From Poblacht to Saorstát: describing the Irish State, 1916-1949
The Proclamation issued by the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin used the phrase "Poblacht na hÉireann" to describe their Irish Republic. However, three years later, the First Dáil switched to "Saorstát Éireann". Why was this change made, and what were its implications?
The Proclamation of the Irish Republic issued by the leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising in Dublin used a three-word phrase to describe their new State: "Poblacht na hÉireann".[1] But when the first Dáil endorsed their gesture with a trilingual Declaration of Independence in 1919, the entity described as "the Irish Republic" and "la République irlandaise" was formally styled "Saorstát Éireann". Etymologically, 'Poblacht' is related to the noun 'pobal' ('the people') and the adjective 'poiblí', meaning 'public'. Thus 'Poblacht' may be loosely interpreted as 'people thing' or 'public entity', exactly parallel to 'respublica' in Latin. It is said to have been coined by Liam Gógan, a brilliant student of Old Irish at University College Dublin, and first used in a paper on Celtic revivalism which he delivered to its Gaelic Society (An Cumann Gaelach) in 1913.[2] 'Stát' is easily identified as related to Dutch, English, French and German terms for 'the State'. 'Saor' has the same dual meaning – both liberated and cashless – as its English equivalent, 'free'. Thus 'Saorstát' means 'independent State', the specific word for 'independent' ('neamhspleách', literally meaning 'not dependent') presumably being regarded as unsuitable for compound forms.[3]
The study of Irish history has been well served by insightful scholarly overviews, and the fraught years of the break with Britain have been examined in detailed and thoughtful monographs. Yet this change in nomenclature is rarely even noted,[4] and there seems to have been no attempt to explain why it came about, or to assess its possible implications in the subsequent struggle to secure recognition of national autonomy.[5]
This essay is exploratory, written in the hope that the questions raised will be considered by historians whose access to library resources and research materials is superior to mine. I should also make clear that I neither speak nor read the Irish language, and this study focuses on the use of Gaelic terminology in English.[6] The concluding Agenda outlines some suggested lines of further enquiry.
From Poblacht to Saorstát[7] When challenged on the linguistic point by the British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, Eamon de Valera "explained that there were two schools of thought among Gaelic scholars regarding the translation of 'republic'." The divergence simply amounted to a "dispute among Gaelic purists whether the idea Republic was better conveyed by the broader 'Saorstat' or by the more abstract 'Poblacht'". (Incidentally, this is the sole example that I have discovered of any perceived distinction between the two terms.)[8] One instance of this linguistic dispute had arisen after the execution of the eighteen-year-old Kevin Barry in November 1920. Students at University College Dublin decided to issue a mortuary card in his honour, which was to be sold to raise money to build a memorial. The organisers intended to hail their martyred fellow-student as a soldier of the Irish Republic, and they were naturally inclined to use the three-word phrase that had headed the Proclamation. However, they consulted the College's professor of Modern Irish, Douglas Hyde, who "insisted that poblacht was a bastard word, unknown to Irish, and that saorstát was the only word properly used as equivalent to republic". With some misgivings, the young men accepted the correction, a concession that they later regretted, when Kevin Barry's relatives angrily repudiated the term after its incorporation in the Treaty, However, the family's own memorial card had used "Saor Stát" in the same context. Gógan, it should be noted, was only 21 when he unveiled 'Poblacht'. It was not an era that paid undue deference to the whims of youth, while the brilliant student prodigy, it seems, showed less respect for the scholarship of Professor Hyde than the founder of the Gaelic League no doubt required.[9] In fact, Gógan strongly opposed the incorporation of loanwords into Irish, insisting that modern terminology should be evolved from the ancient roots of the language. Paradoxically, his attempt to do so with 'Poblacht' was dismissed by Hyde as an illegitimate neologism.[10]
As noted below, the Cork TD Liam de Róiste believed that Piaras Béaslaí had preferred to translate 'republic' as 'Saor Stát' (two words) rather than 'Poblacht', which suggests that there had been some wider debate on terminology among enthusiasts. In the Gaelic League, Béaslaí championed Munster Irish against Éoin MacNéill and Pádraig Pearse, who sought to base a revived national language upon the vocabulary and pronunciation of Connemara.[11] As one of the organisers of the First Dáil, he was well placed to contribute to the drafting of documents. In his massive two-volume Life of Michael Collins, published in 1922, Béaslaí claimed credit for the change in terminology. "The title of the State was given as 'the Irish Republic' in the English language, and 'Saorstát Eireann' in Irish. The title 'Saorstát Eireann' remained the official name from that time forward." In this, he was writing from a pro-Treaty viewpoint, asserting the continuity between the First Dáil of 1919 and Third Dáil elected in 1922 under the auspices of the new regime. According to Béaslaí, George Gavan Duffy drafted the English and French versions of the Declaration of Independence, which were accepted with some minor alterations. "For the Irish version I was responsible."[12]
However, an alternative claim was made by Michael Tierney on behalf of Éoin MacNéill. Tierney was one of the few writers to note that the Irish version of the Declaration of Independence "uses the word Saorstát as the equivalent of 'Republic', thus silently setting aside the word Poblacht which had been used in their proclamation by the men of Easter Week themselves. This change was certainly due to MacNéill."[13] Tierney's relationship to his subject – he was MacNéill's son-in-law – may be regarded as giving additional authority to his assertion, but there is an ambiguity about the adverb 'certainly': did he speak from personal knowledge or did he use the word to underline an unproven assertion? Indeed, we might well expect that, at the time of the First Dáil, in which MacNéill was appointed as Minister of Finance, the co-founder both of the Gaelic League would have possessed a personal ascendancy in relation to Irish vocabulary. Not only had he held the office of Vice-President of the League since 1903, but he had also served as Chief of Staff of the Irish Volunteers. When the First Dáil assembled, he had relatively recently been released from prison and reinstated in his UCD Chair in Irish History. Given the nature of MacNéill's services to the cause of Gaelic Ireland, it is inconceivable that so emotive a term as the word for 'republic' could have been inserted into such a momentous document as the Declaration of Independence without his approval. Béaslaí may well have wielded the pen, but it is very likely that MacNéill approved the choice of vocabulary.[14]
And here we face a serious problem, for the reputation of Éoin MacNéill had been permanently damaged by the events of Easter 1916. Although in effect the head of the Volunteers, he had been outflanked and outwitted by the men of violence, notably and unforgivably by his friend and long-time ally, Pearse himself. Not only was MacNéill humiliated by having been kept in ignorance of plans for the Easter Rising, but his last-minute attempts to frustrate the project were blamed for blocking any possibility of a nationwide rebellion. Thus we might reasonably ask: in January 1919, was Eoin MacNéill simply taking a posthumous revenge by 'correcting' Pearse's use of Irish – or was there some deeper motive behind the replacement of Poblacht by Saorstát?[15]
Saorstát – a repudiation of 1916? It is probably fair to conclude that, on balance, the formulae adopted by the first Dáil adroitly positioned itself as the successor to the men of 1916 while politely avoiding too close an endorsement of their more radical sentiments. Nonetheless, it is worth asking whether – and, if so, how far – the adoption of 'Saorstát' also signalled an attempt at a new beginning. The seven signatories of the Proclamation had acted "[i]n the name of God and the dead generations" to declare an Irish Republic which was "entitled to, and hereby claims, the allegiance of every Irishman and Irishwoman". Pending "the establishment of a permanent national government, representative of the whole people of Ireland, and elected by the suffrages of all her men and women, the Provisional Government, hereby constituted, will administer the civil and military affairs of the republic in trust for the people." In its implicit assertion that the transitional phase had come to end, the Declaration of Independence also subtly inverted the basis of legitimacy, superseding the dead generations by asserting that "at the threshold of a new era in history the Irish electorate has in the General Election of December, 1918, seized the first occasion to declare by an overwhelming majority its firm allegiance to the Irish Republic".[16] Did "the threshold of a new era" imply a disavowal of events from the recent past?
We may fairly assume that Éoin MacNéill had issues with the 1916 Proclamation. No doubt an Ulster critic was typically unfair in dismissing him as a "wambling professor" who would have been well advised to have "restricted all his activities to the solution of problems in Gaelic grammar", but the more sympathetic P.S. O'Hegarty dismissed him as "too full of philosophical inertia to apply his national philosophy".[17] It seems reasonable to suspect that concern for linguistic accuracy played a larger part in the determination of MacNéill's decision-making than street-wise sensitivity to the mundane imperatives of politics. In the confused events of Easter weekend, he had briefly accepted the inevitability of a rising before learning of the failure of the German arms shipment, without which rebellion was doomed. Yet even during that transient moment of acquiescence, he had declined to endorse the planned declaration of the republic sight unseen. "I must see the proclamation first," he recalled saying, adding: "It was not shown to me, nor was I told what it contained." His subsequent objection to its content was the inclusion of "a delusive statement about an alliance with Germany and Austria". (The Proclamation claimed that the Rising was "supported … by gallant allies in Europe", which was not only untrue but a major political blunder: the earlier Volunteer slogan, "We serve neither King nor Kaiser, not Ireland", would have aroused less resentment in a city where there was extensive working-class recruitment in the British Army.) If there was any disagreement among Gaelic scholars over the correct term for a republic in 1916, MacNéill was evidently not asked to adjudicate.
Was the adoption of "Saorstát" a symbolic device for conjuring the inconvenient document out of the onward march to Irish destiny? In fact, the Declaration of Independence acquits the First Dáil of the charge that it sought to repudiate the events of Easter 1916. Rather, it boldly claimed continuity with the men who had seized the General Post Office. "Whereas the Irish Republic was proclaimed in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1916, by the Irish Republican Army acting on behalf of the Irish people…. Now, therefore, we, the elected Representatives of the ancient Irish people in National Parliament assembled, do, in the name of the Irish nation, ratify the establishment of the Irish Republic and pledge ourselves and our people to make this declaration effective by every means at our command".[18]
Furthermore, in the Democratic Programme adopted a few days later, the First Dáil specifically acknowledged and (so it seemed) the sentiments of the Proclamation, endorsing "the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland, and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies to be indefeasible, and in the language of our first President, Pádraig Mac Phiarais, we declare that the Nation’s sovereignty extends not only to all men and women of the Nation, but to all its material possessions, the Nation’s soil and all its resources, all the wealth and all the wealth-producing processes within the Nation, and with him we reaffirm that all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare."[19] Yet these sweeping sentiments were probably not embraced with much enthusiasm. The adoption of the Democratic Programme was a formal gesture to the Labour Party, which had stood aside from the 1918 General Election to allow voters to pronounce a clear verdict on the question of independence. However, specific proposals in that party's draft were omitted as too indigestible for the more conservative members of Dáil Éireann. The Democratic Programme did contain such worthy sentiments as the specific intention to rescue children and old people from poverty, but the gaelicisation – and virtual canonisation – of Pearse notably obscured the absence of any appeal to the socialist Connolly.[20] In general terms, the first Dáil set out to position itself as the heir to the spirit of 1916, but precise identification with the details was obscured. It is possible to view the substitution of "Saorstát" for "Poblacht" as part of this strategy.
Contexts Viewed solely through the narrow prism of Irish history, the thirty-three months that separated the Easter Rising from the convening of the First Dáil may seem to have constituted a simple, even an inevitable step. In fact, viewed in a broader perspective, in that short period the context of the Irish question had changed through four key developments: the Russian revolution, the entry of the United States into the war, the return of Home Rule to the British political agenda and – above all – the ballooning of Sinn Féin into a mass political movement. The February 1917 revolution in Russia had ushered in a democratic State (formally declared a republic in September) whose claim to authority was quickly challenged by workers' councils, just as the Dáil's pretensions were inconveniently undermined on the day it met by the outbreak of violence in Tipperary. In November 1917 (October in the outdated Tsarist calendar), the interim regime had been toppled and the foundations laid for a Soviet dictatorship of the proletariat. British opinion was fed by voluble Unionist propaganda that identified Sinn Féin as either the enabler or the embodiment of an Irish Bolshevik revolution.[21] It is possible – I go no further than the speculative suggestion – that "Poblacht", with its derivation from "pobal" (people), was replaced because it implied a bottom-up approach to sovereignty, whereas "Saorstát" conveyed a less revolutionary top-down interpretation of authority.[22] The obvious riposte to such a hypothesis is that the choleric colonels of Cheltenham were not familiar with the Irish language, and a mere alteration in Gaelic terminology would hardly shake the widespread British belief that Eamon de Valera and Arthur Griffith were the Hibernian Lenin and Trotsky.
The American declaration of war in 1917 marked a major step in the arrival of the United States on the world stage. There was perhaps an element of pardonable naivety in the belief that Wilsonian idealism would deliver Irish freedom.[23] This optimism helps to explain the emphasis placed by the First Dáil on the Declaration of Independence – and, incidentally, solves the mystery of why independence was declared three years after the proclamation of the republic. Its opening statement, that "the Irish people is by right a free people", is an echo of the ringing words of the American Declaration of Independence, which concentrated on breaking the links with Britain and omitted any allusion to the United States as republican in government.[24] Yet the mirage of the Fourteen Points and an Irish seat at the Versailles peace conference quickly dissipated. As in the Land War forty years earlier, the United States became vital as the source of potential Irish-American political pressure and actual Irish-American financial support. At the height of that struggle, in 1879, Parnell had crossed the Atlantic to control the source of funds; de Valera made the same journey in June 1919.
Shortly after his arrival in the United States, he defined the three objectives of his mission in a letter to Arthur Griffith. Naturally, they included the mobilisation of political support for Irish independence and the promotion of a bond issue for a Dáil loan, but there was a third aim – and one that de Valera actually listed second: "The interest of wealthy men of the race in the industrial development of Ireland."[25] This seems to have marked the first appearance on the Irish political agenda of the search for inward investment by private capital.[26] In the days of the Irish Parliamentary Party, politicians had consistently pressed British governments to finance infrastructure projects, such as light railways and fishing harbours – a reasonable demand since Ireland contributed to the United Kingdom Treasury, most notably (and, arguably, disproportionately) through excise duty on whiskey. In addition, a semi-State body, the Congested Districts Board, provided small-scale support for mostly craft industries in a scattering of disadvantaged areas along the western seaboard.[27] Encouraging wealthy Irish-Americans to invest in the modernisation of the Irish economy represented a new official strategy, although it is hard to see it as one that was maintained at high pressure in the decades that followed. Yet de Valera's emphasis was a reminder of a very basic point. From Fenian days, there was a mythology that Irish-America funded nationalist projects through the nickels and dimes contributed by exiled navvies and chambermaids. But the real cash came from men who had made their fortunes in business or the professions, and their money talked: Parnell had been forced to engage in embarrassing contortions to explain away the donor who had offered five dollars for bread but twenty-five dollars for lead.
We may construct an identikit description of the kind of transatlantic emigré upon whom the Sinn Féin leadership in Dublin pinned so much hope in 1919. To have acquired wealth and political influence, he would have been about fifty or sixty years of age. He probably combined radical – and, usually, impractical – attitudes to the assertion of Irish nationality with the social and political conservatism of a man who had made money through his own efforts. On both counts, his outlook would have been reinforced both by his loyalty to the Catholic Church and also, and very likely, a wife of Irish heritage with her own angry memories of the hazards, the loneliness and vulnerability of emigration. Born in the decades after the Famine, when the Irish language was in broad retreat, he would have been reared and schooled primarily in English: the word-play between bread and lead is a reminder that Irish-America operated in an Anglophone world. But that does not mean that the exiles were completely cut off from their Gaelic heritage. The veteran republican John Devoy had been born in 1842 in County Kildare, a region where it would be easy to conclude that the Irish language was already dead. Yet his mother "knew many phrases and hundreds of words" that she had learned from old people in her early years. "I was only one among many who wanted to learn the language and to see it revived. When only nine years of age I bought an Irish Primer. When fourteen, I invested in a lesson book and dictionary." As a young man in Dublin, he joined an Irish-language class that was a front for the Fenian organisation.[28] The background of Joseph McGarrity, the Philadelphia distiller who organised de Valera's 1919-20 American tour, seemingly belonged to an equally unpromising place and time – County Tyrone in the eighteen-seventies and -eighties. Yet he too was exposed to Gaelic enthusiasm of a local curate, and he went on to support an early manifestation of the language revival movement in the United States in the late 'nineties.[29] Of course, Devoy and McGarrity were extreme examples (in more than one meaning of the adjective) but we should not rule out the possibility that there were other Irish Americans who retained some outline familiarity with the language. In retrospect, "Saorstát" may sound like an attempt to wrap a Gaelic garb around a twentieth-century State. However, it may also have been an attempt to send a reassuring signal to a generation of exiles who had carried with them the last echoes of Irish as a living language.[30]
On the face of it, the return of Home Rule to the British political agenda might seem irrelevant to Sinn Féin, which was seemingly inflexible in its separatist demands, for instance resolutely refusing to participate in Lloyd George's round-table project, the Irish Convention of 1917. Yet there were also good reasons to keep a watching brief, in order to position the movement so that it might profit from possible concessions. Hence "Sinn Féin's policy remained studiously vague throughout 1917 and 1918."[31] De Valera trod the tightrope on his election as President of Sinn Féin in October 1917, as he sought to explain the party's promise that, once independence was achieved, "the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own forms of government". In an early exercise in circle-squaring, he asserted that "the only banner under which our freedom can be won at the present time is the Republican banner", adding that he, personally, wanted "a Republican form of government". However, "[t]his is not the time for discussion on the best forms of government." Sinn Féiners were united in their desire for "complete and absolute independence. Get that and we will agree to differ afterwards. We do not wish to bind the people to any form of government. Some of my friends may have different opinions from mine on forms of government."[32] When he discovered in December 1921 that some of his former friends did indeed contemplate an alternative constitutional structure, De Valera would prove less flexible.
This opacity of aim was almost certainly related to the fourth contextual element that separated 1919 from 1916, the explosion of Sinn Féin into a mass political party. O'Hegarty recalled the intoxicating effect of the sudden change: "No such unity and no such enthusiasm had been seen in Ireland since the early Parnell days." But when a splinter group suddenly mushrooms into a contender for power, its character can be diluted. Writing in 1924 through a filter of disillusion, O'Hegarty was in no doubt that there was a downside to mass popularity. "We did not realise it at the time, but what had happened was not that Sinn Féin had captured Ireland, but that … all the elements which had sniffed at Sinn Féin and libelled it, which had upheld corruption and jobbery, had realised that Sinn Féin was going to win, and had come over to it en masse."[33] Perhaps this was unduly cynical, for it is equally possible to conclude that the party that stormed to three unexpected by-election victories contained too much unfocused idealism. It is important to remember that there had been an ambivalent relationship between the previously marginal group led by Arthur Griffith and the men of 1916. It was Unionist disinformation that characterised the Rising as a 'Sinn Féin rebellion': Griffith himself had remained faithful to his principles of non-violence, and took no part in the fighting of Easter Week. On his release from prison in 1917, Eoin MacNéill was asked to define his policy objective, which he did in terms that we might define as 'Saorstát' thinking. "I said that in my view the policy should aim at full political independence. It was a matter of comparative indifference for the time what form this independence ought to take. So far as I knew there was no practical proposal of setting up an Irish monarchy and the alternative was an Irish republic. I declared on behalf of a republic in these terms deliberately, because I knew that many were obsessed with the notion that some sort of sacred principle underlay the republican ideal, and I wished to show that for me at all events it was purely a matter of expediency."[34] Given that there was no thought of importing a king – and that Austria-Hungary, Griffith's prototype Dual Monarchy, was approaching collapse – MacNéill's lukewarm attitude to the republican ideal spoke volumes.
Similarly, the Sinn Féin manifesto for the December 1918 general election offered the people of Ireland "the opportunity of vindicating her honour and pursuing with renewed confidence the path of national salvation by rallying to the flag of the Irish Republic", but it also interpreted the 1916 Proclamation in more general terms as "reasserting the inalienable right of the Irish Nation to sovereign independence, reaffirming the determination of the Irish people to achieve it, and guaranteeing within the independent nation equal rights and equal opportunities for all its citizens". The election was about the assertion of "the principle of untrammelled national self-determination" and only incidentally about its republican form.[35] Brian Girvan has gone so far as to assert that "Sinn Féin's political success cannot be equated to mass endorsement of the Rebellion by Irish nationalist opinion."[36] Father Michael O'Flanagan, an attractive but largely forgotten member of the party's leadership, held much the same view at the time. "The people have voted Sinn Féin," he commented. "Now we have to explain to them what Sinn Féin is."[37] The problem was that Sinn Féin was not entirely sure how to answer the question.
Did it matter? I pause at this point to consider the possibility that the historians have been right to show little interest in the substitution of "Saorstát" for "Poblacht". Perhaps it was indeed no more than the result of a disagreement among Gaelic scholars, a matter of no importance at the time and of little consequence since. To assess this view, it is first necessary to confront – and strip away – the perception of the 1916 Proclamation a century later. In modern Ireland, it is fair to describe the document in that overworked cliché, 'iconic'. Gift shops and tourist offices sell facsimiles of the poster, sometimes decorated with photographs of the seven signatories, and other merchandise is available: in June 2025, it was possible to buy a T-shirt emblazoned with the text. I suspect that this popularisation has its roots in the quasi-religious glorification of the Rising during the fiftieth anniversary commemorations in 1966, and has been made possible by the gradual (and, of course, welcome) growth of a prosperous consumer economy.
By contrast, the original document may have made less impact. One thousand copies were secretly printed for posting on walls and hoardings around Dublin: most were probably torn down by the authorities and would not have survived long in the Irish climate anyway. An unsympathetic observer watched the reception by an inquisitive crowd outside the General Post Office of the boy – probably a member of the Fianna, the republican boy scouts – who emerged from the building to distribute sell copies. The onlookers seemed unmoved by the nobility of the prose, but most of them bought copies as souvenirs, "some with the cute business instinct 'that they'd be worth a fiver each some day, when the beggars were hanged'."[38] However, while the initial arrangements (such as they were) for the distribution of the Proclamation were haphazard and wasteful, the document quickly acquired an afterlife. After the suppression of the Rising, it was widely reprinted in the press. A facsimile formed the frontispiece of the Irish Times souvenir volume, misleadingly titled Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, which seems to have achieved a wide circulation. The text certainly inspired Tom Barry, a major figure in the War of Independence in Cork, when he read it after his demobilisation from the British Army early in 1919.[39] However, it is not clear how widely it was discussed after the failure of the Rising, nor how deep was the impact of its Irish-language heading. Thus we may discount, even if we do not entirely dismiss, any concern that the substitution of "Saorstát" needlessly discarded an established political brand-name consisting of the only three words of Irish associated with 1916, "Poblacht na hÉireann". Three years later, the widespread veneration for the leaders of the Easter Rising owed little to their inspirational prose, whether in English or Irish. It was based on the simple fact that they had been shot after making a stand for Ireland.
Of course, we should not forget that, at the roll-call of Deputies on 21 January 1919, the clerk entered "fé ghlas ag Gallaibh" (imprisoned by the foreigner) against forty-four of the names. Most of those were in British prisons because they had fought in 1916. It is possible that, if they had been in Dublin to influence the preparations for the First Dáil, they might have lobbied for the retention of the concept for which they had risked their lives. But Béaslaí had taken part in Easter Week, while the first Ceann Comhairle, Cathal Brugha, had been severely wounded and could claim to have shed blood for the republic. In any case, the first Dáil session was a carefully staged piece of parliamentary theatre, not an occasion for debates. The proceedings, which lasted for just two-and-a-half hours, were conducted exclusively in Irish, a language that they all respected but few of them had mastered.
The all-Gaelic session set a precedent that Ireland's new legislature most certainly did not follow. We should recall Brian Farrell's comment that the "political values" of the fledgling State "were articulated in a distinctively British way", creating what Charles Townshend called the "paradoxical Britishness" of the new Irish-Ireland regime. The truth was that the "crusading de-Anglicizers" of the First Dáil thought in English, and only incidentally transposed their ideas into Irish.[40] Hiberno-English of course reflected the rhythms of Gaelic speech, and its vocabulary was enriched by the infiltration of words from the older tongue. But these borrowings did not extend to the abstract terminology of government, because such vocabulary did not exist. In one of its earliest decisions, Dáil Éireann established a committee to choose Irish-language technical terms for use in parliamentary procedure. "Apparently the record of the proceedings at Tara in the days of King Malachy and his numerous successors does not afford any vocabulary adequate to the present crisis," jested the Dublin correspondent of the The Times.[41] A few of the neologisms made their way into English. Dáil Éireann, or, simply, the Dáil – "Irish Assembly" – was an obvious candidate for borrowing. Ceann Comhairle, "head of the Council", was an ingenious title for the presiding officer, although Michael Collins for one was punctilious in addressing the chair as "Mr Speaker". Teachta Dála, "Deputy to the Assembly", proved less adaptable, except through its abbreviation, TD, an obvious parallel to the Westminster initials, MP. Príomh Aire, "first minister", awkwardly overlapped with the title 'President': de Valera eliminated it in his 1937 Constitution (a document largely drafted in English). Most documents were submitted to Deputies for their consideration in their English versions. The one major exception in the early days, the Dáil's own Constitution, had been drafted in English by Béaslaí and then rendered by him into Irish. Unfortunately, a "clumsy retranslation" appeared in the press, and this would complicate its subsequent interpretation.[42] Eamon de Valera himself, a notable Gaelic Leaguer, began the debate on the Treaty in December 1921 with a few sentences in both languages in which he regretfully confessed his inability to expound his ideas in Irish, before explaining that he would continue in English out of courtesy to Deputies who were even less bilingual than himself. One of these would have been his colleague W.T. Cosgrave, whose command of Irish was so limited that in delivering a token sentence in a subsequent broadcast to the nation, he felt the need to write it out phonetically.[43] In a predominantly Anglophone world, the rival attractions of "Poblacht" and "Saorstát" may not have seemed a major issue. Maybe we should simply accept Michael Laffan's laconic verdict that "the two words were clearly synonyms".[44] But were they?
Welsh wizardry and Celtic wordplay It would be difficult to imagine a more upright bureaucrat than Sir John Anderson. Seriously Scottish and an archetypal safe pair of hands, he was seconded to Dublin Castle in 1920 to uphold the best traditions of high-minded British governance. Of course, it did not require his massive intellect to identify the key solution to the Irish difficulty: "the great thing is to find the basis of agreement between the PM and SF". In so intractable a confrontation, identifying a compromise and turning it into a structure of government could well prove to be two very different challenges. But Anderson was sure that "once that is done L.G. is quite clever enough to be trusted to find a mode of procedure. Let them concentrate on agreement and leave the way to press the button to him."[45] The leader of Britain's coalition ministry, David Lloyd George, was widely regarded as a political trickster, whose Welshness somehow conferred upon him the aura of Merlin the Magician. Could his sleight of hand pluck from the air an answer to the Irish question that had so perplexed British statesmanship for centuries? In July 1921, the PM and SF finally came face to face, in Downing Street talks between Lloyd George and Eamon de Valera. At their first meeting, the host sprang a linguistic stunt that the British side seemed to regard as diabolically clever. A seemingly innocent enquiry did nothing to impress the visitors with their antagonist's integrity, but it did place 'Saorstát' under a diplomatic spotlight.
Our knowledge of the incident comes principally from a note by Thomas Jones, the Deputy Cabinet Secretary, who sat in on the meeting with Lloyd George; de Valera was accompanied by Art O'Leary, Dáil Éireann's London agent. Jones sent the recollection to Winston Churchill in January 1929, seven and a half years after the event, for what seems to have been last-minute inclusion in The Aftermath, Churchill's sequel to a history of the Great War, The World Crisis.[46] Not surprisingly, the tale was filtered through a standard English (and, in this case, Welsh) filter that viewed the Irish as passionate but inherently muddled people. In addition, by the late nineteen-twenties, de Valera seemed a marginalised and discredited figure within the Free State itself, unlikely to return to office and accordingly someone safe to lampoon. While Lloyd George "received the Irish Chieftain cordially as a brother Celt", de Valera was "guarded and formal" as he submitted a document defining the Irish position. Noticing that it was headed 'Saorstát Éireann', Lloyd George innocently asked for a literal translation, "saying that 'Saorstat' did not strike his ear as Irish". According to Jones, de Valera replied that it meant "'Free State'". (In copying the account, Churchill here inserted the adverb "literally".) Lloyd George turned the screw, asking "what is the Irish word for Republic". At this point, de Valera and O'Leary went into a huddle, while Lloyd George ostentatiously conversed with Jones, his fellow Welshman in their native tongue, a ploy evidently intended to embarrass their visitors. When de Valera declined to go beyond Saorstat and "Free State" (capitalisation by Jones once again), Lloyd George drew the moral that "the Celts never were Republicans and have no native word for such an idea".[47]
De Valera subsequently confirmed the exchange, telling the Dáil in December 1921: "When I was over with the British Prime Minister he looked at my notepaper and he said, 'You need not change the name of your state'." Indeed, de Valera claimed that he did not object to the translation of "Saorstát" as "Free State", although he would have preferred "the Free State of Ireland".[48] He later told sympathetic biographers that Lloyd George had "jumped" on his translation of 'Saorstát', saying, "Yes, there is a South African Orange Free State", as if the parallel had just occurred to him.[49] De Valera believed "that the name Irish Free State originated in this incident", but it is more likely that it was a carefully staged ambush by the British. When their formal written proposals were submitted a few days later, they not only specifically mentioned the Orange Free State but hinted that the adoption of a similar style for the Twenty-Six Counties could prove a step towards ending Partition. "In the Dominion of Canada, British and French have long forgotten the bitter conflicts which divided their ancestors. In South Africa the Transvaal Republic and the Orange Free State have joined with two British colonies to make a great self-governing union under His Majesty's sway. The British people … are determined that … nothing shall hinder Irish statesmen from joining together to build up an Irish state in free and willing co-operation with the other peoples of the Empire."[50]
The trumpery nature of this piece of wordplay was equalled only by the smug assurance on the British side that they had won a great victory. Both Lloyd George and Thomas Jones massively misread their Irish visitor, mistaking de Valera's taciturnity for a malleability that he simply did not possess. The Prime Minister assured his cabinet colleagues that de Valera had "an agreeable personality" and that he had been ready to discuss "the entry of Southern Ireland into the Empire, swearing allegiance in the form of an oath, the name of the new State and so forth". Jones went even further, reassuring the Unionist leader Andrew Bonar Law of the harmlessness of the visiting Irish leader. "He has a limited vocabulary, talks chiefly of ideals, and constantly recurs to the same few dominating notions. He agreed to drop ‘the Republic’, the P.M. telling him that there was no Irish or Welsh word for it, and therefore it was alien to the spirit of the Celt! He was willing to be within the Empire, to recognize the King, to go without a Navy."[51] In reality, Lloyd George's handling of the episode was both artificial and superficial, and can only have strengthened de Valera's already profound suspicion of British negotiating techniques.
We may begin by doubting whether Lloyd George derived any special insight into Irish affairs from his own Welsh heritage. In his radical early career, Lloyd George had supported land reform and once shared a platform with Michael Davitt. In the mid-nineties, he had been active in Cymru Fydd (Wales Future) and a supporter of Home Rule All Round. However, although he lived within fifty miles of the ferry terminal at Holyhead, there is no evidence that Lloyd George ever set foot in Ireland. With political nationalism in Ireland in retreat after the Parnell Split and the defeat of the Second Home Rule Bill in 1893, the vacuum was to some extent filled by cultural activity, such as the language revival movement. Cymru Fydd supported a distinctively Welsh culture, but it is unlikely that he took any interest in parallel developments across the Irish Sea, where output from the Irish language press was still small, while the Gaelic League's preference for the use of antique script would have constituted a barrier to casual browsing anyway. In 1921, the British Prime Minister affected solidarity with his fellow Celts, but he had effectively broken off political contact with the Redmondites twenty years earlier.[52] The two Celtic languages belonged to long-separated branches of Indo-European and had almost no common vocabulary, although there was one exception which probably aroused his interest. 'Pobl' was one of several Welsh words for 'people', and older dictionaries also cited 'poblach', meaning 'low people' or 'mob'. (It is possible that the pejorative connotations of this near-identical term in another Celtic tongue influenced Gaelic purists in their distaste for 'poblacht'.) Yet almost any educated British observer would have had little difficulty in noting that the term for 'republic' used in 1916 had parallels with English and Latin.
Although British military intelligence was poor throughout the War of Independence, Westminster and Dublin Castle political analysis was more insightful, and it would not have been difficult to decode the derivation and significance of 'Saorstát'. As part of his campaign to elevate the status as President of the Republic, de Valera equipped himself with high-quality stationery, decorated with an embossed harp, interwoven with the headings "Saorstát Éireann" and, for good measure, its Latin equivalent, "Respublica Hibernica".[53] Even without this clue, the political and administrative elite of Westminster, Whitehall and Dublin Castle, mostly recipients of an education in the classics, would have encountered little difficulty in exploring the Irish derivation: Edward Carson could actually speak the language.[54] The South African Prime Minister, Jan Smuts, had made a cloak-and-dagger visit to Dublin a week before the start of the Downing Street talks to engage in somewhat theological fencing with de Valera on the rival merits of – as Smuts claimed to see it from his Transvaal experience – a fractious republican relationship with Great Britain and a harmonious Dominion settlement.[55] Back home, champions of Afrikaans were fighting for its recognition as a distinct language rather than a mere vernacular dialect of Dutch, a campaign that was won in 1925. It is likely that the derivation of Saorstát had cropped up in his Dublin discussions and perhaps, too, he drew Lloyd George's attention to the possible parallel with the Orange Free State.
The British Prime Minister delivered his claim that "the Celts never were Republicans and have no native word for such an idea" with all the flourish of a saloon-bar bully seeking to crush an opponent with his pet knock-down argument. Its absurdity was patent: there were many concepts in the modern world that could not be traced to the distant past. Lloyd George was hardly likely to advise the Welsh that they were unfit to practise democracy or prize human rights simply because the terminology was absent from bardic literature. Worse still, he utterly misread the conceptualisation of Ireland generated by the cultural revival of recent decades. Not only did enthusiasts subscribe to the idea of an "old tradition of nationhood" that was invoked by the opening words of the 1916 Proclamation, but they also saw "the old Gaelic polity" as "the land of a true democracy" where kings were elected and every chieftain's court was "a gay and free democracy of hearers and critics". The nostalgia for this lost world conjured by historians like Alice Stopford Green influenced James Connolly, who appealed to "Gaelic ideas of equality and democracy". That idyllic Irish world had been able to absorb the Normans because the people spoke their own Gaelic tongue in those days, but the country was "undone" by the invasion of the English and the permeation of their language. Hence the recreation of an Irish-speaking Ireland would of itself revive the benign traditions of the lost Gaelic world.[56] (In his 1937 Constitution, de Valera would tap into this sense of tradition, replacing the British-inspired 'Príomh Aire' with the Gaelic term for chieftain, 'Taoiseach'. It has lasted longer than the contemporary continental coinages, Duce and Fuehrer.) In any case, Lloyd George misdirected his pre-prepared punchline: far from admitting that there was no Irish word for 'republic', de Valera had explained that there were in fact two. Nor did he translate "Saorstát" as "Free State", for the simple reason that spoken English does not convey capital letters. He was simply conveying the literal meaning of the two syllables, a point underlined by his comment in the Dáil debates that he would have chosen "the Free State of Ireland", a selection that embodied the difference between a truncated remnant and a polity that claimed sovereignty over the whole island.[57]
It was Lloyd George who needed some appropriate style or handle to describe the hybrid solution of 'Dominion Home Rule' that was on offer to the Irish. The concept – if it may be dignified with so formal a term – was an oxymoron, the forcible yoking-together of two distinct levels of self-government in a combination that defied accepted categorisation. This was made clear in the Treaty, which asserted that "the position of the Irish Free State in relation to the Imperial Parliament and Government and otherwise shall be that of the Dominion of Canada", a declaration that was, however, "[s]ubject to the provisions hereinafter set out".[58] Canada had been styled a Dominion in 1867 after the British government vetoed the colonial preference for 'Kingdom' as likely to offend the United States. New Zealand had been accorded the same status in 1907, but the 'Canada-minus' provisions of the Treaty ruled out a Dominion of Ireland, a title that would certainly have rung alarm bells in Belfast. Of Britain's other overseas dependencies, Australia was a Commonwealth, a term with Cromwellian overtones that could hardly be forced upon Ireland, while South Africa was a Union, a designation that obviously did not apply to an island that had just been partitioned. Thus it was the British who sought to coin a term that might encapsulate the awkward novelty of the constitutional settlement that they wished to impose in Ireland while conveying a spurious air of imperial precedent. Unfortunately, Irish history offered no help: the country had been styled a Lordship from 1170 until 1540, when it became a Kingdom until its absorption by Britain 1801: neither term was calculated to provide an escape route for republicans.
In playing their dictionary game with "Saorstát", Lloyd George and his associates almost certainly overestimated its impact upon their Irish sparring partners. First, we may note that 'Orange' is not a word that excites instinctive warmth in the nationalist mentality.[59] Nor was the Orange Free State an encouraging model for future Irish-British relations. As Smuts tried to point, a weak republic subject to undefined British suzerainty was a formula for misunderstanding and conflict. Arguably, left to itself, the Vrijstaat might have managed to maintain harmonious relations with the Empire – in 1882, its President had even accepted a knighthood – but it was drawn into conflict by its loyalty to the stronger and more aggressive Transvaal. Arthur Griffith, who had briefly lived in South Africa between 1897 and 1899, would no doubt have pointed out that the Free State label had not prevented the British from annexing the mini-polity in 1900 and downgrading it to the Orange River Colony. Erskine Childers certainly made that point in his 1911 book, The Framework of Home Rule, in which he added that the provinces of the recently merged Union of South Africa were "little more than municipalities".[60] There had been another example of the term on the map of Africa: the Congo Free State was a theoretically sovereign entity and the personal property of Leopold II, king of the Belgians. During its mercifully brief existence, from 1885 to 1908, it subjected the Congolese population to unspeakable atrocities in pursuit of the production and export of rubber. These outrages were memorably exposed by Roger Casement, who estimated that three million Africans had been killed. Irish republicans had no reason to warm to the concept of a Free State.
Nonetheless, the great Australian scholar Sir Keith Hancock turned the linguistic argument into a pleasant fairy tale. "It might have been expected that the more extreme conception of nationality would be allied with the more uncompromising theory of politics," he commented. However, "the Gaelic aspirations which determined the language of the original declaration of independence, played the republicans false." Like Lloyd George, he insisted that there had been "no theoretical conception of a republic" in ancient Irish civilisation. "The original thought of the [Dáil] declaration of independence is republican, and the word republic appears in the English and French versions of it. But the original version in Irish uses the words Saorstat Eireann. These words passed, nearly three years later, into the Irish Treaty, where they were retranslated with literal accuracy, as Irish Free State."[61] Those illogical people, the Irish, were the prisoners of the history that they sought to defy. By what Hancock mysteriously called "a curious though natural [italics added] chance" – and fortunately for the misguided revolutionaries of Sinn Féin – providential etymology guided them to the happy ending of Commonwealth membership. It was a strange fantasy.
1921 and all that Article One of the Treaty, signed in the early hours of 6 December 1921, comprises one very long sentence. It begins by conferring upon a country called Ireland "the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire" as Canada, Australia, South Africa and New Zealand, but somehow it closes by transmuting that country into an entity "styled and known as the Irish Free State". The point had been settled almost two weeks earlier, during a tense meeting in London with the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead on 24 November, when Arthur Griffith had suggested that the British might wish to render "Saorstat Eireann" as "Free State". "We shall not quarrel with your translation." Birkenhead replied: "The title, Free State, can go into the Treaty." Pakenham believed that Griffith, like de Valera, would have preferred "Free State of Ireland". Nonetheless, he regarded it as a "fragment of dialogue ... destined to make history". Tim Pat Coogan similarly described it as a "momentous agreement on nomenclature".[62] The chronology makes it possible to emphasise two points. First, conjuring away the name of the republic did not resolve major outstanding issues between the two sides, notably those surrounding Ireland's relationship with the Crown. Second, the delegates crossed and re-crossed the Irish Sea in the fortnight following the Griffith-Birkenhead talks, and terms and options of a possible agreement were subject to intense discussion with their colleagues in Dublin. The Sinn Féin leadership knew of the translation of (or equivalent to) "Saorstát Éireann" which the British proposed to include in any formal document. Griffith brought the British draft of an agreement to the cabinet meeting of 3 December, where the minutes show that de Valera specifically quoted the reference to the Irish Free State, incorporating it apparently without objection to his own proposal for an Oath.[63] Although there were alarming signs of an emerging split within the Sinn Féin leadership, it seems that nobody chose to dig in on the question of nomenclature.
The Cork TD Liam de Róiste was in his home city on 6 December as news spread that an agreement had been reached. A Gaelic League enthusiast, he noted that: "The name 'Free State' comes in a curious way. Our best authorities – I think it was chiefly Piaras Beasley – translated 'Republic' by 'Saor Stát', not liking 'Poblacht'. Now the Irish 'Saor Stát' has been rendered into English by 'Free State' to the satisfaction apparently of both sets of plenipotentiaries."[64] Arthur Griffith took a similar line, reminding the Dáil on 19 December that the delegates had fought for the recognition of the republic: "We have come back from London with that Treaty – Saorstat na hEireann recognised – the Free State of Ireland."[65] Overall, however, it is striking how little reference was made to nomenclature in the protracted and wide-ranging Treaty debates. Early in the proceedings, the Dáil endured "a three-hour tirade"[66] from Mary MacSwiney, an inflexible opponent of compromise embittered by the death on hunger strike the previous year of her brother, the Lord Mayor of Cork, Terence MacSwiney. She seemed to trace the origin of what she perceived as submission to British trickery to the "dropping Pádraig Pearse and the Poblacht na hÉireann and putting in its place Saorstát na hÉireann", but it was not always easy to follow her line of argument.[67] (Notably, despite the increasingly toxic atmosphere of mutual distrust, nobody in the Dáil debates alleged that "Saorstát" had been substituted for "Poblacht" in 1919 as a treacherous step towards abandoning the republic.) In what may have been an implied riposte to Miss MacSwiney, W.T. Cosgrave defended the term "Irish Free State". "I believe we are responsible for the name ourselves, but now that the English Government has agreed to give it to us we don't like it. 'Saorstát na hEireann', a title and term honoured in July, now is a term of reproach. It is an extraordinary thing."[68]
Liam de Róiste offered a logical but unfortunately impractical way out of the tangle over terminology. All would be well if Irish people would only live and think in their own language: "now we can get away from the obscurity and confusion of the English tongue. Away with your Dominion and your colony and your Free State terms. Let us re-baptise our nation … as Saorstát na hEireann." (Like de Valera, de Róiste evidently leaned to a 'Free State of Ireland' translation.) The Treaty would give "immediate, full, complete, undisturbed control of the educational systems of the land". This would enable them to "save the language; with the language and all it connotes you can save the soul and mind and intellect of the nation", thereby creating a fortress and a frontier "so impregnable that not all the shock troops of England or of all the Empires can break it down". He dismissed the charge that his acceptance of the Free State violated his previous pledge to uphold the Republic. "I took an oath to Saorstát na hEireann, not to your Dominion, Republic, or form of Home Rule; and by the oath to Saorstát na hEireann I stand now."[69]
As Mary Macardle's embittered allusion indicates, there were signs that the anti-Treaty side was switching back to the vocabulary of 1916. By the beginning of January 1922, Erskine Childers was producing a once- or twice-weekly propaganda sheet, The Republic of Ireland, using An Phoblacht na h-Éireann as its Irish title.[70] Following his defeat in the debate on the Treaty, de Valera began to organise a Republican Party: in March 1922, it was formally constituted as Cumann na Poblachta, with Mary MacSwiney as one of its three Vice-Presidents.[71] The pro-Treaty side similarly weaponised the rival term. In late February 1922, An Saorstat was launched as a propaganda weapon for the upcoming election, with a signed leading article by Arthur Griffith. "What the people of Ireland have sought for generations – Saorstat Eireann (Ireland a Free State) – is reborn. ... In 1918 you gave your representatives the mandate to secure Independence for Ireland." However, unlike de Róiste, who had sought to elide the terminology, Griffith was prepared to step back from the outright republican concept – which, of course, he had never whole-heartedly endorsed. "The word Republic was used to describe our political objective, not because there was any special preference for that form of government but because it seemed that word best emphasised the completeness of the Independence we desired."[72] This was remarkably close to the formula that de Valera had used on being elected President of Sinn Féin in 1917, that "the only banner under which our freedom can be won at the present time is the Republican banner". But that utterance had preceded the 1919 substitution of "Poblacht" for "Saorstát". On 28 June 1922, as Free State forces moved against the Four Courts, the insurgents began to issue news bulletins. Their text was in English, but they were unambiguously headed POBLACHT NA h-EIREANN.[73] In the symbolism of slogans, 1916 was now confronting 1921.
The 1916 description of the Republic and the title of the Army were the only phrases in Irish used in the bulletins of the anti-Treaty forces.
The masthead of pro-Treaty propaganda sheet, An Saorstát, encouraged the shift in translation from 'republic' to 'Free State'.
There were signs, too, not merely that the vocabulary was becoming polarised, but that the predominantly Anglophone people of Ireland would come to regard 'Saorstát Éireann' as the translation from the English, rather than the other way round.[74] The Free State adopted a bicameral legislature, partly to provide the Southern Unionist minority with a token voice. The former Lord Chancellor of Ireland, Lord Glenavy, accepted the presidency of the Senate but "showed his contempt for the new order by mispronouncing Saorstát Éireann as 'Sour state I ran'."[75] The international press occasionally referred to the new polity as "the Saorstat", but the term does not seem to have struck deep roots inside Ireland or beyond. The 1927 edition of Dinneen, the authoritative Irish-English dictionary, sealed the transition.'Saorstát', it explained, meant "the Free State (applied to the 26 southern and western counties of Ireland, originally used to translate 'republic' and now applicable to any autonomous colony or 'dominion' of the British Empire". Meanwhile, by the mid-twenties, An Phoblacht had become the mouthpiece of the Irish Republican Army. When, in 1936, de Valera decided to tackle the interconnected issues of nomenclature and status, he needed to tread carefully.
Postscripts: 1932-1949 Before discussing the constitutional reform episodes of 1936-7 and 1948-9, it is worth noting that modern government tends to be evolutionary. The process of change in administrative practices and institutional relationships often takes place gradually and almost imperceptibly, which means that there is potential for misunderstanding in studying specific issues through large jumps in time – especially if the kangaroo approach leaps over some major systemic redefinition. In regard to recent Irish history, this difficulty is exacerbated by the brooding dominance of Eamon de Valera over the half-century that began in 1916. It seems fair to conclude that, in the hazy public perception of Ireland's past, the decade 1922-32, in which he was out of power, tends to be eclipsed altogether. This is partly because the mundane tasks of setting the foundations of government and restoring stability make less impact upon the collective memory than the more dramatic narrative that focuses on the story of de Valera's tortuous return to office. It is also undoubtedly the product of a continuing wish to forget the Civil War as a shameful episode in Ireland's history – however much those centrally involved in the conflict (and their families) sought to keep the antagonisms alive.[76] Throughout the nineteen-twenties, Free State ministers probed the limits of association with the Commonwealth, seeing membership as the vehicle through which they might pursue the strategy of Michael Collins, who had seen the Treaty conferring "not the ultimate freedom that all nations desire and develop to, but the freedom to achieve it". This objective was dramatically accelerated by the 1931 Statute of Westminster, in which the British parliament disclaimed any future intention to impose legislation upon the Dominions, thereby making them – at least potentially – fully sovereign States. How far Ireland was responsible for this process is open to debate. However, the key point is that a recognition of independence that would probably still have been resisted in the narrow context of British-Irish relations was conceded in the broader Commonwealth framework.[77] Thus subsequent governments in Dublin, whatever their political complexion, faced no legal or constitutional barriers in removing specific irritants, whether of process or of nomenclature, should they seek so to do.[78] The only constraints limiting such tinkering were political: would the theoretical or psychological gain outweigh the nuisance of annoying the British by probing old wounds?
Shortly after the passage of the Statute of Westminster, in 1932, de Valera returned to office at the head of a minority government, increasing his grip on power through a snap election early in the following year. One of the priorities was to maintain a truce between his Fianna Fáil party and the Irish Republican Army. If, in the memorable phrase of Seán Lemass, Fianna Fáil was a slightly constitutional party, then the IRA was at most a marginally legal organisation: it was not formally banned but many of its activities were regarded as a threat to the State whose legitimacy it refused to recognise. Ostensibly regarding IRA supporters as "misguided patriots", de Valera aimed to undermine their position and erode their strength by targeting and removing the most resented symbols of the Treaty settlement. Unluckily, this balanced strategy became untenable in the face of a paramilitary movement which was both inherently committed to violence and unable to exercise control over its operatives in the localities. Several gruesome incidents constituted an unacceptable challenge to democratic government: An Phoblacht was suppressed in 1935. The IRA itself banned the following year, and two of its leading figures imprisoned.[79]
The break with the IRA came at an awkward moment, since de Valera was planning to round off his campaign to unpick the Treaty, first, by side-lining the role of the king in the State's external relations and, second, by the adoption of a new Constitution which would unambiguously recognise the sovereignty of the people of Ireland. This involved the drafting of documents which inevitably compelled selection among various controversial concepts in both English and Irish. In June 1936, de Valera had informed the British government that he intended to introduce structural changes in the relationship between the two countries, which would include the replacement of the Governor-General by an elected President. But the first legislative steps were precipitated by the Abdication of Edward VIII six months later. Some recognition of the accession of George VI was required in Dublin, if only to prevent the twice-divorced Mrs Simpson from becoming Queen of Ireland. While de Valera would have preferred to ignore the royal soap opera, the British need for an illusion of Commonwealth unity provided an opportunity to remove the Crown from the internal affairs of the Irish Free State and reduce the monarch's external role to a formality.[80] Using a royal scandal to take a wrecking ball to the Treaty settlement was a clever exercise in opportunism, but it was awkward in that the changes once again raised issues of nomenclature and terminology just six months after the breach with the IRA.
De Valera had commissioned an outline draft of a new constitution as early as May 1935, and work on what would become the External Relations Act passed during the Abdication was also well advanced by August 1936. His primary aim was to exorcise all allusions to 'Saorstat Éireann', which (so his admiring biographers asserted) had acquired "a connotation completely unacceptable to Republicans". But this raised the question of an alternative name. An early draft of the External Relations legislation had adopted "Poblacht na h-Éireann", but de Valera drew back from its use. There was something unctuous about his claim that the removal of objectionable symbols like the Oath helped draw a line under the trauma of the 1922-3 Civil War: to his opponents, his policy seemed more like rewriting the story of the Treaty debates. However, he appreciated that there were limits in the angry vocabulary of Irish nationality beyond which it made no sense to advance. The new Constitution was intended to unite and "Poblacht na h-Éireann" would be divisive. Specifically, it would be "a direct challenge to Britain". Since 1933, the two countries had been engaged in trade disputes that were grandiloquently described as the "Economic War". Relations had thawed slightly in 1935 with the Coal-Cattle pact, the product of a need to shore up the wounded mining industry on one side of the Irish Sea and recognise the dependence upon agricultural exports on the other. The humiliating downfall of Edward VIII had left the British elite particularly sensitive to symbolic issues surrounding monarchy. Annoying them at that moment by reviving the claim to a republic would have had innate attractions, but not at the price of destroying the livelihood of the country's farmers. Characteristically, de Valera adopted an ethereally nationalist explanation to excuse his retreat. "Poblacht na h-Éireann" had a sacred aura which made it incompatible with the tacit acceptance of Partition. It would be reserved to be proclaimed when the Ireland was eventually reunited.[81] Northern Unionists, already utterly opposed to merging their fortunes with the Twenty-Six County State, were hardly likely to be encouraged to subordinate themselves to a Gaelic republic. Thus the formula combined the reassertion of republican purity with the conveniently indefinite postponement of the issue of unification.[82] The result was a polity mocked by opponents as a "dictionary republic", an entity that conformed to every definition the lexicographers could describe, but stopped short of laying claim to the name itself.[83]
De Valera filled the vacuum in nomenclature by declaring that "[t]he name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland". (He would have preferred to use 'Éire' in English too.) For good measure, Éire / Ireland was described as "a sovereign, independent, democratic state" – a phrase which those fluent in the first official language might have been moved to translate as 'saorstát'. "Éire" was intended to convey to the world a poetic claim to sovereignty over the whole island along with a practical acknowledgement that its authority was restricted to the twenty-six counties. Unfortunately, as with so many of de Valera's carefully crafted structures, the balance proved too subtle for outsiders to perceive. John A. Costello, his successor as Taoiseach, blamed "misuse by malicious people" (i.e. the British) for identifying Éire "with the Twenty-Six Counties and not with the State that was set up under this Constitution of 1937".[84] In fact, there were two largely innocent reasons why the English-speaking world overseas adapted and adopted the name. The first was that journalists and sub-editors found it a conveniently short word to tuck into headlines. The second was that the educated classes in Britain, motivated not by malice but imbued with a vague sense of goodwill, thought it polite to refer to the government in Dublin by the name that it had itself chosen.
The External Relations Act contained another booby-trap. De Valera displayed considerable political skill in taking advantage of the Abdication crisis to drive the legislation through at a time when the British were on the defensive. But protocol required that any formal alteration of the designation of a State required acceptance by other countries with which it exchanged diplomats. Even without the complication that some countries, notably the United Kingdom, might raise objections, as Australia was to do over the accreditation of a minister to Dublin in 1953, the timetable of the truncated Abdication crisis simply did not permit stately diplomatic minuets.[85]
De Valera's solution was ingenious – perhaps too much so. George VI would continue to validate – in effect, formally to countersign – the appointment of Irish envoys overseas, so that governments receiving them could continue to accept the royal accreditation of Free State times. The device broke down in 1940 when the Irish government sought to upgrade its representation in Berlin from chargé d'affaires to minister. The British naturally objected to "asking the King to sign credentials addressed to Herr Hitler", and it is likely that George VI would have refused to act even if constitutionally so advised by both governments. No doubt happy to add to his litany of grievances, de Valera did not press the matter.[86] This episode does not seem to have become public knowledge, but one of Fianna Fáil's most consistent critics, James Dillon, later made much of his "sense of humiliation" that the Irish Ambassador to the Vatican had to present "letters of credence addressed to the Holy Father by His Majesty King George VI".[87]
The postwar world provided a more likely environment for the elimination of these status anomalies. Ireland's neutrality underlined the need to redefine – or terminate – the relationship with the Commonwealth, although the country's principal opposition party, Fine Gael, was a champion of continued membership. With Britain engaged in a no-option withdrawal from India, Imperial symbols were no longer such rigid totems. Moreover, since the Irish Catholics in Great Britain overwhelmingly voted Labour, the Attlee government was hardly likely to reclassify them as foreigners. However, all of these issues pointed to decisions not simply about the relatively straightforward naming of the State in English as the Republic of Ireland, but also to its implications in regard to the claim to the 'national territory', and to the potentially divisive question of its translation into Irish.
The story of the 1948 Republic of Ireland Act has been often told.[88] The general election of that year was followed by the formation of a highly unlikely Interparty government, which brought together – inter alios – the pro-Treaty Fine Gael with a new protest movement, Clann na Poblachta. The Clann was founded and led by prominent members of the Irish Republican Army, determined to take revenge on de Valera for suppression of their activities.[89] However, it broadened its appeal with the slogan "We don't care what colour shirt you wore" and drew into politics idealistic younger people who hoped for a new beginning in Ireland. In a totally unheralded announcement, made with some lack of tact during a visit to Ottawa in September 1948, the new Taoiseach, John A. Costello, revealed that Ireland would formally become a republic, a move that would end its links with the Commonwealth. A Fine Gael lawyer, Costello was a strong critic of the convolutions of the de Valera's 1936-7 settlement, but his initiative startled many in his own party.[90] Costello's motivation was no doubt sincere, but his timing and tactics suggest an intention to outmanoeuvre Seán MacBride, the leader of Clann na Poblachta, whose party might have claimed titular ownership of any move towards the assertion of a republic.[91] Although MacBride held the External Relations portfolio, it was Costello who introduced "the flamboyantly-styled Republic of Ireland Bill"[92] into the Dáil. The legislation was to come into force on Easter Monday 1949, a symbolic date one-third of a century after Pádraig Pearse had read the original Proclamation outside the General Post Office. Yet Costello did not make the obvious point that the State would return to the Irish-language name that had headed that document.[93] He could hardly have regarded the translation as unimportant. Perhaps he preferred to avoid using a term that Fine Gael loyalists would still have associated with their Civil War foes. In many ways, the Bill seems curiously drafted. Section 2 stated: "It is hereby declared that the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland."[94] In no way did this change Article 4 of the Constitution, "The name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland", which remains in force to this day.[95] Costello sought to conjure the problem away: "this section does not purport, as it could not, to repeal the Constitution. There is the name of the State and there is the description of the State. The name of the State is Ireland and the description of the State is the Republic of Ireland." Challenged by James Dillon in 1945 to specify whether the State was a republic or not, de Valera had delivered a memorably Delphic reply: "The state possessed every characteristic mark by which a Republic can be distinguished or recognised."[96] It is difficult to see that Costello's legislation took the process of clarification much further. (Characteristically, de Valera announced that the declaratory nature of the legislation proved that he had been right all along.[97]) The Taoiseach insisted that "those malicious newspapers who want to refer in derogatory tones to this country as 'Éire' and who have coined these contemptuous adjectives about it, such as 'Eireannish' and 'Eirish', and all the rest of it, will have to conform to the legal direction here in this Bill." However, the Bill was purely declaratory, notably omitting any penalties for those who mis-spoke in their allusions to the Irish State.[98] Nor did it lay claim to extra-territorial jurisdiction: there was nothing to prevent Fleet Street and Westminster from continuing to use the snappily poetic four-letter term that had wormed its way into British political discourse.[99]
Given the continuing emotional pull of the events of 1916, there was remarkably little allusion in the Oireachtas debates to the Irish translation of the key phrase. Fianna Fáil deputies displayed some residual concern that the formal endorsement of republican terminology within the existing jurisdiction would amount to an implicit acceptance of Partition. Vivion de Valera, son of the party leader, expressed a hope that "the usage of the words 'Republic of Ireland' or 'Poblacht na hEireann' will not degenerate into merely a description of the Twenty-Six Counties as a republic". Realistically, there was no formula that could prevent a geographical definition from ousting a theoretical concept. Major de Valera reminded the Dáil that the reuniting of the thirty-two counties remained "the ultimate step which is all that is necessary to give us Poblacht na hÉireann in all its glory and in all its reality. It is a big step, but that one step is all that remains."[100] Some suggested following the precedent of the 1937 Constitution and referring to the Irish-language name in the English version of the Act, with talk of an amendment to Section 2 so that it would read "the description of the State shall be, in the Irish language, 'Poblacht na hÉireann' and, in the English language, ‘The Republic of Ireland'." Eamon de Valera confessed to a sneaking sympathy for the idea, since it would encourage the adoption of "the use of the name Poblacht na hÉireann into ordinary speech", just as 'Taoiseach' and 'Dáil Éireann' had been incorporated into English.[101] However, the government ruled out mixing the two languages. "We felt that if that were done we would slip into all sorts of trouble and that the country would be described by all sorts of queer names," MacBride explained.[102] The thought of the British press and politicians casually referring to 'the Poblacht' was enough to squash talk of a formal amendment. Perhaps the final word on the whole episode may be granted to the man whose flickering wraith was finally exorcised from Ireland's constitution. A few weeks after the Republic came into operation, George VI met Seán MacBride at a diplomatic gathering in London. With barbed cheerfulness, he enquired whether the legislation made him "an undesirable alien" in the land where he had so recently, if only notionally, been king.[103]
During the passage of the legislation, Senator Helena Concannon, a History professor from Galway, observed that "it would give great hope to people all over the world if there was an issue of stamps with 'Poblacht na hEireann' printed on them".[104] In 1922 – fifteen years before de Valera's constitution – the Free State had begun to issue its own postage stamps, emblazoned with the simple identifier, 'Éire': it was this gesture, probably more than any other, that persuaded so many outsiders that this was the name the Irish people had chosen for their State. Senator Concannon's suggestion found favour and, in April 1949, a commemorative stamp hailed the new era. Rectangular and designed in 'landscape' format, it provided plenty of space to balance "Poblacht na hÉireann" and "Republic of Ireland" around its margins. (This was, incidentally, the first time that the English language had been used on an Irish stamp.) The stamp showed Leinster House, home of the Oireachtas, flanked by the coats of arms of the four historic provinces. This use of the provincial shields was, of course, a subtle way of projecting an all-Ireland message, and the appearance on a Southern stamp of the Red Hand of Ulster, usually a symbol of Unionist defiance, was provocative. The fact, too, that the issue was limited to higher denominations (twopence-halfpenny and threepence) also underlined the point that it was primarily directed at overseas opinion. The disadvantages of Ireland's six-word official formula became apparent later that year, with the issue of a small 'portrait'-shaped penny stamp commemorating the centenary of the death of a minor bard called J.C. Mangan. The designer squeezed the official names along the top and bottom, the shorter sides, making the whole concoction an untidy muddle. In 1950, a larger 'portrait' stamp appeared to mark the Holy Year, which featured a statue of St Peter, with the papal coat of arms and the inscription "Annus Sanctus MCML". The stamp bore the legend "Poblacht na hÉireann", but the English equivalent was omitted, making it the philatelic apotheosis of an Ireland that was Catholic, Gaelic and republican. It was not repeated.
Presumably it was de Valera, on his return to office in 1951, who decreed that 'Poblacht na hÉireann' was a sacred phrase to be reserved for the ending of Partition. In one of the ironies that pepper the pages of Irish history, his Minister for Posts and Telegraphs was Erskine Childers, son of the propagandist executed during the Civil War who had weaponised 'An Phoblacht' as a rallying cry against the Free State in the name of his anti-Treaty news-sheet. In November 1952, his department issued a commemorative stamp honouring the poet Thomas Moore, once again identifying the country simply as 'Eire'. (By what can only have been an embarrassing blunder, the fada was omitted from the capital letter.)[105] An articulate Fine Gael TD, Gerard Sweetman, challenged Childers to explain why the government had "approved of a stamp the superscription of which is in English and which describes this country as 'Eire'?" Childers pleaded "general custom. If the name of the country and the denomination of the country is in English, the term 'Eire' can be used". This, of course, was totally at variance with the specific provision of the Constitution, "Éire" in Irish, "Ireland" in English, and Sweetman was scornful in his dismissal of the plea.[106] But nobody rose in Leinster House to protest at the eclipse of the hallowed formula of 1916.
Tailpiece In September 1953, the niceties of Irish constitutional terminology were discussed in an article published in an Australian newspaper, the West Australian of Perth. The author was a young Dublin business executive called Garret FitzGerald, who would later enter politics and rise to become an unusually statesmanlike Taoiseach. From the late nineteen-forties, he supplemented his salary as a planner with the country's national airline, Aer Lingus, by writing lively articles for the overseas press, mostly but not exclusively about contemporary Ireland.[107] His opinions were of interest for two reasons. First, he had been a critic of the decision to declare a republic and hence break with the Commonwealth. Second, he was the son of Desmond FitzGerald, who had led the First Dáil's publicity machine between 1919 and 1921 and presided over the election sheet An Saorstát before serving for five years as the Free State's External Affairs minister.[108] Hence, from an early age, Garret FitzGerald imbibed the emotive vocabulary of a divided national movement, the more so as his parents disagreed over the Treaty. (His own birth in 1926 was proof that they managed to accommodate their differences.) His contribution to the West Australian was also of interest in being written specifically for Australian readers on the occasion of a rare blip in the normally distant diplomatic engagement between the two countries. In 1953, the Australian government planned to appoint a minister to Dublin. The Irish government insisted that the envoy should be accredited to 'Ireland'. Concerned that the term implied sovereignty over the whole island, Whitehall persuaded Canberra to insist upon 'Republic of Ireland'. As Vivion de Valera had warned in 1948, the British were determined to interpret 'Republic of Ireland' as a designation limited to the twenty-six counties of the former Free State. The fundamental problem, of course, lay in the anomaly of giving the State one name in the Constitution and then redefining it as another by legislation. As FitzGerald scornfully pointed out, Dublin's hasty insistence "that 'Republic of Ireland' was not the name of the State, but only its description" involved a distinction redolent of Alice in Wonderland.[109]
It is hardly surprising that, in the confines of a newspaper article, Garret FitzGerald cut some corners in his exploration of terminology, but he certainly did not adopt a strictly chronological approach when he declared that "the complicated story of the names of Ireland does not begin in 1937, but in 1921…. When the first Constitution of the new Irish State was being drawn up in the months following the treaty, the question of its name loomed large." Since both his parents had been in action during Easter Week, it was curious that he relegated the earlier declaration of republic to an afterthought. The designation "Irish Free State" had been adopted as a compromise to meet the British refusal to countenance an Irish republic. "On the Irish side the phrase was welcomed by those who supported the treaty because it was the literal translation into English of one of the Irish words for republic – 'Saor Stat'." Any hint of inconsistency here was met by an explanation that was pure Lloyd George. "Naturally no native Irish word for republic existed, as the concept of a non-monarchical State was not introduced into Ireland – save momentarily by Cromwell – until the end of the 18th Century, when the American and French Revolutions provoked a wave of republicanism throughout the country." Unfortunately, despite its respectable South African pedigree, "[t]he extreme republicans were not mollified by this compromise, however; they had their own manufactured word for republic – 'poblacht' – and they looked on the words 'Free State' as an attempt to cover up what they considered to be the betrayal of their republic." The impression conveyed, no doubt inadvertently, was that critics of the Treaty had invented an alternative word in Irish to foment the Civil War. Armed conflict was followed by the convoluted process by which de Valera and his followers entered the Dáil and eventually won power by democratic means. "The outward forms of Commonwealth membership were disposed of in the years that followed", after which "the nation was offered a new Constitution, which was accepted without much enthusiasm. Anxious not to give Great Britain cause for public complaint, Mr De Valera so worded the Constitution that while an Irishman could read it as the basic law of a republic, an Englishman could find nothing in it inconsistent with Commonwealth membership." "Mr De Valera was no more anxious to declare Ireland a republic at that stage than his opponents had been 15 years earlier, and so he changed the name of the State to 'Eire, or in the English language, Ireland'," (a formula that FitzGerald seemed to find hugely amusing). The Fianna Fáil government attempted to resolve "ambiguity as between the island of Ireland and the area effectively governed by the Dublin Government … by adding an asterisk after 'Ireland' in the latter case, with a footnote 'excluding the six north-eastern counties'," a device that he dismissed as an "absurdity". The Interparty government "made a half-hearted effort to extricate the country from this cumbersome verbiage by changing the name to 'The Republic of Ireland'…. The new name was even used on postage stamps, but it had no sooner become current than a reversal of government policy occurred, apparently because it was felt that the British Government was attempting to evade the Southern Government's claims to Northern Ireland by using the new title to distinguish the Southern State from the island as a whole -- a subtlety quite lost on nearly everyone in Great Britain and the vast majority of the people of Ireland as well!"
Garret FitzGerald offered a sensible reflection on the current diplomatic logjam caused by "this unexpected intervention from the Antipodes, as if a cousin from overseas had intervened in a family quarrel". Suppose one of Australia's six states decided to secede: the population of the rest of the continent would probably see no reason to change the name of their Commonwealth – and they would certainly not welcome lectures on the subject from the other side of the world. FitzGerald's Irish riposte was perhaps more probingly appropriate than he knew, for Western Australia had made some half-hearted moves to go it alone twenty years earlier. It would be preferable if "all concerned could accept the proposition that each State should decide its own name, and that all should accept and honour these choices". FitzGerald's Australian readers might well have felt that they were none the wiser for his explanations. However, they were considerably better informed, and at least he had attempted to integrate the emotive Irish terms into his English narrative.
The fate of those key terms in more recent times may be briefly touched upon. In 1970, a new An Phoblacht was launched, this time closely associated with the Provisional Sinn Féin. Since then, it has passed through various incarnations and formats, in 2025 mainly operating online. It supported the Northern Ireland Peace Process and is regarded as being close to the Sinn Féin party. There can be little doubt that it has reinforced that association of 'Poblacht' with an advanced form of republicanism. By contrast, 'Saorstát' has vanished into the mists of textbook History. However, the more relaxed twenty-first century attitude towards the purity of the Irish language produced the hybrid 'Saorview' to describe the country's free-to-air television channels. Terminology and nomenclature are still capable of causing occasional misunderstandings. When President Mary McAleese broke new ground by becoming the first Irish head of State to visit Buckingham Palace in 2011, equerries were uncertain how she should be announced, and reportedly fell back on the hybrid 'President of Éire' (probably, since it was an oral formula, without the fada). Government agencies tend to use 'Rialtas na hÉireann' (which translates as 'Government of Ireland'), perhaps thereby avoiding the name adopted in 1948 that has become so grimly associated with the Troubles in the North.
Agenda and reflections To take this exploration forward would certainly require scrutiny of Irish-language sources, especially from the decade before the Treaty. It seems puzzling that the 1916 Proclamation should have used a word coined by a student just three years earlier.[110] The language movement had been active for over twenty years. The Gaelic League itself was politically neutral, but it is hard to believe that there had been no discussion of constitutional terminology among enthusiasts. Members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood were sympathetic to the idea of a Gaelic Ireland, but it is not clear how effective they were in expressing their aims through Irish.[111] Without some deeper investigation of the Irish-language background, it will probably remain impossible to know why Pearse selected "Poblacht na hÉireann" as the sole Gaelic phrase in the 1916 Proclamation. It is equally difficult to explain the substitution of 'Saorstát' in the January 1919 Declaration of Independence: if 'Poblacht' had been chosen at Easter 1916 as a rallying cry, why was it abandoned?
Under normal circumstances, the explanation that the change reflected precious academic concerns for linguistic accuracy would seem utterly inadequate. In any case, while there is evidence that Douglas Hyde objected to 'poblacht', Hyde was not involved in the establishment of the First Dáil. However, Piaras Béaslaí, a key organiser, may well have accepted his authority, and it is unlikely that so important a document as the Declaration of Independence would have been drafted without the word-for-word approval of Eoin MacNéill. But how did their personal preferences carry so much weight? While it is impossible to underestimate the landmark importance of the First Dáil, it is important to appreciate that it barely resembled a regular legislature, notably in its lack of support staff. Almost all the organisational work was undertaken by a small core of elected members, with the pressures upon them exacerbated by the problem that several key leaders of Sinn Féin were unavoidably absent, mostly because they had been imprisoned for their part in the Rising. Hence there was no parliamentary drafting process which might have scrutinised Irish-language vocabulary, no civil service machine that could have warned of the possible implications of terminology. Those Deputies who might, perhaps, have been faithful to the terminology for which they had fought in 1916 were mostly still in British prisons.
The relative absence of comment on key Irish-language terminology in Dáil debates between 1919 and 1948 is striking. From 1919 to 1922 and again in 1936-7, after de Valera had abolished the Free State Senate, the Dáil functioned as a unicameral legislature, which perhaps meant that pressure of business discouraged theoretical analysis. Yet the restoration of an upper house in the 1937 Constitution did not add much to the process of legislative reflection on the Republic of Ireland Bill: perhaps the sole useful point to emerge from the Seanad debate was the suggestion of a commemorative stamp issue. Perhaps the press provided an alternative forum for the discussion of Irish-language concepts of governance. Were there grumbling leading articles from small-town editors or didactic letters from school teachers engaged in the missionary endeavour of gaelicising Ireland?
The subject seems also to yield relatively little archival material that might throw light on the motives behind the choice of terminology. De Valera was skilled, too skilled, in using fogbanks of words to obfuscate his intentions, but others, such as Griffith and Costello, left little to guide the historian. I have gratefully used three diaries, those of Liam de Róiste, Thomas Jones and Mark Sturgis. Each was located close to the centre of events at crucial moments, and occasionally observed them with clarity and insight. Unfortunately, none of them could be described as a decision-maker.
Of the three key terms, Saorstát, Poblacht and Republic, the first changed its meaning and the other two their connotations between 1916 and 1949. There can be no doubt that 'Saorstát' was regarded as the Irish word for a republic between the beginning of 1919 and the close of 1921. Douglas Hyde endorsed it, de Valera embossed it on his official notepaper and the family of Kevin Barry embraced it in their grief for his sacrifice. While it was the conventional wisdom of Dublin Castle "that the Irish people when they voted Republican did not realise that it was a platform very hard to step down from",[112] Sinn Féin leaders, such as de Valera and MacNéill, hinted at Delphic formulae of compromise while maintaining republican language in English. The possibility that 'Saorstát' was adopted in order to permit a tactical retreat is worth considering, but may be firmly rejected. It was the British who sought to manipulate the word into a cover for their spatchcocked version of Dominion status. The Dáil debate on the Treaty was tense and sometimes bitter, but neither then nor during the later tragedy of the Civil War does it appear that anybody alleged that the term had been adopted as part of a treacherous plot to abandon the ideal of 1916. It would be of interest to know whether the attempt by Arthur Griffith and Liam de Róiste to present 'Saorstát' as a device to elide Republic and Free State was widely shared: certainly it is not clear that the two protagonists dug in very deeply on the argument. But de Róiste was a minor player and Griffith had only a few months to live. His intellectual heir, Kevin O'Higgins, was committed to the Dual Monarchy concept and took little interest in the Gaelic revival.[113] Rather, far from interpreting 'Free State' as the legitimate linguistic heir to its Irish-language forerunner, it was 'Saorstát' that came to be regarded as the translation. Within a few weeks in the winter of 1921-2, the term that had been unequivocally interpreted as the word for a republic became the symbol of a modified entity that was still entangled in outer orbit around a monarchy.
By contrast, Poblacht and Republic retained their essential meaning after 1922, but the connnotations of the two words moved in different directions. By the nineteen-thirties, 'Poblacht' had become firmly associated with paramilitary activity and also carried overtones of social radicalism. Hence in 1937, de Valera achieved his primary aim of exorcising the vocabulary of the Free State in both languages, but was obliged to invoke millennial allusions to the ending of Partition to explain why he stopped short of restoring the slogan of 1916. By contrast, 'Republic' moved up the ladder of respectability. After 1945, there was no longer any question but that every new or reconditioned State would have a President. Pádraig Pearse in Volunteer fatigues at the General Post Office was a challenging symbol of a Fenian State. Thirty years on, Sean T. O'Kelly in top hat and tails at the former Viceregal Lodge made the Republic of Ireland a far less threatening entity. Thus John A. Costello's task in 1948 was to emphasise the overdue dignity of categorising the State in republican terms without drawing undue attention to the only translation now available into Irish.
It seems appropriate to close this exploration by returning to the point made at the start, and underline the virtual absence of interest in the Irish-language terminology that sought to define the identity of the revolutionary State shown both by participants at the time and by historians who have subsequently analysed the challenging century since 1916. The dominance of the English language and British models even among republicans is striking. In modern Ireland, it would be easy to dismiss the use of borrowed terms in what de Valera once revealingly called "ordinary speech" as a tokenistic attempt to disguise the permeation of American culture, British television and London newspapers. Yet the enormous emotional impact of the five-word phrase elegantly voiced by Queen Elizabeth II in 2011 at the State Banquet in Dublin Castle could be seen as a reminder that an ancient nation remains embedded in the modern Anglophone society, in accordance with the precept laid down by Pádraig Pearse in 1910, that even if Ireland spoke English, it "must be permeated through and through by Irish culture, the repository of which is the Irish language".[114] Yet it cannot be denied that some of the Irish-language phrases popularly used in Irish-English are mundane, and one is delightfully vulgar.[115] By contrast, concepts descriptive of the nation itself – notably the two that are pursued in this study – have are either been forgotten or have acquired negative connotations. It is likely that 'Poblacht' and 'Saorstát' still have much to reveal about the unfolding of Irish independence between 1916 and 1922. Their subsequent fate may also have something to tell us about the shaping and the expression of national identity in the century that has followed.
ENDNOTES I am grateful for advice and support from Ann Barry, Andrew Jones and Patrick Maume.
[1] It is generally accepted that the text of the 1916 Proclamation was the work of Pádraig Pearse, with acknowledgement to the socialist ideas of James Connolly. R.D. Edwards, Patrick Pearse… (London, 1979 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1977), 279-81. However, this does not mean that the Irish superscription was a personal selection, since the document required the approval of the Military Council of the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The tradition that Thomas MacDonagh drafted the Proclamation is not mentioned by the Dictionary of Irish Biography. F.X. Martin, Leaders and Men of the Easter Rising… (London, 1967), 174; L.W. White, "MacDonagh, Thomas", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[2] D. Breathnach / M. Ní Mhurchú, " "Gógan, Liam Seosamh (1891–1979)": https://www.ainm.ie/Bio.aspx?ID=142& (translation). It is possible that Gógan had imbibed some Irish-language political terminology from his father, who was a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood: in the 1901 census, his parents, both Dubliners by birth, claimed to be bilingual. The local branch of Conradh na Gaeilge gave classes in the family home, and Gógan was taught Irish by Sinéad Ní Fhlannagáin, who later married another of her students, Eamon de Valera. However, the 1904 edition of Dinneen's Irish-English dictionary mentions the concept of 'republic' only in passing: 'cómhfhaitheacht' could be variously defined as 'a joint sovereignty, a commonwealth, a republic' and it, also meant (confusingly), 'aristocracy'. In the modernised form, Comhlathas, it is apparently used to refer to the [British] Commonwealth. I am advised that it may incorporate a core term based on 'flaitheas', meaning 'heaven'. The 1917 edition of O'Neill-Lane's dictionary also gave 'poiblidheacht' for 'republic'. Given the minefield of unpronounced consonants in Irish, this may be regarded as an acceptance of Gógan's invention, and perhaps suggests that the Proclamation had adopted a simplified version.
[3] 'Saorstát' also seems to have been a recent coinage. The 1904 edition of Dinneen's dictionary had an entry for 'stát' / 'stáit', baldly defined as 'a state, an estate'. 'Saor-stáid' meant 'free state' (note the lower case), but this referred to personal condition or status: the same entry cited 'stáid na ngrás' as 'state of grace'.
[4] There are, of course, exceptions, e.g. A. Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland: Dáil Éireann, 1919-22 (Dublin, 1995), 52.
[5] The 1916 Proclamation and the 1919 Declaration of Independence are in A. Mitchell and P. Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949 (Dublin, 1985), 17-18, 55-8. The Proclamation was printed under clandestine conditions, and the heading appeared in capital letters and without an accent: POBLACHT NA H EIREANN. I understand that the pronunciation of 'stát' is close to that of the Hertfordshire river, 'Stort', but Irish vowel sounds are rarely identical with apparent English counterparts. The second syllable of 'Poblacht' is redolent of the Scots word 'loch'. Confusingly (to a non-Irish speaker), 'na hÉireann' is the possessive form [genitive] of the noun ('of Ireland'), while 'Éireann' is an adjective ('Irish'). In 1916, the first version was adopted; in 1919, the second. This came to have perceived implications for Partition, since a republic 'of Ireland' could be interpreted as claiming the whole island, while an 'Irish' state might be confined to one part of it.
[6] My thanks, as always, to Ann Barry for translation and explanation of Irish terms.
[7] In his biography, De Valera… (London, 1993), Tim Pat Coogan used 'Saorstat v. Phoblacht' as the title for a chapter which briefly mentioned the exchange with Lloyd George, discussed below. I am informed that the 'Ph-' spelling is disputable, since aspiration follows the use of the direct article, 'An'.
[8] Earl of Longford and T.P. O'Neill, Eamon de Valera (Boston, 1971 ed., cf. 1st ed., 1970, and Irish-language version 1968-70), 135; F. Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal… (Cork, 1949 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1935), 82-3. I simply point out here that accounts published from the British side generally omit the fada (acute accent) used in Irish. I have not noted individual examples since their origin is usually clear from the text.
[9] D. O'Donovan, Kevin Barry and his Time (Sandycove, Dublin 1989), 192.
[10] Hyde's commitment to Irish derived from his enthusiasm for the vernacular speech of County Roscommon. Myles Dillon claimed that he was deficient in scholarly and scientific vocabulary: the Gaelic revival world was not always a friendly place. J.W. and D.E. Dunleavy, Douglas Hyde… (Berkeley, 1991), 358-9.
[11] P. Maume, "Béaslaí, Piaras", Dictionary of Irish Biography. If 'Poblacht' is regarded as a more democratic term than 'Saorstát', then it might seem to have been more characteristic of Munster, where the revolutionary ideas of the United Irishmen penetrated deeply in 1798. Connacht, on the other hand, was relatively untouched by echoes of the French Revolution. However, this can only be a speculation. The rapid retreat of Gaelic culture in the 19th century and the fact that most historians write in English have combined to obscure the possibility that political ideas were debated among ordinary people in the Irish language. In studying 1798, Tom Dunne challenged the standard assumption "that the rebels in Wexford were English-speaking": most, indeed, knew English, especially in the towns, but many preferred to speak Irish. Hence, far from being a "barrier", the Irish language may have been "a vehicle of politicization" that is now difficult to trace. Fleeting evidence from poetry and ballads suggests that the political vision of 1798 was limited to a hazily syncretist Jacobite / Jacobin amalgam which saw French intervention as the key to restoring a golden past. But republican ideas were still a novelty in the 1790s even among the Anglophone United Irishmen, and it seems impossible to assess how far they may subsequently have penetrated Irish-language discourse during the 19th century. (Awareness of the United States, the major focus for post-Famine emigration, would have encouraged familiarity with the idea of a country headed by a President.) Of course, there is plenty of evidence of Irish people who were ashamed of the language and saw it as a barrier to progress, but that evidence also implicitly tells us that Irish did survive, even if it was in decline. As the language of a deeply Catholic people, it presumably conveyed sophisticated theological concepts (which probably became more widely understood throughout the 19th century as superstitious practices were rooted out). It is hard to see how any language could be entirely devoid of a conceptual vocabulary, and we may be missing something if we assume that Gaelic discourse was confined to potatoes and pookas. T. Dunne, Rebellions... (Dublin, 2004), 135-6, 155, 158, 245-6.
[12] P. Béaslaí, Michael Collins and the Making of a New Ireland (2 vols, Dublin, 1922), i, 258.
[13] M. Tierney (ed. F.X. Martin), Eoin MacNéill, Scholar and Man of Action, 1867-1945 (Oxford, 1980), 276. See also P. Maume and T. Charles-Edwards, "MacNéill, Eoin (John)", Dictionary of Irish Biography. To complicate the confusion, it has also been claimed that Liam Gógan, credited with the invention of 'poblacht', subsequently advised its substitution by 'saorstát'. Mitchell, Revolutionary Government in Ireland, 355
[14] Douglas Hyde had retreated into academic life, and does not seem to have been consulted about the use of Irish terminology in 1919.
[15] In her December 1921 Dáil speech denouncing the Treaty, Mary MacSwiney mysteriously attributed the change to "a good Irish solicitor", in what seems to have been a sarcastic allusion. It fitted neither MacNéill nor Béaslaí. Kevin O'Higgins combined Dáil membership with the study of Law at UCD in 1919, but he was not a senior figure and had little interest in Irish. J.P. McCarthy, "O'Higgins, Kevin Christopher", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[16] The claim of an "overwhelming majority" was valid in terms of seats, with Sinn Féin winning 73 out of 105, including a near clean-sweep in the future 26 counties. Its share of the all-Ireland popular vote was 47%, but 25 of its candidates were unopposed. The 25% Unionist vote was, of course, mainly concentrated in the North and – despite the attempt to summon Carson to the First Dáil – could be ignored, but the fact that the discredited Irish Parliamentary Party polled 22% indicated that there was still a moderate Nationalist constituency which needed to be managed.
[17] St J. Ervine, Craigavon: Ulsterman (London, 1949), 500; P.S. O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin … (Dublin, 1924), 135. O'Hegarty had completed his book by December 1924, before MacNéill's reputation was overwhelmed by criticism of his role in the Boundary Commission.
[18] Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 17-18, 57-8.
[19] Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 59.
[20] J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985… (Cambridge, 1989), 40-1. "Social revolution was shelved in half an hour," wrote Edward Norman, who was invariably unkind about Irish nationalism, but not always inaccurate. A History of Modern Ireland (Harmondsworth, 1973, cf. 1st ed., 1971), 268. D. George Boyce noted that the Dáil adopted the Democratic Programme "which it was in no mood or position to implement". Nineteenth Century Ireland … (Dublin, 1990), 263. The 'mood' is important: Sinn Féin did not succumb to the temptation to offer pie in a clouded sky. For an account of the evolution of the Democratic Programme (probably a late addition to the agenda), B. Farrell, The Founding of Dail Éireann… (Dublin, 1971), 56-61. Challenged in April 1919 to supply practical proposals, de Valera (who had been in prison when the document was adopted) replied that "it was quite clear that the democratic programme, as adopted by the Dáil, contemplated a situation somewhat different from that in which they actually found themselves". https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1919-04-11/4/
[21] For an example, Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 63-4.
[22] The Declaration of Independence translated "the Irish people" as "muintir na hÉireann" (eight times), although it is arguable that "muintir" conveys the idea of a collection of individuals, as in the rural community development organisation, Muintir na Tíre, founded in 1937, which refers to inhabitants of the countryside. 'Pobal' has a more abstract meaning, as in the occasionally used 'riail an phobai' ('government by the people'). It can also mean 'parish': Old Parish, in the Waterford Gaeltacht, is An Sean Phobal in Irish. However, this usage should be distinguished from the ecclesiastical term for a parish, 'paróiste'. In relatively recent times, it was still possible to hear statements in rural Ireland about the opinion of 'the parish' on controversial issues. The phrase referred not to the viewpoints of any congregation of worshippers, but to a more general assertion of communal wisdom. In this there may be a parallel with the Spanish 'pueblo', which can refer both to 'the people' and also to communities, usually villages and small towns. This dual meaning underpinned the theories of the Spanish Anarchist movement. I stress that these ruminations are based on a shallow depth of understanding, and are thrown out for the consideration of those who are better informed.
[23] So O'Hegarty warned in 1920: "America will help Ireland so far as she can in furtherance of an American policy. America will no more go to war with England for the sake of freeing Ireland than she went to war with Germany for the sake of freeing Belgium and Servia." Old Ireland, 13 March 1920, quoted The Victory of Sinn Féin, 186. As Lee pointed out, there was no reason for a peace conference dominated by the victors to recognise a movement which "traced its new authority to a Rising that had invoked German aid". The 1916 Proclamation's appeal to "gallant allies in Europe" would prove to have been a tactical mistake. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 41.
[24] The American Declaration of Independence asserted that "these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political Connection between them and the State of Great-Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved". Capitalisation varies slightly between different versions. Article IV, Section 4 of the United States Constitution of 1787 guarantees "a Republican Form of Government" to each State in the Union, but uses no such definition for the United States as a whole.
[25] Longford and O'Neill, Eamon de Valera, 98.
[26] There had been previous private initiatives to persuade Americans to invest in Ireland. Fr Michael O'Flanagan, discussed below, had visited the United States between 1904 and 1910 seeking support for projects in the Diocese of Elphin.
[27] Established in 1891, the Congested Districts Board reported to Parliament, and its members were appointed by the British government. However, its income was partly derived from endowment funding and it operated independently.
[28] J. Devoy, Recollections of an Irish Rebel... (no place or date of publication, [1929]), 263.
[29] S. Cronin, The McGarrity Papers (Tralee, 1972), 22, 29.
[30] During 1890-1, teaching at the University of New Brunswick in Canada, Douglas Hyde encountered an old man who could speak "the best Irish … he was from near the city of Kilkenny, and, though he had been here for forty years, had not forgotten the language of his youth". Hyde was speaking in New York in June 1891:
D. Hyde (ed. B. Ó Conaire), Language, Lore, and Lyrics... (Blackrock Dublin, 1986), 146.
[31] Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 41.
[32] D. Macardle, The Irish Republic (London, 1968 ed., cf. 1st ed., 1937), 841.
[33] O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin, 29-30.
[34] Tierney, Eoin MacNéill, Scholar and Man of Action, 1867-1945, 260. Roy Foster has also commented on this theme of ambivalence regarding the question of status in 1921. Foster, Vivid Faces… (London, 2015), 279.
[35] Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 48-50. Capitalisation varies in other versions, e.g. Macardle, The Irish Republic, 842-4.
[36] B. Girvan, From Union to Union… (Dublin, 2002), 47.
[37] O'Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Féin, 31-2. Born into a bilingual family in County Roscommon in 1876, Fr O'Flanagan was elected Vice-President of Sinn Féin in 1917, and served as chaplain to the First Dáil. A dynamic election organiser, "in the second half of 1918 he operated as virtual acting leader" of the movement, since its prominent non-clerical activists were in prison. He was frequently in trouble with his bishop. P. Maume, "O'Flanagan, Michael", Dictionary of Irish Biography. O'Flanagan's comment on the 1918 election result perhaps owes something to Massimo d'Azeglio's famous reflection on the Risorgimento: "We have made Italy. Now we must make Italians."
[38] L.G. Redmond-Howard, Six Days of the Irish Republic (London, 1916), 7. The author was John Redmond's nephew. 1,000 copies of the original Proclamation were printed, not the 2,500 that Connolly had ordered. Redmond-Howard implied that copies were sold in the street. Another contemporary account contradicts this: "a Volunteer at the door of the Post Office handed to passers-by printed copies". This was confirmed by the recollections of Geraldine Plunkett Dillon: "Pearse read the Proclamation of the Republic from a printed sheet, first on the steps and then he moved to the middle of the street, a few yards down from Prince’s Street, and read it again. There was absolute silence for a minute, then he gave the remaining copies to some newsboys to distribute". Since she had married the previous day and her brother would be shot by firing squad, her recollections were vivid. J.F. Boyle, The Irish Rebellion of 1916… (London, 1916), 50; G.P. Dillon (ed., H Ó Brolcháin), All in the Blood… (Dublin, 2006), 224; C. Townshend, Easter 1916… (London, 2006 ed., cf. 1st ed. 2005), 378. Redmond-Howard perhaps confused the Proclamation with the Irish War News, issued by the insurgents the day after the Rising, and priced at one penny. (Facsimile via https://catholicarchives.ie/index.php/irish-war-news-vol-1-no-1).
[39] Sinn Fein Rebellion Handbook, Easter 1916 (Dublin, 1917), 1; T. Barry, Guerilla Days in Ireland (Dublin, 1962 ed., cf. 1st ed., Cork, 1949), 2-5. The Proclamation, including its Irish-language header, was also reprinted in W.B. Wells and N. Marlowe, A History of the Irish Rebellion of 1916 (Dublin, 1916), 147-9, which called the text "striking and dignified" and in Boyle, The Irish Rebellion of 1916, 50-3.
[40] Farrell, The Founding of Dail Éireann, xvi-xviii; C. Townshend, Ireland: the 20th Century (London, 1999 ed., cf. 1st ed., New York, 1998), 90. Farrell, xv-xvi, associated the dominance of British models with the fact that Ireland's successful transition to modernity had occurred before the achievement of independence, a theme elaborated by J.J. Lee, The Modernisation of Irish Society, 1848-1918 (Dublin, 1973). Modernisation and the English language went hand-in-hand.
[41] The Times, 21 January 1919. In 1916, John Healy, editor of the Irish Times, doubled as the Dublin correspondent of The Times of London. It is likely that he covered the First Dáil too. M. O'Brien, The Irish Times: a History (Dublin, 2008), 36, 48. Macardle seems to imply that Sinn Féin itself only adopted the term 'árd-fheis' for its annual convention in 1917. Macardle, The Irish Republic, 216. The Cork TD Liam de Róiste was put on a committee "to draw up Irish terms" for Dáil proceedings, but apparently it did not start work before the first meeting. Cork City and County Archives, Diary of Liam de Róiste, 20 January 1919: https://publications.corkarchives.ie/view/707850180/66-67/.
[42] Macardle, The Irish Republic, 216; The Times, 21 January 1919.
[43] The story bears telling, both because Cosgrave cast the crucial vote in the Dáil cabinet to accept the Treaty, and also because he subsequently headed a government nominally committed to the re-gaelicisation of Ireland. In 1926, he planned to close a St Patrick's Day radio address with a few words in Irish (the phrase 'an cúpla focal' would be adopted in English in scornful allusion to this form of linguistic tokenism). The chosen sentiment was "Beannacht Dé agus Phádraig ar an obair", which means "Blessing of God and Patrick on the work" ('an obair' here conveying the idea of 'the national project' or 'the communal endeavour'). It should be stressed that the phrase represents beginners' level conversational Irish. Cosgrave transcribed it phonetically as "Bannacht Day ogus faudrig er un ubber". In 1923, he had looked to the schools as the key to "gaelicisation" which would "make our nation separate and distinct and something to be thought of". His government made Irish a compulsory classroom subject. M. Laffan, Judging W.T. Cosgrave (Dublin, 2014), 184, 225; Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 132.
[44] M. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: the Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923 (Cambridge, 1999), 350.
[45] M. Hopkinson, ed., The Last Days of Dublin Castle: the Mark Sturgis Diaries (Dublin, 1999), 71 (12 November 1920). The initials referred to Prime Minister, Sinn Féin and Lloyd George.
[46] T. Jones (ed. K. Middlemas), Whitehall Diary, iii: Ireland 1918-25 (London, 1971), 89. Churchill used the anecdote, virtually word-for-word, in The World Crisis: the Aftermath (London, 1929), 297-8. Jones sent the story on 31 January 1929: the book appeared in March.
[47] Frank Pakenham (later Earl of Longford) pointed out that the account published by Churchill was internally inconsistent. De Valera recalled Lloyd George's effusive welcome (although he was unmoved by it), which even extended to indicating the chair at the Downing Street cabinet table that would be occupied by an Irish representative at future Imperial Conferences. No purpose would have been served by attempting to embarrass the visitors by attempting to demonstrate that Welsh was a living language while Irish was an artificial reconstruction. Lloyd George and Jones habitually conversed in their mother tongue, partly because it was natural for them to do so but also because it kept their English (and Scots) colleagues at arm's length. O'Leary was president of the London branch of the Gaelic League, and the two men could have conferred in Irish had they regarded the translation issue as important. Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal, 82-4. Jones would have been familiar with Churchill's inimitable narrative style, which tended to highlight the bizarre, and evidently provided an appropriate briefing note.
[48] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1921-12-14/3/.
[49] Longford and O'Neill, Eamon de Valera, 135.
[50] https://www.difp.ie/volume-1/1921/david-lloyd-george-to-eamon-de-valera/141/#section-documentpage.
[51] T.P. Coogan, De Valera… (London, 1993), 235; Jones (ed. Middlemas), Whitehall Diary, iii: Ireland 1918-25, 90. De Valera was frequently misinterpreted in that period, with many observers imagining him to suit their own wishful thinking: Ged Martin, "De Valera Imagined and Observed" in G. Doherty and D. Keogh, eds, De Valera's Irelands (Cork, 2003, 84-103): https://www.gedmartin.net/published-work-mainmenu-11/10-de-valera-imagined-and-observed.
[52] D.G. Boyce, "How to Settle the Irish Question" in A.J.P. Taylor, ed., Lloyd George… (London, 1971), 137-64 notes his lukewarm attitude to Irish Home Rule. Biographers do not seem to have noted that Lloyd George apparently never visited Ireland. Asquith, so often contrasted with him as ineffectual, went there three times between 1912 and 1916, the last occasion a fact-finding journey after the Rising. This, too, has been largely written out of the record.
[53] S. Lawlor, Britain and Ireland 1914-1923 (Dublin, 1983), 94-5. Lawlor rendered the Latin as "Republica". In making the correction, I have given de Valera the benefit of the doubt
[54] As was pointed out by Patrick Maume in History Ireland in May/June 2020, although Dr Maume suggests that Carson lost his fluency as he grew older.
[55] The austere and bearded Boer statesman was probably the least plausible 'Mr Smith' in the history of aliases. For his talks with de Valera, W.K. Hancock, Smuts … 1919-1950 (Cambridge, 1968), 56-8; J. van der Poel, ed., Selections from the Smuts Papers, v (Cambridge, 1973), 94-8.
[56] D. Macartney, "Gaelic Ideological Origins of 1916…" in O.D. Edwards and F. Pyle, eds, 1916: the Easter Rising (London, 1968), 41-9; A. Stopford Green, Irish Nationality (London, 1911), 136; Green, The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, 1200-1600 (London 1913 ed., cf. 1st ed. 1908), 337. For a wide-ranging survey of attempts to build upon this perceived Gaelic past under the Free State, M. Carew, "Eoin MacNeill and the idea of an 'Irish Cultural Republic'," in C. Mulvagh and E. Purcell, eds., Eoin MacNeill: the Pen and the Sword (Cork, 2022), 153-70.
[57] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1921-12-14/3/.
[58] https://www.difp.ie/volume-1/1921/anglo-irish-treaty/214/#section-documentpage
[59] South Africa's Orange River had been so named by a Dutch explorer in 1779 in honour of the ruling family in the Netherlands. The Orange Order dated from 1795.
[60] E. Childers, The Framework of Home Rule (London, 1911), 135-6, 197. Although not a front-line negotiator, Childers accompanied Irish delegations to London in 1921, where he became increasingly hostile to the emerging terms of a political settlement. John MacBride, shot by firing squad in 1916, had campaigned in the Orange Free State with the Irish Brigade during the Boer War. D.P. McCracken, "MacBride, John", Dictionary of Irish Biography. The Orange Free State name was restored at the Union in 1910.
[61] W.K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs: i, Problems of Nationality 1918-1936 (London, 1937), 107.
[62] Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal, 244. J.M. Curran, The Birth of the Irish Free State 1921-1923 (Alabama, 1980), 113 noted that Griffith even offered an annual contribution to the king's Civil List, an echo of his Dual Monarchy ideas.
[63] Pakenham, Peace by Ordeal, 253, 255-63. R. Fanning, Éamon de Valera: a Will to Power (London, 2015), 118 is one of the few recent studies to note that the term 'Irish Free State' was in circulation among Sinn Féin leaders during the week before the signing of the Treaty. The British proposals of 30 November are at https://www.difp.ie/volume-1/1921/anglo-irish-treaty/207/#section-documentpage and the cabinet minute of 3 December is at https://www.difp.ie/volume-1/1921/anglo-irish-treaty/209/#section-documentpage.
[64] Cork City and County Archives, Diary of Liam de Róiste, 6 December 1921: https://publications.corkarchives.ie/view/761322428/116-117/ . Liam de Róiste was a long-time activist in the Irish-language movement, and one of the most tenacious believers in the feasibility of a Gaelic Ireland. P. Rouse, "De Róiste, Liam", Dictionary of Irish Biography is both informative and kind. His interpretation of the Treaty was evidently not widely shared in Cork: M. Martin, Freedom to Choose: Cork & Party Politics in Ireland, 1918-1932 (Cork, 2009), 51-79.
[65] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1921-12-19/2/
[66] Curran's phrase, The Birth of the Irish Free State 1921-1923, 150.
[67] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1921-12-17/1/ . "Miss M'Swiney spoke for two hours and thirty-two minutes, and devoted most of the time to pouring a torrent of abuse upon everybody associated with the Treaty." Glasgow Herald, 22 December 1921. A biography of Mary MacSwiney, by Dr Leanne Lane, was published in April 2025.
[68] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1921-12-21/2/
[69] Of course, 'Saorstát na hÉireann' was not the Irish name that had been used either by the Dáil or the provisional government since 1919. (The online version of the Dáil debates omits the fada from capital letters in the report of de Róiste's speech.) A similar argument had been advanced by Aodh de Blácam during the Truce, when he insisted that de Valera stood for "the independence of the Irish State – call it Republic or Commonwealth, or what you will, our name for it is Saorstát Eireann". A recently gaelicised Englishman born Hugh Blackham, de Blácam equated Catholic social thinking with Bolshevism, and envisaged an Ireland based on a co-operating network of rural soviets, thinking close to Spanish Anarchism. Patrick Maume remarked that "the image of Ireland he propagated can only be described as delusional on an epic scale". "De Blacam, Aodh (Hugh Saunders Blackham, Aodh Sandrach de Blacam)", Dictionary of Irish Biography. The DIB essay, which is exceptionally insightful, omits the fada (acute accent) on de Blácam's surname, although it was sometimes used, and the pronunciation [blaw-cum] seems to require it.
[70] In the 1968 paperback edition of Macardle, The Irish Republic, 597, the title is given as An Phoblacht no h'Éireann (my emphasis). The glitch was probably caused by photo-reproduction. The title was given correctly in earlier editions.
[71] Longford and O'Neill, Eamon de Valera, 184. Cumann na Poblachta was short-lived: from the end of the Civil War in 1923, de Valera concentrated on reorganising Sinn Féin. However, its brief existence may help to explain why de Valera's next venture in party formation, in 1926, adopted the poetic name Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny).
[72] Quoted in Freeman's Journal (Sydney), 11 May 1922 (Dublin correspondent, 24 February), via the National Library of Australia's online newspaper archive, Trove. An Saorstát was not a financial success: its circulation of about 27,500 was in free-fall well before the Collins-de Valera pact in late May which attempted to neutralise the Treaty issue in the forthcoming general election. An Saorstát largely ignored the factional truce. J.M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921-1936 (Dublin, 1999), 57-8, 60.
[73] The first handbill is reproduced in Tom Garvin's handsomely illustrated Judging Lemass … (Dublin, 2009), 108. Poblacht Na-hEireann War News, No. 2, 29 June 1922, may be consulted via https://catholicarchives.ie/index.php/poblacht-na-heireann-war-news-2.
[74] In 1936, senior civil servant J.J. Walshe was sent to London as the Irish emissary to be briefed on the impending Abdication of Edward VIII. The British expressed alarm when he discussed the king's private life with de Valera in Irish on an open telephone line, but Walshe reassured them that nobody in the Dublin exchange understood the language. D. McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists… (New Haven. Conn., 1984), 199.
[75] P. Maume, "Campbell, James Henry Mussen", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[76] The reputation of the first head of government has been deservedly rescued by Michael Laffan in his superbly presented Judging W.T. Cosgrave (Dublin, 2014).
[77] In 1969, David Harkness published The Restless Dominion, a detailed study of the Free State government's handling of Commonwealth affairs, drawing in particular upon the articulate recollections and personal archives of Patrick McGilligan, Minister of External Affairs from 1927 to 1932. Harkness propounded a dual thesis. He argued, first, that the Free State had been ingenious and persistent in exploiting loopholes and opportunities of membership to enhance its own status and expand Irish autonomy. Second, he contended that Irish pressure had played an important role in reshaping the Commonwealth as a whole, culminating in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. In 1975, I challenged the latter contention, defending the standard view that changes in the association came about mainly in response to Canadian and South African demands. Fifty years on, my alternative interpretation belongs to the study of the evolution of the Commonwealth, a subject that is is now of only marginal interest. D.W. Harkness, The Restless Dominion… (London, 1969); Ged Martin, "The Irish Free State and the Evolution of the Commonwealth, 1921-1949" in R. Hyam and G. Martin, Reappraisals in British Imperial History (London, 1975), 201-225.
[78] T. Mohr, "The Statute of Westminster: an Irish Perspective", Law and History Review, xxxi (2013) argues that the 1931 legislation has been "marginalised" in the consideration of constitutional change in Ireland. Dr Mohr pointed out that the position of Ireland was debated in the British parliament. He also noted that while de Valera took advantage of the Statute of Westminster in 1936, it suited him to pretend that it did not exist, in line with the republican orthodoxy that British legislation had no moral authority in Ireland. The Statute provided that British legislation could only have effect in any Dominion if the local legislature had requested it. Seán Lemass stated the Fianna Fáil position in a Dáil debate in 1931: "the Act has been very carefully drafted to preserve the theoretical right of the British Parliament to legislate for the whole of the British Empire. ... if the legislative independence of the Oireachtas of the Free State … is to depend in law upon a British statute then it is dependent upon the consent of the majority of the British Parliament. What one British Parliament has enacted another British Parliament can repeal and the position will be that, at any time, by simply repealing that Act the British Parliament can reassert its right to legislate for this State": https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1931-07-17/4/.
[79] D. McCullagh, De Valera: ii, Rule 1932-1975 (Dublin, 2018), 68-71; E. O'Halpin, Defending Ireland… (Oxford, 1999), 121-9.
[80] McMahon, Republicans and Imperialists, 198-202; C. Sanger, Malcolm MacDonald… (Liverpool, 1995), 119-21.
[81] Longford and O'Neill, Eamon de Valera, 294-5. It is possible that de Valera was influenced by the wording of the original version of the Irish Republican Brotherhood oath, which referred to "the Irish Republic, now virtually established". It was never clear whether this meant that the republic was on the point of coming into existence, or that it was some sort of constitutional avatar that could be projected over Ireland as a vividly realistic vision. The phrase had been dropped from the IRB oath by the time de Valera became a member, but it may have retained some resonance.
[82] The constitution's confirmation of Irish as "the first official language" and its recognition of "the special position of the Holy Catholic Apostolic and Roman Church" (the latter removed in 1972) were clear signals of the kind of republic that de Valera envisaged for a reunited Ireland. In addition, Article 9 included the mysterious statement: "Fidelity to the nation and loyalty to the State are fundamental political duties of all citizens." It was theoretically possible (if highly unlikely) that Northern Unionists might agree to abandon Partition and transfer a wary loyalty to an all-Ireland State if it constitutionally guaranteed the rights of the Protestant minority. However, fidelity to the nation (presumably as defined by the majority) could only refer to a concept that had long since moved away from the ideals of 1798 and 1848 to become exclusively Catholic and notionally Gaelic. The wish of "the Irish Nation" expressed in Article 3, "to unite all the people who share the territory of the island of Ireland, in all the diversity of their identities and traditions", also implies a distinction between first- and second-class Irishness.
[83] De Valera himself was largely responsible for this gibe, having listed the attributes of Éire to the Dáil before assuring TDs that "[t]he State whose institutions correspond to these articles is, it seems to me, demonstrably a Republic." He then cited (in predictable detail) two encyclopedias and four dictionaries, before pointing out that Éire did not have a king and so must be a republic. Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 242-5.
[84] Mitchell and Ó Snodaigh, eds, Irish Political Documents 1916-1949, 247.
[85] The 1953 episode is discussed below.
[86] Longford and O'Neill, Eamon de Valera, 360; J.W. Wheeler-Bennett, King George VI… (London, 1958), 414. As a member of the Commonwealth, Ireland was represented in London between 1923 and 1949 by a High Commissioner (in fact, by three appointees in succession). High Commissioners have full ambassadorial status, but are accredited on an intergovernmental basis to the Prime Minister. Thus George VI was never required to appoint an Irish representative to himself.
[87] N. Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs ... 1939-1952 (Oxford, 1958), 269.
[88] E.g. Mansergh, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs ... 1939-1952, 275ff.
[89] Two IRA activists were executed in 1940. "You brought a hangman over from England to hang members of the Irish Republican Army," a Clann na Poblachta TD threw at Lemass during the debates on the Republic of Ireland Bill: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-24/51/
[90] In an article specially written for the Australian press, Garret FitzGerald explained how shared antipathy to de Valera placed extreme republicans in coalition with supporters of continuing association with the Commonwealth. "De Valera quickly realised that he could profit from this inherent disunion by proposing formally Eire's secession from the Commonwealth…. Fine Gael, realising their dilemma, performed a volte face overnight, declaring their adherence to the republican ideal, and themselves initiating the proposal to declare a Republic. This naturally outraged many of their supporters, but the party apparently feels that, as no other Conservative Party exists in Eire, these Commonwealth supporters will have no alternative but to continue to vote Fine Gael, and their party's conversion to republicanism is expected to attract new recruits." West Australian (Perth), 18 April 1949. FitzGerald's antipodean journalism is discussed below.
[91] Costello told the Canadian Prime Minister, Mackenzie King, that "if his Government did not do it [move the repeal of the External Relations Act], a private member would bring in a bill and it would carry". J.W. Pickersgill and D.F. Forster, The Mackenzie King Record, iv (Toronto, 1970), 387. It is assumed that Costello referred to Peadar Cowan, an outspoken republican socialist who had been expelled from Clann na Poblachta and was therefore immune to any form of caucus pressure. It has been suggested that Cowan's determination to pursue the issue of status forced Costello's hand: https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-25/27/; P.J. Dempsey, "Cowan, Peadar", Dictionary of Irish Biography; Lee, Ireland 1912-1985, 299-300. In 1981, I was a lecturer at University College Cork. After writing a newspaper article on at the 50th anniversary of the definition of Dominion status by the Statute of Westminster, I was given private information that the leader of the Labour Party, William Norton, had made departure from the Commonwealth a condition of participation in the Inter-party government, although this was not recorded in the formal coalition pact. Given that Norton was the first minister to foreshadow action on the External Relations Act, this seems plausible. R. Keane, "MacBride, Seán", and C. Lysaght, "Costello, John Aloysius", Dictionary of Irish Biography, both conclude that there was no formal cabinet decision prior to Costello's announcement. Thus it is possible that Costello acted to forestall a possible Labour-Clann common front on an emotive issue that had the potential to lead to a strong third force in Irish politics. Cowan was an isolated figure, but he might have set a match to an internal explosion capable of breaking up the Interparty government.
[92] The phrase was used by John A. Murphy, one of the most thoughtful of historians of Ireland's recent past, in his Ireland in the Twentieth Century (Dublin, 1975), 126.
[93] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-24/51/. It may be noted here that a persistent tradition has pictured Pearse "standing on the steps of the GPO". Charles Townshend pointed out that there are no steps to the GPO. Townshend, Easter 1916, 160.
[94] https://data.oireachtas.ie/ie/oireachtas/bill/1948/19/eng/ver_a/bills1947-48-1v-02.pdf. Section 2 of the Irish-language version of the Bill specifies "Poblacht na hÉireann", in what I am assured was a word-for-word translation from the English. In accordance with normal practice, both versions were put before the Dáil at the same time: why then did Costello not make some passing allusion to the revival of an emotionally loaded term?
[95] Peadar Cowan, the outspoken republican socialist Deputy discussed above, argued that "this declaration … if it is to be of any value whatsoever, should be written into the Constitution and should be adopted by the people through the machinery of a referendum". https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-25/27/.
[96] Murphy, Ireland in the Twentieth Century, 124.
[97] "As I pointed out when that question was asked some years ago, there is no doubt whatever about it that our State is a republic ... there would be no use in giving a description of the State as a republic as this Bill does if it was not so in fact. You are not declaring a republic, but you are declaring that the State that exists is a republic." https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-24/51/. Senator Liam Ó Buachalla made the point more bluntly: if the government required farmers to hang a notice saying 'cow' around the necks of every dairy herd in the country, the quality of the milk supply would not be affected.
[98] One organisation that did partly fall into line was the Church of Ireland. Its prayer of General Supplication was amended in 1949 to specify two alternatives. In Northern Ireland, congregations recited: "For all chief rulers called to be stewards of thine authority in their several places; and especially for thy servant George our King, we beseech thee. ... For Elizabeth the Queen, Mary the Queen Mother, the Princess Elizabeth, and all the Royal Family, we beseech thee." Across the rest of the island the formula became: "For all chief rulers called to be stewards of thine authority in their several places; and especially The President of this State, we beseech thee. ... For all others, also, upon whom thou hast laid the burden and care of high and responsible office, we beseech thee." Evening Prayer in the Church of Ireland continues to refer to "the President of this State", but the State itself is not named: http://justus.anglican.org/resources/bcp/Ireland/Ireland_Alt_Evening.htm
[99] It is intriguing to speculate on the impact of a referendum to change Article 4 of the 1937 Constitution. Despite having a bumpy ride in office, the Interparty government came within two seats of re-election in 1951. A constitutional referendum held at the same time (thereby avoiding unnecessary expense) asking the people to endorse the 1948 Act and change Article 4 might (perhaps?) have harnessed sufficient additional support for government candidates to block de Valera's return to office. In the opinion of a recent biographer, defeat in 1951 would have improved de Valera's historical reputation. McCullagh, De Valera: ii, Rule 1932-1975, 316.
[100] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-11-25/27/
[101] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1948-12-01/57/. De Valera's use of "ordinary speech" to describe English was revealing.
[102] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1948-12-10/3/
[103] Wheeler-Bennett, George VI, 719.
[104] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/seanad/1948-12-10/3/
[105] Stanley Gibbons Priced Postage Stamp Catalogue: i, British Commonwealth, Ireland and South Africa (London, 1965), 403.
[106] https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/debate/dail/1952-10-29/29/
[107] West Australian (Perth), 15 September 1953; G. FitzGerald, All in a Life: an Autobiography (Dublin, 1991), 46-8 and cf. P. Maume, "FitzGerald, Garret", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[108] W. Murphy, "FitzGerald, (Thomas Joseph) Desmond", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[109] FitzGerald attributed the device to the White Knight in Through the Looking Glass, but he presumably had in mind Humpty Dumpty's assertion: "“When I use a word …it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.'
[110] The link between Gógan and the heading of the Proclamation may have been Thomas MacDonagh, a language enthusiast and Lecturer in English at University College Dublin from 1911.
[111] In 1910, Thomas J. Clarke established Irish Freedom, a publication which explicitly called for a republic independent of Britain. Initially, it adopted as its Irish name Saoirseacht na hÉireann, employing the same suffix for an abstract formulation that Gógan would use in 'poblacht'. It seems likely that purists objected to the choice, for by June 1911 the newspaper had switched to the simpler word for freedom, 'Saoirse'. Of authoritative dictionaries, de Bhaldraithe (1959) accepted 'saoirseacht' as a technical term for 'exemption', but Ó Dónaill (1977) gave 'craftsman', with multiple compound examples. (I am informed that this usage perhaps derives from the traditional term 'saoi', meaning 'wise or learned man'.) The translation of Irish Freedom illustrates the difficulties encountered in identifying terminology suitable for use in modern times. For Clarke, see J. Quinn, "Clarke, Thomas James ('Tom')", Dictionary of Irish Biography.
[112] Hopkinson, ed., The Last Days of Dublin Castle: the Mark Sturgis Diaries, 90 (12 December 1920).
[113] T. de V. White, Kevin O'Higgins (Dublin, 1986 ed., cf. 1st ed., London, 1948), 169-70.
[114] J. J. Lee, "Pearse, Patrick Henry", Dictionary of Irish Biography. The Queen began her banquet speech with the simple greeting, "A Uachtaráin, agus a chairde" (President and friends), which was followed by a burst of applause. The gesture was widely appreciated as an appropriate expression of parity of esteem.
[115] Two mundane phrases are used ironically to refer to the person speaking. "Mise le meas" appears above the signature of official letters in both languages and has the same connotation of the English slang term "Yours truly". "Mé féin" is the equivalent of the French emphatic "moi", and probably owes its prevalence to "Sinn Féin" (Ourselves Alone). Beyond that, this Note does not go.