Down Dev

Each day for the past nine weeks a furious little motorcade raced back and forth across the roads of Ireland. In the lead ran a seek, black Packard with Ireland's Prime Minister slouched wearily in the front seat beside a tense driver; close behind came a darting blue Ford with its complement of sleepy detectives. In district after district where the caravan stopped, farmers and townsfolk clustered round for a look at the gaunt, aging (71) hero who had won political freedom for their nation in 1922 and guided its destiny almost constantly ever since. They listened respectfully as Eamon de Valera, now almost blind, once again outlined his austere plans for Ireland's future. They cheered him with the old campaign cry: "Up Dev!"

But when the time came to cast their votes last week, the discouraged citizens of Ireland dragged themselves to the polls without enthusiasm and in lackluster weariness turned Eamon de Valera out of office, quite possibly forever. When the returns were in, De Valera's Fianna Fail (Men of Destiny) Party had lost eight seats in the Parliament, the Independents who often supported them had lost one. Altogether the opposition parties, led by John Costello's Fine Gael (United Ireland), had gained enough votes to give the anti-Dev coalition a shaky majority.

A Pint of Beer. "Facts in Ireland," writes Authoress Honor Tracy, "are very peculiar things. They are rarely allowed to spoil the sweep and flow of conversation." In casting aside the grave, ascetic leader whom many of them had served with respect approaching reverence for three decades, the Irish were characteristically unconcerned with facts. Many grim realities confront Ireland in her 33rd year of independence: an emigration rate that is bleeding her white of young blood at the rate of 20,000 a year, an agricultural economy that has still only one market (the U.K.), a soaring unemployment that reached 80,000 this year. Yet none of these facts seemed to be at issue in the general election that Dev himself had called to test his puny two-vote majority in the Parliament. Even the ancient cause celebre, partition, seemed temporarily forgotten.

In the final count, De Valera was defeated largely on the issue of the price of a pint of beer. "Surely," he said to one heckling voter in Limerick, "there is more in the world than the pint." But to many an Irishman, wearied by years of heavy taxation and high prices, unimpressed by the government's high-sounding plans to "harness the winds and the tides" in expensive power projects, the i s. 3 d. pint of beer was the whole story. Since De Valera was responsible for it, De Valera must go.

A Stern Duty. The points at issue, if any, between John Costello's Fine Gael and Dev's own party were largely sentimental ones dating back to the days of the Civil War, when Dev and the Men of Destiny held out for total independence while Fine Gael was willing to settle for mere home rule under Britain. In order to govern at all, Lawyer Costello (accent on the first syllable) will have to join a coalition with the Labor Party, which favors even more government spending than Dev.

Few Irishmen believed that such a shaky coalition could long endure, yet Dev's stern refusal to ease their lot by deficit spending or careless borrowing made them blind to any other risk. "We knew we would be unpopular for increasing taxation and removing [food] subsidies," said Dev, "but we either had to do our duty or not, and we did our duty."

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