The Making of Éamon de Valera

[Draggingtree]

The Making of Éamon de Valera

 

Éamon de Valera: A Will to Power, Ronan Fanning, Faber and Faber, 320 pages

 

By WILLIAM ANTHONY HAY • June 17, 2016

 

Political leadership highlights paradoxes statesmen face. Éamon de Valera, who shaped 20th-century Ireland, embodied paradoxes himself. An Irish nationalist born in the United States with a Spanish father and a consequently distinctive name, de Valera came to personify his country’s identity and self-image. Like his contemporaries Mustafa Kemal and Ibn Saud, he built a distinctive state after breaking with an empire. But de Valera also fits within a notable conservative tradition: he shared Antonio Salazar and Maurice Duplessis’s commitment to integralist Catholicism. Calvin Coolidge’s flinty reserve, frugal upbringing, and Arcadian vision of the national past offer another parallel. As “the heir to generations of conservatism,” de Valera told a colleague in 1922 that he “was meant to be a dyed-in-the-wool tory or even a bishop, rather than leader of a revolution.” So how did he become a revolutionary?

 

Ronan Fanning argues that the centenary of the 1916 Easter Rising is a ripe moment to reconsider de Valera. He aims to reconcile the obloquy de Valera incurred for dividing Ireland over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which won self-government, with his claim to recognition as his country’s greatest modern statesman. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-making-of-eamon-de-valera/