Eamon de Valera

President of Ireland, 1959-1973

• Born: October 14, 1882
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: August 29, 1975
• Place of death: Blackrock, near Dublin, Ireland

The leading Irish statesman of the twentieth century, de Valera embodied the Irish nationalist movement and served as leader of the independence movement and later as head of the Irish government for twenty-one years.

Early Life

Eamon de Valera (AY-mehn dehv-ah-LEHR-ah) was born in New York. His immigrant Irish mother, Catherine Coll, met a Spaniard, Vivion de Valera, and they were married in 1881. Of his parents he remembered little, for his father died in 1885 and he was sent to Ireland to be reared by his maternal grandmother and uncle. He attended the national school at his village of Bruree and later the Christian Brothers School at Charleville. His family was too poor to be able to afford his educational fees, but de Valera’s aptitude at mathematics and general excellence in his studies earned for him a scholarship to Blackrock College in Dublin. In 1898, he began Blackrock and again earned scholarships that allowed him to continue at the University College Blackrock and to take a degree in mathematics. He then took a position at Rockwell College in Tipperary, teaching mathematics.

In 1908, de Valera joined the Gaelic League, which encouraged the study and preservation of the Irish language. De Valera was taught Irish at Leinster College by Sinead O’Flanagan, with whom he fell in love. They were married in 1910 in Dublin and had seven children. Tall and thin, de Valera looked more like an austere scholar than a charismatic politician.

The Gaelic League brought de Valera into contact with men who were active in the nationalist movement. A wide variety of groups were harnessed together by the home rule movement, which pressured the British parliament to give Ireland governing autonomy. The opposition to home rule by the Protestant Unionists of Ulster prompted them to form the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912. This force in turn prompted the formation of the Irish Volunteers in 1913 by the nationalist supporters of home rule. De Valera joined the Volunteers and rapidly became commandant of the Third Battalion of the Dublin Brigade. The mainspring organization behind the militant nationalists and the Volunteers was the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), a secret organization. De Valera joined the IRB, but reluctantly, as he opposed the secrecy of the group. The Brotherhood planned the 1916 Easter Week Rising, which played such an important role in the Irish nationalist movement. When that rising took place, de Valera and his brigade inflicted severe casualties on the British troops and for a week held out. De Valera was the last to surrender. De Valera, among the other leaders, was condemned to death, but he was reprieved and sent to prison in England. Among the prisoners, de Valera emerged as their leader. When he was released in May, 1917, de Valera, at age thirty-five, was to become a leader on a much larger stage.

Life’s Work

When released from prison in 1917, de Valera and others of the 1916 rising were seen as heroes by the Irish people. In a 1917 election in Clare, de Valera was elected president of Sinn Féin (ourselves alone), the nationalist party, and also elected president of the Irish Volunteers. De Valera was then arrested. Running in the 1918 election, the members of Sinn Féin won an immense victory, including a seat won by de Valera while in prison. Sinn Féin set up a revolutionary parliament called Dáil Éireann, which declared Ireland an independent republic. After his dramatic escape from prison, Dáil Éireann elected de Valera president of Dáil Éireann in 1919 (he continued in this position through 1921). His first act as president of the provisional Irish Republic in 1921 was to return to the place of his birth, the United States, to raise money for the revolutionary government, organize Irish American support, and lobby for United States recognition of the new Irish Republic.

On his return to Ireland in 1920, de Valera found the country under martial law and the Irish Republican Army fighting a guerrilla war with the police and British paramilitary irregulars, the Black and Tans, brought to Ireland for the purpose of maintaining order.

The election of May, 1920, was an overwhelming victory for Sinn Féin, and David Lloyd George, the British prime minister, sought negotiations that culminated in a treaty in December, 1921. The treaty contained provisions that were unacceptable to de Valera and others, including the partition of Ireland and an oath to the Crown. In January of 1922, Sinn Féin was riven apart on the question of adopting the treaty. The split deteriorated into a civil war in 1922-1923, which found de Valera on the antitreaty and losing side.

Arrested by the Irish government’s troops in 1923, de Valera spent eleven months in detention. On his release, he assumed leadership of the antitreaty party, Sinn Féin. De Valera sought to enter the government of the Irish Free State and to this end founded a new political party, Fianna Fáil (soldiers of destiny), in 1926. The members of this party entered the Dáil in 1927, signing the oath but not taking the oath to the Crown.

In March of 1932, de Valera became president of the Executive Council when his party won enough seats to form a government. De Valera’s objectives were clear, as he had been enunciating them since 1916. He began through legislation to dismantle the treaty arrangements and move Ireland to full sovereignty. The oath to the king was abolished, the payment of land annuities to London stopped, the status of governor-general diminished, and appeal to the Privy Council was abolished, all enjoying widespread popular support from the Irish people. In 1937, de Valera instituted a new constitution that incorporated Roman Catholic elements as well as a claim to the North Ireland Partition since 1922. De Valera also played a part on the world stage serving as president of the League of Nations Assembly in 1938.

A number of pressing matters with London were dealt with in the 1938 Anglo-Irish Agreement , which settled the land annuities issue, among others, and set up favorable trade arrangements. The world was on the brink of war, however, and de Valera was thrust into the position of having to choose between Adolf Hitler and his Axis powers and Great Britain. He chose neither, and Ireland remained neutral during World War II. De Valera maintained that he could not put Ireland on the side of Great Britain while the partition of Ireland existed, but obviously would not support Germany against the United Kingdom. De Valera resisted enticements (such as a promise to end the partition) and threats to lead Ireland to the full exercise of its sovereignty.

De Valera remained in power until 1948, when his party was eclipsed by a coalition government, and after sixteen years of rule he became opposition leader again. He returned as prime minister from 1951 to 1954 and again from 1957 to 1959. In 1959, in his mid-seventies, he stepped down as prime minister on his election as president of Ireland. After two terms as president in 1973, he returned to private life after more than five decades of service as a public representative from the revolutionary Dáil Éireann to the presidency of the republic. He died on August 29, 1975, only seven months after the death of his wife.

Significance

In the view of his admirers, de Valera accomplished a catalog of achievements culminating in the full independence of Ireland. Among the most notable were his leadership of the independence movement Sinn Féin up to the civil war, his return from the political wilderness in 1926 with the creation of Fianna Fáil, his diplomatic skill and toughness in dealing with London, and his guidance of Ireland through the storms of neutrality. His detractors contend, however, that de Valera should be held responsible for a list of failures at least as long, including failure to lead the treaty delegation personally; actions and words that encouraged the civil war; failure to recover the Irish language; his lack of a social and economic vision, which left Ireland a poor, parochial corner of Europe; and a dictatorial style of leadership. All of his life, de Valera had tried to eliminate the partition of Ireland, instituted in 1922, and in his mind that was the one aspect of the treaty that was not eliminated.

While a balanced view would encompass both the positive and the negative assessments of de Valera, his impact on Ireland goes beyond the specifics of particular policies: He came in his person, his actions, his speeches, and his convictions to symbolize charismatically the qualities of Irish nationalism and the quest for Irish independence. His power flowed from his Catholicism, his commitment to the Irish language, and his unrelenting visualization of the Irish nation, as well as his political skills and specific policies. De Valera once observed that when he wanted to know what the Irish people wanted, he had only to look into his own heart. Such a statement is very bold, but it holds more than a little truth.

Bibliography

Bowman, John. De Valera and the Ulster Question, 1917-1973. Oxford, England: Clarendon Press, 1982. Focusing specifically on the question of partition, this book is one of the best on both de Valera and Northern Ireland.

Bromage, Mary C. De Valera and the March of a Nation. London: Hutchinson, 1956. Reprint. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975. Bromage is very favorably disposed to de Valera and the Irish nationalist position.

De Valera, Eamon. Speeches and Statements by Eamon de Valera, 1917-1973. Edited by Maurice Moynihan. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980. An extensive collection, this book is indispensable for an insight into de Valera’s positions.

De Valera, Terry. A Memoir. Dublin: Currach Press, 2004. De Valera’s youngest son’s memoir is essentially a biography of his parents.

Dwyer, T. Ryle. Eamon de Valera. Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1980. One of a series of shorter biographies. Dwyer captures de Valera well in this book.

Longford, Earl of, and Thomas P. O’Neill. Eamon de Valera. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1971. This biography is considered semiofficial in that the authors had the extensive cooperation of de Valera. Thus, this book is comprehensive but very generous in its view of de Valera.

O’Carroll, John P., and John A. Murphy, eds. De Valera and His Times. Cork, Ireland: Cork University Press, 1986. A collection of first-quality essays on de Valera covering various topics and offering diverse interpretations.