“I’ll never be forgiven for that. I don’t really care”, film director Neil Jordan told the Guardian newspaper last summer, referring to his depiction of former president and taoiseach Éamon de Valera in his 1996 film ‘Michael Collins’.
Jordan’s insouciance about his portrayal of Ireland’s third president echoes his verdict in his memoir, Amnesiac, also published last year. “Did de Valera have a hand in Collins’s death?”, he asks. “Probably not, but he could have prevented it. Did he have a nervous breakdown in the aftermath? I believe so, absolutely. And we all had to live inside it”, he added.
Disparaging de Valera had been a feature of Jordan’s work, predating the Michael Collins film by 20 years and going back half-a-century to his first book, published a few months after de Valera’s death in summer 1975.
Night in Tunisia, Jordan’s debut short story collection, ends with a story set mostly in a cafe on Dublin’s O’Connell Street on the day of de Valera’s State funeral 50 years ago this year. The street has been cleared of all vehicular traffic to make way for the procession of the funeral cortege to Glasnevin Cemetery. Inside the cafe a man in his mid-twenties is talking to a former lover, an older woman. She says that she and everyone of her generation was “taught to idolise” de Valera, but the young man, named Neil, views the passing cortege as that of “an animal dying” – “an animal that was huge, murderous, contradictory”.
Bridge of Sighs (and Laughter)
Film director Neil Jordan and the Éamon de Valera connection
Secluded residence – Frank McNally on the challenge of understanding (or even finding) Eileen Gray’s famous French villa
Hachikō the wonder dog - Frank McNally on the devoted pet’s nine-year vigil for his late master
Winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and the Guardian Fiction Prize, Night in Tunisia was followed by Jordan’s first novel, The Past, which was critically acclaimed in Ireland, Britain and the United States. It is also peppered with unflattering references to de Valera. “That man who would stamp his unlikely profile on the history of this place as surely as South American dictators stick theirs on coins and postage stamps”, a central character recalls. The novel is set in the years after the War of Independence and its first mention of de Valera, on the fourth page, is about his destruction of Dublin’s Custom House and its ancient records in a fire that burned for three days.
Éamon de Valera, who died, aged 92, on August 29th, 1975, was the dominant Irish politician of Jordan’s childhood, teens and student days. He was elected successively to every Dáil from the first (1919-1921) to the 16th (1957-1959), serving as taoiseach six times and as President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) three times. He then served two consecutive terms as president of Ireland from 1959 to 1973. He was president of Ireland when Jordan graduated from UCD with a history degree in 1972.
“This strange figure, from Bruree in Co Limerick by way of Spain and New York, with his predilection for mathematics, Gaelic games and Catholicism”, was Jordan’s description of de Valera in his memoir. The schoolboy Jordan attended a de Valera rally at the GPO and he walked along O’Connell Street in Dublin on the day of de Valera’s State funeral, September 2, 1975. It was in de Valera’s national daily newspaper, the Irish Press, that Jordan’s first published short story, On Coming Home, appeared in September 1974, a few months before de Valera’s death. Jordan had four further stories published on the newspaper’s New Irish Writing Page over the next two years. He won an award at the Berlin Film Festival in 1998 for his adaptation of Patrick McCabe’s novel The Butcher Boy, in which the Irish Press is mentioned.
Jordan was shooting the Michael Collins film on the streets of Dublin when the Irish Press and its Sunday and evening sister papers ceased publication in May 1995, 30 years ago this summer. He supported the journalists following the closure and he said that the Irish Press had been an important outlet for him and writers of his generation.
The Collins film ends with a screenshot of de Valera’s reported 1966 acknowledgment that “history will record the greatness of Collins and it will be recorded at my expense”. But the two main political parties that grew out of the Collins/de Valera split over the Anglo Irish Treaty, and the ensuing Civil War in which Collins was shot dead, now share power in the Dáil.
And Jordan has hailed how 21st century Ireland differs from the previous century. Praising Sally Rooney’s novels in The Irish Times last year, he said: “There’s not a hint of de Valera’s nonsense to be seen there”.
