Éamon de Valera presided over an isolated and old-fashioned Ireland, where change came slowly and those with ambition often left in frustration.
As he has worked at RTÉ for most of his career, this will be a milieu familiar to David McCullagh, who, marking the 50th anniversary of de Valera’s death, delivers an enjoyably subjective take on the revolutionary leader and his legacy with Dev: Rise and Rule (RTÉ One, 9.35pm).
The series arrives at a timely moment. McCullagh has just been announced as the new presenter of the Radio 1’s Today show, replacing the departing Claire Byrne. He has said that this will make him one of the broadcaster’s highest earners – and, by implication, a human pinata for frustrated licence-fee payers.
In that context, Dev: Rise and Rule has the feel of a final hurrah for the presenter, also the author of a two-part biography on the late taoiseach and founder of Fianna Fáil.
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He brings a chummy informality to the subject in the first of two episodes. McCullagh also smartly presents his history of Dev as a personal journey, so avoiding the cliche of talking heads lining up to spout verbiage about one of the most divisive figures in Irish history.
The first half of the documentary is agreeably chatty and fleet of foot. We’re off to New York, where the suave McCullagh addresses question marks hanging over de Valera’s birth in the city. De Valera’s mother, Catherine Coll, insisted the future taoiseach’s father was the Spanish artist Juan Vivion de Valera, who supposedly died two years after his son’s birth.
Yet extensive trawling through the archives by McCullagh finds no record of Juan having ever existed. Was he real? Or was de Valera, that self-appointed guardian of Irish moral virtue, conceived in more scandalous circumstances? McCullagh shrugs. There is, he says, “a lot of mystery” around de Valera’s parentage.
Yet a solidly assembled film goes off the rails in the final few minutes, as it joins McCullagh at a public symposium in Dublin Castle where contributors hold forth on the positives and negatives of de Valera. Their contributions tend towards the partisan. They either love or hate Dev. There is no nuance.
Arriving at the end of a largely orthodox documentary, the Dublin Castle debate is, moreover, a bit of a swerve. Dev: Rise and Rule opens with footage of de Valera’s funeral on O’Connell Street. Now we’re down Moore Street, availing of a cheeky bargain: two documentaries for the price of one.
Still, McCullagh is at least ambitious about how he wants to tell Dev’s story and cannot be accused of phoning it in, as is often the case with the national broadcaster. This well-made series also augurs positively for his future as a radio host. He is both dapper and in command of the facts.
[ Did the man named as Éamon de Valera’s father on his birth cert exist at all?Opens in new window ]
That said, Dev: Rise and Rule is ultimately a failure. Our understanding of de Valera as a politician and private citizen is no more advanced by the end credits than at the beginning. He has been worshipped and condemned for so long that getting past the iconography and forming a sense of Dev as a person proves beyond even a presenter of McCullagh’s skill. As he admits, “decoding Dev is no easy task”.
Fifty years on from his death, de Valera remains elusive – a man who defined Ireland for much of the 20th century, but to this day looms large as an enigma that refuses to be unpicked.
