"Dev would be spinning in his grave if he had seen last year's report by the Moriarty tribunal [into payments to politicians]," according to historian and broadcaster, Dr Diarmaid Ferriter.
He was speaking in Kilkenny where a symposium Eamon de Valera - Statesmanwas one of the biggest hits of the 10-day Arts Festival.
The sell-out event at Kilkenny Castle saw five leading historians discuss the legacy of the man who dominated 20th century Irish politics.
The symposium was chaired by Catriona Crowe of the National Archives of Ireland, who said it was "gratifying to see so many people interested in history at a time when we're all supposed to be philistines and only interested in the future".
Dr Ferriter, who will publish Judging Dev in October, said "too much sneering goes on" about the famous 1943 "comely maidens" speech; and that "it contains much that was positive" and might have new relevance "in an age of vulgar consumption and spiralling suicide rates.
"Dev was expressing scepticism about the idea that wealth could solve all social problems", and would be "angry to see that the pursuit of individual wealth has become paramount as opposed to the idea of communal values".
Dr Ferriter has analysed personal correspondence which reveals that despite serving as taoiseach for 16 years and president for 14, de Valera was "worried in 1973 that he would not have enough money to look after the health needs of himself and his wife who was an invalid at that stage".
Eamon de Valera and his wife Sinéad both died in 1975, aged in their nineties, two years after leaving Áras an Uachtaráin.
Dr Michael Kennedy, executive editor of Documents on Irish Foreign Policy, and the leading expert on archived material relating to de Valera, told the audience that de Valera was not the "dour, dreary" figure of popular culture but a "modern European statesman in the 1930s".
He had "rescued the Department of External [now Foreign] Affairs from the clutches of the Department of Finance who wanted to close it down".
While de Valera could enjoy cafe culture during visits to the League of Nations in Geneva he was also a "maths bore" who drove civil servants to distraction during the long train journeys across Europe.
Other speakers included Dr Deirdre McMahon who noted that "Dev found historians eccentric and puzzling and had a simple, if not naive, view of history which was 'to set the record straight'." She is working on a major two-volume biography of de Valera - the first since the landmark work by Tim Pat Coogan in 1993.
Eunan O'Halpin, professor of contemporary history at Trinity College, said de Valera had "savagely repressed" the IRA during the second World War "to show the British that he could control the country - fearing that otherwise the British might invade". But he had also used internment to "threaten people who wanted to help Britain's war effort".
Speaking after the event, the curator of the festival's literature programme, writer Colm Tóibín, praised the "extraordinary work" of the new generation of historians who all "looked like rock stars" for leading a "reassessment" of de Valera.
He said de Valera's achievements included the introduction of a Constitution in 1937 "which offered considerable human rights to people at a time when many European leaders were leading their people towards fascism".
But he had "a real problem" with de Valera "not taking in refugees during the second World War".
