CELTIC
CORNER:
Eamon de
Valera (1882-1975)
There are different opinions about the impact of
Eamon de Valera on Ireland, some quite negative. For example, author Frank
McCourt characterized him as a “drag” on Ireland’s progress in the twentieth
century. However, one thing about de Valera is indisputable: He dedicated his
life to freedom for and betterment of his countrymen, which included his
risking his life and spending time in prison. Though there might have been
individual acts of other Irish that were greater than anything de Valera ever
did, his impact on the country was massive, and he richly deserves the
sobriquet “Father of Modern Ireland.”
De Valera came, as it were, a long way
from Brooklyn, New York, where he was born on October 14, 1882. His given name
was Edward, but he changed to the Irish equivalent, Eamon. If he had stresses
throughout his adult life, he had stresses when he was young too.
Eamon’s Irish born mother, Catherine,
was not yet married when she emigrated-or fled- from Ireland in the 1870s. At
the time, Ireland was experiencing a partial failure of the potato crop, and
anyone who had heard about or experienced the Great Famine was not about to
endure the same thing again. Arriving in New York, she became a domestic
servant, or “Brigid,” as such servants were called, to a French family named
Giraud. The well-off Girauds employed for their children a music instructor
name Vivion de Valera, who was Spanish, and it wasn’t long before he and
Catherine were involved, then married.
The marriage was haunted by Vivion’s
illness. He was advised by his doctors to go to Denver, which he did, but the
change didn’t help. In 1885 he died.
This story has not been confirmed; in
fact, Vivion de Valera may have deserted Catherine and Edward. One writer who
checked for the marital records of Catherine and Vivion could find none. All
his life, Eamon heard the charge that he was illegitimate.
Following his father’s death,
Catherine treated him more like a problem than a loved one. She deposited him
in the home of a friend, Catherine Doyle. From that time on, all he remembered
of his mother were the occasional visits of a woman dressed in black.
When he was two years old, his mother
sent him to live in Ireland with his grandmother, and it was there that he was
later influenced by a Land League priest named Eugene Sheehy, from whom, he
said, he learned patriotism.
Ultimately, Catherine was remarried,
to an Englishman named Charles Wheelwright, and settled in Rochester, New York.
Her relationship with Eamon was not unfriendly, but he lived in Ireland and she
in the United States.
De Valera excelled in school, being
particularly skilled in mathematics, and after a while he won a variety of
scholarships and awards. In 1903 he was made a professor of mathematics at
Rockwell College, County Tipperary.
In 1908, he joined the Ard-Charaobh of
the Gaelic League, the beginning of what biographer Henry Boylan said was “a lifelong
devotion to the Irish.” It was there that he met an instructor four years his
senior, Sinead Flanagan, whom he would ultimately marry.
In the early 1900s, a strong feeling
of nationalism had developed in Ireland, and when de Valera attended a public
meeting in Dublin in 1913, he was fired up by it. He became a captain in a
volunteer force, and plans were made for a rising.
When the rising-the famous Easter
Rising- began on April 24, 1916,
de Valera
commanded one of the forces covering the southeastern approaches to the city.
When the rising was put down he was arrested, court martialed and sentenced to
death. (It has been said that he was saved from execution because of hi
American birth, but there is no proof of this. His mother also came back and
appealed for his life.) Perhaps the reason he was not executed was that a
general revulsion of killings by both British and Irish citizens had developed.
Following his release in 1917, de
Valera began a lifelong career in Irish politics. For his first position, he
was appointed president of Sinn Fein, Arthur Griffith having stepped aside.
For the next fifty years, until his
retirement in June 1973, de Valera was intimately involved in Irish politics,
his career going from the heights as leader of the country to the depths, when
he took part in the civil war triggered by the Treaty of 1921, “the war of the
brothers,” and was forced to witness and take part in the deaths of men whom he
had fought beside against the British.
De Valera was a master politician, and
one of his greatest feats was keeping Ireland neutral during World War II, when
both the Allies and the Axis were pressuring Ireland to join them.
One action that has been roundly
criticized is the economic war he precipitated between Ireland and England,
which involved each county’s barring the importation of the other’s products.
It caused great hardship. But he was also a man who was three times premier and
founder of Fianna Fail (the political party whose name
means “armed men of Ireland”) and president of Ireland from 1959 to 1973.
The list of honors bestowed on de
Valera is long, and when he was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery after a state
funeral, the greatness of the man could still not diminish a sad and central
fact: The ending of partition-for which he had fought so hard for so any years,
the central goal of his life- had eluded him.
The future is not set,
there is no fate but
what we make for ourselves
Frank Darcy
