The details, however, were crucial. As determined by the treaty, the Irish Free State was to take the form of a constitutional monarchy, not a republic. It was to resemble the existing dominions, such as Canada or Australia, thereby achieving more than the pre-war Home Rule Act, which had only promised self-government within the United Kingdom; but the king was to remain head of state – albeit of a different state – and was to be represented in Dublin by a governor-general. The legislative Dáil, elected by universal suffrage, was to name its candidate for prime minister for the governor-general’s approval. The national anthem, as previously, was to be ‘God Save the King’. These arrangements were the fruit of a reluctant compromise between the British hard line, which upheld the rights of the Crown, and the initial Irish demands, which had hoped to preserve their Republic. They were set to take effect on 6 December.43
Reactions to the treaty were threefold. First, the Unionists in Northern Ireland hastened to exercise their opt-out. At the province’s first general election in May 1921, they had won a 66 percent majority. A second vote was staged with certain outcome. Sir James Craig MP, sometime organizer of the Ulster Volunteers, took the night ferry from Belfast carrying a loyal petition to the king. The whole operation was completed within a month, and six of the nine historic counties of Ulster adopted the position from which they have never since wavered. Secondly, the Irish Free State applied for membership of the League of Nations. Thirdly, the politicians in Dublin who appeared to have achieved a large part of their objectives fell into deadly dispute.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty passed in the Dáil by only sixty-four votes to fifty-seven; the treaty’s opponents, who lost out, flatly refused to accept the result. De Valera resigned, and started making provocative speeches about ‘Irishmen wading through Irish blood’. Michael Collins, who had prosecuted the war against the British but who had also signed the treaty, was denounced as a renegade. In order to prove his patriotic credentials, he launched an abortive attack on Ulster, in the first of the so-called ‘Border Wars’, before entering into armed conflict with his ‘irreconcilable’ Irish adversaries. Nineteen twenty-two, therefore, was a year of civil war. The ‘Free Staters’ and their army were pitted against the rump of the IRA, and were subjected to the same guerrilla-style attacks that the British had endured earlier. Before the treaty entered into force, Collins was killed in an ambush. He claimed to have won ‘the freedom to win freedom’, and he was eventually proved right. Arthur Griffith, too, died that year, from a heart attack. But the pro-treaty forces prevailed, and the Free State took flight as envisioned. George V was the king; Tim Healy (1855–1931), a lawyer and former Westminster MP, was the first governor-general, and W. T. Cosgrave (1880–1965), once sentenced to death, the first taoiseach. As one of the Free State leaders put it: ‘We were probably the most conservative-minded revolutionaries ever.’44
The central cause of the civil war had lain in the decision to sacrifice the Republic. The tragedy was all the greater since ‘feeling in the country at large was far more decisively in favour of the Treaty than in the committed republican atmosphere of the Dáil’.45 In this regard, Roy Foster has written reprovingly of ‘the obsession with “the Crown”.46 The fact is that two opposing groups were obsessed with the Crown: the Irish ultra-republicans and the British establishment. Constitutionally, the Anglo-Irish settlement introduced a system that was halfway between the abandoned Home Rule project and full sovereignty. What it most nearly resembled was the separate but dependent ‘Kingdom of Ireland’, abolished in 1801 to make way for the Union.
In the final phase of the civil war, which continued into the late spring of 1923, exasperated Free State ministers adopted ruthless measures to fight violence with violence. Once masters of their own legislation, they introduced an Emergency Powers Act which sanctioned summary executions. Before the fighting petered out, the forces of the Free State had killed more IRA men than the British ever did. Erskine Childers was among the victims.47 De Valera, having denounced the treaty and praised the ‘Legion of the Rearguard’, was arrested and interned.48
Not surprisingly, most of the songs generated by the Irish Civil War emanated from the defeated republicans. The Free Staters, though they won, had little to crow about. ‘The Drumboe Martyrs’ laments one batch of executed victims, while the satirical ‘Irish Free State’, ‘which ran up the red-white-and-blue’, accurately reflects republican bitterness. Yet nothing offended republicans more than the Free State’s adoption of the green-white-and-gold tricolour of the late Republic:
Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors,
It’s the flag we republicans claim.
It can never belong to Free Staters,
For you’ve brought on it nothing but shame.
Why not leave it to those who are willing
To uphold it in war and in peace,
To the men who intend to do killing
Until England’s tyrannies cease?
You have murdered our brave Liam and Rory,
You have murdered young Richard and Joe.
Your hands with their blood is still gory,
Fulfilling the work of the foe.49
Taken together, the Anglo-Irish War, the Anglo-Irish treaty and the Irish Civil War changed the face of southern Ireland. After 1919, large numbers of Anglo-Irish landowners, the backbone of British rule, left their estates and never returned. After 1922, the treaty made provision for the orderly exodus or retirement of British officials, whom the Free State compensated. The survivors of fratricidal slaughter were left in a state of deep trauma that took decades to heal.
In March 1924, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford died in Cambridge, where he had been Professor of Music for almost forty years. He was a musician of the highest standing both as conductor and composer; his contribution to church choral music in particular passed into the standard repertoire.50 But the professor had equally produced a lengthy series of collections of Irish folk songs and of Irish-inspired compositions. For he was an Irishman, born in Dublin, who never cut his roots. His works included a comic opera, Shamus O’Brien, six orchestral Irish Rhapsodies, Irish Fantasies and Six Irish Sketches for violin, Intermezzo on the Londonderry Air for organ, a Limmerich ohne Woerte under the pseudonym of Karel Drofnatski, and three song cycles for voice and piano: A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster, Six Songs from the Glens of Antrim and An Irish Idyll:
In summer time I foot the turf
And lay the sods to dry;
South wind and lark’s song
And the sun far up in the sky.
I pile them on the turf stack
Against the time of snow;
Black frost, a gale from the north.
Who minds what winds may blow?
Now winter’s here, make up the fire,
And let you bolt the door.
A wind across the mountains,
And a draught across the floor.
…
I see myself a barefoot child,
I see myself a lad,
When the gold upon the gorse bush
Was all the gold I had.
I do be having some fine old dreams
Of days were long ago,
When the wind keens, the night falls
And the embers glow.51
Stanford was witness in his generation to the deep interpenetration of English and Irish life.
The Irish Free State could not have experienced a worse start, and acute problems pressed on many fronts. The coffers, for example, were virtually empty, and confusion reigned over the nature of the Free State’s monarchy. Some sources list George V and his two sons, Edward VIII and George VI, as ‘kings of Ireland’.52 In the light of subsequent Commonwealth practice, this looks logical. But contemporary documents contain no such title. In reality, the exact relationship between the Free State and its monarch had been left curiously (and perhaps deliberately) ambivalent. Article 4 of the treaty laid down an oath of allegiance to be taken by all members of the Dáil, binding
them ‘to be faithful to HM King George V… in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain… and her membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.53
The so-called National Anthem also caused trouble. ‘God Save the King’ is a royal anthem, not a national one, and nowhere does it mention the country whose monarch God is asked to save. More seriously, the words were still the same as in Britain. In consequence, they stuck in many an Irish throat. Though the Free State bands would dutifully play the melody on official occasions, it was often met either with stony silence or with counter-chants. Gaelic-speakers usually sang ‘The Soldier’s Song’. Others preferred a favourite from the American Civil War, sung to the rousing tune of ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp – the Boys are Marching’:
‘God Save Ireland,’ said the heroes,
‘God Save Ireland,’ said they all.
Whether on the scaffold high
Or the battlefield we die,
Oh, what matter when for Erin dear we fall.54
From its inception the Free State was closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church, which, thanks to the exodus of Anglo-Irish Protestants, garnered the loyalties of 93 per cent of the population. The Church, having supported Parnell and the Home Rule Bill, had formally condemned the IRA’s violence, and after the civil war it was the only institution with the resources to assist an impoverished government in the fields of education, healthcare and social reform. The majority of schools were run by Catholic orders, which insisted on Catholic instruction in the classroom. In 1924 divorce was banned and the sale of contraceptives made illegal; abortion was unavailable. After 1930, most Irish hospitals were funded by a sweepstake whose tickets were routinely distributed by priests and nuns, and the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 was treated as a state event. Suggestions have been made that the loss of royal ritual made people more susceptible to the charms of religious ritual.55 The authoritarian ethos of the Irish Church could not be easily contested. For practical purposes, the ecclesiastical Index of banned books functioned as a system of state censorship. Ulster Protestants had always held that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’, and the Free State’s early years did little to discredit the equation.
Nonetheless, during the rest of the 1920s, the two parts of Ireland settled down to an uneasy truce in which open conflict was avoided. In the North, which was more industrialized, competition for work in a sluggish post-war economy led to increasing and blatant discrimination against Catholics in key enterprises such as the Belfast shipyards. A government plan to introduce non-sectarian education was blocked by opposition from Protestants and Catholics alike. In the South, where over half the population still worked the land, the government put its mind to maximizing agricultural commerce, especially with Britain, and to relieving social poverty. Gaelic education represented another priority, which addressed the demands of cultural nationalism. ‘The prosecution of the Irish language became the necessary benchmark of an independent ethos.’56 At the same time, care was taken to strengthen democratic stability round the Dáil, the Free State army and the unarmed police, the Garda Síochána. When Éamon de Valera re-emerged from detention to found Fianna Fáil in 1926, promising to promote republicanism through the Free State’s institutions, he caused the Sinn Féin movement to splinter yet again. From then on, republicans still bent on armed struggle were reduced to a very small rump.
No privileged status was offered to the Roman Catholic Church, despite its long-standing ties to Irish nationalism. Some Catholic politicians harboured anti-clerical tendencies, just as many Catholic priests had shunned the IRA. In any case, the British guardians of the treaty, conditioned by the Protestant Ascendancy, were unwilling to envisage a theocratic state on Britain’s doorstep. So Free State leaders had to be cautious. Taoiseach Cosgrave expressed his country’s undying allegiance to the papacy, but the more extreme advocates of Catholic control were disappointed. Deep-seated tensions between Church and State in Ireland did not surface for over half a century.57
With some delay, the British government responded to the division of Ireland by passing the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act (1927). Ever since his pre-war coronation, George V had used the formula of ‘king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of the Dominions, and of other realms beyond the seas’. Now the initial part of his title was changed to ‘king of Great Britain, Ireland, the Dominions, and…’.58 The replacement of the first ‘and’ by a comma pointed unambiguously to Ireland being accepted as a separate realm. In consequence, the king was advised to accept the nomination of the next governor-general from the Irish government, not from the British. At the Imperial Conference of 1926, when the structures of the British Commonwealth were first mooted, the Irish Free State was listed among its constituent dominions, alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Cosgrave participated without apparent demur.
The 1930s witnessed a republican revival. Membership of the Commonwealth did not give the Free State any marked benefits; and, as the Great Depression deepened, socio-economic ills in Ireland mounted. After five years’ preparation, De Valera’s Fianna Fáil, drawing on pro-republican sympathies that had gone underground since the civil war, won the election of 1932, and formed a radical government. For its party anthem, it had adopted the melody and bilingual lyrics that had been sung before the General Post Office in 1916. The original words of ‘Amhrán na bhFiann’ were in English:
Sons of the Gael! Men of the Pale!
The long-watched day is breaking;
The serried ranks of Innisfail
Shall set the tyrant quaking.
Our campfires now are burning low;
See in the east a silvery glow,
Out yonder waits the Saxon foe,
So chant a soldier’s song.59
De Valera assumed office shortly after the Statute of Westminster of 1931 had retracted Britain’s right to legislate for the dominions. As a result, he was able to use legalistic ‘salami tactics’ to slice up the Free State’s constitution bit by bit. First to go was its reference to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Then, in successive amendments, he abolished or limited the Senate, the governor-generalship and appeals to the Privy Council. Short of declaring war, the British were helpless. The second governor-general, James McNeill (1928–32), grew so irritated that he resigned early; and the third, Donald Buckley (1932–6), was simply told by De Valera to keep a low profile, effectively neutered by a hint about suspending the Irish government’s payment of the lease on his luxurious residence. When he welcomed the French ambassador he performed the only official function in the whole of his tenure.60
The prime opportunity for more extensive change came about through a crisis in the British monarchy. The old king, George V, died in January 1936, breaking the thread of continuity with pre-Rising times. He was succeeded by the playboy Edward VIII, whose association with an American divorcee scandalized Catholic Ireland, no less than Britain. Preparations for a secular coronation broke the sacred spell that monarchists had long cultivated. De Valera seized the opportunity to abolish the oath of allegiance in Ireland, and, through the External Relations Act (1936), to deny Britain control over foreign affairs. He also wrote directly to the new king, giving notice that his government intended to replace the Free State’s constitution. Paralysed by the abdication crisis, the British government barely noticed what was happening.
In December 1936 a curious monarchical moment occurred. Edward VIII abdicated on the 10th, the decision being immediately confirmed by the Westminster Parliament. But the Dáil in Dublin was unable to follow suit until the 12th. This meant that for one whole day – 11 December 1936 – the duke of Windsor retained his status as king in Ireland (if not as ‘king of Ireland’) without being the United Kingdom’s sovereign.
Such was the prelude to De Valera’s boldest step. In 1937 he introduced a bill to the Dáil proposing that the constitution of 1922 be repealed. The Free State was to disappear, and a draft Bunreacht na hÉireann or ‘Consti
tution of Ireland’ was put forward to replace it. The Gaelic version of the Preamble and fifty articles was to be regarded as definitive; the state’s official name was to be changed to Éire. The governor-general was to be replaced by the uachtarán or ‘president’, and the will of the people was to be supreme. The draft was accepted by popular plebiscite on 1 July 1937.61
The British government in London did not yet accept the change explicitly. But it was recognized implicitly by the monarchy when George VI was crowned in May 1937 as ‘king of Great Britain and Northern Ireland’. However, since Éire had not withdrawn from the Commonwealth, and since the king’s claim to reign over ‘the dominions’ was not altered, Britain and Ireland both acknowledged some residual and purely theoretical role for the Crown.
The Bunreacht generated many hostile misunderstandings. The Preamble, for example, was worded, ‘In the name of the most Holy Trinity… to Whom all actions of men and states must be referred.’ This gave rise to wild accusations that the text as a whole discriminated against non-Roman Catholics. In reality, religious freedom together with the rights of all Christian faiths and of the Jewish community were guaranteed; and a reference to ‘the special position of the Holy Catholic, Apostolic and Roman Church’, though deliberately deferential in tone, made no provision for practical action. The first president of Éire, Douglas Hyde (1860–1949), founder of the Gaelic League, who was famous for lecturing forty years before ‘On the Necessity of De-anglicising the Irish People’, was a Protestant.62 De Valera resisted persistent demands to give Roman Catholicism the status of a state-backed religion, and on issues such as divorce or the role of women simply followed the social teaching of his day.
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