On October 12th 2016 under the heading “John Redmond’s Ambition for Ireland” I quoted a speech made by Redmond in London on St Patrick’s Day 1913 and commented on it. It is not a speech often, or perhaps ever, reprinted during my lifetime, or commented on.
Thirty years after Redmond’s speech, on St Patrick’s Day 1943, Eamon de Valera, elected head of government of a sovereign Irish state, addressed the Irish nation and the world.
Poking about in my attic I just found a letter of mine published in Dublin’s “Sunday Press” on November 7 1982 in praise of an article on that speech by Desmond Fennell. Unfortunately the Irish Press Group has since collapsed, though Desmond Fennell survives and I wish him a longer life.
The Editor headed my Letter _”DEV’s VISION BEATS THE DALLAS CULTURE”
“IT IS good that Desmond Fennell (Sunday Press 24 October) has put the record straight. Ever since some sniggering Yahoo in the Irish Times fastened on de Valera’s 1943 “comely maidens” speech, it has been the received wisdom that Dev was some kind of freak for his country and the world at large.
Not only were Dev’s sentiments more emotionally expressed by Michael Collins in a lyrical description of seaweed-gathering, red-petticoat cailins on their asses in Achill, but were long preceded by an injunction by Douglas Hyde that Irishmen wear knee-breeches to avoid Anglicising their essentials.
When Dev made his speech, it might be stressed for those who deplore his supposedly narrow Catholicism, and its supposedly narrow expression in the Constitution, the Protestant Hyde was President. James Connolly had also depicted rural life as idyllic, as realised in the Ralahine commune in County Clare in the 1830s.
Urban Jews of the Diaspora had returned to Palestine to till its soil in kibbutzen, inspired by community rather than profit. In India, the doctrine of village self-sufficiency was preached by Gandhi, and its symbol, the spinning wheel, elevated as a national; standard.
In 1943, many in Europe would willingly have changed places with Dev’s worst-housed fellow-citizens. In the immediate pre-war years, children scavenging on Wigan slag-heaps or the pauperised farmers of Oklahoma exploited by their California neighbours would have settled for frugal comfort – as would many in the post-boom Ireland or Britain of today.
D.H. Lawrence had attacked industrial capitalism for consuming man and his environment alike, and preached a return to nature, while Pope Pius XI had called for a return to a simpler form of life.
It was, of course before the culture and ethics which have reached their mature flowering in “DALLAS” had invaded Erin’s isle, but their budding and development had already been noted and lampooned in Britain from the days of Dickens, through Waugh and Betjeman. Even today’s lumpen-bourgeoisie, which thinks that nostalgia is not what it used to be, is not unaffected by the values of Hyde, Collins and Ghandi. There’s scarcely a wardrobe without a sweater in the style of a Connacht islander or the blue denim trousers of a French peasant, whilst many a suburban house-person has a kitchen furnished in expensive replicas of the farmhouse.
The breadth of appeal of de Valera’s and Collins’ vision might be inferred from their successful launching National loans at home and overseas, with clearly delimited dividends, and their repayment dependent on the establishment of Irish independence, Their appeal was to the masses, not just the rich.
Today, according to your own newspaper, some of Ireland’s leading politicians must appeal to a narrowly drawn international constituency, the 400 strong Trilateral Commission of rich and influential people in the US, Western Europe and Japan, and have recourse to funds for fighting Irish elections from a handful of rich American admirers.
Perhaps some of those Irish people are familiar with a basic rule of American capitalism – “There is no such thing as a free lunch.” When a London newspaper* whose editor, also a member of the Trilateral Commission, looks forward to the fall of Haughey and the installation of “a more collaboratative” regime in Dublin, the idea of an altruistic windfall
of dollars might be dubbed “A TALE OF THE SOUPER-NATIONAL” and suitable material for a Seanachai on a Hallowe’en night.
Donal Kennedy
London
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