The Republic of Ireland: Perils of Pragmatism

In a quaint Easter day speech delivered in 1943, Eamon de Valera, patriarchal prime minister of the Irish Free State (it became the Republic of Ireland in 1949), described his cherished vision of a self-sufficient nation—replete with comely maidens, cozy homesteads and, of course, a reunited Ulster. “The Ireland we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as the basis of a right living,” the Fianna Fail party leader intoned, “of a people who were satisfied with a frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to things of the spirit.” By 1958 the autarkic economic policies pursued by his party since 1932 were abandoned without fanfare or remorse, for the Republic was adrift in a stagnant economy from which capital and people fled in frightful numbers. Now a new generation of self-proclaimed pragmatists in the Fianna Fail party (Gaelic; the party of the “Soldiers of Destiny”) set out, so the saga goes, to steer their fra...