Éamon de Valera, the Constitution, and the Jewish Congregations

Two things were true of de Valera's Ireland, and neither cancels the other.

Its Constitution named the Jewish Congregations, at a time when Germany was stripping its Jews of citizenship. And its Department of Justice let in no more than a hundred Jewish refugees in the whole Nazi period, with de Valera arguing for a more liberal line and losing.

This is how both happened.

1935. The Aliens Act

The Aliens Act of 1935 gave the Minister for Justice wide powers over who could enter the state and stay in it. Most of what follows was done under it.

1937. Article 44

The people approved the Constitution on the first of July 1937, by 685,105 votes to 526,945. It came into force on the twenty ninth of December.

The story says it made the state a sovereign republic. The record shows something narrower. It gave the state a president for its own affairs and kept the king for its dealings abroad. It was republican in aspiration, and it never used the word. The republic came twelve years later, with the Republic of Ireland Act. That Act came into force on the eighteenth of April 1949, and it repealed the External Relations Act of 1936.

Article 44 gave the Catholic Church a special position as the guardian of the faith of the great majority. The next clause recognised the Church of Ireland, the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, the Religious Society of Friends, the Jewish Congregations and the other religious denominations in the country when the Constitution came into force.

It was the hardest article to settle. A conservative Catholic lobby wanted the Church named as the one true Church. In April 1937 de Valera consulted the papal nuncio, Cardinal MacRory, the Catholic and Church of Ireland archbishops of Dublin and a Methodist leader, and he sent an envoy to Rome. The Holy See stayed neutral on the wording. Archbishop John Gregg of the Church of Ireland advised him on how to name the churches, and the Presbyterian minister James Irwin brought his church round.

The story says Chief Rabbi Herzog shaped the Jewish clause. The record shows that de Valera consulted him on the new constitution in 1936. The published accounts of the drafting do not name him. His part in the wording may be real. It has not been shown.

1938. The door stays shut

Dermot Keogh calls the years from 1938 to 1941 a lost chance.

The Department of Justice under Patrick Ruttledge ran a restrictive policy on Jewish refugees, with the support of Seán Lemass's Department of Industry and Commerce. De Valera and External Affairs took a more liberal line. De Valera rebuked Justice. He did not overrule it.

At most a hundred Jewish refugees came in the whole Nazi period. The community grew from 3,686 in 1926 to 3,907 by the middle of the 1940s, mostly through births.

Keogh says de Valera was willing to admit ten thousand. It did not happen.

Whether the officials at Justice acted from antisemitism or from what they called the national interest is not settled here.

1945. The visit

When Hitler died, de Valera called on the German envoy in Dublin to offer his condolences. It was protocol, rigidly applied. Irish Jews were puzzled. Keogh finds that it did not, in the long run, damage their regard for him.

1953. Justice loses

The Department of Justice kept its policy after the war. It was defeated in 1953, after de Valera had returned to power.

1972. The names come out

On the seventh of December 1972 the people voted, by about eighty five per cent, to delete the clauses of Article 44 that named the Catholic Church and the other churches, the Jewish Congregations among them. It was meant as a gesture to Protestants in the North. The guarantees of religious freedom stayed.

For thirty five years the Jewish Congregations had been named in the founding law of the state. For part of that time the state turned away the Jews who most needed it. Article 44 was a real shield. It did not reach past the water's edge.