The Irish Free State, 1922–32

The Irish Free State, established under the terms of the treaty with the same constitutional status as Canada and the other dominions in the British Commonwealth, came into existence on December 6, 1922. The Anglo-Irish Treaty (Article 12) also stated that Northern Ireland could opt out of the Irish Free State and provided for a commission to establish a permanent frontier. Despite Northern Ireland’s reluctance, the Boundary Commission was set up and sat in secret session during 1924–25. But when it recommended only minor changes, which all three governments rejected as less satisfactory than maintaining the status quo, the tripartite intergovernmental agreement of December 3, 1925, revoked the commission’s powers and maintained the existing boundary of Northern Ireland.

The treaty triggered bitter dissension in Sinn Féin, and some of its terms—notably the prescribed oath of allegiance to the British crown—were so repugnant to many republicans, led by de Valera, that the Dáil ratified the treaty on January 7, 1922, by only seven votes: 64 to 57. De Valera’s resignation as president signaled his refusal to accept that vote as a final verdict and enhanced the respectability of opposition to the treaty despite its endorsement in an election on June 16, 1922. The IRA also split, with a majority of its members (known as the Irregulars) opposed to the treaty. There followed a bitter civil war that cost almost 1,000 lives. The most famous casualty was Michael Collins, the charismatic guerrilla leader and chairman of the 1922 Provisional Government (set up to implement the treaty), who was killed in an ambush in Cork on August 22, 1922. He was succeeded by the more prosaic William T. Cosgrave, who became the first head of government (“president of the Executive Council”) of the Irish Free State. The victory of Cosgrave’s government in the civil war was never in doubt: its electoral majority, the Catholic hierarchy’s condemnation of the Irregulars, and such draconian measures as internment without trial and the introduction of the death penalty for possession of arms (77 republicans were executed), as well as factionalism within their own ranks, doomed the Irregulars to defeat, although they did not suspend military operations until April 27, 1923.

In the election of August 1923, Cosgrave’s party, Cumann na nGaedheal (“Party of the Irish”), won 63 seats, as opposed to 44 for de Valera’s Sinn Féin party; however, Sinn Féin abdicated its role as main opposition party when its elected members refused to sit in the new Dáil. Sinn Féin’s absence enhanced the authority of Cosgrave’s government and enabled the speedy enactment of the mass of legislation necessary to set the infant state on firm foundations.

The cost of postwar reconstruction was immense. In 1923–24, 30 percent of all national expenditure went toward defense, and another 7 percent was allocated to compensation for property losses and personal injuries. Yet despite such economic difficulties, the government pursued an efficient farming policy and carried through important hydroelectric projects. Administration was increasingly centralized; an efficient civil service based on the British model and copper-fastened against corruption was established; and Kevin O’Higgins, as minister for justice, carried through many judicial reforms.

In the general election of June 1927, Cosgrave’s support in the Dáil was further reduced, but he nevertheless formed a new ministry, in which O’Higgins became vice president of the Executive Council. O’Higgins’s assassination by maverick republicans on July 10 suddenly revived old feuds. Cosgrave passed a stringent Public Safety Act and introduced legislation requiring that all candidates for the Dáil declare their willingness, if elected, to take the oath of allegiance. De Valera then led his new party, Fianna Fáil (“Soldiers of Ireland”), into the Dáil and signed the declaration required under the oath of allegiance, which he now claimed was “merely an empty political formula” that did not involve its signatories in “obligations of loyalty to the English Crown.”

De Valera’s commitment to constitutional politics and Fianna Fáil’s assumption of the role of parliamentary opposition posed insuperable electoral problems for Cumann na nGaedheal. The civil war split permanently shaped party politics in independent Ireland. It ensured that the British connection, as embodied in the treaty, replaced the Act of Union as the great divide: pro-treaty against antitreaty replaced unionist versus nationalist as the hallmarks of political commitment. Although Collins had described the treaty merely as a “stepping stone,” a means to the end of greater independence, the blood spilled in the civil war locked his successors in Cumann na nGaedheal (which joined with two lesser parties—the Centre Party and the Blueshirts—to form Fine Gael in 1933) into seeing the treaty as an end in itself and denied them the access enjoyed by Fianna Fáil to the reservoir of anti-British sentiment that remained the most potent force in Irish nationalist politics. The problems of Cosgrave’s last administration were compounded by the Great Depression (triggered by the U.S. stock market crash of 1929), and the resulting unemployment and general discontent with the government led to its defeat in February 1932. Fianna Fáil won enough seats for de Valera, with Labour Party support, to be able to form a new government.

De Valera’s governments (1932–48) and the quest for sovereignty

De Valera’s primary purpose was to expunge those elements of the treaty he thought restrictive of Irish independence. His obsession with British-Irish relations was reflected in his holding the ministerial portfolio for external affairs simultaneously with the presidency of the Executive Council. He moved first to abolish the oath of allegiance, although the Senate’s opposition delayed the enactment of the necessary legislation until May 1933. His government also degraded the office of Britain’s governor-general in Ireland by systematically humiliating its incumbent, James McNeill; exploiting the constitutional doctrine that the British sovereign had to act on ministerial advice, de Valera counseled the dismissal of McNeill (which occurred in November 1932) and forced his replacement by a subservient supporter. He also stopped the transfer to the British treasury of the land annuities, repayments of the loans advanced to Irish tenant farmers to buy their land under the Land Acts of 1891–1909. In July 1932 the British imposed import duties on most Irish exports to the United Kingdom to recoup their losses, and the Irish retaliated in kind. Although the British were financial beneficiaries in the “economic war,” Fianna Fáil was the political beneficiary because it cloaked its protectionist policies in patriotic rhetoric and blamed Britain for the deepening recession; it duly won an overall majority in the snap election called by de Valera in January 1933.

In December 1936 de Valera seized on the abdication of Edward VIII to enact two bills: the first deleted all mention of the king and the governor-general from the 1922 constitution; the second, the External Relations Act, gave effect to the abdication and recognized the crown only for the purposes of diplomatic representation. De Valera’s new constitution, ratified by referendum, came into effect on December 29, 1937, and made “Ireland”—the new name of the state (“Éire” in Irish, which was now proclaimed the first official language)—an independent republic associated with the British Commonwealth only as matter of external policy. The head of state was henceforth a president elected by popular vote to a seven-year term, and the head of government was henceforth known as the “taoiseach.” De Valera’s achievement was extraordinary: acting unilaterally, he had rewritten the constitutional relationship with Britain in less than six years. But he had to negotiate with British Prime Minster Neville Chamberlain’s government to achieve his remaining objective: the transfer of three naval bases occupied by the British under a defense annex to the treaty. This he achieved with the defense agreement of April 25, 1938, which was coupled with a finance agreement (settling the land annuities dispute) and a trade agreement (softening the tariff war). The defense agreement completed the process of establishing Irish sovereignty and made possible Ireland’s neutrality in a European war, an avowed republican aspiration since the 1921 treaty negotiations.

At the outbreak of World War II, de Valera renewed his statement, made in 1938, that Ireland would not become a base for attacks on Great Britain. Under the Emergency Powers Act of 1939, hundreds of IRA members were interned without trial, and six were executed between 1940 and 1944. Ostensibly, de Valera’s government, reelected in 1943 and 1944, remained strictly neutral, despite pressure from British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, German air raids on Dublin in 1941, and, after the United States entered the war in December 1941, pressure from U.S. Pres. Franklin D. Roosevelt. But, secretly, the Irish authorities provided significant intelligence and other assistance to the Allies because de Valera realized that a German victory would threaten that hard-won independence of which Irish neutrality was the ultimate expression.