Mayo man was close friend of de Valera
Eamon de Valera with his Kiltimagh friend Frank Hughes. Picture: Courtesy of Blackrock College Archive
A new book highlights the fact that Éamon de Valera’s first close friend outside Co Limerick was Frank Hughes of Kiltimagh. Both boys were enrolled at Blackrock College, and Ryan invited Dev to Co Mayo to spend Christmas 1899 with his family. Dev fondly recalled their walks and evenings at the fireside in Mayo. He was later Dev’s best man, as Dev was his too.
As author Colum Kenny explains in (Eastwood Books, €20), Hughes also offered de Valera’s family hospitality when he was interned in 1916. Sinéad de Valera told Hughes: “You have no idea what my life is like."
Dev once gave Hughes some advice that was revealing of his own way of thinking. During 1915, he wrote to Hughes, stating: “You seem to be too sensitive about the opinion of the world... Let what the world and your neighbour think go be damned. Did you ever see the man who tried his best to be popular ever succeed except in a paltry measure?”
de Valera became godfather of the Mayoman’s daughter Cora, who was later a supporter of the Republican cause in Spain and an active socialist in Dublin.
is the last in a quartet of recent books by Kenny. In these, he challenges our views of aspects of the ‘Irish Revolution’ of 1916 to 1922. The quartet consists of full-length biographies of both Arthur Griffith and Éamon de Valera, along with two succinct volumes reviewing the Anglo-Irish Treaty negotiations of 1921 and the Irish Civil War that followed them.
In 1926, de Valera founded Fianna Fáil. But what had got him there? His was a story of stark rearing and thwarted ambitions. Born in Manhattan in 1882, and christened ‘Edward’, he was brought up in a labourer’s cottage near Bruree. He never knew his father. Two women, his absent mother Kate and his wife Sinéad defined his life.
Eddie worked hard to get an education, winning a scholarship that got him into the prestigious Blackrock College in Dublin and graduating from the Royal University of Ireland – rare achievements for a boy of his social class.
As seen in , reading, rugby, hunting, and prayer were Dev’s youthful pastimes. But in his thirties, he left a good job in education to gamble his wife and children on the outcome of bloody rebellion and civil war. He survived both. Destiny found him a place in history. This book explores the childhood, character and early life of Éamon de Valera before he founded Fianna Fáil in 1926.
Kenny, a professor emeritus of Dublin City University and senior journalist, recently gave an address in Toledo, Spain, about de Valera’s use of at least three Irish ambassadors in Madrid in his futile search for roots in Spain. Kenny was speaking at the annual conference of the International Commission for the History of Representative and Parliamentary Institutions.
Published by Eastwood Books, Kenny’s study is aimed at both general and academic readers.
