The word 'Dev’ is, at this stage in our subjugation to our technological overlords, synonymous with a whole spectrum of software developers, but in the Ireland of 80 years ago there was only one thing ‘Dev’ meant: An Taoiseach. The longest-serving Taoiseach to date, Éamon De Valera led Fianna Fáil for 33 years and guided the Irish constitution into being. So when Mary Immaculate College, Limerick PhD student Keith Ó Riain was browsing in a charity shop a while ago, he came across a battered copy of the constitution from 1941, which he bought for 50c. When he took it home, he told Today with Claire Byrne reporter Brian O’Connell, he found something unexpected on the inside cover:

"My initial reaction was that, well, goodness. I didn’t really kind of credit if it was the real signature because I didn’t think someone who’d have a copy of the constitution signed by De Valera would simply give it to a charity shop."

An 80-year-old copy of the then-new constitution signed by the then-Taoiseach and architect of said constitution is quite the charity shop find. But Keith was sceptical and so the little pale blue paperback stayed on a shelf, pretty much forgotten about, until he came across it again recently:

"I was meeting a friend of mine there in the college for coffee during the week and I said I’d ask him about it."

The friend, Brian informed us, was Dr Paul O’Brien, who is well known for going through historical archives. Keith asked him if he could get the signature verified. Paul told him that the best thing to do would be to put it on Twitter and see what the reaction was. Keith isn’t on Twitter, but Paul is, so he put posted it and that got Brian interested and he did some verifying of his own:

"Éamon Ó Cuív – who, as we know is Éamon De Valera’s grandson – and I’ve just been talking to Éamon Ó Cuív and he says he has a couple of, obviously, copies of Éamon De Valera’s signatures at home and he said, yeah, it looks absolutely genuine to him."

You could hardly, as Keith observes, get a better verification of Dev’s signature than that. So what is he going to do with it? He’ll be keeping it, he told Brian. Brian wasn’t sure Keith would stick to this plan, but time will tell. One other thing that might raise an eyebrow among the eagle-eyed – why wasn’t there a fada on the signature? Brian asked Éamon Ó Cuív, who gave him a fairly plausible reason:

"When his sight deteriorated, he stopped using the fadas because there would have been a difficulty making sure the fada got over the right letter. So, that is the explanation for that."

Not bad for 50c! You can hear Brian’s full report by clicking the play icon above.