The Taoiseach Is Home

In a nation whose heroes have often been martyred failures, Eamon de Valera survived and succeeded. Through a defeated insurrection and a lost civil war, "Dev" struggled to free and unite the nation that had adopted him. When he died last week in Dublin, 92 and nearly blind, few of his countrymen could recall a time when De Valera's gaunt, beak-nosed visage was not a part of Irish political life.

He was an unlikely prophet to his people. Born in New York City to a Spanish musician father and an Irish immigrant mother, De Valera was sent to his grandmother's in County Limerick at the age of two, when his father died. He taught mathematics after graduating from Ireland's Royal University but soon turned to politics. In 1913, the gawky, bespectacled De Valera signed on with the pro-Republican Irish Volunteers, quickly rising to battalion commandant. Three years later, De Valera deployed some 50 men around their battle station for the Easter Rising against the British: a bakery dominating the approaches to Central Dublin. "You have but one life to live and one death to die," he exhorted them. "See that you do both like men." They held out for almost a week, and were the last Republican unit to surrender.

Awaiting a firing squad in Dublin's Kilmainham Jail, Dev was reading St. Augustine's Confessions when he learned that his death sentence had been commuted, possibly because of his U.S. citizenship. He was the only battalion leader to survive the Rising. Amnestied in 1917, he returned to a hero's welcome in Dublin and leadership of a new party, Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone). When the 1920-21 guerrilla war against Britain's "Black and Tan" occupying army led to Ireland's partition into Ulster and the Irish Free State, De Valera joined the "irreconcilables" of the Irish Republican Army in a cruelly scarring civil war against supporters of the treaty.

In 1923, weary of endless bloodshed, De Valera urged a cease-fire and formed a new party, Fianna Fail (Militia of Destiny). In 1932, the party triumphed in elections for the legislature, the Dail, and Dev took power as head of the government. He quickly set about shaving away the vestiges of British power, including the annual payments to former British landowners for their expropriated Irish holdings. He was also forced to break with those who demanded more extreme actions, and in 1936 banned the I.R.A.

Cozy Homesteads. Tweaking John Bull's nose proved costly. Through the 1930s, the British government raised tariff barriers. To counter Britain's economic warfare, De Valera promoted self-sufficiency. "Ireland her own," he intoned, "Ireland her own without suit or service, rent or render, faith or fealty to any power under heaven." In 1937, the Free State declared itself a wholly independent country called Eire, thus severing the last of the links to England, and Dev became Taoiseach (pronounced tee-shock) or Prime Minister.

De Valera himself wrote the new nation's constitution, which lays claim to Ulster and enshrines the Catholic Church as a state religion. Proudly Hibernian, he strove--futilely--to revive Gaelic, holding that "English is the badge of slavery, and we will have to get rid of it." Dev even urged the Irish to give up tea, a foreign import, and switch to milk or native beer. A nonsmoking, ascetic teetotaler, he relaxed by dabbling in Thomistic theology or solving quadratic equations, and often seemed a misfit among his boisterous Celtic countrymen. But he was acutely sensitive to their feelings. "If I wish to know what the Irish want," he once said, "I look into my own heart."

Plumbing the Irish heart as World War II began, De Valera resolved on strict neutrality. Though Ireland emerged from the war unscathed, it was plagued by chronic poverty and unemployment. To a new generation of Irish, Dev was increasingly anachronistic and his romantic policies irrelevant. In 1959, he stepped aside as Taoiseach and took the figurehead post of President. Fourteen years later, he retired to an old folks' home--but only after paying a final visit to the bullet-pocked black bricks of Boland's bakery, where his struggle--and Ireland's--had begun.

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