Analysis: You would have been stunned that de Valera, a rugby player on the southside of Dublin, would have been out with a gun on Easter Monday in 1916 By Paul Rouse, UCD When people look back at the life of Éamon de Valera, they see this old man in his blindness, struggling around the place. They associate him with a certain greyness and maybe an economic failure and maybe a man who is an austere personality. But he was not that at all when he was younger.