href="#ulink_1325ae56-bb53-5939-b712-fcc6f280f115">159 Speeches of MacCartan, Collins, Boland and Gavan Duffy in the Dáil debates on Fine Gaedhael, 8 Jun.1922, which can be found at https://www.oireachtas.ie/en/debates/find/.
160 NLI, Art Ó Briain papers, Mss8461/17, 8456/4, 8429/29, 8421/7, 8426/22. Fine Gaedhael’s official motto was an expression of Patrick Pearse’s, that ‘beyond all telling is the destiny which God has in store for Ireland’.
161 Robert Brennan, Allegiance (Dublin, 1950), 334–6.
162 Irish Examiner, 30 Jan. 1922.
163 Mark Tierney (ed.), ‘Calendar of Irlande, vols 1, 2, 3’, Collectanea Hibernica, nos 21–2 (1979–80), 217.
164 Irish Examiner, 30 Jan. 1922. Shortly before this event, de Valera and Sangnier laid a wreath at the grave of the Unknown Soldier of France, as well as at that of the United Irishman Miles Byrne. Irish Independent, 30 Jan. 1922.
165 Ernest Boyd, ‘Ireland: resurgent and insurgent’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 1 no. 15 (1922), 97.
166 Westminster Parliamentary Archives, Lloyd George papers, F21/1/8, Griffith to Lloyd George, 2 Jun. 1922.
167 Churchill Archives, CHAR22/13/103–12.
168 Ernest Boyd, ‘Ireland: resurgent and insurgent’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 1 no. 15 (1922), 93–4.
169 Westminster Parliamentary Archives, Lloyd George papers, F/10/3/49, Alfred Cope to Lionel Curtis, 9 Sep. 1922; Churchill Archives, CHAR 22/14/71.
170 J.A. Gaughan (ed.), Memoirs of Senator Joseph Connolly (Dublin, 1996); Lord Midleton, Ireland: dupe or heroine (London, 1932), 149–51. Alongside Connolly, Griffith had sent another Belfast man Denis McCullough to America as a would-be diplomatic representative, but he also resigned. While Midleton was in America primarily to assist the British Foreign Office press its case upon US President Harding regarding Anglo-American naval relations, he also used this occasion to speak about Ireland.
171 Stephen Gwynn, ‘Ireland: one and divisible’, Foreign affairs, vol. 3 (1924), 183–98.
172 The last manifestation of this literary trend could be said to have been P.S. O’Hegarty, The victory of Sinn Féin (Dublin, 1924), although it was also deeply influenced by the acrimonious debates of 1922.
173 Owen McGee (ed.), Eugene Davis’ souvenirs of Irish footprints over Europe (1889, 2nd ed., Dublin, 2006), 179–80.
174 Ronan Fanning, A will to power: Éamon de Valera (London, 2015), 258. Owen McGee, Arthur Griffith, chapter 12.
175 David Harkness, The restless dominion: the Irish Free State and the British Commonwealth of Nations 1921–1931 (London, 1969).
3
Financial Quagmires and
Legal Limits: Irish Free State
Diplomacy, 1922–1938
Many of the founders of Dáil Éireann adopted the mindset that the Irish Free State’s foreign policy should not be determined primarily by Irish membership of the British Commonwealth. Instead, it should be an expression of the Free State’s own written constitution, which stated in Article Two that ‘all powers of government and all authority, legislative, executive and judicial, are derived from the people of Ireland’.1 Half of the eighteen constitutions that were studied as templates when drafting the constitution of the Irish Free State were those of republics.2 Reflecting this, the Irish correspondent of Foreign Affairs during 1922 judged that ‘the Free Staters, being republicans, are not prepared to destroy republicanism’.3 America’s ambassador to the United Kingdom also felt that the Irish Free State cabinet should be considered to be republican revolutionaries in their background.4 Irrespective of the existence of a written Irish constitution, however, there was actually a very significant difference between the operations of an independent republic and membership of the British Commonwealth. Ignoring Arthur Griffith’s protests to the contrary, Lloyd George explained in June 1922 that the Irish were not entitled to have ‘their own ideals of political, economic and social welfare’ because, according to British imperial logic, the dominions’ rights in such matters were ‘not based on theory but on experience’: namely, the degree to which the king, or Whitehall, had first judged that it was in everyone’s best political and economic interests that they begin to exercise such powers.5 From this legal perspective, only London could represent the Irish Free State to the rest of the world by means of a proxy.
In his understanding of Irish statehood, Joseph Walshe, the secretary and practical creator of the new Irish department of external affairs, essentially subscribed to a belief in the reality of Irish sovereignty.6 Griffith had believed that the Irish Free State constitution entitled Ireland to stand ‘on equal terms with England’ within the commonwealth,7 but British Commonwealth policy regarding Ireland, upheld by the Dominions Office and the British Imperial Treasury, was always based on a hierarchy of interests that was determined by London’s own foreign trade policy. Adopting this reasoning, Ireland was not regarded by London as a co-equal with Canada and Australia, let alone England, but instead as a fiscal identity comparable to New Zealand as a food supplier nation.8 Against this backdrop, during the 1920s both leading officials and diplomats of the Irish Free State essentially learnt by a process of trial and error of various potential limits to the Irish state’s legal, diplomatic and fiscal authority. This created a preoccupation with counteracting these limitations. This was partly why the Irish government became very inclined to concentrate on the League of Nations as an alternative forum to the British Commonwealth. Former American diplomat Edward House, who would be discredited under the Republican administrations of US presidents Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge for having supposedly been led by the nose by Britain,9 suggested during 1922 that the Irish and German cases were linked by their mutual desire to join the League of Nations and to see the United States also become a member. In any event, House predicted that membership of the League of Nations could serve as ‘a God-sent haven for such states as Ireland’ because if its ongoing dispute with Britain could not be solved bilaterally, ‘Ireland has sought the only forum open to her where it can be done.’10
The importance that the Irish government attributed to the League of Nations was reflected by its decision to appoint most of its cabinet as members of its annual delegations to the league as soon as Ireland was admitted in September 1923.11 By this time, the Dáil cabinet had also established a ‘North Eastern Boundary Bureau’ to seek a resolution of Ireland’s partition dispute. This consisted of the legal personnel that had drafted the Free State’s written constitution,12 but it also included prominent Irish economists and, in the person of Kevin O’Shiel, a northern Irish
