Books in Brief: Eamon de Valera

Eamon de Valera, by the Earl of Longford and Thomas P. O’Neill (Houghton, 499 pp., $12.50). This is probably the most important book on de Valera yet written. It contains many heretofore unpublished documents, as well as information given the authors by de Valera, his family and his friends; he comes off as a much more sympathetic figure here than in previous biographies. Unfortunately, in making the case for de Valera, Longford and O’Neill are guilty of some rather serious lapses of scholarship. For example, they attempt to analyze the motives of Michael Collins, who opposed de Valera over the Treaty in 1921, without mentioning what Piaras Beaslai says on the subject. They also ignore relevant statements in books they do use. For instance, at one point they quote a sentence from Frank O’Connor’s book on Collins, to the effect that the members of the Treaty delegation did not know what de Valera or their fellow delegates were thinking. But they omit O’Connor’s following sentences, which read: “Mr. Pakenham considers that de Valera showed ‘a great flair for preserving harmony.’ I should have said ‘a great flair for masking essential issues.’ ” (Not incidentally, before Longford inherited his present title, he was known as Frank Pakenham.) A few pages later, they quote O’Connor’s as saying: “Both Collins and Griffith put up as good a show as could be expected with de Valera’s plan of external association. Unfortunately neither took it seriously.” In fact, what O’Connor said was: “Unfortunately for de Valera, neither took it seriously.” I suggest that this book is extremely valuable as a corrective to anti-de Valera accounts, but it is not a definitive history.