The Meaning of Irish Freedom Constitutionalism in the Free State

Abstract

The performance of Ireland as an autonomous state since 1922 remains a contentious subject. Joseph Lee's withering critique of Irish economic backwardness and cultural parochialism, which he holds to be rooted in a narrow adhesion to the ‘possessor principle’ against the ‘performance ethic’, charts a long-term failure to rise to the challenge of statehood. It is not appropriate here to attempt even a summary of his sprawling, bristling account; I want to focus on an aspect highlit by Denis Donoghue when he reviewed it in die London Review of Books. ‘The first and most important fact about modern Ireland,’ Donoghue contended, ‘is that, after die Civil War, there was unquestioned transition to democracy.’ On this view, modern Irish history is, pace Lee, in essence a success story. As Brian Farrell put it, die capacity of die Irish parliamentary tradition to ‘encompass, neutralise and institutionalise’ the disastrous split of 1922 ‘makes die Irish experience unique among the new nation-states of the twentiedi-century world’. Tom Garvin has recendy reinforced this verdict by pointing to the surprising speed with which any tendency to military intervention in Irish politics disappeared. This after a Civil War in which die new Army—lacking any experience of subordination to the civil power— had saved die life of the infant Irish Free State. Indeed, far from witnessing the politicisation of the military, Ireland ‘rapidly became one of the most demilitarised societies in Europe’.