Prime Minister of Freedom

EIRE Prime Minister of Freedom

(See Cover)

All Ireland will be free when the palm and the shamrock are worn together.

Old Irish proverb.

This week, as for the first time since 1799 Palm Sunday and St. Patrick's Day came together, there were ominous whispers in Eire that "big events" were in the offing. The outlawed Irish Republican Army was expected to plant a few more bombs in Great Britain. Northern Ireland might blaze with revolt against British rule.

But the day came and went without violence or total freedom. The Irish Prime Minister made a St. Patrick's Day radio speech to the U. S. in which, as usual, he briskly criticized the British Government. New York City's numerous and enthusiastic Irish defiantly paraded up Fifth Avenue against a blinding snowstorm. And the period of great expectations moved to Easter Week, a time of the year which can be and has been most productive of Irish history. It may be moved still further forward, but World War II may well bring a turning point, an end of a 300-year era of Irish history.

On Easter Monday, 1916, during World War I, a few thousand determined Irishmen decided that "Britain's extremity is Ireland's opportunity" and thought the time ripe for revolt. As a popular rising, the Easter Rebellion was a decided flop. In only four of the country's 32 counties did Irishmen take to arms. Only one small but aggressive group of people took part in it. The majority of Irishmen thought it was foolishly timed, were more angry than sympathetic about the commotion it caused.

But years and the English were to change the six-day Easter Rebellion into a hallowed event in Irish history. The revolters who lived through it became heroes, and those who died because of it were added to that list of Irish martyrs --Pat Pearse, Robert Emmet, Terence MacSwiney--which has been growing ever longer since the day in 1603 when proud Hugh O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, last of the great Irish princes, was forced to kneel humbly before King James I.

The immediate aftermath of Easter Week was the execution of 5 leaders, the sentencing of 75 revolters to penal servitude, the imprisonment of 23, the internment of 1,841. Later, in London, the best known of the Easter Week conspirators, Sir Roger Casement, died on the gallows, despite the pleas of Pope Benedict XV and the U. S. Senate. British civil servant turned Irish patriot, Sir Roger had been arrested on the Irish coast only a few hours after landing from a German submarine. His trial was in the glorious tradition; before a British judge and jury he argued Ireland's case against England fully as eloquently as had young Robert Emmet, the heroic Protestant Irishman who had led an attack on Dublin Castle, 113 years before.

Careers as well as martyrs were made that Easter Week, and among those who carved a future for himself was a young, gawky, until then unknown professor of mathematics. Given a battalion command, he led out 50 partly armed men to hold two miles of strategic railway line and canal in Dublin. First he seized Boland's flour mills and bakery as his headquarters. Then, as the British troops came nearer, he called his men together and addressed them: "You have but one life to live, and but one death to die. See that you do both like men.

His contingent fought well. For a whole day a mere handful of his "battalion" prevented 2,000 Sherwood Foresters from crossing Mount Street Bridge and thus proceeding to the centre of the rebellion in the General Post Office in "Sackville Street." Some 300 Britons were wounded or killed trying to force the bridgehead. Moreover, when the fight was over he was the last commander to surrender, and then only on the written orders of his superior. "If the people had only risen, even with knives and forks--" he bitterly complained as he gave in.

A month later, General Sir John Maxwell, British commander at Dublin, announced that the youthful professor, like the other battalion officers, had been condemned to death, and that unlike the others, his sentence had been commuted to penal servitude for life in a British prison. The reason for this clemency could only be guessed, but the fact that this young rebel was born in the U. S. of a Spanish father and an Irish mother and might technically even be considered a U. S. citizen, was an important argument for a Great Britain just then anxious for U. S. aid in the War. This U. S.-born Spanish-Irishman was christened in New York's St. Agnes' Church as Edward. In Ireland where he lived from the age of 2 1/2, he adopted the Gaelic equivalent, Eamon. His full name was Eamon de Valera.

Released from his English jail by a general amnesty in 1917, Eamon de Valera returned to Ireland to become an idol. Though it meant being beaten up, arrested and even imprisoned, thousands of Irishmen persisted in wearing publicly little badges bearing his picture. A million homes had his portrait hung in the place of honor. Irish Republicans inconsistently sang a song with the refrain, "We'll crown de Valera King of Ireland."

In no time he became head of Sinn Fein (which means "ourselves alone"), a political party which, until dominated by de Valera and his Republican cohorts, had worked for no Republic but only a separate Irish Parliament under the British monarchy. That was much too tame a program for the new, determined leader. Before long he was elected an M.P., fully entitled to sit in the British House of Commons -- a privilege he never enjoyed, since he refused at that time to take an oath of allegiance to the British King. In the 1918 general election de Valera & Party swept the Irish polls with the slogans "Up the Rebels!" and "Up de Valera ! " Instead of taking their seats at Westminster, where they would be in a permanent minority, the newly elected M.P.s met at Dublin as Dail Eireann (Assembly of Ireland) and called them selves T.D.'s or Teachta Dala (Assembly Deputy).

About this time the British conveniently "discovered" a pro-German plot in Ireland and in a huge midnight round-up arrested and carted off to England hundreds of prominent Sinn Feiners, including de Valera. The T.D.'s still at large then met, proclaimed the Irish Republic and named de Valera its "President." After that daring supporters smuggled the "President" out of jail, and the Irish "secret service" of Michael Collins, also a veteran of the Easter Rebellion, managed to get him on a ship to the U. S., long fertile ground for Irish nationalism. There he did what many another Irish patriot had done before--raised money and sympathy for the Irish cause.

By 1850 there were 4,000,000 Irish of the U. S.'s 24,000,000 population. Irish influence in U. S. affairs--particularly politics--was growing yearly. Most Irishmen were Democrats, and after the Civil War Irish-run political machines kept the Democratic Party alive in the North. They virtually elected Grover Cleveland and Woodrow Wilson to the Presidency. Secretary of State John Hay forever claimed that his hands were tied by bitter Irish anti-British sentiment, and it was the Irish voter who not only forced Cleveland to take a strong stand against Great Britain in the Venezuelan crisis of 1895-96 but who also helped to prevent a U. S.-British alliance in the Far East.

New Type. The Ireland from which de Valera came to the U. S. in 1919 was not the same island from which Irishmen had fled to the U. S. in the times of Cromwell and William of Orange, not the same island whose people fled to the U. S. during the potato famines of a century ago. Meanwhile, it had had a cultural renaissance. Irishmen had begun again to take poetic pride in their land, with its purple mountains, its lakes and glens peopled with green-coated, leather-aproned leprechauns, the heather-crowned hills of Donegal, the rocky outlines of the Aran Islands. Their poetry that always symbolized Ireland as a woman beautiful and bereaved was brought back to life. The story of Ireland's long struggle for independence, delivered of yore by ragged, foot-sore balladiers, was resurrected so that again, on Dublin streets, could be heard ballad singers raising the cry: "Arise ye dead of Ireland, and rouse her living men."

George Russell, William Butler Yeats and Standish O'Grady had led a new literary revival. The Irish theatre had blossomed. Irish journalism had come out of hiding. In 1893 a Gaelic League had begun to revive the use of the Irish language and the traditional dances and music of Ireland. An early member was Eamon de Valera.

In the U. S. this exiled Irish statesman was something of a novelty. He was a rigid teetotaler. He was a reserved scholar who liked to solve mathematical problems, study Thomistic philosophy, play an organ. As an orator he was almost flat; he neither talked about personalities nor used extravagant imagery.

But he was more than successful. His tour was timed perfectly to cash in on the mounting antipathy to the Versailles Treaty and the League of Nations. The suppression of the Dail Eireann by the British shocked Americans who thought they had fought the war for the self-determination of peoples. The hunger strike and eventual death of Terence MacSwiney, Lord Mayor of Cork, brought pro-Irish feeling to white heat and overshadowed for a time the U. S. Presidential contest of 1920.

De Valera raised money for a "national loan" to the Irish Republic; late in 1920 he returned in disguise to find Ireland in full revolt. The "Black-and-Tans," the khaki-coated, black-trousered special English police, tried to "stamp out rebellion with a strong hand."

By mid-1921 the rebellion had got so out of hand that the British either had to clear out of Ireland, dispatch a considerable military force or negotiate. They chose negotiation. A truce was called and de Valera sent five men to London to talk peace. They signed late that year a treaty establishing dominion status for Ireland, but permitting the six predominantly Protestant northern counties to withdraw.

De Valera promptly denounced the treaty his own men had signed, but the Dail Eireann approved it. Losing his immense popularity overnight, the onetime hero went, with the irreconcilable I. R. A., once again into armed revolt. Ireland counted more dead, among them Rory O'Connor, executed by the Irish Provisional Government and Michael Collins, mainstay for years of the rebellion movement, ambushed and shot by the I. R. A. For two years de Valera hid from not British but Irish forces. Die-hards stood by him through thick & thin, continuing to consider him the genuine President of the Irish Republic.

"Traitor!" For five years the man who now controls the destiny of Ireland stood pat in his demand for a simon-pure, all-Ireland Republic. Then in 1926 he suddenly proposed to his party of Sinn Feiners that they enter the Irish Free State Legislature on condition that they would not have to swear to the oath of allegiance to George V. His proposal was promptly rejected, and he walked out of the Party to form the Fianna Fail (Militia of Destiny). Later he took the oath and entered the Dail. Old Republican "incorruptibles" shouted "Traitor!" They still do. It took six years for de Valera to complete his political comeback. When he did so, he began once more to lead the still-unfinished Irish march to complete independence.

In 1932 he succeeded William T. Cosgrave as Prime Minister. He abolished the oath of allegiance, scared the British Governor away from the Viceregal Lodge in Dublin. He gave Ireland its new name, Eire. He got into a fierce economic war with Great Britain over the land annuities. Since some 90% of all Irish farm produce was sold in England, this action cost Irish farmers plenty; but they considered the sacrifice cheap at the price.

He has given Ireland a considerably greater degree of self-sufficiency. Last week, comparing the Irish economy of today with that of 1914, he told the world what he was doing: "Under our native Government, we have greatly extended our tillage area. For instance, today we come near producing all our sugar and more than one-third of our breadstuffs. In both these commodities in the last war we depended almost entirely upon imports.

"In industrial production also we have made remarkable progress. We now make for ourselves a large variety of goods which formerly we had to secure from abroad.

"Financially our position also is strong. We have a relatively small national debt, and despite a large expenditure for social services we hope in these difficult times, as in the past, to balance our budgets.

"As to agriculture, we produce far more than our own people need of animal products, and the better prices which the war insures will benefit our farmers. The Government at the same time is guaranteeing attractive prices for wheat and sugar beets, thus giving the agricultural community an economic urge to break more land."

In the direction of political freedom, too, de Valera led the way. His country remains a member of the British Commonwealth of Nations, but does not recognize the British Crown. It has its own President--Gaelic Scholar Douglas Hyde. The status of Eire in wartime shows how far towards independence it has gone: it is still strictly neutral, and a German Minister stays on in Dublin. Not only that, but Prime Minister de Valera's protests were enough to make Britain refrain from applying conscription in Northern Ireland.

Eamon de Valera will not be satisfied until Northern Ireland is part of Eire and until all Ireland is entirely free from Great Britain. On his side is the fact that there are no natural boundaries between Eire and Northern Ireland--the border arbitrarily cuts farms in two, splits highways, divides villages. The religious difference has been greatly overemphasized. There are large areas--Counties Tyrone and Fermanagh, the districts of South Downs, South Armagh, Derry City--which Prime Minister de Valera claims wish to enter Eire. Besides, Northern Ireland is economically depressed and riddled with corruption, disfranchisement, electoral gerrymandering. The separation of Eire and Northern Ireland is a repetition of the British pattern, so familiar in India and Palestine, of Divide and Rule.

Eamon de Valera is likely to accomplish his end in time. World War II is on and if he chose he could again raise the cry: "England's extremity is Ireland's opportunity," yet like Gandhi, de Valera wants independence by peaceful means. The I. R. A., now his sworn enemies, want it as he used to want it, by force--are attempting it by terrorism. He or they may soon try to give destiny a push. But as the once violent leader pleads for reason,, nonviolence, legality, there rises from the hills of Eire and even from across the seas, the cry that de Valera has turned ''pro-British." He thinks it wiser when dealing with the English to plant ideas rather than bombs, and events are marching, World War II is not yet over.

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