A highlight of this year’s Dublin Theatre Festival was the Rough Magic Theatre Company’s production of The Train, a musical by Arthur Riordan and Bill Whelan. Political theatre at its wittiest and craziest, it told the story of the fledgling Irish Women’s Liberation Movement’s publicised trip in 1971 to Belfast to buy contraceptives, ostentatiously importing these banned Satanic devices back into the Republic, where the law obeyed the writ of the Catholic church. Watching it, one was reminded of the sheer extent of theocracy in Éamon de Valera’s Ireland (he remained president till 1973, having been Taoiseach for most of the period from 1932 to 1959), and the long journey from those days to this year’s equal marriage referendum. Ronan Fanning’s crisp, economical but deeply thought-provoking biography anatomises de Valera’s influence, and reminds us just how transformed the country is since his heyday.
Fanning lays great emphasis on de Valera’s difficult early life, heavily disguised in the official biography — which was more or less dictated by the man himself to his supine and complaisant hagiographers (prominent among them Lord Longford).
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