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When, in 1921 Ireland’s President Eamon de Valera met Britain’s Prime Minister, David Lloyd George failed to impress him.
The latter pointed to a map of the world, much of it painted red to overawe him with the might of the British Empire.
The mathematician de Valera pointed out that the Mercator Projection greatly exaggerated the land mass of the Empire.
From 1932 De Valera as Head of the Irish Government, at home and abroad maintained rational and ethical standards. When Benito Mussolini, dubbed a Knight of the Bath by Britain’s King George V in 1923, was being praised by Winston Churchill for the rape of Ethiopia, De Valera at the League of Nations was being denounced by Anthony Eden as “a firebrand” for insisting that the nations of the League honour its Covenant and apply effective sanctions against the Italian aggressors. De Valera offered IRISH SOLDIERS with sworn allegiance to Ireland, to any League force organised to defend Ethiopia.
The British, it must be admitted, made Mussolini pay for their rape of Ethiopia – into the coffers of the British-owned Suez Canal Company. This saved the rapists the mal de mare of a journey via the Straits of Gibraltar and the Cape of Good Hope.
Churchill and Eden and Pope Pius XI, the Chief Rabbi of Rome and Ireland’s Blue Shirt Fine Gael were cheer leaders for Mussolini. See THE DARK VALLEY by Piers Brendon covering the world between the two World Wars.
When German Jews were deprived of their citizens’ rights by the Nuremburg Decrees in 1935, Eamon De Valera (probably alone among European leaders) denounced the decrees as barbaric. He was assailed by Fine Gael Blueshirts.
In 1937 he insisted that Germany’s diplomatic representative in Dublin should not be a member of the Nazi Party. Herr Hempel was free of Nazi connections and never gave cause for concern. In London Herr Ribbentrop hobnobbed with Lord Londonderry and High Society in London and THE TIMES was extremely impressed by Hitler.
Poland in 1934 made a 10 year Non-Aggression Pact with the Third Reich.
The Vatican made a Concordat with the Third Reich in 1934 and did little thereafter to further the cause of those outside the institutional Church.
The small Jewish community in Ireland supported the democratically mandated Irish Republic from 1919 and the Chief Rabbi sheltered De Valera in his own home when the British were hunting him with evil intent. The Rabbi was the first Chief Rabbi of Israel and his son and grandsons became President.
De Valera, out of office in 1948 visited India and Israel in 1948 where he was welcomed.
Churchill, who hated Indians would not have dared visit India, Dev’s Document No.2
a formula by which Ireland would be a Sovereign State, with External Association with
the British Commonwealth, rejected by Llloyd George and Churchill, is that which embraces a free India, a country which our recent Taoiseach should know more about,
Nehru and other Indian leaders visited Dublin to honour Dev in 1952.
De Valera was never sectarian nor racialist.
Unlike Ulster Unionists who boasted of a Protestant Parliament for A Protestant
People Dev abhorred the the idea of a Catholic Government for the Irish People.
Most Western Europeans have Public Holidays on Catholic Holidays. Ireland
doesn’t and has had Protestant, Catholic and agnostic or atheist Presidents.
While respecting Judaism and other religions in the Irish Constitution which he inspired
De Valera did not endorse Zionism which has created a State exclusively for Jews where
Christians, Moslems and others have lived for thousands of years,
When de Valera met Lloyd George, the latter tried to trick him into sneering at the former
Irish leader, John Redmond.
Dev would have none of it. “You tricked him” he said.
In Kiev to salute the Clown President, a Fascist Puppet, Leo Varadkar described Eamon
De Valera as an admirer of Hitler. He has since smeared him as sectarian,
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