THE SOCIAL perspective of Éamon de Valera was a subject of derision but he had a valid outlook on the relationship between different age groups, the MacGill Summer School was told yesterday.
Prof Joe Lee, author of Ireland: 1912-85 said Dev’s St Patrick’s Day radio broadcast in 1943 about “the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of comely maidens” had become “the most derided speech in Irish history”. Although generally known as the “dancing at the crossroads” speech, this was a misquotation and those words were not used. Analysing the contents of the speech, Prof Lee said: “It’s about healthy children, teenagers enjoying themselves, adults employed at broadly agreeable work and the elderly being respected.”
He added: “In other words, it’s about the relationship between the generations.” As life expectancy increased in Ireland, there was a need to rethink very fundamentally what was the role of the elderly in society. Commenting on the prospect that State pensions might be cut, Prof Lee, who is based in New York said: “If I were in the country, I would be mad as hell at that sort of thing.” The current older generation were largely born in the 1930s and 1940s and were left behind when half a million emigrated in the 1950s.
“They did not have anything like the opportunities of subsequent generations. They have borne the heat of the day and they are entitled to a twilight of peace,” he said.
Prof Lee said: “Emotional intelligence is far more important for bonding a society together than intellectual intelligence.” Noting that there were frequent complaints about excessive localism in Irish politics, he said: “Localism could be one of our greatest assets if we knew how to use it properly.”
He said: “Localism is not used constructively in Ireland; it is regarded as a pest. The problem was that we had “centralisation with incoherence”.
In his 1943 speech, de Valera, who was then taoiseach, said: “The ideal Ireland that we would have, the Ireland that we dreamed of, would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who, satisfied with frugal comfort, devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit – a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with the sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contest of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens, whose firesides would be forums for the wisdom of serene old age.”
