Eamon de Valera’s ego and pique was fuse that ignited Irish Civil War

Eamon de Valera opposed the Anglo-Irish Treaty without even reading it or taking the time to study it.

As he explained to the Carrickmore-born Joe McGarrity of Clan na nGael in Philadelphia, he was aggrieved that the plenipotentiaries had signed without consulting him which he regarded as an act of disloyalty. He told a private session of the Dáil: ‘I have only one thing to say, one thing I feel hurt about with respect to the delegation and that is when a treaty was signed in London, and when I heard of it the signatures were appended to it’.

So it was all about personal pique, rather than partition or the plenipotentiaries’ failure to deliver a republic.

Ego is all too evident in de Valera’s notorious assertion that ‘… whenever I wanted to know what the Irish people wanted I had only to examine my own heart and it told me straight off what the Irish people wanted’.

Michael Collins argued that the treaty represented ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’ but de Valera rejected this analysis. In the 1930s de Valera demonstrated the truth of Collins’ assertion by systematically dismantling the treaty.

In mid-March 1922 de Valera delivered a series of inflammatory speeches in Dungarvan, Carrick-on-Suir, Thurles and Killarney.

In Dungarvan, de Valera said that acceptance of the treaty meant that freedom could only be won by civil war and if they did not fight today they must fight tomorrow.

In Carrick-on-Suir, he told his audience that if the treaty was accepted ‘the fight for freedom would still go on; and the Irish people, instead of fighting foreign soldiers, would have to fight the Irish soldiers of an Irish government set up by Irishmen. If the treaty was not rejected, perhaps it was over the bodies of the young men he saw around him that day that the fight for Irish freedom may be fought’.

In Thurles, he said: ‘If they accepted the treaty … the Volunteers … would have to wade through Irish blood, through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish government and through, perhaps, the blood of some of the members of the government in order to get Irish freedom’.

De Valera reiterated these views in Killarney.

These speeches are widely regarded as an incitement to civil war and the reason why the blame for the subsequent civil war is placed on de Valera’s shoulders. De Valera disingenuously claimed that his speeches were not incitements but warnings.

Contrary to what de Valera’s heart told him, the southern Irish electorate wanted peace rather than war – overwhelmingly evidenced by the general election held on June 16 1922. Fifty-eight pro-treaty Sinn Fein candidates were elected, as opposed to 36 anti-treaty Sinn Feiners. The remaining seats were won by Labour, the Farmers’ Party and independents, none of whom sought election on an anti-treaty platform.

In his biography of de Valera in 2015 Ronan Fanning observed that his ‘culpability for the civil war’ was ‘incontrovertible’. Professor Fanning might be guilty of overstating the case by the use of the word ‘incontrovertible’ because there are always people who will argue that black is white and vice versa but his basic contention is surely correct.

In the aftermath of the Easter Rising, having confirmed James Connolly’s sentence, General Maxwell, who had been given responsibility for suppressing the insurrection, then asked W E Wylie, the son of a Presbyterian minister from Coleraine and the prosecutor at the military tribunals, who was next. Wylie replied by stumbling over de Valera’s name. General Maxwell asked, ‘Is he someone important?’ Wylie replied, ‘No. He is a school-master who was taken at Boland’s Mill.’

Outside the ranks of his own ‘battalion’ of the Irish Volunteers de Valera had no profile. He had only joined the IRB in 1915. He had played no part in drafting the Proclamation nor was he a signatory to it. Apart from knowledge of his membership of the Irish Volunteers, intelligence on de Valera was otherwise thin.

On the strength of Wylie’s response, Maxwell commuted de Valera’s death sentence to one of life imprisonment. So much of 20th-century Irish history was to hang on Wylie’s answer.

Did W E Wylie live to regret his answer? In the early 1920s Wylie certainly had cause for serious regrets. As a result of his rejection of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Wylie, like Fanning, believed de Valera was single-handedly responsible for the Irish Civil War.

Many years later, reflecting on his conversation with General Maxwell, Wylie explained: ‘I told the truth, what I knew it to be. But my God, I was far off the mark. But for Dev there would have been no split at the time of the treaty, no documents 1, 2 and 3, no civil war, none of the burning of houses and destruction of property and life that took place in 1922 and 1923, and none of the bitterness, the dreadful bitterness and personal hatred which exists between the two parts of the country now, not to speak of the destruction of our relations with England.

‘But am I right in this? Would someone else have taken Dev’s place in 1921? I doubt it. He had the 1916 halo. He had an unusual name. He had a cold reserved personality. He was a bit of a mystic, and an idol to the ordinary peasant and man in the street, and he was above all an absolute fanatical idealist about some things. His mind could not compromise on what he deemed to be principles. He was prepared to sacrifice himself and anyone, indeed everybody else, rather than give away an inch. He looked into his heart to find what Ireland wanted, and his heart told him about an independent people, the Irish language, the past wrongs of Ireland, Gaelic culture, and a lot of things we should all forget and forgive. I find him a difficult man to place.’

In this assessment, Wylie captures the essentials of the man perfectly.