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

Abstract

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.