Eamon de Valera

Eamon de Valera was born on October 14, 1882, in Manhattan, New York City, to Catherine Coll, an Irish emigrant from County Limerick, and Juan Vivion de Valera, a man of Spanish descent about whom little is reliably documented ^[1]. His father died when the boy was an infant, and in 1885 his mother sent the two year old across the Atlantic in the care of an uncle. He was raised by his grandmother and other relatives in the small village of Bruree, County Limerick, in a laborer's cottage that is today preserved as a museum ^[2].

The question of who was Eamon de Valera begins with this unusual double identity: an American birth certificate and a rural Irish upbringing. His American citizenship would later matter enormously, since it was cited among the reasons his death sentence was commuted in 1916 ^[1]. As a boy he showed a strong aptitude for mathematics, winning scholarships that carried him from the local national school to Blackrock College in Dublin in 1898 ^[3].

He studied at the Royal University of Ireland, graduating in 1904 with a degree in mathematics, and spent the following years teaching the subject at various colleges around Dublin ^[3]. Around 1908 he joined the Gaelic League, the organization dedicated to reviving the Irish language, a decision that changed the direction of his life. There he met Sinead Flanagan, an Irish language teacher four years his senior, whom he married in 1910. He also began using the Irish form of his first name, Eamon, in place of Edward ^[2].

De Valera joined the Irish Volunteers at their foundation in November 1913, drawn into militant nationalism as the campaign for Home Rule stalled and unionist resistance hardened ^[1]. He rose to command the Third Battalion of the Dublin Brigade, and during the Easter Rising of April 1916 he held Boland's Mills, a bakery complex covering the southeastern approaches to the city. His garrison was among the last to surrender ^[4].

A British court martial sentenced him to death, but the sentence was commuted to penal servitude for life. Historians have debated the exact reasons: the general revulsion at the executions already carried out, the timing of his trial, and uncertainty over his American citizenship all appear to have played a part ^[1]. The outcome left him the senior surviving commandant of the Rising, a fact that gave him unmatched standing among republicans when he was released in the general amnesty of June 1917.

Within months he had won a Westminster seat in the East Clare by-election as a Sinn Fein candidate, and in October 1917 he was elected president of both Sinn Fein and the Irish Volunteers ^[4]. Arrested again in May 1918 during the so-called German Plot roundup, he was held in Lincoln Jail in England until February 1919, when he escaped in a celebrated operation involving a duplicate key smuggled inside a cake ^[2]. By then Sinn Fein had swept the 1918 general election, its members had refused to sit at Westminster, and the First Dail had convened in Dublin. In April 1919 the Dail elected de Valera its Priomh Aire, effectively president of the self-declared Irish Republic ^[1].

From June 1919 to December 1920 de Valera toured the United States, raising over five million dollars in bond certificates for the republic and seeking, without success, formal American recognition ^[5]. He returned to an Ireland deep in the War of Independence. After the truce of July 1921 he met the British prime minister David Lloyd George in London, but when formal treaty negotiations opened that autumn he chose to remain in Dublin, sending a delegation headed by Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins ^[1].

The delegates signed the Anglo-Irish Treaty on December 6, 1921, accepting dominion status for a twenty six county Irish Free State and an oath of fidelity to the Crown. De Valera rejected the settlement, arguing for his alternative of external association, a looser link with the British Commonwealth. The Dail approved the Treaty by 64 votes to 57 in January 1922, and de Valera resigned the presidency ^[4]. The split descended into civil war between June 1922 and May 1923. De Valera sided with the anti-Treaty republicans, though his actual influence over the fighting was limited, and the pro-Treaty government won decisively ^[1].

The civil war left scars that defined Irish party politics for generations, and de Valera spent years in the political wilderness, including a period of imprisonment by the Free State in 1923 and 1924. Among the most disputed Eamon de Valera facts is his responsibility for the split itself; his defenders point to the delegation's decision to sign without referring back to Dublin, while critics have asked why he declined to lead the negotiations in person ^[5].

In 1926, after failing to persuade Sinn Fein to abandon its policy of boycotting the Free State parliament, de Valera broke away and founded a new party, Fianna Fail ^[1]. The following year its deputies entered the Dail, treating the required oath as an empty formula. The gamble transformed Irish politics: Fianna Fail won the 1932 general election, and de Valera became President of the Executive Council, taking office peacefully from the men who had defeated him in the civil war ^[4].

Any account of Eamon de Valera achievements centers on the decade that followed. He dismantled the Treaty settlement piece by piece: abolishing the oath, downgrading and then removing the office of governor general, and withholding land annuity payments to Britain, which triggered the Economic War of 1932 to 1938 ^[1]. In 1937 he introduced a new constitution, Bunreacht na hEireann, approved by referendum, which replaced the Free State with a sovereign state named Eire, created the office of President of Ireland, and asserted a claim to the whole island while recognizing the special position of the Catholic Church ^[6]. The 1938 Anglo-Irish agreements ended the trade dispute and, crucially, returned the three Treaty ports that Britain had retained, a transfer that made Irish neutrality practicable ^[5].

During the Second World War, known in Ireland as the Emergency, de Valera as Taoiseach held the state to a policy of neutrality despite intense pressure from Britain and the United States ^[1]. The policy enjoyed broad domestic support and confirmed the state's independence in foreign affairs, though his formal call of condolence to the German legation on the death of Hitler in May 1945 drew lasting international criticism ^[5]. He also served as his own Minister for External Affairs for most of the period from 1932 to 1948, and he presided over sessions of the League of Nations Assembly and Council in the 1930s ^[6].

De Valera married Sinead Flanagan on January 8, 1910, at St Paul's Church in Dublin. The couple had seven children: five sons and two daughters. One son, Brian, died in a riding accident in 1936 ^[2]. Sinead, a writer of children's stories in Irish, kept almost entirely out of public life during her husband's long career and died in January 1975, months before him. Their marriage lasted just short of sixty five years.

He remained a committed Catholic throughout his life and a lifelong advocate of the Irish language, which he spoke at home and promoted in schools and public administration ^[3]. Mathematics stayed a genuine passion rather than a discarded early career: in 1940 he founded the Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, whose School of Theoretical Physics attracted the Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger to Dublin ^[6].

His eyesight deteriorated from the 1930s onward, and repeated operations could not prevent near blindness in his later decades, though he continued in office regardless ^[2]. Family members carried his political inheritance forward: his son Vivion managed the Irish Press newspaper group that de Valera had founded in 1931, and his grandson Eamon O Cuiv later served as a Fianna Fail minister. The Irish Press connection also generated controversy, since critics questioned the family's controlling interest in a company originally financed by republican bond subscribers ^[5].

Fianna Fail lost power in 1948 after sixteen unbroken years, and the inter-party government that replaced it declared the twenty six counties a republic in 1949, completing a constitutional journey de Valera himself had mapped ^[1]. He returned as Taoiseach twice more, from 1951 to 1954 and from 1957 to 1959, though these final administrations struggled with emigration and economic stagnation, problems his protectionist policies had failed to solve ^[4].

In 1959, at the age of seventy six, he retired from party leadership and won election to the largely ceremonial office of President of Ireland. He was re-elected in 1966, narrowly defeating Tom O'Higgins, and served the full second term. When he left office in June 1973, aged ninety, he was the oldest serving head of state in the world at the time ^[2].

De Valera died at Linden Convalescent Home in Blackrock, County Dublin, on August 29, 1975, at the age of ninety two ^[1]. After a state funeral he was buried in Glasnevin Cemetery beside Sinead and their son Brian. His grave lies in the same cemetery as those of many comrades and rivals from the revolutionary generation, including Michael Collins ^[2].

Few careers in modern democratic politics match de Valera's span: elected to the First Dail in 1919, he remained head of government or head of state for most of the following half century. Any balanced Eamon de Valera biography must weigh the builder of institutions against the divider of the independence movement. The 1937 Constitution he drafted remains, with amendments, the fundamental law of Ireland today, and Fianna Fail, the party he created, governed the state for the greater part of the twentieth century ^[6].

Critics fault the Ireland he shaped as economically protectionist, socially conservative, and culturally inward looking, and they point to his 1943 St Patrick's Day radio address, with its vision of a frugal rural society, as emblematic of those limits ^[5]. His constitutional recognition of the Catholic Church's special position, removed by referendum in 1972 during his own presidency, and the ban on divorce that lasted until 1995, are often traced to his influence. Partition, which he opposed rhetorically all his life, remained untouched at his death.

Historians continue to argue over the balance sheet. Biographers such as the Earl of Longford and Thomas P. O'Neill, whom de Valera authorized, presented him as the father of the nation, while later writers, notably Tim Pat Coogan, offered far harsher judgments, and recent scholarship by Ronan Fanning and David McCullagh has sought a middle course ^[7]. What no account disputes is his centrality: for better and worse, the independent Irish state that emerged between 1916 and 1949 bore his imprint more deeply than that of any other individual ^[1].