Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (118 page)

The serried ranks of Innisfail

Shall set the tyrant quaking.

Our campfires now are burning low;

See in the east a silvery glow,

Out yonder waits the Saxon foe,

So chant a soldier’s song.
⁵⁹

De Valera assumed office shortly after the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had retracted Britain’s right to legislate for the dominions. As a result, he was able to use legalistic ‘salami tactics’ to slice up the Free State’s constitution bit by bit. First to go was its reference to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Then, in successive amendments, he abolished or limited the Senate, the governor-generalship and appeals to the Privy Council. Short of declaring war, the British were helpless. The second governor-general, James McNeill (1928–32), grew so irritated that he resigned early; and the third, Donald Buckley (1932–6), was simply told by De Valera to keep a low profile, effectively neutered by a hint about suspending the Irish government’s payment of the lease on his luxurious residence. When he welcomed the French ambassador he performed the only official function in the whole of his tenure.
⁶⁰

The prime opportunity for more extensive change came about through a crisis in the British monarchy. The old king, George V, died in January 1936, breaking the thread of continuity with pre-Rising times. He was succeeded by the playboy Edward VIII, whose association with an American divorcee scandalized Catholic Ireland, no less than Britain. Preparations for a secular coronation broke the sacred spell that monarchists had long cultivated. De Valera seized the opportunity to abolish the oath of allegiance in Ireland, and, through the External Relations Act (1936), to deny Britain control over foreign affairs. He also wrote directly to the new king, giving notice that his government intended to replace the Free State’s constitution. Paralysed by the abdication crisis, the British government barely noticed what was happening.

In December 1936 a curious monarchical moment occurred. Edward VIII abdicated on the 10th, the decision being immediately confirmed by the Westminster Parliament. But the Dáil in Dublin was unable to follow suit until the 12th. This meant that for one whole day – 11 December 1936 – the duke of Windsor retained his status as king in Ireland (if not as ‘king
of
Ireland’) without being the United Kingdom’s sovereign.

Such was the prelude to De Valera’s boldest step. In 1937 he introduced a bill to the Dáil proposing that the constitution of 1922 be repealed. The Free State was to disappear, and a draft
Bunreacht na hÉireann
or ‘Constitution of Ireland’ was put forward to replace it. The Gaelic version of the Preamble and fifty articles was to be regarded as definitive; the state’s official name was to be changed to
Éire
. The governor-general was to be replaced by the
uachtarán
or ‘president’, and the will of the people was to be supreme. The draft was accepted by popular plebiscite on 1 July 1937.
⁶¹

The British government in London did not yet accept the change explicitly. But it was recognized implicitly by the monarchy when George VI was crowned in May 1937 as ‘king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. However, since Éire had not withdrawn from the Commonwealth, and since the king’s claim to reign over ‘the dominions’ was not altered, Britain and Ireland both acknowledged some residual and purely theoretical role for the Crown.

The
Bunreacht
generated many hostile misunderstandings. The Preamble, for example, was worded, ‘In the name of the most Holy Trinity… to Whom all actions of men and states must be referred.’ This gave rise to wild accusations that the text as a whole discriminated against non-Roman Catholics. In reality, religious freedom together with the rights of all Christian faiths and of the Jewish community were guaranteed; and a reference to ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church’, though deliberately deferential in tone, made no provision for practical action. The first president of Éire, Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), founder of the Gaelic League, who was famous for lecturing forty years before ‘On the Necessity of De-anglicising the Irish People’, was a Protestant.
⁶²
De Valera resisted persistent demands to give Roman Catholicism the status of a state-backed religion, and on issues such as divorce or the role of women simply followed the social teaching of his day.

Article 2 of the
Bunreacht
reasserted the concept of a national territory covering the whole island of Ireland, as in the Act of 1542. This provoked howls of protest in Belfast, which claimed that Northern Ireland’s existence was denied. Yet Article 3 specifically stated that Éire would not govern anywhere beyond the twenty-six counties. Widest of the mark was the accusation that the
Bunreacht
of 1937 had created an Irish ‘Republic’. Acutely conscious of the painful sensitivities of the 1920s, De Valera needed no instruction on this point. Neither ‘the Republic’ in English, nor any Gaelic equivalent, found a mention. He had long since learned the virtue of constructive obfuscation.

In this same period, De Valera was extremely active in the League of Nations. His speech in 1936 on ‘The Failure of the League’ underlined the selfishness of the Great Powers and their disregard for small nations. It helped him to the League’s presidency, and strengthened his hand in dealings with Britain.
⁶³
In 1938 Éire succeeded in terminating an Anglo-Irish trade war, and in regaining the three ‘Treaty Ports’ of Spike Island, Berehaven and Lough Swilly which the Royal Navy had occupied since 1922. It was edging its way towards full sovereignty.

During the Second World War, Ireland immediately declared an ‘Emergency’ accompanied by strict neutrality. The Emergency was explained by the need to restrain the IRA, which had traditional pro-German sympathies and which perpetrated several anti-government bombings. (Evidence would emerge long afterwards of De Valera’s complicity with British Intelligence on this issue.) The policy of neutrality was genuine, seeking to avoid commitment either to Britain or to Germany. De Valera’s temerity caused immense anger in London, where the British government had assumed that all the dominions would automatically take Britain’s side. British attitudes were still largely configured in imperial mode, and, since Irish harbours were sorely needed for the campaign against German U-boats, a real danger arose that British forces would reoccupy them. Churchill first tried to tempt De Valera by dangling the prospect before him of a reunited Ireland. When this failed, he swallowed his fury. He knew how much trouble the ‘Irish Question’ had caused only twenty years earlier. In any case, Britain’s resources were hopelessly overstretched. But Éire did not tempt fate by cosying up to the Third Reich. Indeed, as the Nazi star waned, intelligence was shared with the British. Nonetheless, De Valera’s defiant, not to say gratuitous gesture in April 1945, when he visited the German embassy in Dublin to present his condolences on Adolf Hitler’s death, exceeded the normal demands of protocol. Despite his American roots, he made no parallel gesture on the death of President Roosevelt.
⁶⁴

After the war, Ireland could have expected British retribution. Yet Clement Attlee’s Labour government was less bullish than Churchill’s Conservatives might have been, and amid a torrent of post-war crises Ireland did not figure high on Britain’s priorities. The decision in 1947 to abandon India, and the collapse of the Empire, deflated Britain’s imperial pretentions for good.

By 1948, therefore, having after some delay repealed Emergency powers, John Costello’s interparty coalition, which had taken over from De Valera, felt confident enough to initiate the final break with Britain, and the British government felt sufficiently contrite to bow to the inevitable. On 18 April the Republic of Ireland Act was introduced to the Dáil. In five brief clauses, it renamed the state, cancelled the External Relations Act (1936), gave executive authority to the president, formally withdrew from the Commonwealth, and established the date of its completion exactly one year later.
⁶⁵
De Valera, the republican, though out of office, had finally triumphed after thirty-three years of struggle. Asked what his greatest mistake had been, he confessed: ‘to have opposed the Treaty’. Foster calls him an ‘old political shaman’.
⁶⁶
He would serve two presidential terms under the new dispensation.

In the meantime, the rules of the British Commonwealth were amended so that republics were not automatically excluded. Ireland did not seek to benefit. Then Attlee’s government moved the Ireland Act (1949), which both recognized the Republic and confirmed Northern Ireland’s separate status. The British were at pains not to disturb the huge number of Irish people who were living and working in Britain.

Nonetheless, the clumsy wording of the Ireland Act sowed the seeds of future conflict. One clause stated, bizarrely, that ‘Ireland shall not be regarded as a foreign country for the purpose of any law’. Another stated that the status quo in Northern Ireland could not be changed without the express consent of the Stormont parliament,
⁶⁷
effectively handing the Unionists a built-in veto on all reforms. This created the impression that the British government was retracting with the left hand what had just been granted by the right, and, in the eyes of many, provided the rallying point round which the near-defunct IRA could rise again. Henceforth, the clandestine IRA reverted to the fundamentalist brand of republicanism that condemned it to be treated as a pariah both in the South and the North.

The clause also lay at the root of a long-running wrangle between Britain and Éire’s head of state. According to the
Bunreacht
of 1937, the head of state’s official title in English was ‘president of Éire’. But British officialdom refused to use it, and invitations were politely turned down for decades. When the Commonwealth Conference determined in 1953 to regulate its affairs at the start of a new reign, therefore, Ireland was no longer a member. Queen Elizabeth II became ‘queen of Canada’ and ‘queen of Australia’ but not ‘queen of Ireland’. Though Irish people had played a prominent part in creating the human substance of Empire and Commonwealth, their representatives did not participate in the post-imperial club. Instead, they poured their enthusiasm into the Marian Year of 1954, an ultra-Catholic occasion that jarred with prevailing attitudes in Britain.

In 1962 an embarrassing legal anomaly was discovered. As part of a legislative spring-cleaning exercise, it was found at Westminster that the original Crown of Ireland Act (1542) was still on the statute books. It had been left untouched in 1801 when the Kingdom of Ireland had supposedly been abolished; and again in 1921–2, when the Irish Free State seceded from the United Kingdom. Henry VIII’s Act laid down, among other things, that all the Tudor monarch’s heirs and successors were to be ‘kings of Ireland’ in perpetuity. For the legal purists, the implications were astonishing. Elizabeth II did indeed belong to the heirs and successors of Henry VIII. So by right of inheritance if not by coronation, she was still queen of Ireland. The Act was promptly repealed.
⁶⁸

Also in 1962, the latest of the IRA’s long-running ‘border campaigns’ came to an end. Notwithstanding appearances, pockets of the diehard IRA had lived on, and for six years they had pursued a series of typical hit-and-run actions on the border of Northern Ireland. One incident, the inglorious raid on the Brookeburgh barracks of the RUC in County Fermanagh on New Year’s Day 1957, left two young men dead and produced one of the most poignant of modern Irish ballads. Written by Dominic Behan, brother of the playwright Brendan, ‘The Patriot Game’ pours scorn on the Irish Republic and on British forces alike:

Come all ye young rebels, and list while I sing,

For the love of one’s country is a terrible thing.

It banishes fear with the speed of a flame,

And it makes us part of the patriot game.

This Ireland of ours has too long been half free.

Six counties lie under John Bull’s tyranny.

But still De Valera is greatly to blame

For shirking his part in the patriot game.

And now as I lie here, my body in holes

I think of those traitors who bargained in souls

And I wish that my rifle had given the same

To those Quislings who sold out the patriot game.
⁶⁹

It was recorded by Liam Clancy and in the United States by Bob Dylan, who said of Clancy: ‘the best ballad singer I’ve ever heard’.