At first glance, Éamon de Valera seems an unlikely patron of Ireland’s offshore wind revolution.
Yet, to borrow from Tim Pat Coogan, the Long Fellow casts a long shadow in the most surprising of places, including today’s offshore energy strategy.
For all of his instinctive conservatism and rural idealism, de Valera had a keen intellect and understanding of cutting-edge science. Before politics called, he aspired to teach mathematical physics, while imprisoned he scratched complicated formulae into the wall of his Kilmainham cell, and kept a chalkboard in the Áras to indulge his interest there in a less permanent fashion.
As minister for external affairs and later taoiseach, de Valera was a staunch advocate for Ireland’s maritime rights. From the 1930s, he argued that sovereignty extended beyond land into adjacent seas.
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His governments supported early moves to expand territorial waters and, through the 1959 Maritime Jurisdiction Act, extended Ireland’s control offshore. Later legislation in the 1960s advanced claims to the continental shelf, a vast swathe of the north Atlantic.
This legal architecture, built decades before the 1982 UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, gave Ireland the basis to control one of Europe’s largest exclusive economic zones (EEZ), more than 10 times the size of its land mass. Today, that EEZ is central to Ireland’s offshore wind strategy.
De Valera also embedded the principle of State-led development. Whatever the shortcomings of his economic policies, he defended national ownership of essential infrastructure. The ESB, rural electrification, and Bord na Móna reflected a belief that resources should serve the public good.
Perhaps his most lasting contribution was the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies (DIAS), founded in 1940. Drawing the renowned physicist Erwin Schrödinger was seen as a massive coup and won the headlines, but the Geophysics Section at DIAS quietly laid the foundation for Ireland’s Earth systems expertise.
[ What did Éamon de Valera ever do for us?Opens in new window ]
DIAS has since shaped Irish seismology, geomagnetism, and subsurface mapping, precisely the knowledge needed to plan offshore wind. Its Irish National Seismic Network monitors offshore environments, while alumni occupy key roles in marine governance. By investing in “pure learning”, de Valera ensured the State had the tools to understand and use its maritime territory.
De Valera is often caricatured as rural and inward-looking, yet his maritime vision was strategic and global. He negotiated return of the Treaty Ports, worried about nuclear submarines in Irish waters, supported marine research and consistently linked sovereignty with international law, as his contributions at the League of Nations demonstrated.
That outlook resonates with today’s offshore wind strategy, which frames our island’s continental shelf and its reliable wind as both economic opportunity and geopolitical asset.
Obviously, de Valera did not foresee floating turbines or green energy parks. But without his approach to sovereignty, Ireland’s jurisdiction over its seas might look quite different. Without the DIAS, it might lack the scientific and technical infrastructure to map and study them. And without his insistence on State-led development, the framework for offshore energy might look very different.
There is a real irony here. The leader most associated with a romanticised, rural nationalism actually, through his joint interests in mathematics and maritime sovereignty, helped enable a 21st century reinvention: Ireland as an exporter of clean power, rooted in ownership of its seas and its capacity to harness them.
Stuart Mathieson is research manager with InterTradeIreland
