Éamon de Valera’s well-known visionary speech of 1943, with its references to “cosy homesteads”, “the romping of sturdy children” and “the laughter of comely maidens”, envisaged Ireland as a kind of bucolic idyll. But he made it clear that this was a dream. It was not a nostalgic backward glance, as sometimes thought.
Sent to Ireland aged two and a half by his impoverished Irish mother in New York, de Valera (1882–1975) was raised in a labourer’s cottage near Bruree in rural Limerick by a bachelor uncle. Uncle Pat worked him hard, minding cattle and digging potatoes. Young “Eddie” (as he was then known) took refuge in books. One of them, about English village life, made a big impression on him.
In Dangerous Ambition, my new character study of de Valera as a young man, I look at books that shaped his mind. He especially liked Our Village, by Mary Russell Mitford (1787–1855). It was a collection of literary sketches of English rural life in Berkshire, begun in 1819 as pieces for The Ladies Magazine. De Valera later confessed that he often thought how one could write a similar book about Bruree, but he himself did not feel experienced enough to write it, he said.
Was there more of this English idyll in Dev’s vision of Ireland than there was of Charles Kickham’s famous Knocknagow? Although Kickham’s very popular account of Irish rural life was set nearby in Co Tipperary about 1870, Dev did not mention Knocknagow when asked by RTÉ about the books he read as a boy. Kickham’s work exposed class differences in rural Ireland that the older de Valera may have wished to gloss over.
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But the story of Robinson Crusoe, shipwrecked on a deserted island, was among his favourites: “When I was minding the cows, of course, that was when I was able to read. I remember reading Robinson Crusoe for instance. Then, later, I used to read books on the hill of Knockfenora.” Yet there were still very few books in any house when he was a boy, de Valera said.
He recalled that what he really enjoyed was going to the nearby stream: “I had an island in it. I could get away from everybody. I used to play Robinson Crusoe there … What I liked best was playing Robinson Crusoe.” Dev himself was quite a loner, both as a child and as a politician.
De Valera said that as a boy he had also read about and understood the “slavery” of Native Americans and longed to become one of them: “And yet, though I dreamed a great deal, I had no ambitions or expectations. I had nothing but the spade.” Not at first anyway. Later, remarkably, he was made a Native American chief when in America.
He was impressed by Charles Abbott’s long Life of Napoleon, and later quoted the French emperor in the draft of a preface he wrote for Dorothy Macardle’s study of Irish republicanism. That reference went unpublished in the end, perhaps for fear readers might think him imperious.
De Valera read Abbé James MacGeoghegan’s History of Ireland, as well as Jane Porter’s The Scottish Chiefs. MacGeoghegan (1702–63), priest and historian, wrote this account of Ireland before the 1691 Treaty of Limerick. His book was an Irish nationalist classic during the 19th century. For her part, Porter (1776–1850) played a big role in using the historical novel to promote a heroic Scottish identity. Another Scottish influence was Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe. Dev said it was the first novel he ever read.
In March 1888, on her sole visit back to see Eddie as a child in Bruree, his mother brought with her a copy of Thomas Moore’s Melodies. De Valera remembered them sitting round the table on Sunday afternoons reading aloud songs from the Melodies.
At his national school there was a branch of the Uncle Remus Club. This provided access at low cost to a range of books. Eddie became secretary of the Bruree branch when aged 13. “In the Uncle Remus Club we got books like The Bog of Stars.” Written by Standish O’Grady, The Bog of Stars was a collection of sketches of Elizabethan Ireland (1558–1603), involving dramatisation.
De Valera read too The Wild Rose of Lough Gill: A Tale of the Irish War in the Seventeenth Century by Patrick G Smyth. Published in 1883, this was another historical romance; also Twenty Years After by Alexandre Dumas, a sequel to his Three Musketeers, as well as stories by Captain Frederick Marryat of the Royal Navy, particularly Mr Midshipman Easy.
Then there was –”of course” he said –The Story of Ireland by AM Sullivan. It was “the book that I read from most” and the first history of Ireland he “really” read. Published in 1867, it was intended for children. The book, often reissued, has been criticised for popularising a simplistic nationalist narrative.
De Valera’s uncle used to buy the Weekly Freeman, the weekend edition of the Catholic/nationalist Freeman’s Journal – and Eddie remembered in particular the big political cartoons printed in colour in it. He had access to other reading through the Mortell family next door, who got the Cork Examiner and the Munster News, with one of the Mortell boys getting the illustrated Shamrock nationalist weekly as well as comic cuts – “wild westerns” such as Buffalo Bill.
When it came to more traditional storytelling, Eddie was among children kept in after dark, for he once said “I wouldn’t be allowed out at night to hear the storytelling, but Tim Hannan used to go out, and at school he’d tell us the stories he had heard the night before from Jim Connolly; and one of these was the story of Séadna, in English.” Written by the Cork priest Peadar Ó Laoghaire, the quasi-Faustian story of the cobbler “Séadna” first appeared in print as a serial in 1894.
Dangerous Ambition: The Making of Éamon de Valera by Colum Kenny is published by Eastwood Books, priced €20
