Eamon de Valera

Eamon de Valera (1882–1975)
Teacher, revolutionary, taoiseach, and president of Ireland

Extract from RIA Dictonary of Irish Biography by Ronan Fanning

Like many Irish-speaking nationalists, de Valera's political horizons were confined to a full measure of home rule, but that changed dramatically when he joined the Irish Volunteers at their inaugural meeting in Dublin's Rotunda Rink (25 November 1913)....In March 1915 he was appointed commandant of the 3rd Battalion, comprising the companies in the south-east of the city, after he had satisfied Patrick Pearse (qv) of his willingness to participate in a rising; he then became adjutant to Thomas MacDonagh (qv), the brigade commander. ...

During the rising de Valera's battalion occupied Boland's Mill, commanding the south-east approaches over the Grand Canal; isolated and without scouting parties, they knew little of what was happening elsewhere. ...But what he did in the rising mattered little when set against the iconic stature he acquired in its aftermath as the only surviving commandant, when his sentence of death on 8 May by a military court was commuted to life imprisonment.

...De Valera's imprisonment, first in Mountjoy jail and then in four English prisons (Dartmoor, Lewes, Maidstone, and Pentonville), massively enhanced his standing among revolutionary nationalists. Age and education (he was older and much better educated than most fellow prisoners), military seniority, and schoolmasterly authority contributed to his meteoric emergence as leader.

...When all the convicted prisoners were finally released, it was de Valera who paraded them before boarding the boat on their triumphal return from Holyhead on 18 June 1917. He had been selected as the candidate for a by-election in Clare East before his release and he now abandoned his reservations about running on the Sinn Féin ticket. He campaigned in his Volunteer uniform, telling audiences that they ‘must be prepared to fight against England’ and that every vote was ‘as good as the crack of a rifle’ (Laffan, 210); ...