Politics & Power Quote by Eamon de Valera

De Valera is doing what he did best: turning a ledger line into a nationalist rallying cry. “Annuities” sounds like paperwork, not destiny, so he yokes it to something voters could picture and feel: the Shannon Scheme, the young Free State’s signature proof that big, modern infrastructure wasn’t just a British monopoly. The line is engineered to make retention look less like default or defiance and more like investment - a yearly factory of progress, paid for with money that’s already “ours.”

The specific intent is tactical. In the Economic War period, the state’s decision to withhold land annuity payments to Britain needed a moral and material alibi. De Valera supplies one: keep the cash at home, spin it into jobs, electrification, and industrial capacity. It’s Keynesian in instinct but rhetorical in packaging - not “stimulus,” not “fiscal sovereignty,” just a repeatable national triumph “every year.”

The subtext is sharper: Ireland’s dependency is not only political but infrastructural, and the cure is to build. He’s also smuggling in a rebuke of caution. If you can imagine one Shannon Scheme, you can imagine many; if you can imagine many, then fears about retaliation, tariffs, or short-term pain start to sound like small-minded defeatism.

Context matters because the Shannon Scheme was both myth and measurement: a rare project that looked like a future arriving on schedule. De Valera borrows that glow to argue that economic confrontation can be recast as nation-making, not just nation-arguing.