IRELAND: The Old Country

In the grey, glum village square of the town of Kildare (pop. 2,617), a big red sound truck stood waiting last week, its horns pointed directly at the church. “It’s the only way to get a crowd to listen to a speech these days,” explained the politician in charge. “Catch them coming home from Mass.” Finally the church bell rang, and a small crowd—oldsters and children mostly, the young adults having sped by on their bicycles—gathered to hear the candidate for the grand, if ornamental, job of President of the Republic of Ireland. Portly General Sean MacEoin, 65, the “Blacksmith of Ballinalee,” the man who in the Great Trouble “refused to have an anesthetic while having an English bullet removed from his body for fear that while unconscious he might betray his comrades,” had all the proper credentials for Irish politics. But the fact remained: he was running against the Long Fellow himself.

March of a Nation. Now old and nearly blind, tall, austere Eamon de Valera, 76, had stepped down as Taoiseach (Prime Minister), confident that his people would send him “into the park,” i.e., to the presidential residence in Dublin’s Phoenix Park and to the job that he himself had declared to be “above politics.” For 40 years he had dominated the Irish scene, and for 21 of those he had headed the government. Though born in Manhattan —a fact that was to help him escape a British firing squad—he grew up in an

Ireland ringing with Parnell’s cry: “No man has a right to fix a boundary to the march of a nation.” A soft-spoken teacher of math who later joined the Sinn Fein (We Ourselves), “Dev” is still credited by legend with being the last rebel patriot to surrender during the Battle of Boland’s Mills in 1916, and with being one of only 13 scholars who understood Einstein’s theory of relativity.

But a long time had passed since he was the martyr “Convict 95” who set the crowds to screaming, “Up Dev! Up the Republic!” For one thing, he had insisted on tying to the presidential election “the Issue”—doing away with proportional representation, which, while giving minorities a voice in the Dail, tends to keep alive old animosities that should have long since become ancient history. “Get rid of the intrigous P.R.!” cried a member of Dev’s Fianna Fail (Party of Destiny). “De Valera and Fianna Fail want dictatorship!” retorted the opposition Fine Gael (United Ireland) Party. But it was hardly the sort of issue to stir the hearts of a people who 40 years ago fought the “oppressor” and have never got over it.

Broken Dream. “What difference does P.R. make?” says John Gibbon, a weathered County Mayo man whose wife runs the Quiet Man Fame cafe in the town of Cong, where John Ford shot some of his movie. Two of the Gibbons’ four sons are already in the U.S., and their daughter is planning to go soon. For all its progress since the old colonial days, Dev’s Ireland still watches 40,000 of its most energetic young people leave for other lands each year. The rest usually quit school at 14—and drop Gaelic as soon as they do. Dev’s dream was to make Gaelic the symbol of Irish culture, but he himself is now one of the few politicians to use it. The others, say the wags, may start their speeches “A chair de [friends],” but then they hastily retreat to “the language of the accursed oppressors.”

Unemployment still runs high, and old-age pensions—less than $4 a week—barely keep a body alive. A prominent physician recently reported that many old people in Dublin’s hospitals are dying of nothing more than malnutrition. But an even more insidious kind of malnutrition has invaded the body politic. Asks a National University student who has hopes of some day going into politics: “What’s the hurry? The parties are still run by old men, or men who know that the past is past but are afraid to admit it. Even the young people get caught up in it. Do you know what the most popular movie in Dublin is? It’s Jimmy Cagney telling us how to be martyrs against the Black and Tans.”

Hasty Heart. “Whenever I want to know what the Irish are thinking,” Old Dev once said, “I look into my own heart.” But last week his heart partly deceived him. He won the presidency by so much smaller a margin than expected (538,000 to MacEoin’s 417,000) that the opposition even began making noises for a general election to contest the succession as Prime Minister of energetic Sean Lemass, 59, Dev’s No. 2 man, who has been largely responsible for the few economic advances Ireland has made of late.

As for P.R., the voters decided to keep the old ways, despite the Long Fellow. And at Dev’s own big sentimental rally before the election, no more than 25,000 Dubliners turned out to hear him, far fewer than the 100,000 who flooded into Croke Park the day before for a rally of the Total Abstinence Association—a 60-year-old society that has covered the lapels of Ireland with small Sacred Heart badges signifying the lifelong pledge, and has been largely responsible for reducing the consumption of whisky among the Irish by 42,000 gallons a year.