduated from the Royal University...
...As Arland Ussher writes in The Face and Mind of Ireland, De Valera is "in spite of all, of the line of Grattan, Parnell and Swift—the uncrowned Kings of Ireland...
...Soon he mastered Irish, called himself Eamon instead of Edward, and became intimate with Padraic Pearse, Thomas MacDonaugh and other militant Irish patriots...
...Hyde, De Valera, who was President of the Ard Croagh branch, led his group into Pearse's camp...
...He would take orders but have no part in making them, he stipulated...
...If he had been, he undoubtedly would have agreed with those who wanted to call it off when Casement, who had come to warn the Brotherhood that no real help could be expected from Germany, was landed by a German submarine, promptly captured, and shipped off to a British prison...
...Lloyd George, of course, was paying the inverted tribute of an old antagonist...
...De Valera, being left without means, sent the boy back to Ireland...
...A nation once again...
...Bromage, without meaning to do so, makes it pretty clear that he was, and that it was the greatest mistake of his career...
...Addressing Parliament in 1932, Lloyd George said of De Valera: "Fortunately for this poor distracted world, he is perfectly unique...
...After his death, when Eamon (christened Edward) was three years old, the widowed Mrs...
...312 pp...
...4.75...
...Already Edward Carson's Ulster Volunteers were drilling in the North...
...hence he was at no time privy to the plans for the Easter Rising...
...The same inflexible honor that made him defend Boland's mill to the last, the same prodigious will that sustained the nation through the Black-and-Tan ordeal, led him to repudiate the bargain that Collins and Griffith were forced to strike with the shrewd and tricky Lloyd George, although the terms of the treaty they signed were probably as good as anything that De Valera himself could have gotten...
...Ironically, De Valera, whose role in the Rising appears to have been that of the good soldier obeying orders he thought unwise, was the last of the Volunteer Commandants to surrender, and the only one of them to survive...
...Bromage hastens to explode the myth, propagated by O'Duffy's Blue Shirts, that De Valera is of Jewish descent...
...What we now call Eire might have become one half a bog for the Colonels to shoot over with their small dogs and one half a prairie for a few farmers to raise their herds on...
...He is always looking back to the past like a pillar of salt...
...But at that time the De Valera conscience asserted itself...
...Indeed, it is unlikely that the aging, half-blind De Valera will live to see the united Ireland to achieve which he has devoted most of his life...
...Was this another great mistake...
...With this caveat, however, it must be said that her book provides an excellent account of Irish history from the 1916 Rising almost to the present, and that the figure that emerges from her pages is a noble one, who has always commanded the respect even of his more severe critics...
...Now he is less sure, either that the bargain could have been struck, or that in the long run it would have been a good one for Ireland...
...John Gogarty—that if partition had ended in 1941 "the Ulsterman of the Northeast counties might have become the Irishman, as the Lowland Scot has become the Scotsman...
...Of his father, Vivion De Valera, little seems to be known except that he was Spanish-speaking, talented, educated and versatile, and that he married his Irish bride in a Catholic church and had his son baptized as a Catholic...
...Whether it was fate or De Valera that decreed the two parts of Ireland would march separately, they are certainly farther apart today than they were in 1941—and the current exploits of the Moscow-supported IRA are bringing them no closer together...
...Now or never...
...With respect to another momentous choice—De Valera's insistence on maintaining Ireland's neutrality during World War II—the verdict of history is less clear...
...De Valera answered neither wire...
...De Valera's early history was like that of many another poor but bright boy whose ability and industry earned him special opportunities for education and advancement...
...In one of her most fascinating— and depressing—chapters, Mrs...
...But there are some, even among De Valera's compatriots, who share this view of the stiff-necked Irish leader, and it would have been better, perhaps, if Mrs...
...He was even persuaded to become a member of the secret Irish Republican Brotherhood, financed by the Clan Na Gael in America, in which Sir Roger Casement was a leading spirit...
...Bromage had admired her subject a little less devoutly...
...Bromage has told it honestly and well...
...Your freedom, too, is at stake," wired President Roosevelt, a few days after Pearl Harbor, while from Churchill came this entreaty: "Now is your chance...
...Because he did not wish to abuse the confidence of his associates in the Irish Volunteers, few of whom knew what the Brotherhood was up to, De Valera declined membership in the Supreme Council of the Brotherhood...
...The De Valera story, like so many Irish stories, is sad as well as a little mad...
...There he was brought up in the household of his grandfather, Patrick Coll, a farm laborer in the village of Bruree in County Limerick...
...By exploiting England's and America's desperate need for Irish bases, could De Valera have ended the partition in 1941...
...As a young teacher of mathematics, De Valera was influenced by Arthur Griffith, founder of Sinn Fein, and by Douglas Hyde, organizer of the Gaelic League...
...The South's response was the formation of the Irish Volunteers, and De Valera was elected captain of one of its ill-equipped companies...
...In her first chapter, Mrs...
...Certainly there is something to be said for Ussher's belief—vigorously shared by Oliver St...
...But was he responsible, a few years later, for the inglorious Civil War that made a mockery of the Irish dream of freedom and peace...
Vol. 40 • February 1957 • No. 5
