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Eamon de Valera

1882–1975

 

By common agreement of his admirers and foes, Eamon de Valera has exercised the greatest influence over modern Ireland, drawing on the past to create a present which he hoped would be cherished by his countrymen forever.

      Through a long life in which much was achieved as well as left unfinished, he has become a permanent feature of the Irish historical landscape.  He created the party with the largest popular support in Ireland, and it still dominates the present political scene.  He is the historical figure against whom all others are judged.

      De Valera first came to prominence during the Easter Rising against British rule in Ireland in 1916, a rebellion organized by Irish republicans hoping to liberate their country from what they saw as eight hundred years of foreign rule.  Because of his American birth, de Valera was one of the two rebel commanders spared.  He was tried and imprisoned, but he gained great prestige from being the one survivor of this great patriotic act.  This prestige carried an otherwise obscure young man on to half a century of intense political activity.

      De Valera was born in New York, where his Irish immigrant mother had married a Spaniard who died soon after his birth.  Brought back to Ireland in 1885, he was reared among his mother's people in East Limerick.  Though never a farmer himself, he claimed to cherish these early experiences as a permanent model of Irish social life.  He also looked to America and to the Irish-American community as a source of support in the long struggle for Irish freedom.

      An intelligent child, he was sent to one of the country's leading schools, where he excelled in maths.  He lived quietly, working as a teacher.  He and his wife were little known among the vigorous and often colourful cultural circles in the Dublin of WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS [8].

      But politics soon took hold of him.  In 1912 the British government offered Ireland home rule, the option to run their own affairs, except defence and foreign affairs, but this was not acceptable to a Protestant minority in Northern Ireland, who wished to remain a full part of the United Kingdom.  A great political crisis ensued, which almost led to a mutiny of British army officers in Ireland.  Though the Home Rule Act became law, it was suspended for the duration of the First World War, which broke out in August 1914.

      De Valera joined the Irish Volunteers, a group which was organized to defend Ireland's rights to independence, and this led to his part in the Easter Rising, his work as 'President of the Irish Republic' in America, the controversies surrounding the treaty with Great Britain, and to the civil war in Ireland, which ended with him being imprisoned again, this time by the new Irish government.

      In 1924 he was released.  The anti-treaty republicans who had fought in the civil war were a disparate group, ranging from revolutionary radicals to deeply conservative Catholics.  In 1926 de Valera split from the Irish Republican Army (IRA) to form a new republican party, Fianna Fáil, which quickly built up a following on the middle ground of Irish politics.  The party entered the Dáil (Ireland's national assembly) in 1927.

      In 1932 de Valera came to power and quickly consolidated his sway over the country.  On the world scene he began to play a useful but ultimately frustrating role in the League of Nations.

      At home he began to pick at the treaty solution, and in 1937 he introduced a new constitution which provided for a president as head of state within a legal framework based on the social teachings of the Catholic Church.  The idea of a written constitution came from America.  Though amended from time to time, the constitution is de Valera's most lasting monument, and it still provides the basic law of Ireland.

      Adroitly, he managed to keep Ireland out of the Second World War.  Ireland prospered during the war, but there were social difficulties afterward which resulted in de Valera losing power in 1948.  In 1951 he returned to power, but was again ousted in 1954.  Re-elected in 1957, he was faced with worsening economic conditions.

      A solution to Ireland's economic malaise was begun by the Economic Plan of 1958, the basis of the country's development since.  But this was a scheme of his deputy SEÀN LEMASS [14], a young man impatient for power.  De Valera left politics and was elected to two terms as president.  In 1973 he retired to private life and died in 1975.

      In a famous speech at the end of the Second World War, de Valera spoke of his vision of an ideal Irish society based on traditional rural and spiritual values.  But by the time of his death, Ireland, with the advent of prosperity based on industry and electronics, and dominated by television and the wider interests of the day, had abandoned that vision.

      De Valera remains a controversial figure.  The details of his career are still debated.  To a generation of Irish people whom he saved from the scourge of a world war, he was seen as a giant among modern statesmen; a visionary with an unblemished record of probity.

      Like all people in public life, his political opponents differed.  He was often seen, even by his friends, as aloof and cold.  His years as a teacher of maths and languages had left him with a pedantic attitude of a calculating grammarian, delighting in the small points of a matter in hand, while others were impatient to settle larger issues.

      Yet he retained the lifelong devotion to men of great capacity and integrity, and his certainty of mind gave confidence to many others.  He once said that if he wished to know what the Irish people thought, he had only to look into his own heart.  This outlook lies at the heart of the separation of Northern Ireland, one of the great issues he never resolved (having done so much to create it).  He could not understand the unionist people of Belfast by looking in his heart.  These contradictions are all a part of the de Valera legend, an aspect of the hold which he retains over the minds and imaginations of the Irish people.

      A final judgement can be left to the historian Prof. J.J. Lee of Cork University, who writes of de Valera in his history of modern Ireland: 'He was, in a sense, greater than the sum of his parts.  Behind the ceaseless political calculation and the labyrinthine deviousness, there reposed a character of rare nobility.'