DE VALERA'S BOYHOOD.

New Zealand Tablet, 19 June 1919, Page 42

DE VALERA'S BOYHOOD.

” - V!< 'S(> much has been written about Eamonn De Valera and so little' that' is really tangible', that I thought it would ;) be interesting : to your readers to give some facts from" the standpoint ■of a former schoolmate (says a correspondent to America). 'O'; ■ ■ De Valera attended the village'school, the so-called national school, in Bruree (in Irish, “Brugh High," “Palace of the King"), County Limerick, in which I was a pupil until my 20th year. De Valera then lived with - his grandmother and his uncle in a little cottage on the road towards Kilmallock. I often saw his grandmother when she came to the school at noontime, bringing a warm lunch for her grandchild. She belonged to the family of Coll, typically Irish in name and character. My father, who knew them well, tells me that he spoke Gaelic as well as English, so that the statement that De Valera spoke Gaelic fluently when 12 years of ago may not be very greatly exaggerated. Still, from personal experience I incline to the belief that his acquaintance with the language was casual until contact with the Dublin intellectuals spurred him on to closer study of his native tongue. He like many another, became a true child of the renaissance. As he worked his way. through the university by means of "exhibitions" or scholarships— l followed up his success as they were reported in the daily press, while attending a sister college of Blackrock, where De Valera won his greatest scholastic successes he must have been infected with enthusiasm for the Celtic past. I noticed his name some years after as one of the instructors in Gaelic at a summer school in Galway, devoted to the study of the Irish language. What laborious days and nights before attaining to that proficiency, with prospects of no financial returns for the sacrifice, but with that love that urges on the true, heroic renaissanceman. His mathematical bent early showed itself at the village school. He was appointed “monitor” or pupilteacher whilst there. I remember distinctly getting my first knowledge of proportion or the rule of three from him. Needless to say that the teaching was thorough and lasting. Our instruction in literature was only casual I remember some discussion amongst a circle of boys, including, I believe, De Valera, as to the justice of including so much non-Irish matter in our school reader. At that time Irish literature to me meant Moore, Davis, and the Anglo-Irish school, not the least inkling of the existence of heroic saga ! What had "Whang the Miller” to do with our native land’ De Valera was an object of myth and fable to most of us boys. His name was hibernicised into Divvelera; my father still calls him “Belvidera” —an unconscious compliment. ■ According to gossip, he was descended from a stray, shipwrecked Spaniard from the Armada. Only recently did I discover that his father, a Spaniard, in New York City, had lived only a short time after his romance with an Irish colleen. Romance still rules his life, whether from the viewpoint of fact or fable. May the story have a happy ending !