De Valera: Long Fellow, Long Shadow

By Tim Pat Coogan

Eamon de Valera – 'The Long Fellow' – remains a towering presence whose shadow still falls over Irish life. The history of Ireland for much of the twentieth century is the history of de Valera.

From the 1916 Rising, the troubled Treaty negotiations and the Civil War, right through to his retirement after a longer period in power than any other 20th-century leader, Eamon de Valera has both defined and divided Ireland. He was directly responsible for the Irish Constitution, Fianna Fail (the largest Irish political party) and the Irish Press Group. He helped create a political church-state monolith with continuing implications for Northern Ireland, the social role of women, the Irish language and the whole concept of an Irish nation. Many of the challenges he confronted are still troubling the peace of Ireland and of Britain, and some of the problems are his legacy.

Tim Pat Coogan's comprehensive study of this political giant is a major addition to the history of Irish-British relationships.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Dec 16, 2015
• ISBN: 9781784975371

Tim Pat Coogan

Tim Pat Coogan is Ireland's best-known historical writer. His 1990 biography of Michael Collins rekindled interest in Collins and his era. He is also the author of The IRA, Long Fellow, Long Shadow, 1916: The Mornings After and The Twelve Apostles.

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Prologue

ALTHOUGH HE DIED in 1975, Eamon de Valera, generally known as either Dev. or the Long Fellow, cast a long shadow that still falls over Irish life. Quite simply the history of Ireland for much of the twentieth century is the history of de Valera. As befitted a man who sometimes seemed to model his actions on the Roman Catholic doctrine of Three Divine Persons in One God, his tangible legacies are three also: the Irish Constitution; the largest Irish political party, Fianna Fail; and the second largest Irish newspaper empire, the Irish Press Group, founded, as was so much of his political strength, on Irish America. His intangible influences can still be traced in the divisions between the leading Irish political parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, and in attitudes towards Northern Ireland, Church–State relationships, the role of women in Irish society, the Irish language and the whole concept of an Irish nation. Any one of his visible creations would have been an achievement beyond the powers of most men. The three, taken together, must be accounted a rare feat indeed.

But it is perhaps in his intangible legacies that Eamon de Valera’s real influence lies. The lay pontiff, the man of politics and of God, Eamon de Valera was the epitome of a land where Christ and Caesar were hand in glove. It was on his hand that the glove fitted; his hand, which, as a result, held the reins of power longer even than contemporaries such as Roosevelt, Salazar or Stalin. Yet this was not the end of his significance. In de Valera’s career lies the explanation of such contemporary Irish complexities as the relationship between constitutionalism and physical force, and the ambivalence of some politicians towards violence and Northern Ireland. Approaches to education, economic planning and family law can still be measured by, with or from his policies.

Was he a Lincoln or a Machiavelli? A saint or a charlatan? A man of peace, or one who incited young men to hatred and violence? Did he seek to heal or worsen the wounds that the Irish and the English inflicted (and inflict) on each other? Was he a revolutionary or a conservative? An unscrupulous manipulator or a nice guy? The truth is that in a sense the answer to all these questions is ‘Yes.’ Eamon de Valera was a law-giver who helped to bring down a civil war on the heads of his people; a revolutionary who kept his country neutral in World War II. As a result of his neutrality policy Ireland was spared the horrors of war. But his playing of the Green card of nationalism also helped to create the circumstances wherein, decades later, many young Irish emigrants found themselves denied a green card. De Valera was born in America. The money he raised from Irish emigrants helped to found and fund his Irish Press. Yet Roosevelt, who had helped him to secure these monies, became enraged at him. By the time the war was over the American Minister in Dublin, a connection of Roosevelt’s, was persona non grata with de Valera and his Cabinet.

De Valera was a world figure who attempted to confine his disciples to the narrowest of cultural and intellectual horizons. Many of the challenges he confronted are still troubling the peace of Ireland and of England, disturbing relationships from Belfast to Birmingham to Boston. Some of the vexing questions of the moment are directly traceable to him: the effect of part of the Irish Constitution on Northern Ireland’s Unionists; his philosophy of talking about God and the High Destiny of the Gael while practising realpolitik gave him control of the Irish Press and of Fianna Fail. But ownership has involved his descendants in the newspaper in some very unfortunate court proceedings. And in politics, some of those who came after him in Fianna Fail sought to profit from their opportunities by acting in ways which have spawned scandals, given rise to government inquiries, wrecked Cabinets and interfered with Ireland’s ability to handle a devaluation crisis. Paradigms of modern Ireland, both the newspaper and political sagas are still evolving at the time of writing.

‘Dev.’ was the greatest political mover and shaker of post-revolutionary Ireland. His towering figure continues to cast shadows that are both benign and baleful. Therefore, as a biographer, I have been conscious of two linked and major problems in the course of attempting to chart the career of this extraordinary man: first, to convey a sense of his importance to Ireland and her relationships with Great Britain, America and the members of the British Commonwealth; second, while so doing to steer between the Scylla of hagiography and the Charybdis of denigration. Practically everything of substance written about him falls into one category or the other. There is no via media where Eamon de Valera is concerned. The problem is compounded by the fact that not only did de Valera shape history, he attempted to write it also – or, more correctly, to have it set down as he ordained. I have tried to evaluate him neither as a demon nor as a plaster saint, but as what he was: for better or worse, the most important Irish leader of the twentieth century. Doubtless my approach will leave me open to attack from both denigrators and hagiographers. Attempting a biography of Eamon de Valera, is, for an Irishman, somewhat like an Iranian sitting down to write about the Ayatollah Khomeini. Uneasy visions of Salman Rushdie occur. Nevertheless, though the reader may fault me for want of pietas, critical faculty or honest omission, I hope that I cannot be assailed on the grounds of fairness.

1

THE HARSH REALITY OF A NURSERY

PERCOLATING DOWN TO US through a process of selective amnesia, recollections by contemporary admirers (and detractors), the story of Eamon de Valera’s childhood and youth comes across as a combination of Aesopian fable and Lincolnesque progression from log cabin to White House, laced along the way with a liberal dash of what is known in Ireland as the ‘cute hoor’ approach or, in less Rabelaisian societies, peasant cunning.

In some ways de Valera’s early life resembled that of his great rival, Michael Collins, who also suffered the loss of his father in early boyhood. Both leaders were reared in rural Ireland at a time of heightened nationalist sentiment, a time when two colonialisms dominated that sentiment – those of Mother England and Mother Church. On the streets was the visible sign and instrument of England’s control: the Royal Irish Constabulary patrolling in pairs, their carbines slung over their backs. In the classrooms were the schoolbooks extolling the virtues of the British Empire. Less visible, but probably more potent, were the teachings from altar and confessional of a rigorous form of ultramontane Roman Catholicism that controlled the minds and hearts of the majority of the people in their part of the country. It was an Irish bishop who had recently¹ led the charge in favour of the acceptance of the doctrine of papal infallibility. And there was more than a little truth in the jest, common in clerical circles in Rome at the time, that this was entirely appropriate. For: ‘Not alone do the Irish believe the pope is infallible. They believe the same of their parish priests and will beat anyone who suggests otherwise.’ The parish priest was the Irish peasant’s spokesman and bulwark against an unjust authority, an ever-present eternity. The consolation and support that the better priests gave their flocks was reciprocated by a respect for the clergy generally only equalled today by that accorded to an imam in a fundamentalist Arab village.

A vicious land war was petering out in the year of de Valera’s birth. It left behind tales of violence, death, cattle houghing, boycotting, evictions and the creation of a peasant proprietorship. The land issue at least was, at long last, on the way to being settled. Both Collins and de Valera knew what it was to experience feelings of awe and enlightenment as they listened to the stories of these turbulent times and imbibed the wisdom of their elders amidst the sights and sounds of one of the focal points of an Irish parish in those pre-television days – the local forge. Both were marked by application to ‘the books’, de Valera being the more obviously studious and less rumbustious of the two. And, for those with a taste in coincidence, both were influenced in their earlier careers by close female relations affectionately known as Hannie; in Collins’ case his oldest sister, in de Valera’s an aunt. Finally, and more startlingly, both were nearly killed in infancy through falling out of a loft.

But here one runs out of analogies, sharply. Collins’ childhood was enveloped in the love of a remarkable mother² and of a large and affectionate extended family. His immediate family comprised seven brothers and sisters who lived on a farm of some ninety acres surrounded by neighbouring cousins, uncles and aunts. De Valera’s mother largely banished him from her life, and he grew up, an ocean away from her, in the impoverished cottage of an uncle who possessed only half an acre – and no wife – for a significant part of the time that de Valera lived with him. Hannie seems to have reciprocated the affection that the infant de Valera transferred from his absent mother to her sister; but, through being forced to emigrate to America, leaving the boy behind, she was also the unwitting cause of worsening his inevitable feelings of loneliness³ and rejection.

Why did de Valera grow up on the opposite side of the Atlantic to his mother? The answer, in a word, was poverty. On 2 October 1879 Catherine Coll of Knockmore townland, near Bruree, Co. Limerick, landed in New York, ‘tired and almost penniless’,⁴ fleeing from a one-roomed, mud-walled, thatched cabin in an Ireland where ‘famine threatened once more’.⁵ The threat was a real one, as Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien has noted:⁶

The fear of famine, or rather of having to choose between starvation and eviction, was the great underlying political reality of the late seventies and early eighties of the Nineteenth Century in Ireland. The famine of 1845–7, as a result of which a million people died and many thousands were evicted, was present in the memory or in the imagination of every Irishman. From 1878 on partial failure of the potato crop – still the staple diet of thousands of Irish tenant-farmers – and falling prices for other crops threatened a recurrence of the patterns of the forties and fifties, mass starvation, mass evictions, mass emigration.

It was in 1879 also that Michael Davitt founded the Land League. Using tactics such as boycotting – named after a Captain Boycott against whom the weapon was first used – the league eventually succeeded, with the help of the Irish Parliamentary Party leader at Westminster, Charles Stewart Parnell, in achieving its main objective, the ‘three Fs’ of fair rent, fixity of tenure and free sale. The settlement of the land issue created the conditions which would one day enable Catherine Coll’s son to change Irish history. Thoughts of such a prospect for any child of hers would have been remote from the mind of the twenty-three-year-old Catherine as she disembarked in New York, armed for the New World with nothing more than a letter for an aunt in Brooklyn. Her father, Patrick Coll, a farm labourer, had died five years earlier when Catherine, or Kate as she was generally known, was eighteen. After her in the family were two brothers, Patrick and Edward, and a sister, Hannah (Hannie). Catherine worked as a maidservant for a local farmer, which later helped to give rise to various versions of a rumour that the reason she sailed for New York was not poverty but pregnancy. An embroidered version of this story is contained in a memoir drafted by a contemporary of de Valera’s, Dick Kennedy:⁷

The Colls were never troubled with principle to hinder their advancement… they transmitted that ability to Dev… Pat Coll never married but he had nine Chirpauns [children of love]. Dev’s mother was the first. She went as a maid to Tom Aitkinson of Glenwilliam at 17 years.

The Sailor Coll [Pat Junior] told me that Tom was Dev.’s father. When she was going to have the child Tom sent her to America. The Sailor said Dev was born in New York Harbour just before the boat landed. She went to a friend in Brooklyn and there was a Mexican waiter who died of galloping consumption at the age of twenty-two years in same lodging so they decided to say that she was married to this waiter and called the child de Valera.

When I first read the foregoing I was strongly inclined to doubt its veracity. Apart from the obviously hostile tone of the memoir, I then had other reasons for questioning the illegitimacy story. Before going into these, let us look at the arguments advanced in its favour. An obvious one was de Valera’s height and general appearance, which made him appear older than his stated age. Another was the fact that, though his mother married again and had other children, she did not extend the benefits of her new home to her first child. The Kennedy memoir states that this was because the man she subsequently married did not want the boy. And further plausibility is given to the illegitimacy theory by local⁸ gossip: it was commonly said that a daughter of Atkinson’s, Mrs Sybil Worteledge, ‘always greeted Dev as her half-brother and boasted that he was such’.⁹ Certainly de Valera had to deal with such rumours (and more besides) from his earliest days in party politics. During his first by-election campaign, in June 1917, he wrote to his wife:¹⁰

Unfortunately it is no longer the preaching of ideals here but the practical work of defeating the enemy’s misrepresentation – one of which is that I am a Jacobin another a letter from the Lewes Chaplain [while in Lewes Jail in England after the Easter Rising, de Valera, as part of a prison protest, had ordered his comrades not to obey an order to go to Mass, but instead to remain in their cells saying the rosary], one I haven’t unfortunately been able to get a copy so far, making it appear that I was responsible for sacrilege, a third that I am illegitimate. By the way isn’t ‘lawful wife’ in Baptism certificate. I think it is – that would be sufficient to prove the lie…

It is, of course, possible that Kate could have conceived a child before emigrating. But if she did, that child could hardly have been Eamon de Valera. He was born, as the official biography asserts, three years after Kate is said to have landed in America, on 14 October 1882, in New York Nursery and Child’s Hospital, Lexington Avenue (between 51st and 52nd Streets), New York. Curiously, in view of the importance of the part the Anglo-Irish Treaty would play in de Valera’s life, 1882 was also the year of the Kilmainham Treaty which freed Parnell from Kilmainham Jail. The conflict between the landlords and the Land League resulted in a ‘land war’ involving evictions and agrarian outrages of all sorts. Parnell was jailed, leaving ‘Captain Moonlight’, as he described the state of disorder, to rule unchecked. The turbulence was ended after protracted negotiations conducted between the British Government and Parnell while he was still in Kilmainham Jail.

The baptismal certificate¹¹ to which de Valera referred in his letter gives the date of baptism as 3 December 1882 and the venue as the church of St Agnes, near Grand Central Station. He was christened Edward, apparently because Kate’s younger brother was called Edward and her baby was born on the day after the Feast of Edward the Confessor. But, in one of those gossip-provoking circumstances that surrounds de Valera’s early years he was apparently registered as George. His authorized biography states¹² that this was not altered until he lay under sentence of death in 1916, when his mother procured a copy of the certificate in an effort to prove American citizenship. De Valera was to change his given name further by using his own version, with a single ‘n’, of the Irish form of Edward, Eamonn.

According to his biography¹³ his father was Juan Vivion de Valera, a young Spaniard whom Kate first met the year after she landed; he had called on the Girauds, a French family for whom she worked. Though her subsequent treatment of her child indicates some coldness in her psychological make-up, she was obviously sufficiently well thought of by the Girauds to have been taken with them when they moved from Myrtle Avenue to Gold Street. But Kate soon opted for a change of scene and obtained a job in Greenville, New Jersey. Vivion followed, and the couple were married on 19 September 1881 in the church of St Patrick, Greenville. In the earlier part of my research, until I had learnt to mistrust de Valera’s accounts of his activities, I accepted this version of his origins. In fact, the first draft of this chapter which I sent to the publishers contained the following passage:

At this stage, in view of the persistence of the illegitimacy theory, and at the risk of stating the obvious, one should perhaps draw attention to the following. Whatever about the possibilities of godparents giving a church registrar a false name for a father ‘unavoidably absent’ during a christening, or perpetrating some similar fraud on a birth certificate, someone (who would have had to give proof of his identity as Vivion de Valera) had to stand before the officiating priest on that September day.

Vivion’s mother, Amelia Acosta, had died while he was young and he was raised by his father, Juan de Valera, who seems to have been in the shipping end of the sugar trade between Cuba, Spain and the USA.¹⁴ Vivion had intended to be a sculptor, but a chip damaged his eye and he took up first book-keeping and then music teaching to earn a living. The couple lived in an apartment at 61 East 41st Street, Manhattan, a site now dominated by the Chrysler Building. Vivion’s health deteriorated, and in 1884 his father paid to have him sent to Denver where it was vainly hoped that the air would be better for him. He died there in November 1884; Kate, either for financial or for other reasons, remained in New York with the two-year-old Edward.

All the foregoing is based on de Valera’s official biography. My suspicions were slightly stirred by a diary entry written by a journalist¹⁵ whom Kate trusted. He had tried to get her talking about her first marriage, but just as she began to reply de Valera entered the room and she dried up. De Valera himself obviously obtained sufficient information about his father from Kate to be able to write the following remarks in the family Bible:¹⁶

Father. born in Spain educated abroad – knew fluently Eng, German, Spanish & French. He was trained as a sculptor but chip injured his sight. He gave music lessons after marriage. Met mother in 1880 (At Greenville – village near N.Y. Bay Cemetery). Went to Denver in fall, 1880 & married mother in Sept. 1881. Died in Nov ’84 (Minneapolis?) Denver. He was 5′ 7″ or 5′ 8″ in height & could wear mother’s shoes. Said he was twenty-eight at time of marriage.

With the ending of the ‘marriage’, the young de Valera’s separation from his mother is said to have begun. According to his biography,¹⁷ ‘Mrs de Valera put the child Eamon in the care of another Bruree immigrant, Mrs Doyle, and went out to work again.’ The biography says that de Valera only retained ‘one vivid memory of his early childhood… a New York apartment, 1885. Beside the fireplace sits a man. On the floor lies a small, fair-haired boy. A slim, pale-face young woman is bending over him, dressed in black. The child’s eyes are fixed wonderingly on the shiny metal fittings which ornament her handbag…’ This idealized account, having set the scene for the circumstances which the future President of Ireland wished to have generally accepted as the reasons why the baby de Valera found himself in Ireland in the first place, goes on to explain: ‘…the young woman in black was de Valera’s widowed mother and his mental picture was of the occasions when she came from work to visit him. This arrangement was hardly ideal; the little boy would be much happier in the friendly Bruree atmosphere. Mrs de Valera’s brother, Ned Coll [Edward], who had joined her in America, was about to return home. He would take his nephew across the Atlantic to his grandmother.’

And so, aboard the SS City of Chicago, ‘Dev. was brought to Ireland, in 1885, by an uncle who at that time was about eighteen years of age.’¹⁸ Kate Coll’s living conditions must indeed have been ‘hardly ideal’ if they caused her to send her only child on such an arduous journey – back to a one-roomed thatched cottage – in the care of her teenage brother. Even the journey’s last lap in Ireland, from Killmallock to Bruree, had its hardships. On 20 April 1885, the child was ‘carried over the hills by his uncle in his arms as that was the shortest walking way to Bruree at the time’.¹⁹

Normally one would expect maternal feelings to have dictated that Kate either brought the child home herself, or explored the possibilities of his father’s family assisting in the infant’s upbringing so that she might have kept him. For all we know she may have done so, but we are informed that Juan de Valera called on Kate ‘about a year or less after the baby had been sent to Ireland and was very angry that he had been sent. He had no interest left when he heard his grandson was gone and Dev.’s mother never saw him again. She learned that he died a year or so later.’²⁰ This incident would obviously be significant in itself: it indicates that, had relationships between Kate Coll and Juan de Valera been closer, young George/Edward de Valera could well have grown up in America and the course of Irish history would have been vastly different. But it has the added importance that de Valera himself spoke about it to Frank Gallagher, the journalist and de Valera apologist who was close to him for much of his life. These accounts of childhood obviously either lodged with de Valera, or were invented by him.

I do not propose at this stage to attempt an adjudication on the issue. But, on the principle of reasonable doubt, I have to say that my researches, conducted at a stage when the bulk of this book was already written, indicate that the story about Kate Coll’s getting married in Greenville does not stand up. I was able to substantiate part of Kate Coll’s early history in America, but not the official account of her marriage. Firstly, consultation of immigration records²¹ shows that on 2 October 1879 there did arrive in New York from Liverpool, aboard the SS Nevada, a Kate Coll, passenger number 130. Her age is given as twenty-two and she is described as a ‘spinster’.

However, not only is there no record of any Coll–de Valera marriage at St Patrick’s, but there is a confusion about the church’s location. Greenville is a microcosm of the American melting-pot process. It was strongly Irish in the 1880s. From the church directories one can see the churches going up throughout New Jersey in the 1860s as the Kate Colls and the Patrick Murphys, all fleeing famine, poured out of Ireland. Greenville was a small farming and fishing settlement. There was one Catholic church, St Paul’s on the corner of Bergen Road and Greenville Avenue; it is still in existence, but its records show no Coll–de Valera marriage. Greenville merged²² with Jersey City in 1873 and the church of St Patrick’s, on 492 Bramhall Road, which also stands today, was built in 1869, about ten blocks outside the old Greenville boundary, in Jersey City. Most of its parishioners came from the old Greenville area, which is possibly why it could have been referred to as being in Greenville. St Patrick’s records show the changes in population from the days in the 1880s, when its marriage certificates could have been for a parish in Clare or Kerry, to today; now the pastor is Haitian, as are most of the parishioners. But those records contain no record of a Coll–de Valera wedding. The other church in the area is St John the Baptist on 3026 Kennedy Boulevard, about a mile and a half away. This is also considered to be in Jersey City, not Greenville. It contains no record of a Coll–de Valera wedding either. I consulted the records in the churches²³ and there was no Coll–de Valera wedding listed in a time-span of twelve years (from 1875 to 1887) before and after the date given in the biography for the wedding, 1881.

There remained the possibility that a civil ceremony had been performed. However, enquiry at the New Jersey State Records in Trenton also failed to unearth a Vivion de Valera–Catherine Coll wedding. The Records do contain a certificate for a Catherine Coll who married a James Thompson between 1882 and 1883, and for a Joseph de Valera who married Maria Turst in Newark between 1890 and 1891. Interestingly, Joseph de Valera’s country of origin is given as ‘Spain’, and his father’s name²⁴ as ‘August’, which is not dissimilar to the ‘Acosta’ described as Eamon de Valera’s maternal grandmother in the official biography.

The State of New York records contain two birth certificates²⁵ for de Valera. The first, registered on 10 November 1882, describes the child as ‘George de Valero’. It states that he was born on 14 October that year at the Nursery and Child’s Hospital. His father’s name is again spelt with an ‘o’, his first name is given as ‘Vivion’, born in Spain, and his occupation as an artist. The mother’s name is given as ‘Kate’. It does not state whether or not the couple were married. The second certificate was approved as ‘corrected’ on 30 June 1916. It is signed by Catherine Wheelright, Kate’s married name, and gives the child’s name as ‘Edward’ and the surname as ‘de Valera’. The father is again described as being an artist, born in Spain. The certificate does not say whether the couple were married. The place of birth is given as the Nursery and Child’s Hospital, 61 East 41st Street.

Enquiry at the New York Historical Society²⁶ confirms that the Nursery and Child’s Hospital did exist. It was for destitute, abandoned children, children whose parents were away, and orphans: hardly the sort of place in which a mother would have wished to leave a child if she had a home, even that of a relative in another country, in which to place it. The original de Valera baptismal record in St Agnes’s has also been altered. The name was originally given as ‘De Valeros’, and the father’s name as ‘Vivian’. Someone has changed these to ‘Vivion’ and ‘de Valera’ and altered ‘Edward’ to ‘Eamon’. I was informed that it is believed that the changes may be in the handwriting of Vivion, Eamon de Valera’s eldest son. The church is something of a shrine for de Valera worshippers; one of the few things to survive a disastrous fire which destroyed it was a baptismal font with an inscription recording the fact that de Valera was baptised on it on 3 December 1882.

In de Valera’s childhood, and afterwards, illegitimacy carried a stigma in Roman Catholic Ireland. If he knew or suspected that there was a doubt about his parents’ marriage the knowledge must have been a burden to him. It must have had a marked effect on his character; if even a portion of what the psychiatrists tell us about the influences of childhood be true. The death of, or abandonment by, his father, rejection by his mother, and growing up in poverty a continent away from her were the sort of experiences which either broke or toughened a man. Did they also dehumanize him? Many would say they did. A not unsympathetic historian, Dr T. Ryle Dwyer, once inscribed a copy of his biography of de Valera:²⁷ ‘If behind the cold, impersonal countenance of the subject of this biography, there seems to be no real humanity, possibly it’s because there was none.’

While conceding that there is sufficient in de Valera’s career to justify that comment, it should in fairness also be noted that one may see a warmer personality emerge in the anecdotes about his early life which de Valera confided privately to Frank Gallagher. Gallagher accompanied de Valera to America on two extended tours during the 1920s when he was gathering the money to found the Irish Press. He became the paper’s first Editor, and later Director of the Government Information Bureau. De Valera intended Gallagher to write his biography, and in various relaxed moments over a quarter of a century provided him with information about his background and with unique insights into various aspects of his career and philosophy. In the end Gallagher’s health failed before he could write the book, but he left behind a large and most valuable collection of diaries, drafts and notes.²⁸ The drafts clearly indicate his deification of de Valera, but his diaries and in particular his notes, often made in the tiny handwriting on scraps of folded paper that one frequently finds ex-prisoners producing, contain verbatim accounts of ‘The Chief’s’ recollections unsanitized by any attempts to present them for publication.

Symbolically enough the Colls were moving up in the world as de Valera arrived in Bruree, with the result that he had the unpleasant experience, for a child, of waking up in an empty house the morning after he arrived. The others – his grandmother, Uncle Patrick and Aunt Hannie – had forgotten about him in the excitement of inspecting the new three-room slate-roofed cottage, with a half acre of ground attached, which had just been awarded them by the state. Despite his initial scare de Valera subsequently took a pride in being ‘the last occupant of his family home’,²⁹ even if it was a one-roomed, mud-walled cabin with an open fire around which cooking and sleeping took place.

The move to the new house almost had fatal consequences for the young de Valera. There was a loft over the kitchen, and one morning the child was preparing to descend from it by ladder when his attention was distracted by the blood on a newly plucked goose-wing feather and he fell to the floor beneath. He became aware of his grandmother standing over him, calling out: ‘Is he dead?’, and years later he solemnly informed Frank Gallagher that that was the first occasion on which he became aware that ‘unconscious people could hear things’.³⁰ Michael Collins also had a fall through a loft trapdoor at a similar age, caused by his sisters covering it with flowers. But his fall, which was broken by a pile of hay, does not appear to have prompted any form of realization on his part. Ironically he was killed, needlessly, in a badly planned ambush staged in a place called Beal na mBlath, the mouth of flowers. As we shall see, it was his death, more than any other single circumstance, that allowed de Valera – who, coincidentally, was not far away at the time – to develop into the figure of influence he later became.

Another influential figure shortly to be removed, albeit less drastically, from de Valera’s life was that of his fifteen-year-old Aunt Hannie. For about a year after he arrived in Bruree she played a mothering role, lacing his boots and dressing him up in his American velvet suit. He became ‘particularly fond’ of his aunt.³¹ But the same economic situation that had driven her sister Kate to America drove Hannie there in 1886. Her mother’s tears mingled with those of young Edward as they waved her goodbye at Bruree railway station. At the age of four he was being left behind in a strange country, bereft of the presence that had helped to make up for the loss of his father and mother.

One of the first manifestations of that strangeness that he became aware of was to have a profound effect on his entire life and career: it was the Irish language. His grandmother’s friends used to speak in Irish around their firesides. He did not learn Irish as a boy and when, later in life, he took it up he learned the Connemara dialect. As a child he had not realized that the old people were speaking the Decies dialect, and he came to regret not learning this living link with his early life. Speaking in Irish three-quarters of a century later, at the opening of Ring College in the Decies (Co. Waterford) Gaeltacht,³² he said: ‘Alas, that it is not the sounds of the Decies I have, although these were the first sounds I heard when I was a young lad. Near Bruree, at that time, almost all the old people were native Irish speakers, and it was the Ring dialect they had.’

De Valera seems to have turned to the Irish language as part of a process of creating an identity for himself to compensate for the uncertainties of his early upbringing. Not only did he want to recapture his country’s past – he sought to reclaim its geography also. Self, race and place were bound up in his lifelong preoccupation with the language. Significantly, he chose Bruree to make two revealing statements about how he saw Irish. At a feis, an Irish musical festival, which he opened on 25 June 1950, he first gave the names and meanings of various places from his boyhood and then went on: ‘I am wandering like this to show you how living a link with the past the language is. The simplest place name isn’t without a meaning. All you young people who want to know your country must also know your language.’ And during a by-election campaign in 1955 he said on 30 October:

It is the bond that kept our people together throughout the centuries, and enabled them to resist all the efforts to make them English. It would be useful to us in that way today, when we have poured in upon us, from every direction, influences which are contrary to the traditional views and hopes of our people. The biggest thing that could be done for our people is to restore the language. If you do that the other things will be added to you…

It might be remarked that at the time he made the speech the economy was near collapse, and unemployment and emigration were rising; but his candidate won. However, this is to anticipate and we must return to the Coll hearthside when Eamon de Valera was a small boy. Apart from the Irish language the child heard stories that:³³

caught the secret voice of the nation. He shared the traditions of the people, their music and their songs. By winter firesides, where crickets chirped, and where the kettle hung cronawning on the crook, he heard with pride of the gallant Sarsfield; of Emmet and Tone; of the Bruree Fenians who fought at Kilmallock in ’67, and left one of their number dead on the bullet-swept street. He heard of the Great Famine, and of the Land War and its evictions and clearances… He heard about the hurling matches and race meetings and match-makings: about the feats of great mowers and spadesmen, about all those things that are the warp and woof of Irish life in the countryside.

De Valera did not write that description, but I commend it to the reader as being typical of the rhetoric and the psychology which would permeate his political career. It is in its way both totally accurate and fundamentally misleading. It sketches the basis for his claim in later life that he had unique insight into the minds and hearts of the Irish people – a claim which on occasion, though not always, he did justify. But while the events described in the quotation were those that the child de Valera heard discussed at his family fireside, the account is arcadian, sanitized, selective. The references to the Land War give no indication of the degradation, violence and servility spawned by the conditions of the time. At the beginning of the 1880s General Gordon wrote perceptively to the British Prime Minister, Gladstone:³⁴ ‘I must say, from all accounts and from my own observation, that the state of our fellow countrymen in the parts I have named is worse than that of any people in the world, let alone Europe. I believe that these people are made as we are, that they are patient beyond belief, loyal, but at the same time, broken spirited and desperate, living on the verge of starvation in places in which we would not keep our cattle.’

In the year de Valera was born, the desperation of which Gordon spoke led to some of the most horrific murders in Irish history. There were some sixty agrarian or politics-related killings in the first eight months of that year alone. Amongst these were the knifing to death on 6 May 1882, the day he arrived in Ireland, of the Chief Secretary for Ireland, Lord Frederick Cavendish, and of his Under Secretary, T. H. Burke. The killings were the work of the republican splinter group the Invincibles. Some would argue that reaction in Britain to the deaths aborted progress to Home Rule for Ireland and so paved the way for revolution, partition and today’s Provisional IRA. Certainly, Parnell was so shattered by the assassinations that for a while he seriously contemplated resignation. Then, in August, there occurred the Maamtrasna murders in Co. Mayo: the Joyce family were slaughtered in a clay-floored hovel shared by humans and animals. The Lord Lieutenant said: ‘The house where the murders took place would not be used for pigs in England.’ Here died John Joyce, his wife Breege, his elderly mother Margaret and his daughter Peggy. His two sons, Michael and Patsy, were savagely mutilated and left for dead alongside the four corpses. The neighbours, out of superstition and ignorance, left the boys in agony without doing anything to help them. One child died, and subsequently three men – one of them innocent – were hanged for the crime; five others served twenty-year sentences.

Maamtrasna and other deeds were spoken of at every fireside in Ireland. Their omission from the description of the Colls’ is typical of the suppressio veri romanticism that would form an essential part of the de Valera hagiography. But equally essential to the de Valera saga were the violence and servility bred in the dark underside of colonial Irish peasant life. De Valera was to subsume the violence into his own political entourage, and the servility would be turned to account to depict him as the embodiment of the asexual, moralistic, free Ireland that raised the peasantry from the slime. Servility is a characteristic that Irish historians often shy away from examining; but rage at being rendered servile, and respect for one who seemed to help alleviate that condition, were important components in de Valera’s popularity. One of the cause célèbre landlord murders which occurred when Kate Coll was thinking of going to America was that of Lord Leitrim in 1878. After killing him in broad daylight his assassins rowed to freedom across Mulroy Bay ‘to be acclaimed across the land as the nation’s heroes’. How colonialism and peasant morality combined to create such a metamorphosis is, as often happens, better explained through one verse from a poet than a chapter from a historian:³⁵

And who are you? said the poet speaking to

The Old Leitrim man.

He said, I can tell you what I am.

Servant girls bred my servility:

When I stoop

It is my mother’s mother’s mother

Each one in turn being called to spread—

‘Wider with your legs’ the master of the house said.

Domestic servants taken back and front

That’s why I’m servile. It is not the poverty

Of soil in Leitrim that makes me raise my hat

To fools with fifty pounds in a paper bank.

The verse probably also helps to explain why so many rumours circulated about Kate Coll’s departure from Atkinson’s. And it helps to shed light on why she should choose to face the uncertainties of America rather than the subjugation of ‘Domestic servants’. Kate did re-enter de Valera’s life in Bruree for a brief interlude. The year after Hannie left she showed up for a ‘few glorious weeks’³⁶ before returning to America – to get married again, to one Charles Wheelright,³⁷ a groom employed by a wealthy family near Rochester. Wheelright, who was English and not a Catholic, is remembered as being easy-going, fond of his beer and content to appear before the world behind a team of horses resplendent in his employer’s livery. They had two children, Annie, who died at the age of ten, apparently from heart disease, and Thomas, who became a Redemptorist priest. But no call came to Bruree to bring the two half-brothers under the one roof.

As to why this should have been we can only speculate. In later life Kate Coll was described by Frank Gallagher as a ‘sweet little woman… very very Irish’.³⁸ Yet a typically Irish mother would have gone through fire and water to have her son with her. It is possible that her husband did not want someone else’s child. When they were first married their living quarters were rooms over the stables where he worked. However, when Gallagher met Kate and Wheelright, by then (1 April 1927) ‘a heavy aging man with plenty of sport in him, though rheumatism is making him irritable’,³⁹ he was impressed by the way ‘she bossed him and he, quizzically complaining that he had to keep his job, obeyed at once’.⁴⁰ Another observer commenting on Kate said:⁴¹ ‘There was no frivolity about her and even her sister and her sister’s grown children stood in some awe of Aunt Kate. They could not catch her up on the name of a single plant or flower or bush in the fenced-in garden behind her house.’

There is a well-attested⁴² story of how Kate once won a spelling bee in Rochester from other contestants who included a businessman, a lawyer and a schoolteacher. The report says there was some laughter at her plainly dressed appearance when she arrived on the platform, but she proved herself the only one able to spell all the test words correctly. In an unconscious comment on how circumstances changed for de Valera from his schooldays, in the course of an appreciation of Kate the priest who vouched for this victory told how he⁴³ ‘administered the last rites of the church to this saintly mother of perhaps the greatest living statesman in the world. Mr de Valera surely has reason to be proud of such a mother.’

Such a mother would appear to have possessed the determination and force necessary to get her second husband to accept her child had she really wanted him to. She did, after all, succeed in persuading the Protestant Wheelright to bear the expense of making his own son a priest. But whatever the reasons for Kate’s decision, what is certain is that, on the morning of 7 May 1888, de Valera set out from a motherless house for his first day at school. He was six years of age when he set off hand in hand with an older neighbouring lad, Jamsie MacEniry, to walk the mile to and from Bruree National School.

His first teacher, Thomas MacGinn, had to rely on a boy who lived near the Colls, Tom Mortell, for the spelling of his name. Consequently he was entered on the roles as ‘Eddie Develera’. He was generally known as ‘Eddie Coll’. His strange-sounding Spanish name puzzled the villagers; by a process of elimination they decided that, since it was neither Irish nor English, it had to be French – France being the foreign country uppermost in folk memory because of French involvement in the 1798 rebellion. It is recorded⁴⁴ that, when he had grown a little older, he foiled an attempt by two other boys to hi-jack his uncle’s jennet and car. Admiring the way in which one lad defeated two, a bystander called out: ‘Ha! ha! The Frenchman will do for ye!’ De Valera’s authorized biography says that he got into other fights by standing up for his Uncle Patrick, who was known as the ‘Dane Coll’. This may have been a corrupt pronunciation of Dean, a nickname given either because Patrick was sometimes called on to perform functions in the local church, such as giving out the rosary, or because he was distantly related to a Dean Coll in nearby Newcastle West. But the de Valera version is that he would not allow any uncle of his to be stigmatized by reference to the Danish Vikings who once pillaged Ireland.⁴⁵

The fights were not the only difficulties which the young de Valera had to contend with during his eight years at Bruree School. In years to come he found it easier to romanticize the Irish peasantry in retrospect than he did while living amongst them. A half-century later he told Frank Gallagher a story which gives a telling indication of how the coarsened texture of his childhood environment must have impacted on him. Soon after he arrived in Ireland, when he could not have been ‘more than three,’⁴⁶ his grandmother took him on a pilgrimage to a holy well. As the well was situated in rough ground she left him in a cottage nearby while she completed the pilgrimage. In the cottage a young woman was feeding a baby ‘goody’ – bread and sugar softened in boiled milk. Having fed the child, she cleaned the spoon in her mouth and then used it to give de Valera some of the ‘goody’. Sixty years later Gallagher marvelled at how he could recall both the taste of the ‘goody’ and his revulsion at the girl’s licking the spoon.

The Coll household did not provide a great deal in the way of childish entertainment. His official biography had to concentrate on one annual event to provide a paragraph on ‘Eddie’s pleasures’:⁴⁷ ‘The race-meeting at Athlacca with its thimble riggers, three-card tricksters, the man in the barrel who kept bobbing his head up and down while people tried to hit him with a thrown wattle, pigs crubeens, more sweets and cakes and, of course, the races themselves – all this was top entertainment.’ And, if this ‘top entertainment’ was not enough to sustain a lad for a year, when the heady delights of Athlacca began to fade Bruree also provided a ‘forge and the cooper’s yard, producing an endless supply of firkins and barrels. There were three bootmakers, though Connor’s was only for fine boots.’ It is not made clear whether or not the quality of Connor’s footwear deprived it of ‘entertainment’. If it did, the children of the village would seem to have made up for the loss by visiting Rourke’s, near Connor’s, where ‘a big blackbird was being trained to whistle Harvey Duff’. And on top of all this ‘Bruree village church was a centre of much excitement’. This last was probably true enough because the parish priest, Father Sheehy, who would have been the leading figure in the village anyhow, was doubly famous for his nationalist sermons and for having served a prison sentence on account of his Land League activities. De Valera, who served Mass for him, has described sitting with his fellow altar boys ‘drinking in every historic detail. Father Sheehy, eyes closed and long nose reaching his lips, retailed the golden exploits of bygone days, as if in ecstasy.’⁴⁸ This vision of Father Sheehy prompts one to speculate as to whether the good priest would have been the more moved by knowing of the path his words helped to guide his altar boy along, or by the fact that a nephew of his own was to grow up to become the celebrated arch-revisionist Dr Conor Cruise O’Brien.

De Valera developed one unusual pastime which does not appear on the official list of ‘Eddie’s pleasures’: digging for springs. ‘In the long summer evenings he and a companion often spent hours at this work.⁴⁹ It would seem a peculiar method of enjoyment, and indeed an unprofitable one’, comments his sympathetic but puzzled biographer. But de Valera was so keen on this activity that he rigged up ‘something in the shape of a bell which he affixed to the top of a hawthorn tree… The first to arrive would pull the string and the loud metallic sound of the time-saving apparatus resounded through the ether, a reminder to the absent youth that operations had commenced.’ From his late teens another loud sound came to be associated with him: the crack of a shotgun cartridge. He became so fond of fowling that neighbours remarked he seemed to have a different gun every time he came home. Prophetically he said: ‘I’m afraid I shall be a soldier. I have such a love for guns.’

Near the end of his parliamentary career de Valera gave a remarkable lecture in Bruree, ‘a recalling of things I heard in this very spot some 65 years ago’.⁵⁰ He spoke for an hour and a half without notes. But while he went into great and affectionate detail about history and topography, he had comparatively little to give in the way of boyhood memories. Swimming in the Maigue, being sent by the master to watch for the arrival of the school inspector, remembering a penny farthing bicycle race at the focal sports, the arrival of the pneumatic tyre – but of Bruree and its life only an outline:⁵¹

I would like to speak of the changes that have occurred in the sixty-five odd years since I was here. I would like if we could bring back parts of the old life I knew here, but there were other parts that were not so good… We had two tailor’s shops, we had shoemakers, dressmakers, stone masons, thatchers, carpenters, smiths… We had here, then, a little self-sufficing community, a very pleasant community. It was a pleasant life for those who were able to make a living…

Perhaps one reason why there is so little flesh on the bones of de Valera’s memory is because it was consciously, or unconsciously, selective. In later life, for political reasons, he idealized the ethos of the peasant patriarchy; he never referred to the reality of the brute sexuality and near slavery that lay behind that patriarchy, and which bore particularly heavily on women. Sean Moylan, who later became a famous IRA leader and a lifelong political colleague of de Valera’s, has left a memoir⁵² which paints a more accurate and more uncomfortable picture:

…for the farmer’s wife, and particularly for the female farm servant, there was no respite. From the dawn’s early light to the sunlight’s last gleaming she was still unflaggingly employed… and fathead economists talk about the causes of emigration! It amazed me to see a slight young girl lift a huge pot of boiling potatoes from the fire and lug it into the farmyard to feed pigs and poultry. The carrying of these awkward shaped pots, weighing over fifty pounds, necessitated a posture that surely wrenched every organ in the body out of its proper alignment, with evil effect in after years.

Moylan ended his description with a plea for ‘the mothers of the race whose lot on Irish farms is cast in any but pleasant places’.

But de Valera, although he invariably showed a studied courtesy to women, never showed any disposition to improve their lot in society. He would always have loyal women workers around him, but not colleagues. Perhaps the absence of a mother in his own formative years had something to do with his attitude. Grandmother Coll seems to have been closer in character to Hannie than to Kate. Years after her death there was an obvious regard in the manner in which de Valera described for Gallagher various details of her daily life: the care with which she used to tie her apron strings; how she went about her chores saying prayers; how she was always first up, collecting eggs, milking cows, getting the breakfast. In his first days at Bruree de Valera, who slept with his grandmother, used to leave her bed when she got up and he would then climb in with his uncle.

His ‘hard though good uncle’⁵³ Patrick was obviously a man of some political talent. He served on the Killmallock Board of Guardians for three three-year terms, and was active throughout Munster in the labour movement. He thrashed the lad when he ‘mitched’ from school. Physical punishment was commonly meted out for misbehaviour, or what was deemed to be misbehaviour: for example, using the good reins (normally kept for driving the donkey to Mass on Sunday) to make a swing.⁵⁴ Patrick Coll’s reaction to his nephew’s mitching seems to have been prompted by anger at wasting time which might have been spent on the farm, rather than at lost educational opportunity – for he ensured that the boy took the fullest possible part in the labouring work of the Coll holding. In class II de Valera is recorded as being present on thirty-six days fewer than the most regular boys.⁵⁵

One of de Valera’s most famous speeches to the Dail during a perfervid moment in his career⁵⁶ gave details of his chores:

There was not an operation on the farm, with perhaps one exception, that I as a youngster had not performed. I lived in a labourer’s cottage, but the tenant in his way could be regarded as a small farmer. From my earliest days I participated in every operation that takes place on a farm. One thing I did not learn, how to plough, but until I was sixteen years of age there was no farm work from the spancelling of a goat and milking of a cow, that I had not to deal with. I cleaned out the cowhouses. I followed the tumbler rake. I took my place on the cart and filled the load of hay. I took milk to the creamery. I harnessed the donkey, the jennet and the horse.

His early thought was so conditioned by farming routine that when he was once given a school essay to write on ‘Making Hay While the Sun Shines’ he could think of nothing to say. ‘What other time would you make hay?’ he asked.⁵⁷ One task he did not mention in the Dail was grazing the cows along the ‘long acre’, the grassy roadside ditches. This was a normal method of eking out the sparse amount of grass available either on the Coll’s own half acre on on what they could rent, and it involved keeping a wary eye out for the police. When they showed up, de Valera used to pretend to be driving the cattle from one field to another.

But despite all this toil, from his earliest days he seems to have been sufficiently other-directed and self-motivated to put in the study required to get him promoted from one class to another. Gallagher recorded an anecdote which shows how, even at the age of twelve, de Valera had his eyes set on wider horizons than Bruree. He and a boy some four years older were digging potatoes one day when the other boy announced that he was going to Limerick to a job. To de Valera, going to Limerick ‘seemed like a great adventure and he said bitterly to himself, and I am to remain digging potatoes all my life.’⁵⁸ Another anecdote from the period when his time at Bruree School was drawing to a close could be taken as an early illustration of his competitiveness, his cunning, his courage, his studiousness or a combination of all four. He told Gallagher:⁵⁹

There was to be an inspection… we were all preparing for it. I was the star reader but before the great day came I was down with the measles. The boy who sat next to me in class and who if I was absent the master would produce as the star came to my grandmother on the morning of the inspection. I heard him warning her how dangerous it is if anybody thinks to be allowed out with the measles. I was very sick but when that boy left I waited until my grandmother had gone off on some chore. Then I tumbled out of bed and dressing started off to school. Half way there I met the master coming to fetch me. I did my stuff but remember well how the other pupils stood well clear of me. Half the class were over to the right and the other half were over to the left with me alone in the middle.

De Valera’s grandmother died in 1895, her loss being somewhat mitigated for him by the fact that Hannie had come back to Ireland once more to nurse her. It was at this stage that the boy gave a major display of that determination and self-belief that was to be the hallmark of his adult career. With the illness and death of his grandmother, his labouring chores were increased considerably: cooking was added to his list of duties. He even prepared the wedding breakfast⁶⁰ when his Uncle Patrick went through with the marriage that he had seemingly been hesitating over while his mother was alive. Coll married Catherine Dillon and they had three children, Patrick, Elizabeth and Mary.

But de Valera was determined not to ‘remain digging potatoes all my life’. In his official biography he says his uncle was prepared to go part of the way towards meeting his aspirations to do something other than manual labour by urging him to become a monitor at Bruree School. Monitors were boys who had recently left school and returned to assist the teacher, in the hope that classroom experience would help them become teachers themselves. De Valera’s biography says that he rejected this plan as a ‘dead end unless he had enough money to pay for his teacher’s training later’.⁶¹ According to his biography, he decided that Bruree would never satisfy him and wrote to Hannie asking her to persuade his mother to bring him back to America, as an alternative to a life either as a labourer or as a monitor. But, the biography tells us, he had a hidden agenda. He wanted to persuade his uncle to send him to Charleville Christian Brothers’ School which, unlike Bruree, offered the possibility of studying for an exhibition that could carry him on up the educational ladder. ‘At last uncle Pat agreed to the scheme since de Valera was willing to walk the seven miles there when necessary.’

However, de Valera confided privately to Gallagher⁶² that his uncle saw no need for school and that he got to Charleville by making his mother an offer she could not refuse. He insisted that either he was sent to Charleville or she sent him his passage money for America. Kate evidently shrank from bringing her first-born to the USA. Charleville it was, and Gallagher’s diary