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Broken Dream. "What difference does P.R. make?" says John Gibbon, a weathered County Mayo man whose wife runs the Quiet Man Fame cafe in the town of Cong, where John Ford shot some of his movie. Two of the Gibbons' four sons are already in the U.S., and their daughter is planning to go soon. For all its progress since the old colonial days, Dev's Ireland still watches 40,000 of its most energetic young people leave for other lands each year. The rest usually quit school at 14—and drop Gaelic as soon as they do. Dev's dream was to make Gaelic the symbol of Irish culture, but he himself is now one of the few politicians to use it. The others, say the wags, may start their speeches "A chair de [friends]," but then they hastily retreat to "the language of the accursed oppressors."
Unemployment still runs high, and old-age pensions—less than $4 a week—barely keep a body alive. A prominent physician recently reported that many old people in Dublin's hospitals are dying of nothing more than malnutrition. But an even more insidious kind of malnutrition has invaded the body politic. Asks a National University student who has hopes of some day going into politics: "What's the hurry? The parties are still run by old men, or men who know that the past is past but are afraid to admit it. Even the young people get caught up in it. Do you know what the most popular movie in Dublin is? It's Jimmy Cagney telling us how to be martyrs against the Black and Tans."
Hasty Heart. "Whenever I want to know what the Irish are thinking," Old Dev once said, "I look into my own heart." But last week his heart partly deceived him. He won the presidency by so much smaller a margin than expected (538,000 to MacEoin's 417,000) that the opposition even began making noises for a general election to contest the succession as Prime Minister of energetic Sean Lemass, 59, Dev's No. 2 man, who has been largely responsible for the few economic advances Ireland has made of late.
As for P.R., the voters decided to keep the old ways, despite the Long Fellow. And at Dev's own big sentimental rally before the election, no more than 25,000 Dubliners turned out to hear him, far fewer than the 100,000 who flooded into Croke Park the day before for a rally of the Total Abstinence Association—a 60-year-old society that has covered the lapels of Ireland with small Sacred Heart badges signifying the lifelong pledge, and has been largely responsible for reducing the consumption of whisky among the Irish by 42,000 gallons a year.