Childers elected to European Parliament

Nessa Childers, the daughter of a former Irish president and government minister, and granddaughter of one of the most prominent of the Republicans executed during the 1922-1923 Civil War, was elected on the Labor Party ticket in Leinster.
The one-time environmentalist Green Party candidate is one of two new Labor members in the European Parliament. Munster’s Senator Alan Kelly, brother of prominent New York businessman Declan Kelly, also joins Proinsias De Rossa who was reelected for the party in Dublin.
In comments after her victory, Childers said her father, the late President Erskine H. Childers, was an enthusiastic supporter of the European Union ideal. Childers had served in a number of Fianna Fail cabinets before being elected head of state in an upset election in 1973. He was a popular activist president before dying suddenly of a heart attack after 18 months in office.
His father, Robert Erskine Childers, was shot by soldiers of the new Irish government in the first high-profile execution in the Civil War in November 1922. A long-time servant of the British Empire and an influential spy novelist, Childers, who had roots in Ireland on his mother’s side, became a convert to Irish nationalism before the First World War. He was secretary-general of the Irish delegation during the 1921 Treaty negotiations in London. He was a bitter critic of the subsequent deal, however, breaking off his close friendship with Michael Collins. After Collins’s death, he became a marked man because of his propaganda efforts on behalf of the anti-Treaty side. One of his aides, the writer Frank O’Connor, later reported that as an English Protestant, he was a distrusted and isolated figure among his fellow Republicans.
When caught by government forces, Childers was in possession of a revolver (which, legend had it, was a gift from Collins), a capital offense under special powers legislation. He asked his then 16-year-old son to shake the hand of every man who’d signed his death warrant, which the future president subsequently did as an act of reconciliation. Childers senior himself shook the hand of every member of the firing squad that killed him.