page_title: Erskine Hamilton Childers
section_title: Death
hierarchical_section_title: Erskine Hamilton Childers / President of Ireland / Death
caption_attribution_description: memorial to Erskine Hamilton Childers in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin
context_page_description: Erskine Hamilton Childers was an Irish Fianna Fáil politician who served as the fourth President of Ireland from June 1973 to November 1974. He is the only Irish president to have died in office. He also served as Tánaiste and Minister for Health from 1969 to 1973, Minister for Transport and Power from 1959 to 1969, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs from 1951 to 1954 and 1966 to 1969, Minister without portfolio in July 1959, Minister for Lands from 1957 to 1959 and Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Local Government from 1944 to 1948. He served as a Teachta Dála from 1938 to 1973.
  His father Robert Erskine Childers, a leading Irish republican and author of the espionage thriller The Riddle of the Sands, was executed during the Irish Civil War.
context_section_description: Prevented from transforming the presidency as he desired, Childers instead threw his energy into a busy schedule of official visits and speeches, which was physically taxing.
  On 17 November 1974, during a conference to the psychiatrists of the  Royal College of Physicians in Dublin, Childers suffered a congestional heart failure causing him to lie sideways and turn blue before suddenly collapsing. He was pronounced dead the same day at Mater Misericordiae University Hospital.
  Childers's state funeral in St. Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, was attended by his presidential predecessor Éamon de Valera and world leaders including the Earl Mountbatten of Burma (representing Queen Elizabeth II), the British Prime Minister Harold Wilson and British Opposition Leader Edward Heath, and Presidents and crowned heads of state from Europe and beyond. He was buried in the grounds of the Church of Ireland Derralossary Church, in Roundwood, County Wicklow.
caption: Memorial to Erskine Childers in St. Patrick's Cathedral
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