De Valera in the Limelight

Dominion, Volume 25, Issue 166, 9 April 1932, Page 18

De Valera in the Limelight

/r R- DE VAI,ERA'S worst hour is at hand.” says the "Star,” % /I London. “The Irish passion for being ‘agin the Govern\j | ment’ has brought him within sight of power. For sixteen V B years the ‘Professor of Arithmetic’ has been doing nothing quite well. Now he has to add two and two together in a different sense from ever before. “He has gained his success partly by the support of those who objected to President Cosgrare’s drastic action against the gunmen’s movement, and largely by his declarations that he will abolish the oath of allegiance and repudiate the debt to this country of three millions a year which is owed to Britain as repayment of loans advanced for land purchase. “Mr. De Valera could soon lose his unhappy country much more than that by unwise policies. It is a terrible. movement for a man who for sixteen years has been able to talk at large in the void to have to lace the logical implication of his tall talk.” “Mr. De Valera's principles,” points out the "Observer," “involve the repudiation of the Treaty and of the Oath of Allegiance. “In other words, his programme amounts to the forfeiture ol: Ireland’s pledged word, on the strength of which her autonomy was gained. It requires the Free State to disregard the precepts of honour, aud to override, in the names of self-interest and self-will, the undertakings it has solemnly ratified. “If that should be the pathway followed by Irish policy with the assent of the new Dail, it means the abandonment of an asset of some importance to political communities generally. A nation that promises and then decides not to perform must feel very sure that it can stand alone aud has no need of its neighbours’ confidence.” “The essence of De Valera’s policy,” asserts the Manchester Guardian,” “is rather his economic nationalism, his desire for a self-sufficing economy, with agriculture and mines producing raw materials and industries

working them up to supply the needs of the Irish consumers who in their turn will be required to be content with Irish products. “ He hopes thus to find employment for all and to secure the diffusion of property which he prefers to capitalism or Communism. His intellectual supporters deride the old-fashioned simplicity of him who maintains that a self-sufficing economy has been rendered unnecessary and inadvisable by the possibilities of international trade which they regard as an obsolescent monstrosity. “All policies require some financial basis. Under the foundation of De Valera’s policy there yawns a financial vacuum. That vacuum De Valera proposes to fill by withholding the land annuities, £3,000.000 a year, and leaving the British taxpayer the pleasure of paying tins sum to the creditors to whom it is due. "President Cosgrave's Government, with the support of its legal advisers and the Dail, has steadily from 1922 onward held and acted on the assumption that the annuities were legally and morally due to the holders of land stock. It is therefore, difficult to sec how in dealing with another country President Do Valera will be entitled to disown the actions of his predecessor. “For if he does his actions may in their turn be disowned by his successor. But even if that consideration has no weight with the new Dail it will have to ask itself whether the representatives of the British taxpayer may not feel bound to take action to defend his Interests, the more so as De Valera, having obtained a favourable opinion on the land annuities, has given notice of his intention of consulting the same oracles again in the hope of transferring a further burden on to the shoulders of the British taxpayer. “ It seems only too probable that this method of conducting international relations will lend to controversies which may leave'lreland with little energy for attending to her domestic affairs.”