PAT Kenny played host last week to a strange debate about de Valera's alleged secret career as a British spy.

De Valera was never short of enemies over the course of his long life. Lloyd George called him a Spanish onion. American fundraisers called him a thief when he used their millions to set up a personal newspaper without delivering their mythical Republic.

John Maynard Keynes called him an economic ignoramus addled by visions of wheat surpluses in the era of Siemens and Ford.

And now an American writer suggests he was really a British spy after having been turned by the security services in exchange for a commuted death sentence in 1916.

Quite a facer, as Bertie Wooster used to say when presented with unhappy news.

The absurdity of this thesis should not, however, obscure de Valera's very profound Anglophile streak.

De Valera's first love, of course, was Woodrow Wilson, the dyslexic Virginian academic who descended on a shattered Europe in 1919, bearing the balm of national self-determination and collective security.

But Wilson himself was mesmerised by the British parliamentary tradition, and by the reverent constitutional histories of Macaulay, Bagehot and Dicey.

De Valera shared a similar regard for the great liberal tradition in British politics and at his meridian he acted like a strong British prime minister, rather than an American president, even though he briefly experimented with a presidential-style system of government during the chaotic years between 1919-21.

While rhetorically American in so many ways, de Valera's constitution of 1937 was really a British document. It allowed the Minister for Finance to hold his ministerial colleagues to ransom, just as British mandarins such as Warren Fisher said he should in the Twenties.

A study of his own speeches dealing with the new judicial review mechanism he sponsored in 1937 also show a very British regard for the traditional prerogatives of parliament viz a viz unelected judges.

The crucial religion clauses of the new constitution were also themselves very British in their thinking, even though commentators see them as carry-overs from Polish practice in the Twenties.

In the religions clauses, de Valera gave clear preference to one sect, the Catholic Church, and then said that this was not incompatible with full tolerance for other rival sects in the state. This approach to religion -- pick a clear favourite, but lay off the other ones -- was classically British in that it followed Edmund Burke's great speeches on establishment and toleration of religion in the 1770s. Dev preferred this British approach to the luminous clarity of Madison's First Amendment.

He was nowhere more of an Anglophile than in his attitude towards the civil service, where he held views that would not have seemed out of place in Gladstone's era.

De Valera had enormous faith in the skill and patriotism of the bureaucracy, and his premierships were dominated by a small group of mandarins who fed him policies that he pushed through his cabinet.

He openly speculated once in the Dail in the Fifties about setting up a French-style personal cabinet or a Rooseveltian brain trust of independent whizz kids and experts.

He rejected the idea of amassing a staff outside the formal bureaucratic channels with a palpable shudder, though, since he doubted anybody could be as good as his own golden boys.

He treated his Private Secretary Maurice Moynihan with all the reverence British prime ministers usually accorded their cabinet secretaries since the Great War.

Just as the British government centralised its recovery programme in one official after 1945, de Valera also wanted to make Moynihan chief executive planning officer that year (as well as Cabinet Secretary and Secretary to his department), but this plan was scuttled by the jealous number crunchers in JJ McElligott's Finance.

Dev tended to treat senior officials as if they had the inviolate permanence of members of the College of Cardinals, itself a very British, even Victorian attitude towards departmental secretaries.

McElligott used to practically laugh into his face when confronted by Dev's economic policy in the Thirties, or his first drafts for what would become the toxic Article 2 territorial claim over Northern Ireland in 1937. He told him it would all end in tears and yet Dev let him be.

He did the same with Joseph Walsh, chief diplomat in External Affairs since the early Twenties, would-be Irish Bossuet, and another openly hostile commentator, at least until Dev installed himself in St Stephen's Green as Minister and Taoiseach in 1932.

Stephen Roche at Justice also ridiculed his initial indulgence of the IRA and the enforceable bill of rights he proposed in 1934, but he too was left to his own devices without overt prime ministerial obstruction.

Though Dev met with all the great Commonwealth statesmen of his era -- King, Nehru, Menzies -- it was altogether fitting in this context that his warmest words were reserved for Neville Chamberlain, his beau ideal among British Prime Ministers between Lloyd George and Macmillan.

Dev wasn't turned by the British spooks, but he was charmed by her parliamentary genius and by what Burke once called her liberal descent.

John-Paul McCarthy teaches Irish history at Exeter College, Oxford.

Sunday Independent