Select documents XLVI: ‘Unofficial emissaries’: British army boxers in the Irish Free State, 1926

1996 ◽  
Vol 30 (118) ◽  
pp. 206-222
Author(s):  
David Fitzpatrick
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Free State ◽  
Internal Stability ◽  
British Army ◽  
Economic Dependence ◽  
The Troubles ◽  
Domestic Security ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Irish Free State

By October 1926 the Irish Free State seemed to have emerged at last from the prolonged nightmare of the ‘Troubles’. Within three and a half years of the abandonment of armed insurrection by the republicans, Cosgrave’s government had proved unexpectedly effective in securing both internal stability and external reconciliation with its former antagonists. In May 1926 de Valera had committed his followers to parliamentary struggle by founding Fianna Fáil, thereby marginalising intransigent republicanism until it became a lingering irritant rather than an immediate menace to domestic security. The tripartite agreements of December 1925 had perpetuated partition and resolved some of the thorny fiscal problems raised by the Anglo-Irish treaty. The process of reconciliation with Britain was crowned during October and November 1926, when Kevin O’Higgins and the Irish delegation played a creative and enthusiastic role in remodelling the British Empire at the Imperial Conference in London. The consolidation of the Irish Free State as an autonomous dominion of twenty-six counties, comfortably acknowledging its strategic and economic dependence on Britain, seemed virtually assured.

The Irish Free State passport and the question of citizenship, 1921–4

1989 ◽  
Vol 26 (104) ◽  
pp. 396-405 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph P. O’Grady
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
The Other ◽  
Central Issue ◽  
Free State ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
The Status ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
British Commonwealth ◽  
Direct Answer

The issue of citizenship played a major role in the negotiations that led to the Anglo-Irish treaty of 1921; but that point was overshadowed by the tendency of those who negotiated the treaty (and the authors who have written about it) to see the issue of ‘common citizenship’ as only one point under the heading of allegiance to the crown and membership of the British Empire. That it was a central issue is clear, however, for at one point in the 1921 negotiations Lloyd George asked, ‘to put it bluntly will you be British subjects or foreigners? You must be either one or the other.’ Arthur Griffith, the leader of the Irish delegation, answered: ‘in our proposal we have agreed to “reciprocity of civic rights”. We should be Irish and you would be British and each would have equal rights as citizens in the country of the other.’ That exchange caused the British to ask the Irish for a direct answer to the question, would they ‘acknowledge this common citizenship?’. The Irish, however, only responded with the words, ‘Ireland would undertake such obligations as are compatible with the status of a free partner’ in ‘the community of nations known as the British Commonwealth’. Those words did not satisfy the English negotiators, but in the end the Irish accepted an agreement in which the words ‘common citizenship’ appeared in the oath to the king which all members of Dáil Éireann would have to take. That satisfied the British demands on allegiance to the crown.

The politics of reaction: the dynamics of treatyite government and policy, 1922–33

1997 ◽  
Vol 30 (120) ◽  
pp. 542-563 ◽  
Author(s):  
John M. Regan
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Free State ◽  
Executive Council ◽  
Municipal Politics ◽  
Political Career ◽  
Popular Support ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Irish Government ◽  
Irish Free State

On 3 July 1944 William T. Cosgrave, the former President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State, wrote to his friend and former colleague, Professor Michael Hayes, reflecting on his life in politics. The occasion was Cosgrave’s retirement as leader of the Fine Gael party. I find this break a painful operation in many respects. Even were my physique equal to the Dáil and political work it seems this slip should have been inevitable ... But we must be candid — in the sphere that one considered the least important but which was the most important we failed — viz to retain popular support. It should not and I believe it is not beyond the capacity of able men to discover a way to the people’s confidence and having found it to keep it.The letter remains a lachrymose valediction to a political career which witnessed Cosgrave’s rise from Dublin municipal politics to the leadership of the first independent Irish government. Cosgrave presided over the first decade of independence. Governments under his leadership fought and won the Civil War which was waged against the implementation of the 1921 Anglo-Irish treaty. In the process they created a stable polity which integrated its internal opponents with remarkable success. Within nine years of defeating the anti-treaty forces in the Civil War Cosgrave’s last government was able to pass power peacefully to its former adversaries in the guise, by 1932, of the Fianna Fail party under the leadership of Eamon de Valera.

An Irish-Ireland for business?: the Control of Manufactures Acts, 1932 and 1934

1984 ◽  
Vol 24 (94) ◽  
pp. 246-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Daly
Keyword(s):  
Industrial Policy ◽  
Complete Removal ◽  
Free State ◽  
Tariff Protection ◽  
Fianna Fail ◽  
Irish Free State

The Control of Manufactures Acts of 1932 and 1934 were ostensibly designed to ensure that new industries established in the Irish Free State under extensive tariff protection would be Irish-controlled. This legislation has been seen as one of the major implements of Fianna Fail industrial policy — a measure which indicated the party’s commitment to an introspective, self-sufficient Ireland; its partial repeal in 1956 and complete removal the following year has been taken as marking the transition from a protectionist mentality to a more outward industrial orientation.

scholarly journals “The Statute of Westminster, 1931: An Irish Perspective”

2013 ◽  
Vol 31 (4) ◽  
pp. 749-791 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Mohr
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
British Empire ◽  
The Self ◽  
Free State ◽  
Significant Events ◽  
History Of ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
White Settlement

The enactment of the Statute of Westminster in 1931 represents one of the most significant events in the history of the British Empire. The very name of this historic piece of legislation, with its medieval antecedents, epitomizes a sense of enduring grandeur and dignity. The Statute of Westminster recognized significant advances in the evolution of the self-governing Dominions into fully sovereign states. The term “Dominion” was initially adopted in relation to Canada, but was extended in 1907 to refer to all self-governing colonies of white settlement that had been evolving in the direction of greater autonomy since the middle of the nineteenth century. By the early 1930s, the Dominions included Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State.

Models of Government and Anglo-Irish Relations

1988 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan J. Ward
Keyword(s):  
South African ◽  
British Empire ◽  
Free State ◽  
Home Rule ◽  
War Of Independence ◽  
The People ◽  
Lower House ◽  
Irish People ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
The Government

In 1922 the Irish Free State began life with a constitution which embodied two contradictory principles. The first recognized that all powers of government derive from the people and provided for a system of government in which the Irish Cabinet was clearly responsible to the popularly elected Irish lower house, Dail Eireann. The second recognized a monarch, King George V, as head of the Irish executive, with substantial prerogative powers derived not from the Irish people but from British common law. The constitution was a compromise between Britain and Irish republicans to end the Irish War of Independence. Though not every compromise in politics makes complete sense, for Britain this one represented more than a short-range expedient. Its contradictions represented the dying gasp in a long, often anguished, and ultimately futile attempt by Britain to devise a formula which would simultaneously permit the Irish a measure of self-government and protect vital British interests in Ireland.This essay will review the attempts to construct a satisfactory Anglo-Irish relationship in the years between 1782 and 1949. It will concentrate on four models of government proposed for Ireland: (a) the independent Irish Parliament of the period from 1782 to 1800, (b) O'Connell's proposals to repeal the union with Britain in the 1830s and 1840s, (c) the devolution proposed in the home rule bills of 1886, 1893, 1912, and the Government of Ireland Act of 1920, and (d) the independence provided in the Irish Free State constitution of 1922 and its successor, the Irish constitution of 1937. It will also place these models in the context of the constitutional evolution of the British Empire. In the Canadian, New Zealand, Australian, and South African colonies, colonial self-government and British imperial interests were reconciled, beginning in Nova Scotia in 1848, by using a kind of constitutional double-think involving the Crown and the colonial Governor. But the problem of the troubled Anglo-Irish relationship could not be resolved so easily.

Imperial Armies in the Period of Rearmament and Appeasement, 1933–1939

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Douglas E. Delaney
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
British Army ◽  
General Staff ◽  
Far Eastern

European and Far Eastern threats made the 1930s more serious for the armies of the British Empire. In 1934, the Defence Requirements Sub-Committee (DRC) of the Committee of Imperial Defence recommended British measures to rearm and put the prospect of a continental commitment back to a place of prominence in British Army planning. But manpower problems continued to figure prominently in any general staff appreciation of possible army commitments, so Britain still looked to India and the dominions. The problem was that they were of very different attitudes politically, and generally unwilling to make commitments in advance of hostilities. Even so, generals across the empire had to plan for worst cases and they continued to pursue measures that would ensure reasonable cooperation when war came. Dominion and Indian officers still attended the staff colleges and the Imperial Defence College, and exchanges of periodical letters continued with renewed vigour.

Irish Free State newspapers and the Abyssinian crisis, 1935–6

2009 ◽  
Vol 36 (143) ◽  
pp. 368-388 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cian McMahon
Keyword(s):  
Crop Production ◽  
Free State ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Irish Free State ◽  
High Tariff ◽  
Agricultural Labourers

Twenty-four years ago, Terence Brown raised very few eyebrows when he portrayed the Irish Free State in the 1930s as an insular society obsessed with self-sufficiency. The theme of insularity has dominated most narratives of the period, with emphasis on the Anglo-Irish Economic War, the Censorship Board and the 1937 Constitution. The de Valera government’s intention in the Economic War, after all, was to create native industries behind high-tariff barriers and to favour agricultural labourers by shifting the tillage/pasture ratio in Ireland in favour of crop production. This protectionist programme was insularity writ large. Likewise, the government’s censorship of domestic and imported literature ‘concelebrated’, according to J. J. Lee, ‘the intellectual poverty of the period’.

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