Éamon de Valera
Eamon de Valera (October 14, 1882 - August 24, 1975) was a leader of Ireland's struggle for independence from Britain (1916-1921), and of the Republican opposition in the ensuing Irish Civil War, and was subsequently thrice Irish Prime Minister and later President. His name is frequently misspelt 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'.
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 have failed to find either a church or civil record of the marriage. Futhermore, 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 generally agreed that deV (to use his nickname) was illegitimate. While this fact might seem irrelevant to modern eyes, one result of illegitimacy in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century was that one was barred from a career in the Roman Catholic Church. It is worth speculating about how different Irish history would have been had deV, a deeply religious man, been able to enter the priesthood or religious life (as did his step-brother), rather than politics.
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. An intelligent young man, he became an active gaelgoir (Irish language enthusiast), marrying his Irish teacher, Sinead 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.
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 American citizenship caused a delay, while the full legal situation of his status 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 Parliament 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. Historians question however the 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. A ministry or Áireacht was formed, under the leadership of Príomh Áire (also called President of Dáil Éireann) Cathal Brugha. De Valera had been re-arrested in May 1918, he escaped from Lincoln prison (February 1919). He replaced Brugha as Príomh Áire in the April session of Dáil Éireann. However the Dáil Constitution passed by the Dáil in 1919 made clear that the Príomh Áire (or President of Dáil Éireann as it came to be called) was merely prime minister - the literal translation of Príomh Áire - 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, another of deV's nicknames given to him because of his great height) left day to day government to Michael Collins(The Big Fellow), his younger 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 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 bauked 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 Fein 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 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 the Provisional Prime Minister, Michael Collins, the death through exhaustion of the President of Dáil Éireann, Arthur Griffith, the execution of one of the treaty signatories, 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.
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). The party made swift electoral gains but refused to rake 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 begun 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", even though one that people had fought and killed in a civil war over 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: withholding Ireland's land annuities to Britain (payments for earlier British government compensation to landlords in Ireland following land reform legislation), he led Ireland through the subsequent period of economic reprisals known as the "Economic War" (1932-1938).
De Valera seized the occasion of the confrontation with Britain to enact the abrogation of the oath of allegiance to the crown (1936), the abolition of the Crown and governor-generalship (1936-37) and a new constitution (1937) called Bunreacht na hÉireann under which the Free State became Éire and the prime minister (hitherto President of the Executive Council) was renamed Taoiseach. The Anglo-Irish dispute was settled (1938) by a one-off Irish payment of £10 million and the ending of Britain's military control four Irish ports.
Éire under de Valera remained ostensibly neutral during World War II, although the British MI5 took more than a passing interest in his deeds and whereabouts. Furthermore, contrary to claims, Éire was secretly aiding the Allies side; the timing of D-Day, for example, was decided thanks to weather reports supplied by Éire which told of incoming weather conditions from the Atlantic. Allied airmen were 'accidentially' allowed to 'escape' into Northern Ireland while German airmen who crashed in Éire were interned. Overall, his policy of apparent neutrality enabled de Valera and the opposition to maintain a political unity that might not have been achievable had Ireland openly sided with the Allies and so provoked anti-British campaigning by the IRA. (De Valera had no hesitation in executing IRA prisoners during the War also!). Irish neutrality on balance was probably 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. In contrast, had Éire openly sided with the Allies, it would 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.
Defeated in the election of February 1948, De Valera 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 inproprieties. (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 93, within weeks 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 conservativism, 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 wholescale 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 brilliant 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, Eamon 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.
|
Preceded by: |
Succeeded by: |