Eamon de Valera - Introduction

During his exhausting 18-month tour of the United States between 1919 and 1920, and the relentless political campaigning of the early 1920s, Eamon de Valera must have occasionally wondered if there was an easier way to reach the masses than by constant travel and countless mass meetings. The following decade, he discovered that there was indeed an easier way of getting his political and cultural messages to a large audience, which involved sitting in front of a microphone in a radio studio in Dublin and reading carefully prepared scripts.

His broadcasts from the 1930s to the 1950s were used to explain or justify his governments' policies, to send messages to the Irish Diaspora, to give updates on developments in Anglo-Irish relations, to address the momentous issues of peace and war, to castigate the real and imagined enemies of the Irish state and to make audiences aware of the political and cultural independence of the 26 county state. One overriding theme was common to most of these speeches- the need to maximise the sovereignty of Ireland and to let the people at home and abroad know that Ireland was independent.

In January 1938, for example, in a radio broadcast to mark the first anniversary of the introduction of the Constitution, he referred to the fact that in the Constitution "the traditional aspirations of our people for national independence... and the unfettered control of their domestic and foreign affairs" had been recognised and accepted as basic principles. De Valera was far-sighted in his use of the radio, and very alert to the potential of the medium. In 1932, he was able to broadcast to the Irish Diaspora for the first time as a result of the new and more powerful transmitters that he had encouraged. He made the annual St Patrick's Day broadcast his own and this did much to keep his profile high in the United States as well as putting the Irish point of view to the American public at large. He became something of a master of the craft of broadcasting and it was probably easier for him to do it this way; after all, if playwright Sean O'Casey is to be believed, he was not a natural orator. O'Casey wrote that, "He was outside of everything except himself. There seemed to be no sound of Irish wind, water, folk chant or birdsong in the dry, dull voice...De Valera's voice was neither cold nor hot- it was simply lukewarm and very dreary".

That may have been true when he was speaking on public platforms, but he did not need, on the radio, to be melodic or forceful. His mission was simple: to let the people at home and the world abroad know that Ireland was independent, and this was to be done in a dignified, understated and intimate way. Even though the writer Seán Ó Faoláin became an ardent critic of de Valera, he acknowledged that "nobody will deny that one of his greatest qualities- and it contributes greatly to his influence- is dignity".

His most famous broadcast – "The Ireland which we dreamed of" speech in 1943 - has often been inaccurately quoted or dismissed as naïve and sentimental, and subjected to ridicule due to its preoccupation with self-preservation. But when the text is heard or read in full it can be analysed in another, more positive way- as a focused and sincere statement of ideals and healthy ambitions, emphasising the need for a nation to move in a positive direction, and for there to be a scepticism about the idea that material gain would solve all of a country's problems.

His champions and foes alike were delighted with his response to Churchill's attack on Irish neutrality in 1945 because he had demonstrated that understatement and a calm and controlled tone were much more effective in influencing an audience than emotive overstatement. During this broadcast, de Valera acknowledged that in earlier days he would have added "fuel to the flames of hatred and passion", when responding to British misrepresentation, a reminder of his own maturation as a politician and one with a responsibility beyond his own party and support base. After he had finished his broadcast, his son Terry recalled that de Valera's wife Sinéad danced a jig in celebration; the speech also earned him a standing ovation in Dáil Éireann and messages of congratulation poured in from every quarter. Such was its impact that it sold on the streets of Dublin in broadsheet form.

His mastery of the radio broadcast and his decision to, not quite embrace, but to tolerate television, was also part of de Valera ensuring that he was seen as an indispensable father figure in Irish society who would be seen and heard when he chose, while reiterating that the Irish people needed to continue to be true to themselves. Undoubtedly, he was less comfortable with television, because he preferred prepared scripts and total control. He tended to give terse and sometimes monosyllabic answers during his limited number of television interviews, and rarely demonstrated the considerable humour he could display in private. As with radio, he had been made well aware of the potential of television. On New Year's Eve in 1961, he participated in the first broadcast of Ireland's domestic television service and he expressed the fear that "Like atomic energy it can be used for incalculable good, but it can also do irreparable harm". This was a recognition that control of the media was soon going to be out of the hands of the civil war generation and that the focused and mono-cultural broadcasts of the previous 30 years were no longer going to satisfy hungry audiences who would be ever more exposed to the kind of events at home and abroad that de Valera and his generation had never dreamed of.

Diarmaid Ferriter