De Valera, Eamon

De Valera, Eamon (1882-1975), Irish nationalist leader, Taoiseach (prime minister) of the Irish government (1932-1948; also 1951-1954 and 1957-1959), and President of Ireland (1959-1973).

De Valera was born on October 14, 1882, in New York, the son of Vivian de Valera and an Irish immigrant, Catherine Coll. After his father’s death, his mother, who remained in the United States and later remarried, sent him back to Ireland in 1885, where he was brought up by her mother and uncle, near Bruree, County Limerick. At the age of 16 he won a scholarship to Blackrock College, near Dublin, and he graduated from the Royal University in 1904. After several years teaching in schools, he was appointed in 1906 to teach mathematics at a teacher-training college, and part-time at Maynooth College. He joined the Gaelic League in 1908, and two years later married his Irish language teacher in the League, Sinead Flanagan. The couple had seven children.

De Valera joined the Irish Volunteers on their foundation in November 1913, and in the Easter Rising of 1916 was appointed Brigade Adjutant, with the task of holding back British forces seeking to enter Dublin from the nearby port where they had landed. Following the Rising, his death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. After the release of the 1916 prisoners a year later, he was elected to the British Parliament as abstentionist Sinn Féin member for East Clare, and in October 1917, following the withdrawal in his favour of the party’s founder, Arthur Griffith, became president of the party.

Six months after the re-arrest in 1918 of Sinn Fein leaders, including De Valera, the party won 73 of the 105 Irish seats at Westminster, and in 1919 a separate Irish parliament was established, which declared Irish independence. After De Valera’s escape from Lincoln Gaol early in 1919, the Irish parliament elected him President. For 18 months, from June 1919 onwards, he was in the United States, raising funds and pressing US politicians to recognize Irish independence. His return to Ireland in December 1920 led to some tension between himself and Michael Collins, who during his absence had become de facto leader of the Irish independence movement.

Following a truce called on July 11, 1921, De Valera entered talks with the British prime minister, David Lloyd George, which led to formal negotiations in London between an Irish delegation and the British government from early October to December 6. De Valera, who hoped to secure a solution under which an independent Irish state would be associated with the Commonwealth of Nations, would not lead the delegation, but appointed the moderate Arthur Griffith to do so, accompanied by Michael Collins and three others. On December 6 the delegation signed an agreement, commonly known as the “Treaty”, under which Ireland was to become an independent state within the British Commonwealth, but with the six north-eastern counties (which since 1920 had had their own home rule parliament and government) given the right to opt out and remain within the United Kingdom. De Valera, until then seen by his colleagues as a moderate, rejected this agreement, and resigned as president when defeated on this issue in Dáil Éireann (the Irish parliament) on January 7, 1922.

Elements of the Irish Volunteers, by this time known as the Irish Republican Army (IRA), who had rejected the Treaty took over buildings in Dublin and other centres and, after an election in which the great majority voted for candidates supporting the Treaty, the transitional government moved against these irregular forces. The ensuing Irish Civil War, in which De Valera supported the anti-Treaty forces, lasted until May 1923. In 1924 anti-Treaty activists, including De Valera, were released from internment, and two years later De Valera abandoned abstentionist Republicanism and formed a new party, Fianna Fáil, which entered the Dáil in 1927. After an election in February 1932 he formed a minority government with Labour support, but following a further election in 1933 secured an overall majority, retaining power until 1948. In these governments he also held the post of Minister for External Affairs.

In 1932 De Valera served as President of the League of Nations council. He was a strong advocate of collective security under the League, but was disillusioned by the unwillingness of the powers to take action against Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia, and thereafter held that the best policy for small countries was neutrality. In 1938 he was elected President of the League assembly.

His years in government were marked by an economic war with Britain arising from a financial dispute. De Valera abolished the oath of fidelity to the Crown, the office of Governor-General, and the upper house or Senate. In 1937 he secured popular approval for a new Constitution purged of monarchical elements. In 1938 he signed an agreement with Britain that ended the economic war and secured the return to Irish control of British bases on the territory of the Irish state. During World War II, with the support of all parties and public opinion, De Valera pursued a policy of neutrality. The fact that this was secretly accompanied by close cooperation with Britain did not emerge until some decades later.

In 1948 De Valera’s Fianna Fáil party lost power to a multi-party coalition, which a year later declared Ireland a republic, but he was back in office from 1951 to 1954 and again from 1957. In 1959 he resigned from the office of Taoiseach (prime minister) and was elected President of Ireland. In 1966 he was re-elected for a second term by a narrow majority, serving until 1973, when he retired from public life. He died near Dublin on August 29, 1975.

De Valera was Chancellor of the National University of Ireland from 1921, and he founded the Institute for Advanced Studies in Dublin in 1938. His outstanding achievement was his leading of so many who had been defeated in the Irish Civil War back into constitutional politics, winning power democratically, and making the new state acceptable to alienated opponents of the Treaty through the new constitution of 1937. His skilful negotiation of the agreement between Britain and Ireland of 1938, which returned British bases to Irish sovereignty, facilitated Irish neutrality in World War II, preserving the state from a potential renewal of internal conflict.

However, his deep conservatism, commitment to the Irish language revival and to a Roman Catholic ethos for the state, as well as his sentimental attachment to a disappearing rural culture and efforts to make Ireland self-sufficient through a policy of industrial protection, did not equip him to address the problem of modernizing Ireland. Nor did he adequately address the problem of Northern Ireland, which he perceived as one of persuading the British government to return it to the Irish state, despite the wish of a majority of its inhabitants to remain within the United Kingdom.