EAMON DE VALERA

Stalin may have been a devil without peers, but minor devils there has been no shortage of, and de Valera - 'Dev' to his friends - could well be cited here in respect of his ardent republicanism, even though he was less of a republican than some of his Sinn Fein and, subsequently, Fianna Fàil comrades.

More than any man, he was responsible for the Irish Civil War that erupted in the swift wake of the withdrawing British, his intransigent republicanism a grave stumbling-block to peace on the basis of the 1921 Treaty, which granted Southern Ireland Dominion Status within the British Empire. For de Valera and his followers, however, it was republicanism or nothing, and although a republic eventually emerged, if only on the 26-county basis, it was paradoxically long after the Anti-Treaty rebels had been defeated.

Yet even with republicanism handed to him on a plate by Sean Costello, leader of the Fine Gael-dominated coalition government, de Valera was not satisfied with Ireland's partitioned status and vigorously campaigned, as before, for its annulment ... on the basis of popular consent. Here he was barking up the wrong tree, but he continued so to bark, sometimes more fiercely, sometimes modulating his tone in an attempt to placate the loyalists, and always, no matter how often, with negligible results.

In Partition, de Valera met his match, indeed was outmanoeuvred and ignominiously defeated. His lifelong dream of a united republican Catholic Ireland was never realized, can never be realized, which, alas, is a thing that most of his Fianna Fàil successors have singularly failed to appreciate, since they also speak in terms of a united republican Ireland achieved through popular consent!

In terms of the ultimate solution to Ireland's tragedy of partition and its ideological concomitance of sectarian intransigence, republicanism is a lost cause, an abysmal failure. Its true value lies not in itself as an ideal end, but, on the contrary, in itself as a means to an ideal end, which can only be realized through Social Transcendentalism, the ideology, if you will, of the Second Coming, or of one who most corresponds, in his own philosophically-derived estimation, to a Messianic equivalent vis-à-vis the possibility of an interpretation of 'Kingdom Come', as expressed in his best theoretical writings, which he regards, not without reason, as both religiously sound and politically sustainable. However that may be, it is within this republican soil that the seeds of Social Transcendentalism should be sown, to sprout Ireland's true freedom ... not merely from the British but, more importantly, for the Holy Spirit.

De Valera couldn't have understood this and it must remain doubtful, were he alive today, that he would support it. For it entails nothing less than the democratically-engineered total eclipse and supersession of the Republic ... by what I term 'the Centre', with the inevitable corollary of the replacement, completely or partially, of the tricolour - that unitary delusion of Tonean grandeur - by the Y-like inverted CND emblem of what is potentially if not actually, at this point in time, the religion of 'Kingdom Come', verily a reformed, and hence true, Cross - the absolutist 'Cross' of a free transcendentalism.