Word: valera
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...nation whose heroes have often been martyred failures, Eamon de Valera survived and succeeded. Through a defeated insurrection and a lost civil war, "Dev" struggled to free and unite the nation that had adopted him. When he died last week in Dublin, 92 and nearly blind, few of his countrymen could recall a time when De Valera's gaunt, beak-nosed visage was not a part of Irish political life...
...unlikely prophet to his people. Born in New York City to a Spanish musician father and an Irish immigrant mother, De Valera was sent to his grandmother's in County Limerick at the age of two, when his father died. He taught mathematics after graduating from Ireland's Royal University but soon turned to politics. In 1913, the gawky, bespectacled De Valera signed on with the pro-Republican Irish Volunteers, quickly rising to battalion commandant. Three years later, De Valera deployed some 50 men around their battle station for the Easter Rising against the British: a bakery dominating...
...returned to a hero's welcome in Dublin and leadership of a new party, Sinn Fein (Ourselves Alone). When the 1920-21 guerrilla war against Britain's "Black and Tan" occupying army led to Ireland's partition into Ulster and the Irish Free State, De Valera joined the "irreconcilables" of the Irish Republican Army in a cruelly scarring civil war against supporters of the treaty...
...weary of endless bloodshed, De Valera urged a cease-fire and formed a new party, Fianna Fail (Militia of Destiny). In 1932, the party triumphed in elections for the legislature, the Dail, and Dev took power as head of the government. He quickly set about shaving away the vestiges of British power, including the annual payments to former British landowners for their expropriated Irish holdings. He was also forced to break with those who demanded more extreme actions, and in 1936 banned the I.R.A...
...Fail, which lost control of the government three months ago, defeated Thomas O'Higgins, the candidate of the governing Fine Gael and Labor coalition, by a vote of 636,162 to 587,577. When he starts his seven-year term later this month, Childers will succeed Eamon de Valera, 91, who has dominated Irish public life for half a century...