Family memoirs or studies can shed valuable light on important historical figures. Examples are Roy Foster's Charles Stewart Parnell, The Man and his Family; Michael Yeats's vignette Cast a Cold Eye; and Terry de Valera's A Memoir (Currach Press) reviewed in this paper by Garret FitzGerald (July 17th, 2004).
Terry de Valera, born in 1922, was the youngest of Eamon and Sinéad's children. He had a distinguished legal career, becoming taxing master of the Supreme and High Court. However, his book is primarily a memoir of his parents, and a vindication of his father's reputation.
It incorporates excerpts from the unpublished autobiography of Sinéad de Valera. The importance of her testimony and Terry's has been little commented upon.
One name not in the index is that of de Valera's most virulent critic, Tim Pat Coogan.
Opponents have long insinuated doubts about the legitimacy of de Valera's birth and the authenticity of his parents' marriage, though few children born out of wedlock were registered in their father's name.
A well-researched chapter documents de Valera's Spanish ancestry. He was descended from a junior branch of a noble family originating in Galicia that moved to Andalucia. When he was President, the Spanish Council of Nobility presented him with the coat of arms.
Enrique Valera, Marques de Aunon, told the Irish wartime minister to Spain that a close relative and naval officer in the early 1900s "had become deeply interested in the fact that one of the family had married an Irish girl in domestic service in New York and the child of that marriage, an infant boy, had been sent to Ireland".
Sinéad de Valera was born in Balbriggan. She remembered Parnell shaking her brother's hand on a visit there, and was part of the vast crowd at his funeral procession.
She had a love of English literature, knew Thomas Davis's Fontenoy by heart, and joined the Gaelic League at 21.
Her acting impressed Yeats, and she was invited to join the Abbey Theatre. Maud Gonne, about whom she had reservations, once said to her, half in jest: "Beautiful women over 40 should be shot!"
Sinéad met Dev at Gaelic League classes and céilís, and they married in 1910.
Dev insisted 1916 had nothing to do with Sinn Féin, except in the minds of the British, though he admired Griffith.
Dev's battalion performed most effectively in the Easter Rising, and was the last to surrender (reluctantly).
Terry de Valera differs from the now received account of Dev's escape from Lincoln jail depicted in the Michael Collins film. It shows Harry Boland disguising Dev with a fur coat as his girl to escape the attention of soldiers.
Terry, like Longford and O'Neill, relates it the other way round; that Boland gave his (male) fur-lined coat to Dev, and pretended to be his girl (a far more probable version given his irrepressible character and the difference in height).
Terry recalls Dev re-enacting the scene for his family, "even acting his part when he pretended to be a somewhat tipsy Australian soldier linking arms with his girl and imitating the Australian accent".
The film version is used to promote Tim Pat Coogan's "cute hoor" theory of de Valera, an expression of contempt out of place even in a critical biography.
Some members of the Collins and de Valera families remained friendly despite the Civil War. Unlike some successors, Collins was not vindictive.
Some quotes carry a lot of weight. The words attributed to Dev in 1966 that end the film, which were transmitted to Coogan third-hand via a dying Joe McGrath to Collins's nephew, that "in the fullness of time history will record the greatness of Collins, and it will be recorded at my expense" are surprising.
How can we be sure they are exact? While freely recognising Collins's other merits, Dev did not forgive the signature of the Treaty without further reference to him as head of government.
Better corroborated within the family is Dev's tribute to W.T. Cosgrave's government in establishing a fine system of public administration.
As president of the League of Nations, Dev took an instant dislike to Mussolini, telling his son he was "an arrogant, bumptious little man".
He also told him the intended Blueshirt march on Government Buildings was to be followed by a coup d'état. The author complains: "Some modern revisionists have tried to deny or at least soften down these events."
The memoir underlines the personal pressure that de Valera was under during the second World War.
An old opponent, Winston Churchill,smarting at British diplomatic defeats in Anglo-Irish relations in the 1930s, was in power in London.
The US minister in Dublin, David Gray, was deeply hostile, trying to destabilise de Valera. This elicits the comment: "He was no match for Eamon de Valera. A lesser man might well have yielded to the might and strength of the US and Britain, both then and in the earlier part of the war."
The memoir describes friends and neighbours. A Protestant solicitor, Dix, helped Sinéad financially in 1916. There are numerous other testimonies that de Valera was well regarded later in life within the Protestant community.
He was frugal, believing he should not accept a State car until he was President, though because of poor eyesight he needed a driver.
The Irish Press was structured by Dev to have a political viewpoint represented, not as an instrument of enrichment.
The memoir also attests to Dev's dislike of the EEC, which conflicted with traditional sovereignty.
The private family side of de Valera helps to fill out the picture of a founding father of independent Ireland.