Word: dev
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Ireland ringing with Parnell's cry: "No man has a right to fix a boundary to the march of a nation." A soft-spoken teacher of math who later joined the Sinn Fein (We Ourselves), "Dev" is still credited by legend with being the last rebel patriot to surrender during the Battle of Boland's Mills in 1916, and with being one of only 13 scholars who understood Einstein's theory of relativity...
...long time had passed since he was the martyr "Convict 95" who set the crowds to screaming, "Up Dev! Up the Republic!" For one thing, he had insisted on tying to the presidential election "the Issue"-doing away with proportional representation, which, while giving minorities a voice in the Dail, tends to keep alive old animosities that should have long since become ancient history. "Get rid of the intrigous P.R.!" cried a member of Dev's Fianna Fail (Party of Destiny). "De Valera and Fianna Fail want dictatorship!" retorted the opposition Fine Gael (United Ireland) Party...
Forty years ago, Ireland's countryfolk used to sing: "When next we challenge England, we'll beat her in the fight, and we'll crown De Valera king of Ireland." But Dev himself made Ireland a republic. But for 21 of the last 27 years the inflexible ex-rebel, whose dour personality probably owes more to his Spanish father than his Irish mother, has been Ireland's Prime Minister or Taoiseach (pronounced tea-shock). A man of homely analogies, naive honesty and unbudgeable stubbornness, New York-born De Valera dominated Irish politics...
...revival of Gaelic as the national tongue. But nobody thought for a minute that he would now fail to get into the Arus an Uachtarain, the presidential mansion set in Dublin's Phoenix Park. There was even talk that the opposition Fine Gael Party would let Dev run unopposed in the June presidential election-if only out of enthusiasm at the idea of seeing him safely removed from active politics. The independent Irish Times, which has often bitterly attacked Dev and his "break all links with Britain" policy, said that Dev was "the fitting choice" for President, and there...
...ruined. She has slept the night on his floor. He has bought her drinks, and "a man who'd let a young girl get stocious drunk is almost as bad as a fornicator.'' Soon, the school knows, and the writing is on the jakes wall for Dev. Yet-most horrible touch of all-Dev is forgiven, and it is put about that "nothing" has happened. "If it wasn't so pitiful, it would be funny," says Una in an exact summary of the book itself. It is Dev's tragedy to remain a man among...