The Press TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 1966. Mr De Valera Challenged

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31079, 7 June 1966, Page 12

The Press TUESDAY, JUNE 7, 1966. Mr De Valera Challenged

The Fine Gael candidate, Mr Thomas O’Higgins, had Mr Eamon De Valera under strong pressure in the Irish presidential election; so it seems that, fifty years after the 1916 Easter Rising, some change at least has come over Irish thinking. Mr O’Higgins had appealed to the people to “forget the past and “ its bitterness and look with confidence to the “future’’. It is too much to suppose that the past will ever be forgotten, even though a majority of the voters of today know of the revolution only through their reading and the already near-legendary tales of their elders. Yet the voters’ response to Mr O’Higgins’s plea does indicate some leavening of old sorrows and some purging of old hatreds, together with a realisation that the problems of the future are themselves a sufficient preoccupation. Seven years ago Mr De Valera was virtually presented with the presidency when his Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny) party submitted that the post would fittingly recognise his stature as one of-the founders of Irish nationalism. He had a majority then of about 121,000 over his Fine Gael opponent, after some 24,000 voters had spoiled their ballot papers. Last week’s voting might be an indication of radical change in the political atmosphere in the Irish Republic. When the first session of the Dail Eireann ratified the Easter Week proclamation of the republic it also confirmed the resolve of the Irish .people to develop their resources, protect their ’national language and culture, and foster the interests of the small farmers and the workers. A change of power after ten years of self-government put Fianna Fail into office and the Fine Gael, successors of those who accepted the Anglo-Irish treaty, into Opposition, where they remain. Mr De Valera cut the constitutional ties with Britain and called the State “ Ire- “ land ”, despite the fact that it comprehended only 26 of the 32 counties and that the North, then as today, emphatically repudiated any desire or intention of ending the partition

Mr De Valera has never compromised on the questions of Irish unity and the restoration of Gaelic as the national language. He has continued to argue that the “ President of Ireland ” is above politics—hence the decision of the Prime Minister, Mr Lemass, that he and other members of the Government should conduct the election campaign on his behalf, with the President himself maintaining an attitude of lofty detachment. It is likely that Mr O’Higgins, vigorously stumping the country—competently aided by his wife—made a considerable impression with his impatient dismissal of the language issue as “ irrelevant ”, in an Ireland beset by industrial unrest and economic turmoil to a degree almost suggesting social revolution. The farmers, indeed, have been picketing Parliament and even going to prison in support of their demands for higher prices for their produce, while business interests complain that industrial expansion is being stifled by a chronic shortage of money and credit.

Mr De Valera, at 84, must be optimistic in supposing that he will see the end of another seven-year term of office. The support accorded Mr O’Higgins, furthermore, might presage a change in political alignments, although the present Dail was elected only last year, in April, for the prescribed five-year period. And, as the Easter Rising celebrations showed, always in the background are the hard-core active revolutionaries, as witness the dynamiting of Nelson’s Column. They present, as was suggested at the time, an almost insoluble problem, no matter what ameliorating influences may be at work elsewhere within the social structure of the republic. Weed them out and lock them up, one commentator has said, and there is a protesting outcry; leave them alone, and they will strike again, in a manner and at a time of their own choosing. The conditions call for strength and judgment in leadership which Mr De Valera must become increasingly incapable of providing.