Éamon de Valera

He met Sinéad Flanagan, a teacher, in 1908 and married her in 1910. The couple was blessed with five sons and two daughters.

Eamon de Valera died on 29 August 1975, at the age of 92.

He was born as Edward George de Valero on 14 October 1882 in New York City, United States to a Spanish father, Juan Vivion de Valera, and an Irish mother, Catherine Coll.

His father died when the boy was just two and he was sent to Ireland to live with his maternal relatives.

After completing his schooling he first went to the Blackrock College and then to the Rockwell College. He was an athletic young man who loved to play rugby.

In 1903, Eamon de Valera was appointed a teacher of mathematics at Rockwell College, County Tipperary. He then furthered his education from the Royal University of Ireland and was appointed a teacher of mathematics at Carysfort Teachers' Training College for women in Blackrock in 1906.

He was a true patriot and became involved in the political revolution in 1913 when he joined the Irish Volunteers, an organization that supported Home Rule for Ireland.

In 1916, the anti-British Easter Rising in Dublin was in full-swing and de Valera led his forces to occupy Boland’s Mill. The forces were told to surrender after a week of fighting and de Valera was the last to surrender. He was also the only commandant of the rebellion, who was not executed, partly because of his American birth.

He joined the political party Sinn Féin in 1916 and was selected as its president in 1917 as several others of the rebellious leaders were dead. Sinn Féin won a huge majority in the 1918 general election following which de Valera went in disguise to the United States, where he collected funds to promote the cause of Irish Independence from the United Kingdom. De Valera was successful in collecting $5,500,000 from American supporters.

Meanwhile in Ireland, patriotic passions of the Irish revolutionaries reached a new height, igniting the Irish War of Independence. De Valera returned to Ireland shortly before the war ended with the truce that took effect on July 11, 1921.

Eamon de Valera is undoubtedly one of the major figures in the political history of Ireland. Over the course of his long political career which spanned over half a century, he played a vital role in the Irish War of Independence and decades later, in the establishment of Ireland as a republic.