Éamon de Valera
Éamon de Valera dominated Irish politics for half a century and was spared execution in 1916 partly by being born in New York. He was born in Manhattan in 1882 to a Spanish father and an Irish mother, sent to Ireland at two to be raised by his grandmother, became a mathematics teacher, and joined the Irish Volunteers in 1913. He commanded at Boland's Mill in the Easter Rising, was sentenced to death and reprieved — the American citizenship, and the fact that the executions had already turned opinion. He was released in 1917, made president of Sinn Féin, and spent eighteen months in the United States raising money while the war of independence was fought at home. The decisive act of his career was refusing the Treaty of 1921, which he had not gone to London to negotiate, and leading the walkout from the Dáil that produced the civil war. He was interned by the government he had opposed, took his party into the Dáil in 1927 by treating the oath as an empty formula, and won power in 1932. What he then did was dismantle the treaty piece by piece rather than by war: the oath abolished, the governor-general reduced to nothing, the land annuities withheld, the ports recovered in 1938, and a constitution in 1937 that made Ireland a republic in all but name. He kept the country neutral through the war. He was president until 1973 and died in 1975. His constitution also wrote in a special position for the Catholic church and a clause about women's place in the home, both removed by referendum decades later. The economic war of the 1930s and the protectionism that followed left the country poor and emigrating until the policy was reversed in 1958.
- Lived: 1882 CE – 1975 CE
- Nationality: Irish
- Roles: politician, leader
