Éamon de Valera those deserters who had served in the Allied forces. General Richard Mulcahy also spoke against the Order, disagreeing with the way in which it applied to enlisted men and not to officers. After de Valera had spent sixteen years in power without answering the crucial questions of partition and republican status the public demanded a change from Fianna Fáil government. In the 1948 election, de Valera lost the outright majority he'd enjoyed since 1933. It initially looked like the National Labour Party would give Fianna Fáil enough support to stay in office as a minority government, but National Labour insisted
Éamon de Valera law, for use in representing the Irish Free State at diplomatic level. With the implementation of the new constitution, named in Irish as "Bunreacht na hÉireann" (meaning the Constitution of Ireland), the title ultimately given to the president was "President of Ireland" (Uachtarán na hÉireann). The constitution contained reforms and symbols intended to assert Irish sovereignty. These included: Criticisms of some of the above constitutional reforms include that: As Bew concludes, in the constitution of 1937, de Valera was "trying to placate left-wing Republicans with national phrases and pious people with expressly Catholic bits [and] patriarchal Catholicism." Éamon de Valera