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Well, I talked to some Irish guys from my office about this, and they tend to agree. Initially, De Valera was staggeringly popular as the leader of the moment that gained Ireland's independence, especially with the founding of the Republic in the late '40s. But on reflection in later decades, people from the poorer strata of Irish society realized they weren't actually economically better off than under the British. The main change was that a bunch of absentee landlords in Britain had been traded for a bunch of intellectuals in Dublin, and British suppression of basic freedoms had been replaced by the Catholic church's (do you realize contraceptives have been available in the Republic for less than twenty years?).
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