last December, moved by T. Ryle Dwyer's Big Fellow, Long Fellow, I wrote a column not just about the true paternity of Eamon de Valera, but about his truly abominable childhood too. Abandoned by his mother, he was raised by his uncle and an aunt in Bruree until he was five, when his mother returned from the US. He pleaded with her to take him with her when she returned to the US, but she refused. Instead, she departed for the US with her sister, de Valera's aunt, leaving young Edward Coll (as he was then known) to be raised by his uncle, who bitterly resented the financial and social burden that his nephew constituted.
Young Dev entered school as Edward Coll. That was how he was known in childhood. He became Edward de Valera in the school rolls at Blackrock, where at the age of 15 he asked permission to stay on over the Christmas holiday rather than return to the dreariness of his home. He learnt Irish in his twenties, when he completed his transformation into the revolutionary named Eamon de Valera. I added that there was no known record of his alleged father, "Vivion".
Attacking nationalism
Proinsias Mac Aonghusa replied rather curiously, not to say incomprehensibly, apparently suggesting that to ask such questions was to attack Irish nationalism once again. No, actually: I ask such questions because they are pertinent. He insisted that, contrary to my speculations, the record was clear and unambiguous; Vivion Juan de Valero (as the family name was then known) married Kate Coll in St Patrick's Church in Greenville, New York in 1881.
I let the matter rest there; Tony McCarthy, of the refreshing and highly rewarding magazine Irish Roots, did not. He reported that the tale of the de Valero-Coll wedding quoted by Proinsias Mac Aoghnuasa appeared initially in Thomas O'Neill's and Padraig O Fiannachta's Irish-language biography of Dev. That is the source. So what is the source of the O Fiannachta-O'Neill contention that the wedding actually occurred? Thomas P. O'Neill is admirably placed to answer any questions about Dev, having been able to ask him and his mother directly; but he is not giving any consultations at the moment. His coauthor, Padraig O Fiannachta, being still alive, is, and when approached by Tony McCarthy about his source for the de Valera-Coll wedding, replied that "he wouldn't have a notion about it."
I said in my column that Dev's father was probably the son of a local landlord by the name of Atkinson, for whom Kate Coll worked as a domestic servant. Frank Meehan, however, now tells Irish Roots that an old lady from Bruree told him many years ago that young Coll's father was in fact a local horse-breeder, John Gubbins, the owner of Bruree House. The photograph of John Gubbins shows a dark complexion and a very pronounced nose. His features are heavier and coarser than Dev's ever were. But a resemblance is very clear indeed - though it might, of course, be coincidental.
Documentary doubt
Is it important that de Valera was "illegitimate", as the term once was? It is if he believed it; and if it is actually true, and he knew it to be true (perhaps having been jeered at for his bastardy by his unloving uncle), might that not have coloured his entire life? And what documentary doubt surrounds that life. Tim Pat Coogan searched through the church records and was unable to find a registration of the wedding of Dev's family.
The two documents which register his arrival in this world are his birth certificate, in which he is named "George" and the father is called Vivion de Valero, and his baptismal certificate. But the baptismal certificate in St Agnes Church (not, you note, the church of the alleged wedding) names the father as Vivian De Valeros, and the child's name has now become Edward. Clearly whoever was registering the child had not got a clear grasp of the dad's name. But we are not done with the name-changing yet. De Valera invented a third surname for himself when in adolescence he ceased to have the name of his accursed uncle. He did not call himself de Valero (as on his birth certificate) or De Valeros (as on the baptismal certificate), but de Valera.
The Dev myth
When Dev was under sentence of death, and it was essential to prove his American birth, family members then altered the birth and baptismal certificates in New York to de Valera: even Vivion was changed to Vivian to accord with the Dev-created myth in Ireland. But that myth seems to have been largely the fantasy of a little boy, unloved and alone, who dreamt of an exotic identity with an exotic name and exotic, Mediterranean antecedents.
Is it surprising that such an emotionally-deprived youngster should in adulthood have created a Constitution around the very institution of which he was most deprived - the family? Is it amazing that this Constitution declared that the mother's place should be where his mother had not been - the home? Is it surprising that this man of so many names - George, Edward, Eamon, Coll, de Valero, De Valeros - and so many childhood identities should create in adulthood a political world of such utter ethnic certainty? And is it not more than interesting that the Long Fellow and the Big Fellow, Coll and Collins, were effectively both fatherless?