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Éamon de Valera (1882-1973) Éamon de Valera (Irish name Éamonn de Bhaileara) was born Edward George de Valera in New York City in 1882 to an Irish mother. His name is frequently misspelled Eamonn De Valera but in fact he never used the second 'n' in his first name (the standard Irish spelling) and always a small 'd' in 'de Valera'. (Similarly his nickname was always written as 'deV', not 'Dev' or 'DeV'). de Valera said that his parents, Kate Coll and Juan Vivion de Valera, were married in 1881 in New York. However, his most recent biographer, Tim Pat Coogan (1990), and others before him, failed to find either a church or civil record of the marriage. Furthermore, no birth, baptismal, marriage or death certificate has ever been found for anyone called Juan Vivion de Valera or de Valeros, an alternative spelling. As a result, it is now widely believed by academics that deV was illegitimate. Whatever his parentage, de Valera was taken to Ireland 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 maternal relatives in Limerick until he was of age to attend boarding school in his beloved Blackrock College, in Dublin. He was an intelligent young man and he became an active gaeilgeoir (Irish language enthusiast), marrying his Irish teacher, Sinéad Flanagan. de Valera was also an active member of Conradh na Gaeilge, known also as the Gaelic League founded by Douglas Hyde. He joined the nationalist Irish Volunteers on its creation in 1913, and commanded a Volunteer unit in Dublin during the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin. The Easter Rising showed up a number of contrasting aspects of Éamon de Valera's personality, however. On one hand, he showed leadership skills and a meticulous ability for planning, but during his command he also experienced what in hindsight was seen as a form of nervous breakdown, so embarrassing that its occurrence was hidden by those who had been with him in 1916 all through his lifetime. In fact the details of his erratic and emotional behaviour only came to light in Coogan's recent biography. After the Rising, de Valera was condemned to death by the British military authorities, but the sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. It was speculated that he was saved from execution because of American citizenship. That is technically incorrect. 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 Padraig Pearse, James Connolly and others, he probably would have been one of the first executed.  Secondly, his rumoured American citizenship caused a delay, 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. Both two delays taken together meant that, while he was next-in-line for execution, when the time came for a decision, all executions had been halted in view of the negative public reaction. Freed under an amnesty in 1917, he was elected member of the British House of Commons for East Clare (the constituency which he represented until 1959) in the 1918 general election as well as president of Sinn Fein, the previously small monarchist 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. The previous president of Sinn Féin, Arthur Griffith, had championed an Anglo-Irish "dual monarchy", with an independent Ireland governed separately from Britain, their only link being a shared monarch. That had been the situation with the so-called Constitution of 1782 under Henry Grattan, until Ireland merged with the Kingdom of Great Britain to form the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in 1800. Sinn Féin won an overwhelming majority of MPs in the 1918 election in Ireland. In January 1919, those Sinn Féin MPs, calling themselves TDs, assembled in the Mansion House in Dublin and formed an Irish parliament, known as Dail Eireann (in English, the Assembly of Ireland). A ministry or Aireacht was formed, under the leadership of Práomh Aire (also called  President of Dáil Éireann) Cathal Brugha. De Valera had been re-arrested in May 1918 and imprisoned and so could not attend January session of the D�il. He however escaped from Lincoln Gaol in February 1919. As a result he replaced Brugha as Práomh Aire in the April session of Dáil Éireann. However the Dáil Constitution passed by the Dáil in 1919 made clear that the Práomh Aire (or President of D�il �ireann as it came to be called) was merely prime minister -- the literal translation of Práomh Aire -- not a full head of state. As conflict between the British authorities and the Dáil (declared illegal in September 1919) escalated into the Irish War of Independence (also called the 'Anglo-Irish War'), de Valera went to the United States to raise financial support from Irish Americans for the Irish revolution. The Long Fellow (or An t-Amad�n Fada, another of de Valera's nicknames, given to him because of his great height) left day to day government to Michael Collins (The Big Fellow), his 29-year old Minister for Finance and rival. Returning to Ireland in in August 1921, de Valera had Dáil Éireann change the 1919 Dail Constitution to upgrade his office from prime minister or chairman of the cabinet to a full President of the Republic. 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 26 of Ireland's 32 counties as the Irish Free State, with the other six in the north remaining under British occupation. The Republic's delegates to the Treaty Negotiations were accredited by President de Valera and his cabinet as Plenipotentiaries (i.e., negotiators with the legal authority to sign a treaty without reference back to the cabinet.). However the Treaty proved controversial in so far 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. De Valera baulked at the agreement, even though his opponents claimed he had refused to go because he knew what the outcome would be and did not want to get the blame. de Valera and minority of supporters in Sinn Féin left Dáil Eireann and tried unsuccessfully to set up a republican administration with a republican ministry under himself. Griffith was elected President of Dáil �ireann in his place. A Crown-appointed administration under Michael Collins was created also. Relations with the new Irish government, which was backed by most of the Dáil and the electorate, and the Anti-treatyites under the nominal leadership of deV, now descended into the Irish Civil War (June 1922), in which the pro-treaty Free State forces defeated de Valera's Republicans. Among the Civil War's many tragedies were the assassination of Michael Collins, who was the head of the Provisional Government, the death through exhaustion of the President of Dáil Éireann, Arthur Griffith, the execution of one of the treaty signatories, Robert Erskine Childers and the deliberate booby-trapping and destruction by republicans of the Irish Public Records Office, which destroyed one thousand years of Irish state records in an act that even the strongest defenders of the anti-treaty cause describe as a "pointless act". After ordering his supporters (April 1923) to dump their arms rather than surrender them or continue a now fruitless war, de Valera returned to political methods. Frustrated by Sinn Féin's refusal to move on from the past, deV resigned from the presidency of the party and the party itself in March 1926 to form a new party, Fianna Fail (Soldiers of Destiny). The party made swift electoral gains but refused to take the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown. The party then began a legal case to challenge the requirement that it take the Oath, but the assassination of the Vice-President of the Executive Council (ie. deputy prime minister) Kevin O'Higgins led the Executive Council under W.T. Cosgrave to introduce a Bill requiring all Dáil candidates to promise on oath that if they were elected they would take the Oath of Allegiance. Forced into a corner, and faced with the option of staying outside politics forever or taking the oath and entering, deV and his TDs took the Oath of Allegiance in 1927, declaring it "an empty formula." In February 1932, Fianna Fáil won power in the D�il, and de Valera was appointed President of the Executive Council (Prime Minister) by Governor-General James McNeill (de Valera took office on March 9). He withheld Ireland's land annuities to Britain (payments for earlier British government compensation to landlords in Ireland following land reform legislation) and led Ireland through the subsequent period of economic reprisals known as the "Economic War" (1932-1938). Under de Valera's leadership, Fianna Fáil won further general elections in 1933, 1937, 1938, 1943 and 1944. de Valera was also elected President of Council of the League of Nations at its 68th and Special Sessions, September and October 1932 and President of the Assembly of the League of Nations, 1938. 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 Michael Collins. In reality, deV had only been able to do this due to three reasons: First, though the 1922 constitution was supposed to require amendment through public plebiscite eight years after its passage, the Free State government under W.T. Cosgrave had amended that period to 16 years, meaning that until 1938 the Free State constitution could be amended by the simple passage of a Constitutional Amendment Act through the Oireachtas.  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.  Thirdly, in theory the Constitution had to be in keeping with the provisions of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, the fundamental law of the state. However that requirement had been removed only a short time before de Valera gained power. de Valera then ensured that the Oath of Allegiance was abolished, as were appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. The opposition-controlled Senate, when it protested and slowed down these measures was also abolished. And finally in December 1936, deV used the sudden abdication of King Edward VIII as king of his various realms including King of Ireland to pass two Bills; one amended the constitution to remove all mention of the King and Governor-General while the second brought the King back, this time through statute law, for use in representing the Irish Free State at diplomatic level. In July 1936, de Valera as constitutionally the King's Irish Prime Minister, wrote to King Edward in London indicating that he planned to introduce a new constitution, the central part of which was to be the creation of an office deV provisionally intended to call President of Saorstát Éireann, which would create the governor-generalship. To his new constitution, he gave the Gaelic name Bunreacht na hÉireann (meaning literally the Constitution of Ireland). De Valera's new constitution embodied a process called Constitutional Autochthony, that is, the assertion of legal nationalism. At various levels it contained key symbols to mark Irish republican independence from Britain. These included: a new name for the state, Éire a claim that the island of Ireland was a natural national territorial unit (Article 2) and so challenged Britain's partition settlement of 1920; a new popularly elected 'President of Ireland' to replace the British King and Crown and the appointed Irish Governor-General; recognition of the "special position" of Roman Catholicism, which had cultural links with Irish nationalism by which had for most of Britain's rule in Ireland been suppressed and discriminated against; a recognition of an 'Irish catholic' concept of marriage which excluded divorce, something that was culturally associated with English Protestantism (e.g., Henry VIII) but which had no history of acceptance within Catholicism. the declaration that the Irish language was the official language of the nation, with English reduced to being a secondary one. the use of Irish language terms to stress Irish cultural and historical identity (eg, Uachtarán, Taoiseach, Taonaiste, Rialtas, Dáil, Seanad, etc.) In reality, however, for all the anti-partition rhetoric, partition remained a legal reality, accepted by Article 3. de Valera kept Éire neutral in World War II. The British MI5 naturally took more than a passing interest in his deeds and whereabouts. Whereas the neutrality of the USA was terminated with the attack on Pearl Harbour, Irish neutrality was maintained right through to the end of the war. But, on the occasion of the death of Adolf Hitler, de Valera paid a visit to Hempel, the German minister in Dublin, to express sympathy over the death of the Fuhrer. de Valera has often been criticised for this action. [See Nazi's in Ireland] Defeated in the election of February 1948, de Valera resigned as Taoiseach of Ireland on February 18 but led two more governments (1951-1954 and 1957-1959) before retiring as party leader to serve two terms (1959-1973) as President of Ireland (an office created by him in Bunreacht na hEireann). By now, he was almost totally blind, but hid the fact through the use of an aide, whose job was to whisper sotto voice to deV instructions such as the number of steps to take, or where to 'look'. (In one famous photograph, President de Valera is seen 'inspecting' a new statue just erected of Irish patriot Robert Emmet, apparently standing back in admiration. In fact, he could not see it at all!) In 1966, de Valera narrowly won the election, by a majority of a mere 10,000 votes in a poll of over 1,000,000, he did develop a deep dislike and distrust for his campaign manager, Agriculture Minister and future taoiseach (prime minister) Charles J. Haughey. He warned colleagues later that Haughey would 'destroy the (Fianna Fáil) party', a perceptive analysis of the now disgraced former prime minister who did indeed almost destroy Fianna F�il in the 1980s, and who has since been the subject of tribunals enquiring into proven financial improprieties. De Valera finished his final term of office in 1973, aged 91, the oldest head of state in the world. He died in a Dublin nursing home in 1975 aged 92, within months of the death of his wife, Sinead. He was buried in Dublin's Glasnevin Cemetery. Ireland's dominant political personality for many decades, as well as co-owner of one of Ireland's most influential group of newspapers, Irish Press Newspapers, de Valera is alleged by critics to have kept Ireland under the influence of Catholic conservatism. His role in Irish history is no longer unequivocally seen by today's historians as a positive one. However, historians overall regard de Valera as a brilliant but flawed leader: from his disastrous behaviour during the Civil War that inflamed hatred rather than cooled tempers, to his 1937 constitution, studied most recently by Nelson Mandela's South Africa as they designed their own. Erratic, brilliant, tactful, tactless, innovative and most of all pragmatic, Éamon de Valera, the American-born head of an Irish republic, was the most influential Irish leader of the twentieth century. Sources:  Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (Hutchinson, London, 1993) The Wikipedia Encyclopedia at TheFreeDictionary.com Page updated 20 Jul 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.