Dev’s youth in Limerick goes under the spotlight

A NEW book on Éamon de Valera drills down into his early years in Co Limerick, and looks at the influence Limerick people had on him.

As its author Colum Kenny explains in Dangerous Ambition: The Making of Éamon de Valera (Eastwood Books, €20), Dev managed to pull himself up by his bootstraps as the son of a distant mother in America. She sent him home at the age of two and a half to be raised by her brother Pat Coll outside Bruree village.

Most biographies of Dev have concentrated on his later political career but this volume looks at how his character was formed when young.

Pat lived in one of the first “labourers’ cottages” built. For he was a labourer as his own father had also been. He reared Eddie Coll (as Dev was often then known) to work hard. But Dev later said that what he liked best when a boy was to go and play in a stream near Bruree: “I had an island in it. I could get away from everybody. What I liked best was playing Robinson Crusoe there.”

Dev was a solitary child who learnt to depend on his own abilities to get ahead, and to get his way.
“I had no one to play with. I was alone a good deal. In the river I had a little island, and I used to shape it and make plans about it. This was Ireland and I was the ruler of it.”

In 1926 de Valera founded Fianna Fáil, now, once again, the leading political party in Ireland. But what got him there? His was a story of stark rearing and thwarted ambitions. Born in Manhattan in 1882, and christened ‘Edward’, he was brought up in Limerick. He never knew his father. Two women, his absent mother Kate and his wife Sinéad defined his life.

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Eddie worked hard to get an education, winning scholarships that got him into the prestigious Blackrock College in Dublin and saw him graduate from the Royal University of Ireland – rare achievements especially then for a boy of his social class.

As seen in Dangerous Ambition, reading, rugby, hunting, and prayer were Dev’s youthful pastimes. But in his thirties he left a good job in education to gamble his wife and children on the outcome of bloody rebellion and civil war. He survived both. Destiny found him a place in history. This book explores the childhood, character and early life of Éamon de Valera before he founded Fianna Fáil in 1926.

Kenny, a professor emeritus of Dublin City University and senior journalist, recently gave an address in Toledo, Spain, about de Valera’s use of at least three Irish ambassadors in Madrid in his futile search for roots in Spain. Kenny was speaking at the annual conference of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions.

Dangerous Ambition is the last in a quartet of recent books by Kenny. In these he challenges our views of aspects of the ‘Irish Revolution’ of 1916 to 1922. The quartet consists of full-length biographies of both Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera, along with two succinct volumes reviewing the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations of 1921 and the Irish Civil War that followed them.

Published by Eastwood Books, Kenny’s study is aimed at both general and academic readers.