Eamon DeValera: The Father of Modern Ireland

           Eamon DeValera was one of the most important figures in the history of Ireland.  He was a very successful and intelligent Irish Politician and a brave patriotic commander. Without his involvement in the Irish Nationalist movement, the course of Irish history would have been radically different.

            Edward George DeValera was born on October 14, 1882 in New York to a Spanish father and an Irish mother. At the age of two, he moved to Ireland and was brought up by relatives in Limerick. He formally changed his name to Eamon and became a teacher in Mathematics and a huge supporter of the Irish language movement. As an active revolutionary, he became a leader in the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin with the goal to proclaim an Irish Republic. This skirmish against the British was fought for seven days but ultimately failed. DeValera was the last commander to surrender. He was arrested along with the other commanders who were executed, but DeValera managed to escape a death sentence because of his American citizenship and instead received a prison term. After his release, he became a member of the Sinn Fein party in the 1918 general election, but later was elected as the president of the Dail Eireann party (an independent parliament).

            The Irish Republican Army (part of the Sinn Fein) began a guerrilla war against Crown forces. After two years of violence, a truce was agreed and a treaty with the British negotiated by a Sinn Fein delegation, which DeValera chose not to join. Michael Collins, who led the Sinn Fein negotiating party, described the result as “the freedom to achieve freedom”. However, DeValera opposed the agreement because it involved the partition of Ireland and did not create an independent republic. In 1922, DeValera supported the Republican Resistance in the ensuing Civil War. Even though its Commander Collins was killed, the Sinn Fein was victorious in the Civil War.

DeValera founded the Irish Republican Political Party known as the Fianna Fail, which translates into “soldiers of destiny”. He then went on to write a new Constitution in 1937 asserting greater autonomy for Ireland, although stopping short of declaring the Free State a republic. This eventually occurred in 1948 during a period in which DeValera opposed such designation. He was elected Prime Minister three times and then President of the Republic, a position he held until 1973. Under DeValera’s rule, the cultural identity of the Irish Republic as Roman Catholic and Gaelic was asserted. Complete independence was secured, but a lasting accommodation with the majority Protestant and British Northern Ireland suffered as a result.

            DeValera’s career spanned the dramatic period of Ireland’s modern cultural and national revolution. As an anti-colonial leader, a skillful constitutionalist and a symbol of national liberation, DeValera dominated the Irish political scene in the half century following the country’s independence.