Inventing Ireland by Declan Kiberd

Author:Declan Kiberd [Declan Kiberd]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409044970
Publisher: Random House

SEXUAL POLITICS

SEXUAL POLITICS

In the 1920s James Joyce liked to joke that his country was entering "the devil's era"; and historians now tend to agree that the next three decades were indeed "the age of de Valera". More had died in the Civil War than in the War of Independence, but once again out of the ashes of defeat the republican phoenix arose.

The new government was conservative in social policy, impartial in its handling of the civil service (most of those servants who had been trained under the British scheme happily worked on in unchanged structures), and had a proper arm's-length relationship with the army and police. The country was slowly recovering from the devastation of war and poverty was still widespread, made worse by the international economic recession of the late twenties and thirties. In 1926 de Valera and his followers left Sinn Féin and founded Fianna Fáil, which its members liked to call "a slightly constitutional party".1 They took their seats in the Dáil as the largest opposition party (it was rumoured that some of them carried small firearms in their pockets, should any difficulty arise). As the economy worsened and the government cut old-age pensions, it became clear that Fianna Fáil would win the election of 1932. Mr. Cosgrave's government quietly and smoothly passed the seals of state office to men who just a decade earlier had denied the state's right to exist and sought to kill its representatives. A crucial test of the stability of a young democracy had been passed.2

De Valera was something of a world figure, well known to Irish Americans and also to the leaders of decolonizing movements overseas. He was made president of the council of the League of Nations in the year of his election. At home he announced a programme of industrialization and further deanglicization (he would remove the oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the 1922 Constitution). He also refused to pay land annuities of £5 million per year to the British, in defrayment of a loan advanced years earlier to farmers wishing to buy out landlords. Britain retaliated by taxing Irish cattle on point of entry, and the Irish duly riposted with a surcharge on British imports. A so-called Economic War lasted until 1938, further depressing the economy.

De Valera's main achievement in this decade was the legitimation of state institutions: those IRA veterans who protected his early election rallies from enemy attack in 1932 soon found themselves at odds with the disciplined new regime, but there were fewer and fewer dissidents as erstwhile republicans were drawn into the mechanisms and lured by the rewards of government. De Valera himself soon began to appear at ceremonial occasions sporting a top hat. A neo-fascist organization called the Blueshirts (after their Continental counterparts the Brownshirts) had formed itself as a private army to meet the threat of "Dev's Bolsheviks", but (despite having some marching songs written for it by W. B. Yeats)3 enthusiasm and membership soon evaporated. After decades of

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