In the grey, glum village square of the town of Kildare (pop. 2,617), a big red sound truck stood waiting last week, its horns pointed directly at the church. "It's the only way to get a crowd to listen to a speech these days," explained the politician in charge. "Catch them coming home from Mass." Finally the church bell rang, and a small crowd—oldsters and children mostly, the young adults having sped by on their bicycles—gathered to hear the candidate for the grand, if ornamental, job of President of the Republic of Ireland. Portly General Sean MacEoin, 65, the "Blacksmith of Ballinalee," the man who in the Great Trouble "refused to have an anesthetic while having an English bullet removed from his body for fear that while unconscious he might betray his comrades," had all the proper credentials for Irish politics. But the fact remained: he was running against the Long Fellow himself.
March of a Nation. Now old and nearly blind, tall, austere Eamon de Valera, 76, had stepped down as Taoiseach (Prime Minister), confident that his people would send him "into the park," i.e., to the presidential residence in Dublin's Phoenix Park and to the job that he himself had declared to be "above politics." For 40 years he had dominated the Irish scene, and for 21 of those he had headed the government. Though born in Manhattan —a fact that was to help him escape a British firing squad—he grew up in an
Ireland ringing with Parnell's cry: "No man has a right to fix a boundary to the march of a nation." A soft-spoken teacher of math who later joined the Sinn Fein (We Ourselves), "Dev" is still credited by legend with being the last rebel patriot to surrender during the Battle of Boland's Mills in 1916, and with being one of only 13 scholars who understood Einstein's theory of relativity.
But a long time had passed since he was the martyr "Convict 95" who set the crowds to screaming, "Up Dev! Up the Republic!" For one thing, he had insisted on tying to the presidential election "the Issue"—doing away with proportional representation, which, while giving minorities a voice in the Dail, tends to keep alive old animosities that should have long since become ancient history. "Get rid of the intrigous P.R.!" cried a member of Dev's Fianna Fail (Party of Destiny). "De Valera and Fianna Fail want dictatorship!" retorted the opposition Fine Gael (United Ireland) Party. But it was hardly the sort of issue to stir the hearts of a people who 40 years ago fought the "oppressor" and have never got over it.