Eamon de Valera: Encyclopedia II - Eamon de Valera - Childhood

Eamon de Valera - Childhood

Born in the New York Nursery and Child Hospital in New York City in 1882 to an Irish mother, he stated that his parents, Catherine Coll de Valera Wheelwright and Juan Vivion de Valera, a Spanish-Cuban settler and sculptor, were married in 1881 in New York. However, exhaustive trawls through church and state records by genealogists and by his most recent biographer, Tim Pat Coogan (1990) have failed to find either a church or civil record of the marriage. Furthermore, no birth, baptismal, marriage or death certificate has ever been found for anyone called Juan Vivion de Valera or de Valeros, an alternative spelling. As a result, it is now widely believed by academics that de Valera was illegitimate. While this would be irrelevant to many nowadays, one result of illegitimacy in the late 19th/early 20th century was that one was barred from a career in the Roman Catholic Church. Eamon de Valera was throughout his life a deeply religious man, who in death asked to be buried in a religious habit. There are a number of occasions where de Valera seriously contemplated entering the religious life like his half-brother, Fr. Thomas Wheelwright. Yet he did not do so, and apparently received little encouragement from the priests whose advice he sought. In his biography of de Valera, Tim Pat Coogan speculated about whether questions surrounding de Valera's legitimacy may have been a deciding factor.

Whatever his parentage, de Valera was taken to Ireland at the age of two. Even when his mother married a new husband in the mid-1880s, he was not brought back to live with her but reared instead by maternal relatives in County Limerick. He was educated locally at Bruree National School, County Limerick and Charleville Christian Brothers School, County Cork. At the age of sixteen, he won a scholarship to Blackrock College, County Dublin.

Always a diligent student, he won further scholarships and exhibitions and in 1903 was appointed professor of mathematics at Rockwell College, County Tipperary. He graduated in mathematics in 1904 from the Royal University of Ireland and then went back to Dublin to teach at Belvedere College. In 1906, he secured a post as professor of mathematics at Carysfort Teachers' Training College for women in Blackrock, County Dublin. His applications for professorships in colleges of the National University of Ireland were unsuccessful, but he obtained a part-time appointment at Maynooth and also lectured in mathematics at various Dublin colleges.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Childhood", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki