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Born in New York City in 1882 to an Irish mother, he stated that his parents, Kate Coll and Juan Vivion de Valera were married in 1881 in New York. However exhaustive trawls through church and state records by genealogists and by his most recent biographer, Tim Pat Coogan ( 1990) have 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 (to use his nickname) was illegitimate. While this fact might seem irrelevant to 21st century eyes, one result of illegitimacy in the late 19th/early 20th century was that one was barred from a career in the Roman Catholic Church. Éamon de Valera was throughout his life a deeply religious man, who in death asked to be buried in a religious habit. There are a number of occasions where de Valera seriously contemplated entering the religious life like his step-brother, Fr. Thomas Wheelright. Yet he did not do so, and apparently received little encouragement from the priests whose advice he sought. In his biography of de Valera, Tim Pat Coogan speculated as to whether rumours surrounding de Valera's legitimacy may have been a deciding factor.
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.
An intelligent young man, he became an active gaeilgeoir (Irish language enthusiast), marrying his Irish teacher, Sinéad Flanagan. He also became an active member of Conradh na nGaeilge, 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 abortive April 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin.
The Easter Rising showed up a number of contrasting aspects of Éamon de Valera's personality. On the one hand, he showed leadership skills and a meticulous ability for planning. Yet 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, thanks to a recent biography.2
After the Rising's defeat, he 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; so timing, location and questions relating to citizenship saved deV's life.
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 Féin, 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 amid allegations of fraud and the intimidation of non-Sinn Féin candidates out of the race. For various reasons historians question how representative that victory was; while few doubt Sinn Féin had mass support, the fact that most Irish seats in 1918 were uncontested make it impossible to show how extensive that mass support was (though recent calculations based on actual electoral contests at parliamentary and local government level suggest its support base was in the region of 45-48%, considerably lower than the 90%+ claimed in the past). In January 1919, those Sinn Féin MPs, calling themselves TDs, assembled in the Mansion House in Dublin and formed an Irish parliament, known as Dáil Éireann (in English, the Assembly of Ireland). A ministry or Aireacht was formed, under the leadership of Príomh 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 Dáil. He however escaped from Lincoln Gaol in February 1919. As a result he replaced Brugha as Príomh Aire in the April session of Dáil Éireann. However the Dáil Constitution passed by the Dáil in 1919 made clear that the Príomh Aire (or President of Dáil Éireann as it came to be called) was merely prime minister - the literal translation of Príomh 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-Amadán 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 twenty-nine year old Minister for Finance and rival.
Returning to a country gripped by the Irish War of Independence, de Valera in August 1921 had Dáil Éireann change the 1919 Dáil 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 sovereignty as Protestant-dominated Northern Ireland. (Technically, the Six Counties were originally part of the Free State, but with the option of opting out immediately, which they did straight away. Having done so, a Boundary Commission came into place to redraw the Irish border. Nationalists expected its report to make Northern Ireland so small it would not survive, eventually joining the South. A Council of Ireland was also provided in the Treaty as a model for an eventual all-Irish parliament. Hence neither the pro- nor anti-treaty sides made much complaint about partition in the Treaty debates. They all expected it would prove shortlived.)
The Republic's delegates to the Treaty Negotiations were accredited by President de Valera and his cabinet as Plenipotentiaries (ie, 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 (which was unrecognised by any international state) 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 didn't want to get the blame. Curiously, he reacted to news of the signing of the Treaty not with anger at its contents (which he refused even to read when offered a newspaper report of its contents) but with anger over the fact that they had not consulted with him, their president, before signing. De Valera and minority of supporters in Sinn Féin left Dáil Éireann and tried unsuccessfully to set up a republican administration with a republican ministry under himself. Griffith was elected President of Dáil Éireann 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. Even de Valera's most passionate supporters admit his behaviour at that point was the low point in his career. Speeches where he talked of "wading through the blood" of ministers hardly cooled tempers. Though nominally head of the Anti-treatyites, de Valera had little influence and spent part of the time in prison. 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 Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny), a party destined to dominate twentieth century Irish politics. 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: The oath was actually largely the work of Michael Collins and based ironically on three sources: British oaths in the dominions, the oath of the Irish Republican Brotherhood and a draft oath prepared by de Valera in his proposed Treaty alternative, Document No.2 ). The party 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", albeit one that people had fought and killed over in a civil war five years earlier.
In February 1932 Fianna Fáil won power in the Dáil, 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.
He 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 his great rival, 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. Thus, with all the checks and balances that had been provided to preserve the Treaty settlement neutralised, de Valera had a free hand to change the 1922 constitution at will.
This he did with vengeance. 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. The title may ultimately have 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).
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:
In reality, as with much of de Valera's policies, most of the above were more apparent than real.
Thus for all the constitutional autochthony symbols, the Irish state was neither as nationalist nor as catholic, neither as gaelic nor as free from the Crown as deV, through his use of symbols, tried to suggest.
Germany's interest in Éire before and in the early years of World War II (called The Emergency in Éire) including investigating whether the IRA could be used against Britain, investigating the tactical advantages of invading Éire, and negotiating with Éire. Germany courted Éire, before and during the war, though with little success.
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. Both the possibility of a German invasion and a British invasion were discussed in Parliament.
Irish neutrality took on some unique characteristics of its own:
Non-neutrality could either have meant support for Germany or Britain. Neither was particularly appealing. An alliance with Germany risked invasion from Britain. An alliance with Britain risked internal political instability. De Valera's policy of neutrality probably enabled de Valera and the opposition to maintain a political unity. That might not have been achievable had de Valera wanted to openly side with the Allies, which might have provoked anti-British campaigning by the IRA. (De Valera had no hesitation in executing IRA prisoners during the War also!).
Some historians might argue that Irish neutrality was the best tactic for the Allies too, as an attack by Germany on a neutral Ireland risked enraging Irish-Americans and so bringing the United States into the war earlier, although had Ireland joined the war in 1939, the reality of the war would have been brought to Irish-Americans earlier. Had Éire openly sided with the Allies, it might have been, both politically and militarily, the Allies' weakest link, drawing resources for its protection at a time when there were no resources to spare.
In his VE day radio broadcast, British Prime Minister and old de Valera adversary Winston Churchill launched a strong attack on the Irish government's policy of neutrality, while being careful to distinguish that from any criticism of the Irish people as a whole or of individual Irishmen - a nuance that may well have failed to be communicated. De Valera's reply, also in a radio broadcast, won widespread respect and praise in Ireland from even his bitterest opponents. However, at the time and in the emotions of the moment, it lowered the respect for him held by people in combatant countries, who did not always fully appreciate the points and who were also influenced by indignation at his official and diplomatically proper condolences on the death of Hitler. De Valera told Radio Éireann listeners:
As a speech, it probably counts among de Valera's finest and even his opponents spoke of their pride in his words. But the speech also contained another interesting but often overlooked phrase. Early in the speech, he told listeners,
In those sentences he showed a degree of criticism of his own behaviour in the past that was occasionally repeated, particularly towards the end of his life, how a quarter of a century before, during the Treaty debates and the civil war, he had used war-like provocative words and sentences, such as 'wading through the blood of Irishmen', that inflamed tension; indeed, his aside however unworthy was provocative there and then if not to later perceptions, in the circumstances he himself had noted. The Éamon de Valera of 1945, in his sixty-fifth year, was not the hothead of 1921 and would not make precisely the same mistakes. Though overshadowed by other parts of his most famous speech, those lines showed a self-critical side to Éamon de Valera that was rarely expressed publicly.
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 hÉireann). 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!) However de Valera's career came to the brink of disaster in 1966 when he was almost defeated in his final electoral battle, for re-election to the presidency. So close was the election that a mere one vote more in each ballot box in the Republic for his opponent would have been enough to secure the election of Fine Gael's youthful presidential candidate, Tom O'Higgins. While 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 Fáil in the 1980s, and who has since been the subject of tribunals enquiring into proven financial improprieties. (Haughey is currently due to stand trial, as a result of the revelations.)
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, though to his credit his constitution did explicitly recognise the existence and rights of the Jewish community in Ireland in 1937, at a time when much of Europe was beginning the process of wholesale extermination of Jews. He also rejected fundamentalist Catholic demands by organisations like Maria Duce that Roman Catholicism be made the state religion of Ireland, just as he rejected demands by the Irish Christian Front that the Irish Free State support Franco during the Spanish Civil War. His role in Irish history is no longer unequivocally seen by today's historians as a positive one, and a recent controversial biography by Tim Pat Coogan alleges that his failures outweigh his achievements, with deV's reputation declining as that of his great rival in the 1920s, Michael Collins is rising.
Overall, historians 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 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, admired, criticised and studied the world over, by leaders from Nehru to John F. Kennedy.
1His 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'.
2. 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. According to one account, deV, on being forced to sleep by one subordinate who promised to sit beside him and wake him if he was needed, suddenly woke up, his eyes 'wild', screaming 'set fire to the railway. Set fire to the railway'. Later in the Ballykinlar Internment Camp one deV loyalist approached another internee, a medical doctor, recounted the story and asked for a medical opinion as to deV's condition. He also threatened to sue the doctor, future Fine Gael TD and minister, Dr. Tom O'Higgins, if he ever repeated the story. Tim Pat Coogan, De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow (Hutchinson, London, 1993) hardback. pp.69-72. BooksEnthsiast.com
| Preceded by: Cathal Brugha (Jan-April 1919) |
President of Dáil Éireann | Succeeded by: office replaced by President of the Republic |
| Preceded by: Office of President of Dáil Éireann |
President of the Republic | Succeeded by: Arthur Griffith |
| Preceded by: William T. Cosgrave (1922-1932) |
President of the Executive Council Uachtaráin an Árd Comhairle |
Succeeded by: Office abolished and replaced by Taoiseach |
| Preceded by: A new office, replacing President of the Executive Council |
Prime Ministers of Ireland Taoisigh na hÉireann |
Succeeded by: John A. Costello Taoiseach (1948-1951) |
| Preceded by: John A. Costello Taoiseach (1948-1951) with First Inter-Party Government |
Prime Ministers of Ireland Taoisigh na hÉireann |
Succeeded by: John A. Costello Taoiseach (1954-1957) |
| Preceded by: John A. Costello Taoiseach (1954-1957) with Second Inter-Party Government |
Prime Ministers of Ireland Taoisigh na hÉireann |
Succeeded by: Sean Lemass Taoiseach (1959-1966) |
Preceded by: Sean T. O'Kelly |
Presidents of Ireland | Succeeded by: Erskine Hamilton Childers |
|