Eamon De Valera
His political career spanned over half a century, from 1917 to 1973; he served multiple terms as head of government and head of state, and is credited with a leading role in the authorship of the present-day Constitution of Ireland. He was a significant leader of Ireland's struggle for independence from the United Kingdom, and the anti-Treaty opposition in the ensuing Irish Civil War.
In 1926, he founded Fianna Fáil, which continues to be the largest political party in Ireland. Over the years, the principal element of his political creed evolved from militant nationalism to social and cultural conservatism. De Valera was also the co-owner of The Irish Press, a newspaper supportive of Fianna Fáil.
His family
De Valera was born in the New York Nursery and Child's Hospital in New York City in 1882 to an Irish mother; he stated that his parents, Catherine Coll (subsequently Mrs Wheelwright), an immigrant from Bruree, County Limerick, and Juan Vivion de Valera, a Cuban settler and sculptor, were married on 18 September 1881 at St.
Patrick's Church located within the Greenville Section of Jersey City, NJ. However, exhaustive trawls through church and state records give no birth, baptismal, or death certificate information for anyone called Juan Vivion de Valera or de Valeros, an alternative spelling. The historian Sean Murphy has listed the long-term search for facts about Mr de Valera, allowing that he may have come from New Mexico, and was perhaps returning there at the time of his death.
On de Valera's original birth certificate, his name is given as George De Valero and his father is listed as Vivion De Valero.
The first name was corrected in 1910 (possibly 1916) to Edward and the surname to de Valera.
There were a number of occasions when de Valera seriously contemplated the religious life like his half-brother, Fr. Yet he did not do so, and apparently received little encouragement from the priests whose advice he sought.
Éamon de Valera was throughout his life portrayed as a deeply religious man, who in death asked to be buried in a religious habit. While his biographer, Tim Pat Coogan, speculated that questions surrounding de Valera's legitimacy may have been a deciding factor in his not entering religious life, being illegitimate would only have been a bar to receiving orders as a secular or diocesan cleric, not as a member of a religious order.
Juan Vivion died in 1885 leaving his widow and child in poor circumstances. Éamon was taken to Ireland by his Uncle Ned at the age of two.
Even when his mother married a new husband in the mid-1880s, he was not brought back to live with her but reared instead by his grandmother Elizabeth Coll, her son Patrick and her daughter Hannie, in County Limerick. He was educated locally at Bruree National School, County Limerick and Charleville Christian Brothers School, County Cork.
At the age of sixteen, he won a scholarship to Blackrock College, County Dublin. Later during his tenure at Rockwell College, he joined the school's rugby team where he played fullback on the first team, which reached the final of the Munster Senior Cup.
De Valera was a close friend of the Ryan brothers at Rockwell who played on Ireland's Triple Crown-winning team in 1899. De Valera went on to play for the Munster rugby team in the mid 1900s in the fullback position and remained a lifelong devotee of rugby, attending numerous international matches up to and towards the end of his life despite near blindness.
He also won further scholarships and exhibitions and in 1903 was appointed teacher of mathematics at Rockwell College, County Tipperary. It was here that de Valera was first given the nickname "Dev" by a teaching colleague, Tom O'Donnell. He then studied for a year at Trinity College Dublin but owing to the necessity of earning a living did not proceed further and returned to Dublin to teach at Blackrock College. In 1906, he secured a post as teacher of mathematics at Carysfort Teachers' Training College for women in Blackrock, County Dublin.
His applications for professorships in colleges of the National University of Ireland were unsuccessful, but he obtained a part-time appointment at Maynooth and also taught mathematics at various Dublin schools including Castleknock College (1910–1911) under the name Edward de Valera and Belvedere College where he taught Kevin Barry, an Irish republican executed for his part in an ambush of British Soldiers during the Irish War of Independence.
De Valera's children were five sons Vivion, Éamon, Brian, Ruairi and Terence (Terry), and two daughters, Máirín and Emer.
Early political activity
An intelligent young 'Gaeilgeoir' (Irish speaker), he became an activist for the language. Preparations were pushed ahead for an armed revolt, and he was made commandant of the Third Battalion and adjutant of the Dublin Brigade.
De Valera was court-martialled, convicted, and sentenced to death, but the sentence was immediately commuted to penal servitude for life. It has been argued that he was saved by two facts: firstly, he was held in a different prison from other leaders, thus his execution was delayed by practicalities; had he been held with Patrick Pearse, James Connolly and others, he probably would have been one of the first executed; and secondly, his American birth delayed his execution, while the full legal situation (i.e., was he actually a United States citizen and if so, how would the United States react to the execution of one of its citizens?) was clarified.
Timing, location, and questions relating to citizenship may have saved de Valera's life.
The Kilmainham Gaol cell of Éamon de Valera.
De Valera's supporters and detractors argue about de Valera's bravery during the Easter Rising. According to accounts from 1916 de Valera was seen running about, giving conflicting orders, refusing to sleep and on one occasion, having forgotten the password, almost getting himself shot in the dark by his own men.
He also threatened to sue the doctor, future Fine Gael TD and minister, Dr. Tom O'Higgins, if he ever repeated the story.
After imprisonment in Dartmoor, Maidstone and Lewes prisons, de Valera and his comrades were released under an amnesty in June 1917.
On 10 July 1917 he was elected member of the British House of Commons for East Clare (the constituency which he represented until 1959) in a by-election caused by the death of the previous incumbent Willie Redmond who had died fighting in World War I. In the 1918 general election he was elected both for that seat and Mayo East.
From 1917 he was president of Sinn Féin, the party which had wrongly been credited by the British for the Easter Rising and which the survivors of the Rising took over and then turned into a republican party. When it became clear by May 1919 that this mission could not succeed, de Valera decided to visit the United States.
The mission had three objectives: to ask for official recognition of the Irish Republic, to float a loan to finance the work of the Government (and by extension, the Irish Republican Army), and to secure the support of the American people for the republic. He also had difficulties with various Irish-American leaders, such as John Devoy and Judge Colohan, who resented the dominant position he established, preferring to retain their control over Irish affairs in the United States.
Meanwhile in Ireland, conflict between the British authorities and the Dáil (which they declared illegal in September 1919) escalated into the Irish War of Independence (also called the 'Anglo-Irish War').
The Long Fellow (or An t-Amadán Fada, another of de Valera's nicknames, given to him because of his great height, meaning the Long Fool) left day to day government, during his eighteen month absence in America, to Michael Collins (The Big Fellow), his twenty-nine year old Minister for Finance and rival.
President of the Republic
In January 1921, at his first Dáil meeting after his return to a country gripped by the War of Independence, de Valera introduced a motion calling on the IRA to desist from ambushes and other tactics that were allowing the British to successfully portray it as a terrorist group, and to take on the British forces with conventional military methods. himself, on the pretext that only he could take up where de Valera had left off.
In the elections of May 1921, all candidates in Southern Ireland were returned unopposed, and Sinn Féin secured some seats in Northern Ireland. Following the Truce of July, 1921 which ended the war, de Valera went to see David Lloyd George in London on 14 July.
Declaring himself now the Irish equivalent of King George V, he argued that as Irish head of state, in the absence of the British head of state from the negotiations, he too should not attend the peace conference called the Treaty Negotiations (October–December 1921) at which British and Irish government leaders agreed to the effective independence of twenty-six of Ireland's thirty-two counties as the Irish Free State, with Northern Ireland choosing to remain under British sovereignty. Nationalists expected its report to recommend that largely nationalist areas become part of the Free State, and many hoped this would make Northern Ireland so small it would not be economically viable.
A Council of Ireland was also provided in the Treaty as a model for an eventual all-Irish parliament. They all expected it would prove short-lived.
Anglo-Irish Treaty
The Republic's delegates to the Treaty Negotiations were accredited by President de Valera and his cabinet as plenipotentiaries (that is, negotiators with the legal authority to sign a treaty without reference back to the cabinet), but were given secret cabinet instructions by de Valera that required them to return to Dublin before signing the Treaty. However, the Treaty proved controversial in Ireland insofar as it replaced the Republic by a dominion of the British Commonwealth with the King represented by a Governor-General of the Irish Free State.
His opponents claimed that he had refused to join the negotiations because he knew what the outcome would be and did not wish to receive the blame. On a speaking tour of the more republican province of Munster, starting on 17 March 1922, de Valera made controversial speeches at Carrick on Suir, Lismore, Dungarvan and Waterford, saying that: "If the Treaty were accepted, the fight for freedom would still go on, and the Irish people, instead of fighting foreign soldiers, will have to fight the Irish soldiers of an Irish government set up by Irishmen." At Thurles, several days later, he repeated this imagery and added that the IRA: "...would have to wade through the blood of the soldiers of the Irish Government, and perhaps through that of some members of the Irish Government to get their freedom." In a letter to the Irish Independent on 23 March de Valera accepted the accuracy of their report of his comment about "wading" through blood, but deplored that the newspaper had published it. De Valera's detractors claim that this was an incitement to the civil war that developed.
His supporters say that de Valera was lamenting the fact that the British had managed to divide Irish nationalists with the Treaty, but the text was inevitably a compromise as Sinn Féin was not in a position to dictate its terms.
De Valera's major problem with the Treaty was twofold. Secondly, he was concerned that Ireland could not have an independent foreign policy as part of the British Commonwealth when the British retained several naval ports (see Treaty Ports) around Ireland's coast.
Both sides had wanted to avoid civil war, but fighting broke out over the takeover of the Four Courts building in Dublin by anti-Treaty members of the IRA. De Valera, though he held no military position, backed the anti-Treaty IRA or "Irregulars" and said that he was re-enlisting in the IRA as an ordinary volunteer.
However, according to de Valera, they "could not find a basis" for agreement.
Though nominally head of the anti-Treatyites, de Valera had little influence. He does not seem to have been involved in any fighting and had little or no influence with the military republican leadership - headed by IRA Chief of Staff, Liam Lynch.
However it had no real authority and was a pale shadow of the republican Dáil government of 1919–21, which had provided an alternative government to the British administration. De Valera, who had wanted an end to the internecine fighting for some time, backed the ceasefire order in a famous speech in which he called the anti-Treaty fighters "the Legion of the Rearguard", saying that "the republic can no longer be successfully defended by your arms ...
De Valera was arrested in County Clare and interned until 1924.
Founding of Fianna Fáil and entry into Free State Dáil
File:Dev-st.jpg
Éamon de Valera entering Leinster House, home of the Free State parliament.
After the IRA dumped their arms rather than surrender them or continue a now fruitless war, de Valera returned to political methods. The party made swift electoral gains but refused to take the Oath of Allegiance (spun by opponents as an 'Oath of Allegiance to the Crown' but actually an Oath of Allegiance to the Irish Free State with a secondary promise of fidelity to the King in his role in the Treaty settlement.
Its members arrived at the first sitting of the new Dáil carrying arms, as they assumed that like them the former government would not accept the will of the people. De Valera was appointed President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) by Governor-General James McNeill on 9 March.
He at once initiated steps to fulfil his election promises of abolishing the oath and withholding land annuities owed to Britain for loans provided under the Irish Land Acts and agreed as part of the 1921 Treaty. The ensuing "Economic War" lasted until 1938 and caused much distress, impoverishment and severe damage to the Irish economy.
On his advice the appointment of James McNeill as Governor-General was terminated by King George V on 1 November 1932 and a 1916 veteran, Domhnall Ua Buachalla, was appointed Governor-General in his place.
De Valera encouraged IRA members to join the Free State army and the Gardaí. De Valera then banned the ACA permanently in 1933.
De Valera's new constitution
During the 1930s, de Valera had systematically stripped down the Irish Free State constitution that had been drafted by a committee under the nominal chairmanship of his great rival, Michael Collins.
Secondly, while in theory the Governor-General of the Irish Free State could reserve or deny the Royal Assent to any legislation, in practice the power to advise the Governor-General so to do as and from 1927 no longer rested with the British Government in London but with His Majesty's Government in the Irish Free State, which meant that in practice, the Royal Assent was automatically granted to legislation; the government was hardly likely to advise the Governor-General to block the enactment of one of its own bills. The title ultimately changed from President of Saorstát Éireann (Uachtarán Shaorstát Éireann) to President of Ireland (Uachtarán na hÉireann), but it still remained the central feature of his new constitution, to which he gave the new Irish language name Bunreacht na hÉireann (meaning literally the Constitution of Ireland).
The text of the 1937 Constitution of Ireland is available as amended to 2004.
The constitution contained a number of reforms and symbols intended to assert Irish sovereignty.
The state adopted an official description, the Republic of Ireland while keeping its name, Ireland. In doing so Ireland left the Commonwealth. In 1951 de Valera was returned to power but without an overall majority.
This was the beginning of another sixteen year period in office for Fianna Fáil. An important function of his newspaper group, the Irish Press group, was to rectify what he saw as the errors and omissions of a decade in which he had been the subject of largely hostile commentary.
In recent decades his role in Irish history has no longer been unequivocally seen by historians as a positive one, and a biography by Tim Pat Coogan alleges that his failures outweigh his achievements, with de Valera's reputation declining while that of his great rival in the 1920s, Michael Collins, is rising.
A constitutional referendum to ratify this was defeated by the people.
One aspect of de Valera's legacy is that since the foundation of the state, a de Valera has nearly always served in Dáil Éireann.