Free De Valera's Irelands by Dermot Keogh, Keogh Doherty

state – albeit a claim that was accompanied by an abrogation in practice of this claim to sovereignty.
    And third, the inclusion of a provision recognising ‘the special pos­ition of the Catholic, Apostolic and Holy Roman Church as the guardian of the faith of the great majority of the people’ (a provision which, how­ever, also recognised a list of named Protestant Churches and the Jewish community, and which was eliminated from the constitution in 1972 by an overwhelming majority in a popular referendum), served to confirm northern unionist prejudices about the predominantly Roman Catholic character of the Irish state.
    This, incidentally, found further confirmation in their eyes in anoth­er new provision banning legislation for the dissolution of marriage, for, while most Protestants in Ireland at that time did not personally favour divorce for religious reasons, they saw this constitutional provision as evidence of influence by the Catholic Church on the government of the Irish state.
    Finally, the policy of neutrality in the Second World War, designed both to proclaim Irish sovereignty and to maintain the consensus pain­fully brought about over the preceding years on the legitimacy of the Irish state, had the effect of further alienating unionist opinion in North­ern Ireland, and of greatly increasing British sympathy with the unionist position. This was a further inevitable but unintended consequence of the policy to which de Valera had in practice given priority since the im­mediate post-Civil War period – vis., the achievement of a more com­plete separation of the Irish state from Britain.
    Thus, in pursuing the unspoken objective of establishing the Irish state on a solid domestic foundation that would command the loyalty of all but a handful of its people, de Valera had found it necessary to pursue a course that divided this state more deeply from Northern Ireland and made re-unification more difficult, more distant and more problematic.
    This was paradoxical, because he himself frequently publicly pro­claimed the re-unification of Ireland as one of the two major national aims – the other, and prior, aim being the revival of the Irish language. His real order of priorities was, however, disclosed in a speech in reply to a debate in the Senate on 7 February 1939. There, in his customary rath­er tortured style, he said:
    Although freedom for a part of this island is not the freedom we want – the freedom we would like to have – this freedom for a portion of it, freedom to develop and to keep the kernel of the Irish nation, is something, and some­thing that I would not sacrifice, if by sacrificing it we were to get a united Ireland and that united Ireland was not free to determine its own form of government, to determine its relations with other countries, and amongst other things, to determine for example, whether it would or would not be involved in war.
    The relationship he saw between neutrality and sovereignty is there sug­gested, as well as the priority he always in practice accorded to the achieve­ment and maintenance of sovereignty of the partitioned Irish state, as against political re-unification of the island.
    In that same speech he even made it clear that re-unification came third and not even second in priority in his mind, for he emphasised that the object of restoring Irish as the spoken language of the majority of the people also took priority over re-unification:
    For instance, speaking for myself – I am not talking about government policy in the matter, which has been largely embodied in the constitution – I would not tomorrow, for the sake of a united Ireland, give up the policy of trying to make this a really Irish Ireland – not by any means. If I were told to­morrow: ‘You can have a united Ireland if you give up your idea of re­storing the national language to be the spoken language of the majority of the