| Review of IRELAND STANDING FIRM
in IRISH POLITICAL STUDIES 18:2 pp107-108 BOOK REVIEWS _____________________________________________________________________________ Robert Brennan, Ireland Standing Firm and Eamon de Valera: A Memoir. Richard H. Rupp (ed.), UCD Press, 2002; 208pp.; 1 900621 68 1 (pb) £13.95. From UCD Press comes another little gem from its Classics of Irish History series. To an already distinguished list, Richard Rupp brings us the wartime recollections of Robert Brennan, Irish minister in Washington both immediately before and during the Second World War and Brennan’s intimate portrait of Eamon de Valera written on de Valera’s retirement as Taoiseach in 1959. Robert Brennan, known as ‘Bob’ by de Valera and almost all who knew him, was director of publicity and director of elections to the first Dáil. He would later become under-secretary for external affairs both in 1920 and later in de Valera’s first administration. After the civil war Brennan became the first manager of the Irish Press and in 1934 became secretary to the Irish Legation in Washington. Four years later he was appointed Irish minister to Washington and served in that position until 1947. It is this latter appointment that Ireland Standing Firm documents. Subtitled ‘my wartime mission in Washington’, this account was first serialised in the Irish Press daily during April and May 1958 and is a robust defence of Irish neutrality. In it Brennan gives us a flavour of his almost impossible task of trying with one hand to raise the evil of the partitioning of Ireland, while explaining with the other how the Irish state had to defend itself from the twin perils of possible German aerial bombardment and British reoccupation. We get a bird’s-eye but very one-sided view of Frank Aiken’s trip to the United States in the spring of 1941 and his famous visit to President Roosevelt. Brennan’s description is vivid but incomplete. One problem with his memoir is that he is loath to criticise any of his political masters. Thus Aiken gets off scot free while Roosevelt and his secretary of state, Cordell Hull comes in for stringent criticism. The truth is that the visit was a diplomatic disaster, which ended up excluding the United States as a source of military aid for Ireland for the rest of the war, while simultaneously bolstering Roosevelt’s hostility towards Ireland. It was this hostility that Brennan spent the remainder of the war trying to overcome; with some success if we are to trust his memoir as he recounts tale after tale of speaking in various parts of the United States decrying partition and defending neutrality. The second half of this book, Brennan’s memoir of de Valera, is straight from the Dorothy Macardle school of Irish history. To Brennan, de Valera was amongst other things a ‘rare political genius’ who throughout his career was let down by ‘men of lesser vision’. This applies to the international scene as well as the national, as Brennan laments that if there had been more men like de Valera at the Geneva assembly, the League of Nations would not have died as ignominiously as it did and Europe and the world would have been spared the horrors of the Second World War. These are heady claims which, while they might ignore the realities of great power politics in the 1930s, were held by most Fianna Fáilers. To the followers of the ‘chief’ he could do no wrong and this is what we get in Brennan’s account. It is as clear a case of a polemic as one could wish to get and all the more historically useful for that. Brennan was close to de Valera throughout the war of independence and the civil war and was the general manager of the mouthpiece of Fianna Fáil, the Irish Press. Thus the de Valera in this memoir bears no responsibility for the civil war but on the contrary strove manfully to avoid it. He is credited with the masterstroke of not going to the final treaty negotiations and thus providing the delegation with a ready way to evade any trap the British might set them. Once the treaty was signed de Valera sets himself the task of trying to ‘repair the damage done’ but is thwarted time and again by lesser mortals than himself and the newspapers who attempt to turn the people against him. Later he is the hero returned to save the people from themselves on his election in 1932. Much of the account presented here deals with the events of the foundation of the state. Brennan, writing in 1958, does touch on and indeed hails the policy of economic self sufficiency, the writing of the Irish constitution and Irish neutrality but he seems most concerned with defending his own hero’s actions in the pivotal years 1919–1922. In this Brennan is not unusual among followers of de Valera. His memoir is touching for the loyalty it shows to de Valera and sheds much light on why a substantial proportion of the Irish people felt that de Valera could do no wrong and were prepared to gloss over the dismal economic performance of the Irish state, particularly in the late 1950s when Brennan himself was writing. Richard Rupp has done us a service by reproducing this material but it is a pity that his introduction is so brief. The two accounts we are given, valuable as they are, could have done with much more annotation from the editor, who in leaving the words speak for themselves, fails to contextualise much of what Brennan is saying and more importantly why. GARY MURPHY Dublin City University Back to Ireland Standing Firm Back to Robert Brennan Yvonne Jerrold's Homepage |
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