Read Online De Valera's Irelands by Dermot Keogh, Keogh Doherty - Free Book Online

Fáil under de Valera in 1932, only nine years after the defeat of the republicans in the Civil War, was a seis­mic event for all those who were politically active at the time. It involved what appeared to apparent contemporaries to be a sharp discontinuity in public policy, and especially in the state’s relations with Britain – rela­tions that immediately deteriorated into an Economic War centring on both constitutional and financial issues.
    But in a historic perspective this discontinuity can be seen to be an illusion. The events between 1932 and 1937, when the new constitution was enacted, can now be seen to have been rather a continuation under a different leadership of the policy of seeking a separation of the new Irish state from Britain that Cumann na nGaedheal had been under­tak­ing through successful diplomatic action. The difference lay in the fact that the new government was not committed to the terms of the 1921 Treaty and felt free to disregard some of its elements.
    It was in this light, indeed, that the officials of the Department of Ex­ternal Affairs, as it was then, seem to have viewed the change of govern­ment, despite personal ties they had naturally formed with members of the Cumann na nGaedheal government that had appointed them and had built up the department.
    Certainly within days of taking over the reins of government, de Va­lera’s initial suspicion of that department (which he chose to head him­self in addition to leadership of the government) had dissolved, encour­aged by what today reads as a cloyingly sycophantic letter from its per­manent head, Joe Walshe. This suspicion was replaced by a conv­iction that the External Affairs officials saw their role as helping him to pursue the achievement of the nationalist aim beyond the limits that had been imposed on the former government by their moral obligation to honour the Treaty.
    The extent to which members of that first government had felt that this sense of moral obligation tied their hands in moving outside the Treaty obligations cannot be over-estimated; nor should the extent to which this sense of moral obligation was felt by them as a burden in­hibiting the rea­lisation of an aspiration which they largely shared with their anti-Treaty opponents. But, unhappily, having achieved sovereign independence with­in the commonwealth through the Statute of West­minster, their judgement of de Valera’s effort to go further became ser­iously distorted. This reflect­ed continuing bitterness at what they saw as his role in the initiation of the Civil War – a role, in their view, motivated by personal vanity and pique, rather than by principle.
    The fact that complete continuity of public administration was pro­vided after 1932 by the civil service, army and police that had served the Cumann na nGaedheal government during and since the Civil War was an achievement, the credit for which must be widely shared by: the pub­lic service itself, which thus established its political neutrality in the most difficult circumstances; the outgoing government which had consciously prepared the way for the change-over, including in particular W. T. Cos­grave and my own father whom he appointed as Minister of De­fence with the task of taking tough steps to ensure that the army would be loyal to a future Fianna Fáil government; and, of course, by de Valera himself who effectively resisted great pressure to purge the army, the police, and the administration that he had inherited.
    Apart from the removal of several police officers, he resisted this pres­sure – which paralleled very closely the pressures which the Cum­ann na nGaedheal government had faced from its supporters in 1923 (documented in minutes of party meetings), to purge its new adminis­tration of people who had served under the British government.
    The constitution of 1937 came to provide the basis for a