Dev's Return

By the smoky orange light of flaming tar barrels, voters in County Clare sang and danced at the crossroads one night last week. They were celebrating the return to power, in Ireland's first general elections since 1954, of their own 74-year-old Eamon de Valera, whose Fianna Fail (Men of Destiny) Party scored a clear-cut victory by taking 78 of the Irish Dail's 147 seats.

The venerable Dev is half-blind and not the man he used to be, but he is still Ireland's best-known politician. He was a world figure when Dwight Eisenhower was an unknown Army major, served as president of the League of Nations when Richard Nixon was an undergraduate at Whittier College. Dev, who has been Prime Minister of his fledgling republic for a total of 19 years, is the only surviving commandant of the legendary Easter Rebellion of 1916. In those feverish days he was saved from execution only by British fears of U.S. reaction (Dev was born in New York).

It was symptomatic of Ireland's present difficulties that last week's elections were almost without issue. De Valera campaigned almost exclusively on the grounds that the coalition government of John A. Costello was too weak to govern effectively. The real question seemed to be whether any government can cure Ireland's ills.

Ireland's living standard has never been high; its young, overprotected industries do not begin to supply its needs for manufactured goods. During the past two years the country has been struggling with an increasingly serious balance-of-payments crisis. John Costello met this courageously by slashing imports drastically, but meantime unemployment rose to 90,000 (out of a population of 3,000,000), and construction slumped. And every year some 30,000 to 40.000 Irish of working age are emigrating, mostly to Britain, where the average wage is 50% higher than in Ireland.

Both Costello and De Valera are too good patriots to make a campaign issue of the flaming question of partition, emphasized in recent months by a sharp increase in border raids by the outlawed Irish Republican Army. Though campaign speeches by all contestants dutifully included at least one soaring reference to the injustice of dividing Northern and Southern Ireland, both the speakers and their listeners knew that none of the old men who lead Irish politics today, nor even men much younger than they, were likely to live to see partition's end. The Sinn Fein (We Ourselves) Party, the political front for the I.R.A.. won only four seats. When De Valera heard that the Sinn Fein members would as usual refuse to take their seats, he said simply: "These men are living in the past . . ."

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