55 Years Ago: The Republic of Ireland is born

First announced three months earlier by Taoiseach, John A. Costello, it brought to fruition a long process of dismantling the ties between Ireland and the United Kingdom stipulated in the 1921 Treaty creating the Free State.
It marked a triumph for the nationalist cause that for nearly two centuries had called for the creation of an independent Irish republic.
But there was no escaping the fact that the partition creating Northern Ireland in the 1920s meant several important and divisive questions remained for future generations to answer.
As the Free State, Ireland existed as a dominion within the United Kingdom and all its office holders were required to swear an oath of allegiance to the British Crown. The journey from this semi-independent status to independent Republic began with Eamon de Valera?s reentry into Irish politics in the late 1920s.
In the wake of the Treaty (1921) and subsequent Civil War (1922-23), de Valera and the anti-treaty republicans boycotted Irish politics, insisting that the Free State government was invalid and that the second Dail, elected in 1920, remained the only legitimate government of Ireland. In particular, they bristled at the very idea of swearing allegiance to the Crown.
But De Valera soon recognized the futility of this position and in 1926 he formed a new political party, Fianna Fail (Irish for “Soldiers of Destiny “). In the general election of June 1927, Fianna Fail candidates outpolled Sinn Fein by a wide margin.
Reluctantly, they accepted the despised oath of allegiance and took their seats in the Dail.
From that point forward, the party made steady gains, until 1932 when it won a plurality of seats in the Dail and, in coalition with the Labour Party, formed a government with de Valera as its prime minister.
For the next sixteen years (1932-1948), Fianna Fail controlled the government of the Free State, allowing de Valera the opportunity to transform Ireland into a republic.
Soon after taking office he made good on his campaign promise of 1932 to end payment of “land annuities” to the British government (payments made by Irish farmers for loans granted by the British government under the Land Acts of 1891-1909 that allowed them to buy their land).
One year later, de Valera took aim at a symbolic but much-despised legacy of the Treaty and abolished the oath of allegiance to the British Crown from the Irish Constitution. More concretely, he reduced the influence of the Governor-General — an official appointed by the British government with limited executive authority over all of Ireland — in Irish affairs.
Three years later, he seized the opportunity presented by the constitutional crisis in England over King Edward VIII?s abdication to eliminate the office of Governor-General altogether and to reduce further the authority of the King in the Irish Constitution.
Far greater changes came in 1937, when de Valera introduced a new Constitution that replaced the name Free State with Eire and established the offices of president (mainly symbolic) and prime minister, known as Taoiseach (Irish for ‘chief’). The new Constitution passed in a national referendum with 57 percent of the vote.
The closeness of the vote and the fact that nearly a third of eligible Irish voters refused to vote indicated how divided Ireland remained fifteen years after the conclusion of the Civil War.
World War II provided de Valera with yet another opportunity to erode the ties between Ireland and the United Kingdom. As soon as hostilities broke out in 1939, de Valera’s government announced a policy of strict neutrality.
On one level, this was seen as a practical decision that would allow Ireland, like the small nations of Switzerland and Portugal, to avoid the devastation of war. But de Valera also knew that with England a major combatant in the war, a declaration of neutrality by Ireland — still a member of the British Commonwealth — served as a powerful affirmation of his policy of moving Ireland toward the status of independent republic. Not surprisingly, Prime Minister Winston Churchill reacted with rage and threats of invasion.
De Valera’s constitutional changes in the 1930s brought Ireland to the doorstep of declaring itself an independent republic. But he resisted that last step, believing that maintaining Commonwealth ties with Northern Ireland through a symbolic link with Britain increased the long-term chances of a united Ireland.
But the political opposition did not agree and when Fianna Fail’s sixteen-years of uninterrupted power came to end in 1948 with the election of a coalition government headed by Fine Gael, they set about making the final break.
On September 7, 1948 the new government’s Taoiseach, John A. Costello, announced while attending a Commonwealth conference in Canada that Ireland would soon declare itself a Republic and withdraw from the Commonwealth. The Republic of Ireland Act was passed December 21, 1948, and took effect April 21, 1949.
In essence, the act amounted to an official name change (from Eire to Republic of Ireland) and the assumption of all powers related to internal and external matters by the Irish government. Membership in the Commonwealth was allowed to expire.
Many in Ireland and America celebrated the establishment of the Republic of Ireland for its symbolic significance. Ireland, so long oppressed by its neighbor England, now assumed its place among the independent nations of the world. Membership in the United Nations soon followed.
Yet there was an unsettling, unintended aspect to the act, for it seemed to give an air of permanence to the partition that created the six-county Northern Ireland. Certainly the Unionist majority in the North read it that way. They had long opposed any suggestion of a reunification with the Free State, but the possibility of such an eventuality — however remote — existed so long as the whole island was part of the United Kingdom. Now with the lower 26 counties established as an entirely separate political entity (and a Catholic majority one at that), reunification seemed an impossibility. Accordingly, ties between Northern Ireland and Great Britain were greatly increased in the coming years and the border between North and South — the source of so much death and destruction in the future — grew more fixed.

HIBERNIAN HISTORY WEEK

Dec 18, 1944: The Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of Japanese internment during World War II. Justice Frank Murphy, however, writes a stinging dissent denouncing the “legalization of racism.”

Dec 18, 1980: The hunger strikes that claimed the lives of ten IRA prisoners are called off after prisoners receive promises that they will be treated as political prisoners.

Dec 22, 1691: Defeated by King William, Patrick Sarsfield and 16,000 soldiers (known as the Wild Geese) sail for France.

HIBERNIAN BIRTH DATES:

Dec 20, 1820: playwright Dion Boucicault is born in Dublin.

Dec 21, 1865: Revolutionary Maude Gonne is born in Hampshire, England.

Dec 23, 1862: Baseball manager, Connie Mack (born Cornelius Alexander McGilicuddy), is born in East Brookfield, MA.