He knew he was right

A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical by Arthur Riordan and Bill Whelan. Political theatre at its wittiest and craziest, it told the story of the fledgling Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s publicised trip in 1971 to Belfast to buy contraceptives, ostentatiously importing these banned Satanic devices back into the Republic, where the law obeyed the writ of the Catholic church. Watching it, one was reminded of the sheer extent of theocracy in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland (he remained president till 1973, having been Taoiseach for most of the period from 1932 to 1959), and the long journey from those days to this year’s equal marriage referendum. Ronan Fanning’s crisp, economical but deeply thought-provoking biography anatomises de Valera’s influence, and reminds us just how transformed the country is since his heyday.

Fanning lays great emphasis on de Valera’s difficult early life, heavily disguised in the official biography — which was more or less dictated by the man himself to his supine and complaisant hagiographers (prominent among them Lord Longford). He was born to an Irish servant-girl and an obscure Spaniard in New York in 1882, and his parents were soon separated. His father died and his mother sent the two-year-old child back to relations in County Limerick, more or less rejecting him forthwith.

Fanning’s description of ‘engineering a separation’ is well put. The boy’s early years on a tiny and impoverished farm were miserable, but he pulled himself out of it by the traditional Irish route of education, managing to get to the elite Holy Ghost Fathers’ Blackrock College, where he was blissfully happy; he stayed there for holidays rather than returning to Limerick, and in many ways it remained the emotional centre of his life.

Marked out to be an academic or a priest, his involvement in Gaelic League activities in the early years of the new century led him into the paramilitary nationalist volunteer movement — and also into matrimony, as he fell in love with and married his Irish teacher.