NEXT PRESIDENT OF IRELAND

Southland Times, Issue 23377, 8 December 1937, Page 5

NEXT PRESIDENT OF IRELAND

Descendant Of Noble Family Suggested TITLE FORFEITED IN GREAT WAR (United Press Assn.—Telegraph Copyright) (Received December 7, 6.30 p.m.) DUBLIN, December 6. The former Viscount Taaffe, a descendant of a noble Welsh family which settled in Ireland in the 10th century and then, 300 years ago, settled in Bohemia, has arrived. He refused to comment on the suggestion that he had been nominated by the President of the Irish Free State (Mr Eamon de Valera) as the next President. The former viscount is applying immediately for Free State citizenship and is resigning from the Czechoslovakian Army. He said he would not at present petition the British Government for restoration of the peerage of which his father was deprived during the Great War.

Henry Taaffe, Count of the Holy Roman Empire, formerly Viscount Taaffe of Corren, and Baron of Ballymote, County Sligo, Ireland, was born in May 1872. His father, the 11th viscount, was President of the Austrian Ministry from 1879 to 1893. The family seats are Ellischau Castle and Kolinetz Castle, Bohemia.

The title was created in 1628 and Henry Taaffe succeeded to it when his father died in 1895. He served as a lieutenant in Kaiser Franz Joseph’s Regiment of Dragoons. In March 1919 the title was removed from the Roll of Peers in Ireland.

Henry Taaffe intends to live in Ireland permanently. He fought against Britain in the Great War, which caused the British Parliament to abolish the title.

He is the only person in the world who holds the secret of the death of Crown Prince Rudolph of Hapsburg, in 1889. It was confided to him by his father before the latter's death.

Crown Prince Rudolph of Hapsburg was the only son of the Emperor Francis Joseph and his wife, Elizabeth. His marriage with Stephanie, daughter of the King of the Belgians, took place in 1881. Later he developed a deep passion for the young and beautiful Baroness Marie Vetser and, on January 30, 1889, the sudden and appalling news reached Vienna that the bodies of the two had been found in Rudolph’s hunting lodge near Vienna.

It was officially announced that the pair had committee suicide. All persons connected with the story were sworn to secrecy. Numerous extraordinary rumours arose connecting the deaths with various quarters, but the suicide version was generally accepted. A message from Vienna in October said a middle-aged man resembling the Hapsburgs claimed to be a son of Crown Prince Rudolph. He said the Prince was secretly married to Princess Marie Antoinette of Tuscany in 1880, and that he was their son.