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On This Day: Irish independence leader Eamon de Valera died in 1975 - after serving as Taoiseach for 21 years
Thousands lined Dublin’s streets during his funeral when his body was carried by gun carriage
August 29: Irish independence leader Eamon de Valera died on this day in 1975 – almost six decades after being one of the few organisers to survive the failed Easter Rising.
De Valera, who served as Taoiseach – or prime minister – for 21 years and President for 14, succumbed to ill health after reaching the age of 92 just two months earlier.
Thousands lined Dublin’s streets during his funeral when his body was carried by gun carriage past the General Post Office where the April 1916 Easter Rising ended.
It was this botched rebellion against British rule – during the First World War – that ensured he would lead Ireland’s more successful freedom fighters a few years later.
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De Valera – or Dev as Sinn Fein comrades knew him – was sentenced to death for treason after leading a unit of insurgents.
But – unlike 15 other organisers who were killed by firing squad – his sentence was commuted to jail because he was born in New York, which made him a U.S. citizen.
The executions sparked outrage and helped recruit members for the forerunners of the Irish Republican Army as Ireland rapidly destabilised.
De Valera, the son of a Spanish father and Irish mother who sent her two-year-old boy to her parents in Ireland after her husband died, was released under a 1917 amnesty.
He was elected president of Sinn Fein and helped the pro-republican party win 73 out of 105 Irish constituencies in the 1918 Westminster elections.
They refused to take their seats in the British parliament and instead formed the Dáil assembly in Dublin, where a declaration of independence was declared in 1919.
It precipitated the Irish War of Independence, a guerrilla conflict in which recruits for the newly formed IRA killed 714 police officers and UK soldiers in ambushes.
The war – during which ill-disciplined British Black and Tan auxiliaries killed a similar number of civilians in reprisal attacks - led to a ceasefire in July 1921.
De Valera refused to attend London peace talks, which historians argue was because he knew Britain would neither permit a republic nor independence for all 32 counties.
Instead he sent Sinn Fein founder Arthur Griffith and chief IRA coordinator Michael Collins to negotiate in his place and eventually sign and see ratified in Dáil.
But de Velera refused to back the Anglo-Irish Treaty, which gave 26 southern and Catholic counties self-government - but within the British Empire, not as a republic.
The new Irish Free State would also keep King George V as its head of state while the six mainly Protestant counties of Northern Ireland would remain in the UK.
De Valera’s anti-Treaty faction sparked a year-long civil war, which pro-Treaty Free State government forces won – although Collins and 3,000 others lost their lives.
After a period in the political wilderness, he decided against abstentionism and formed a new party called Fianna Fáil, meaning “Warriors of Destiny” in Gaelic.
The group - which along with Collins’s Fine Gael, or “Tribe of the Irish” have dominated Ireland’s politics ever since – were elected to govern in 1932.
In power, de Valera shaped Ireland more than anyone else in pursuing his dream of bringing to life a distinctly Irish state with Gaelic and Catholicism at its core.
Among a minority of Irish speakers, he drafted a new constitution that gave Gaelic primacy over English in a bid to revive the dying native language.
While granting religious freedom, it also recognised the “special position” of the Church and ensured that divorce, abortion and the sale of contraceptives were banned.
The document, which was sent to the Vatican for approval, also abolished the controversial Oath of Allegiance to the crown.
After World War II - in which Ireland remained neutral - de Valera lost power to Fine Gael, which finally declared Ireland a republic, without British opposition.
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He returned as Taoiseach in 1951 and was then elected president in 1959.
At the beginning of his second term, he took part in celebrations for the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising – filmed in a British Pathé newsreel.
He went on to become the oldest head of state in the world in 1973 when he retired from the presidency at age 90.
In his final years, he remained a national hero, but increasingly Irishmen believed he held Ireland back with his isolationism and social conservatism.
