In July 1987, the private papers of Éamon de Valera relating to the drafting of the Irish constitution of 1937 were opened to the public for the first time. The purpose of this paper is to examine, in the light of this material, which is held in the Francisan House of Studies, Killiney, County Dublin, and of documents now available in the Irish Jesuit Archives, the contribution of a number of Jesuit priests to the drafting of this constitution.

On 24 May 1934, Éamon de Valera, president of the executive council, set up a committee of four civil servants to examine the Irish Free State constitution of 1922. Its membership consisted of Stephen Roche, secretary of the department of justice (committee chairman), Michael McDunphy, assistant secretary of the department of the president (committee secretary), Philip O’Donoghue, assistant to the attorney general, and John Hearne, legal adviser in the department of external affairs who, with de Valera, was to prove to be the principal architect of the 1937 constitution. It is clear from the minutes of this committee that its members were initially under the impression that what de Valera was seeking was a wholly new constitution. Thus, at its second meeting it was ‘agreed that the report of the committee should take the form of an entirely new constitution’. It soon became clear, however, ‘as a result of pronouncements by the president and of conversations which individual members of the committee had with him’, that what he really wanted was not a new constitution but ‘a selection within the framework of the present constitution of those articles which should be regarded as fundamental’ and ‘a recommendation as to how these should be rendered immune from alteration by ordinary legislation’.