EAMON DE VALERA

Rotorua Morning Post, Volume 1, Issue 200, 16 April 1932, Page 3

EAMON DE VALERA

FREE STATE LEADER AS HE SEES HIMSELF. EXTRAORDINARY CAREER. Intense interest is being taken in England in the new Irish question. A characteristi'c article by the Irish eorrespondent of the leading Gonseryative paper, the London Morning Post, indicates the Conservative reaction to the new President. The eorrespondent writes: — Christened plain Edward de Valera, but transformed by the Gaelic revival into Eamon de Valera, the leader of Fianna Fail, the Irish Republican Party, is one of the strangest figures who ever played a part in the confused drama of Irish politics. Tall, gaunt and angular, with a mop of untidy hair straying aeross his temples, there is nothing in the appearance of the man to suggest a popular idol. His voice, curiously attractive at first, soon becomes monotonous, for its range is limited, and the dead level of its uniformity becomes infinitely wearisome. Yet this man, in spite of a series of blunders which would have biasted the career of any other politician, letains a hold on the youth of the Irish Free State which nothing seems- ablo to shake. It must De coneeded to him that he has a certain amount of personal magnetism which draws people towards him. "Moses of Race." Sixteen years ago he was a professor of mathematics in a training college, employing his spare time in studying the Irish language and playing at soldiers with the Irish Volunteers. For a brief moment at Easter, 1916, his play became grim earnest, and as a Commandant of the Insurgents he leaped from obscurity. The execution of most of the oth'sr leaders left him as the principal survivor, and when the Sinn Fein movement following in its wake swept the country, de Valera found national leadership thrust upon him. In his own eyes he is Ireland's man of hope. He sees h'mself as the Moses of the Irish race, specially chosen by Providence to lead his people out of the wilderness of British rule into the promised land of an independent Ireland. De Valera no more hates England or the English people than Moses hated the ancient Egyptians. To him they are simply unbeliavers, against whom the seven plagues are to be employed only when efforts to touch the hearts of the Pharaohs of Downing Street have failed. None would rejoice more than he at their conversion to his point of view. When the Treaty of 1921, was signed, de Valera was dumbfounded.