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This chapter reflects on ‘remembrance’ after the Great War — memorials and services. It notes a new modern world and the advent of radio broadcasting. It considers currents of belief and unbelief. Internationally, Christian-Jewish relations, missionary activity and imperialism, and the issues posed by the new Europe come to the fore. The 1926 General Strike is placed in the context of contemporary Church social and economic thinking, but the political limitations are exposed. In England, both the new Church National Assembly and the Revised Prayer Book controversy of 1927-8 reveal church-state tensions. The partition of Ireland, British-Irish church and political relations, and church-state relations in the new Irish structures (Irish Free State and Northern Ireland), are considered. Disestablishment in Wales and post-war change in Scotland place these developments in context. Evidence of social division and political dislocation partly explains renewed interest in church unity, but no rapid change is evident despite the reunification of the Church of Scotland.

This chapter begins with a discussion of the establishment of the Irish Free State in December 1922, which saw the culmination of the withdrawal process from southern Ireland that Britain had begun in January of that year. It then discusses the threat from the Irish Republican links with the rest of the world in the 1920s, Ireland as a intelligence target, the intelligence and security lessons of the Anglo-Irish conflict from 1916-21, and Ireland and the German threat. It argues that Ireland was to provide Britain with extraordinary security headaches once war came, problems accentuated by the almost complete absence of pre-war consideration of Irish affairs.

This chapter explores the ideological arguments that justified the Free State's prosecution of the civil war. It shows how heavily they were influenced by the 19th-century liberal conception of the state as the protector of private property and individual liberty. This enabled them to represent their opponents as enemies of society in their propaganda, and in this they were heavily influenced by the Catholic Church's attitude to the IRA. As IRA violence grew, both concurred that the survival of the moral fabric of Irish society was now at stake. The pro-Treaty government's subsequent failure to covert their military victory in 1923 into long-term electoral dominance is explained by the failure of their economic policies, as well by as their inflexible commitment to the Treaty settlement. Nonetheless, their conception of the Irish state had a long-term impact on its subsequent development.

This chapter offers a history of Irish politics and nationalism in an imperial context, from the Home Rule movement of the 1880s to Ireland's departure from the Commonwealth, and its subsequent reorientation toward the European Union. The Home Rule debates illuminated the anomalies of Ireland's domestic and imperial position and highlighted the differences between Ireland and England. The debates provoked profound soul-searching about ideology, race, national character, religion, the constitution, and history. During the negotiations, which started in October 1921, allegiance to the Crown, membership of the Empire, and defence guarantees were the core of the British demands. The Anglo-Irish Treaty signed on 6 December 1921 established the Irish Free State as a self-governing Dominion within the British Empire. The Northern Ireland Troubles, which surfaced in the press from time to time, received more attention immediately before and after the 1998 Belfast Agreement.

This chapter examines the arguments over the Irish Republic as a ‘neo-colony’ or ‘postcolonial’ state. Since the 1920s and 1970s, a substantial body of writing has sought to analyse the Irish Free State and later Republic either as ‘neocolonial’, that is, overwhelmingly dependent on the United Kingdom or some other foreign power, or ‘postcolonial’ or substantially shaped and determined still by the legacies of British rule. The economic ‘neocolonialism’ case depends on a claim about persisting Irish dependence and British exploitation, and that Ireland's economy would have performed better, developed and probably industrialised more rapidly, and avoided the extremes of emigration and depopulation, without Britain's interference. The ‘modernisation’ or ‘Europeanisation’ of Ireland has thus been associated with secularisation and ‘detraditionalisation’. By every indicator of public opinion, Ireland has become virtually the most enthusiastically integrationist of all European Union member states.

This chapter discusses the anti-Treaty interpretation of the civil war and its evolution after the formation of a Fianna Fail government in 1932. It shows how the anti-treatyites had a constitutionalist interpretation of the civil war, which was shared by moderate and hardline republicans. Common to both was a conviction that British pressure rather than divisions within Irish nationalism was responsible for the outbreak of fighting, so establishment of the Free State was essentially a neo-colonial project. Under the leadership of de Valera, this outlook increasingly concentrated on the oath of allegiance as their main grievance with the Free State, which enabled Fianna Fail to combat the accusation that their position in 1922 was fundamentally anti-democratic. Indeed, the abolition of the oath enabled de Valera to call for all republicans to recognize the Free State and claim that his party had helped the society recover from the civil war.

This chapter explores the conceptualisation of ‘governance’ in Irish official discourse in relation to both the Irish ‘state’ and the European ‘polity’. ‘State’ and ‘polity’ constitute the broad conceptual and institutional supporting frameworks for the meaning and significance of governance in nation-statehood and European Union (EU), respectively. The traditional narrative of the state is national self-determination. The traditional model of the state is sovereignty. One aspect of the new model of the European polity is the conception of multilevel citizenship, with the coexistence of national and European citizenship. This chapter explores how the traditional and new frameworks, narratives, and models of the state and the European polity have been brought together in Irish official discourse since the 1970s. After a summary of the traditional conception of the Irish state, it discusses the way in which this conception has been upheld in Ireland's approach to the EU. This then leads into an analysis of how the conception of the Irish state has been influenced by the EU-inspired conception of polity in Irish official discourse on Northern Ireland.

The establishment of an independent Irish state was severely complicated by the fact that there was not an Irish nationalism seeking an Irish nation-state as such but rather a range of nationalisms competing for political space and influence in Ireland. The three core versions of nationalism — unionist nationalism, constitutional nationalism, and republican nationalism — fostered different conceptions of the meaning and implications of Ireland's identity, borders, and governance and consequently occupied conflicting positions regarding the ideal notion of Irish nation-statehood. In relation to their opposing views on Britain's role in Ireland, these competing nationalisms also fostered different opinions regarding the relevance of developments in the international context for Ireland. Developments in international affairs, particularly in Europe, had the effect of altering the focus and appeal of each of these versions of nationalism in Ireland. As a result, the need to find a middle ground between constitutional and republican nationalisms shaped the development of official nationalism in the independent Irish Free State after 1922.

Chapter One provides the first statistical illustration of individuals from home rule backgrounds who entered representative politics in the early years of the Free State with the number of TDs with home rule heritage in each political grouping detailed in a number of tables. Given the historiographical attention drawn to the character of Cumann na nGaedheal, there is detailed attention devoted to comparisons between the government party and the Irish Party in personnel, policy and organisation. While the Farmers’ Party and Labour are also considered for continuities between membership of both parties and the earlier agrarian and labour associations of the home rule era, there is special assessment of former MPs who were elected as independent TDs such as Capt. William Redmond, Alfie Byrne and James Cosgrave and the persistence of the IPP’s methods. This chapter thus highlights the continuities between pre- and post-independence Ireland, helping to explain the party fragmentation experienced in the early 1920s.

The initial focus of official nationalism in the Irish Free State was on the activity of nation-building. The core purpose of nation-building was to unite the nation behind the new state. Consequently, the Irish official nationalism that developed emphasised the points of convergence between republican and constitutional nationalism. These included the roles of intellectual and political elites and a shared conception of the importance of the narrative and cultural identity of the nation. This chapter examines the way in which official nationalism developed from this basis, noting in particular the implications of the subsequent conception of the Irish nation-state for its relations with Northern Ireland, Britain, and the wider international community. It also identifies the processes of state-building that occurred after 1937, in which Northern Ireland and the international context, particularly Europe, again were of immense importance. The chapter concludes by analysing the approach and motivating assumptions of the Irish government towards Northern Ireland and European integration in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

This chapter examines Irish unionism. For much of the first three quarters of the 19th century, Irish electoral politics were dominated by parties, Conservative and Liberal, which were united by a shared commitment to union. Each of these traditions, but in particular the Conservative, fed into the creation of an organized unionist movement between 1884 and 1886. Drawing upon a formidable range of social, financial, and cultural resources, this movement successfully delayed the implementation of any form of Home Rule until 1920–1921; and it has so far prevented the attainment of the historic nationalist goal of a united and autonomous Irish state. Whether the Unionist movement, in achieving this delay, effectively scuppered an historic reconciliation between Irish nationalism and the British state is open to counterfactual debate.

This chapter examines the reform of the poor law in the early years of the Irish Free State. It highlights that despite the closure of workhouses principles of deterrence still permeated official welfare policies towards the able-bodied. Central and local government authorities remained primarily concerned that unchecked poor relief was immoral; in turn the workhouse-test, which underpinned the former poor law, was replaced with work-tests as a method to determine the eligibility of poor relief. This chapter also explores localised relief polices in county Kerry and Cork city. Furthermore, it highlights how principles of deterrence were challenged during periods of economic depression leading to further welfare reforms.

Between 1939 and 1945, intelligence-gathering and counter-espionage work were, along with a high degree of censorship, seen by the Irish state as necessary weapons in the maintenance of a non-belligerent status that carried real risks, especially in the earlier years of the war. In the case of intelligence gathering, de Valera's government performed with a level of competence now well documented, and which was more than satisfactory to Britain and its allies. With counter-espionage there was frustration for those such as Betjeman and Sir John Maffey, whose role was to represent, as well as they could, Britain's interests in Éire. They and their colleagues simply learnt to live with the censorship, and to work around it as and when they could. The censorship was often driven by ignorance and prejudice, and its concern was to keep the Irish people as unaware as possible of events in Europe and beyond. It remains inescapable that the enervating effects of the censorship left the Irish public ill prepared to confront the truth of Nazi genocide once the censorship was lifted on 11 May 1945.

The establishment of an international boundary between the newly independent Irish Free State and Northern Ireland, which remained part of the United Kingdom, was the most important territorial division in Ireland's history. The initial geographical impacts of partition were mainly political, but the repercussions on other aspects of human geography developed with time as policies and practices in the territories diverged. These distinctions became superimposed on gradations that predated the border. Little of the new differentiation had emerged by the mid-1920s, but the existence of two states with different data sources necessitated the making of some distinctions between them in this geographical panorama, the reference date for which derives from the holding of the first separate census of population in both territories in the year 1926.

This chapter examines the impact of Éamon de Valera's decision to dismiss Eoin O'Duffy as commissioner of the Garda Síochána in 1933. Though the issue was hotly debated in the Dáil, O'Duffy remained uncharacteristically quiet throughout the furore and spent a holiday vacation in the Middle East. After his return, he decided to lead the Blueshirt movement, which made him the central figure in the most turbulent period of the Irish Free State's history. The chapter highlights the selection of O'Duffy as director general of the movement to replace T.F. O'Higgins, and his leadership of Fine Gael.

This chapter explores the constitutional path that was laid down for the process by which the Provisional Government constructed the civil service of the Irish Free State. It is stressed that ‘it [was] of the highest importance for the Provisional Government to get in touch with and take the fullest advantage of the experience of the Irish civil service generally’. The split in the republican movement profoundly affected the Dáil Éireann civil service. Under the terms of the 1920 Act, there were three categories of applicant to the Wylie committee: those discharged by the Irish government, those seeking permission to retire and those opting to retire under the statutory conditions provided by the Act. The Provisional Government squandered the goodwill of its civil service, ans as 1923 dawned and the Irish Free State came into office, the attitude of the civil service was one of suspicion and defensiveness.