Sir,—Brian Hanley has written a lively review of David McCullagh’s recent two-part, point-of-view RTÉ documentary, Dev: Rise and Rule (HI 33.6, Nov./Dec. 2025). In it he gives Dev his due, but it left me no wiser as to what David was getting at in the opening section of the first programme, widely promoted in advance as including some kind of surprise about the subject’s father. The fact that the man said to have been Dev’s father may not have existed is a story told before by biographers, including at some length in Dangerous ambition, my character study of the young de Valera published last year. In it I tracked in detail the absence of birth, marriage, death or census records for that man and the lengths to which Dev and others have gone to find these.
RTÉ travelled to New York and filmed two birth records that I was satisfied with looking at online—as anyone may do for free on the official New York website for such things. These are no different online from what RTÉ showed on TV and it was hard to see why the fact that Dev’s mother may have partly filled in these records herself was as significant as the programme-makers seemed to think, for women admitted to give birth in the Protestant charitable institution in which Dev was born in Manhattan were expected to pay or provide services in return, including even wet-nursing a second baby at the same time as their own. Unlike many others admitted, Kate Coll—Dev’s mother—was literate and, although RTÉ did not say so, she appears also to have filled in the same official form for other mothers there. These were not quite what we think of as birth certs but were ‘birth returns’, signed in each case by a leading doctor at the hospital to verify the basic fact of birth. Whether a hospital employee or a mother filled in the family names and family information made no difference, for the data derived directly from the mothers in any event.
An image of the register of the Manhattan institution itself that confirms that Dev was actually born there to Kate Coll was published for the first time ever in my article in HI 31.5, Sept./Oct. 2023, p. 39. It may also be seen in my new book, Myths and lies of ‘the Irish Revolution’.
Brian Hanley correctly notes that the matter of his origin was of great importance to Dev, but I think that your reviewer conflated this somewhat with what he sees as Irish xenophobia and the characterisation of Dev by his enemies as a foreigner. Dev in his earliest election literature actually boasted of being Spanish-American and, as I show in Dangerous ambition, went to great and almost absurd lengths to prove that he was at least largely a foreigner. In fairness to de Valera, unlike some of his supporters, he was never convinced that the evidence was there. His denial of being Jewish was a different kettle of fish and related to anti-Semitic sentiment in Ireland that he thought had damaged his job prospects when he still yearned to be a university professor of mathematics. The strange speech that Brian notes that Dev made in Dáil Éireann in 1934 shows that he feared that the Jew allegation might then damage him politically.
Dev’s long quest to establish his paternity may have been partly related to the religious vocation that for at least a decade he thought he might have, at a time when one’s parents being unmarried could be an impediment to becoming a priest. The very fact of being literally a ‘bastard’ (that blunt word commonly used at that time) was also then a social liability and indeed was, as Brian notes, used against him politically on the doorstep.
Yet, at an even more fundamental human level, Dev simply wanted to know who he was. He was a solitary child, whose mother came back to Ireland only twice to see him after she sent him, aged two and a half, to Ireland, where he was raised by her bachelor brother. Dev as a boy confessed that he felt at times like an orphan. UCD Archives have what seem to be the only photos taken of him in New York in the 1880s, curiously isolated images in which he is an infant alone without any other person present, even his mother.—Yours etc.,
COLUM KENNY