IRISH HISTORY SINCE 1850
2. An Gorta Mór
3. The Land League
4. Parnell and Home Rule
5. Unionism
6. The Cultural Revival
7. Home Rule
8. The Easter Rebellion
9. The War of Independence
10. The Free State: '20s
11. The Free State: '30s
12. The Troubles: '60s & '70s
13. The Troubles: '80s & '90s
14. The Celtic Tiger
15. Death of the Tiger
16. Sources
The Free State in the 1930s
The Cumann na nGaedheal government of the Irish Free State spent their first decade in office establishing the workings of the state. They had clear successes, and achieved great acclaim for their vision with projects such as the Shannon Dam. Their real problem was the resentment that lingered after the Civil War.
Sinn Fein had refused to accept the Treaty and had fought against it during the Civil War. They had refused to enter parliament, and worked against Cumann na nGaedheal. By the mid-1920s the government was sick of this kind of opposition from outside parliament and demanded that Sinn Fein take their seats in the Dail.
The history of the first government in the 1920s has been quite contentious. Some historians applaud Cumann na nGaedheal, and argue that they made the best of a difficult situation. They managed to put all the major institutions of state in place, and avoided a renewed flare up of the Civil War. Others argue that the government wasn't aggressive enough, that it worked too closely with the British and didn't create a stridently independent Ireland.
One issue of contention was whether Cumann na nGaedheal failed to deliver on the promises of the revolution. Rather than creating a socialist Republic, as suggested in the 1916 proclamation of an Irish Republic, the government of the 1920s was, by its own admission, the most conservative bunch of revolutionaries ever.
The leader of Sinn Fein, Eamon de Valera, decided he had to act. In 1926 he set up a new party, Fianna Fail ("Soldiers of Destiny"). Shortly afterwards they entered the Dail, and genuine two-party politics began in the Free State.
Fianna Fail and Cumann na nGaedheal weren't simply two parties who disagreed with each other in the way of normal politics. Both parties had emerged directly from opposing sides in the Civil War. They deeply distrusted each other. People in each party blamed their opponents for deaths in the Civil War, and remained ideologically opposed to each other over the workings of the Treaty. Throughout the late 1920s and early 1930s there were regular rumors that elected officials were entering the Dail carrying firearms as they were convinced that their personal safety was under threat from the other side.
Despite having opposed the Treaty and staying out of parliament during the early years of the Free State, de Valera and his Fianna Fail party were very popular among those who had opposed the Treaty and the working classes.
There was a belief that Cumann na nGaedheal were only acting in the interests of big farmers and landowners. By the time of the 1932 election Fianna Fail were able to win by a minority and form a government.
Given the bitterness between the two parties, it has often been argued that Cumann na nGaedheal would fail to recognize the election result, and would choose to stay in office through the use of force. Instead, they adhered to the rules of democracy and allowed their former Civil War enemies to take power, less than a decade after the ending of that war. Most historians acknowledge that Cumann na nGaedheal acted selflessly in accepting the popular vote and allowing their erstwhile enemies into office. In doing so they stabilized Irish democracy at a time when it could have easily fallen back into a state of war.
Whereas the Free State of Cumann na nGaedheal had operated under the terms of the Treaty, and had co-operated with Britain and its Commonwealth, the agenda of de Valera and Fianna Fail was far more radical. De Valera had a very particular vision for Ireland.
On St Patrick's Day 1943, in one of his most famous and most quoted speeches, de Valera said:
That Ireland which we dreamed of would be the home of a people who valued material wealth only as a basis for right living, of a people who were satisfied with frugal comfort and devoted their leisure to the things of the spirit — a land whose countryside would be bright with cosy homesteads, whose fields and villages would be joyous with sounds of industry, with the romping of sturdy children, the contests of athletic youths and the laughter of happy maidens.
The speech summed up what de Valera wanted, essentially a self-sufficient, rural, and Catholic Ireland. His vision was radically different than that of Cumann na nGaedheal, which had wanted to work within the terms of the Treaty and follow economic orthodoxy. It was popular though, as he stayed in office from 1932 until 1948.
Once in office de Valera acted quickly. He passed a whole load of legislation aimed at turning back the clock on the Treaty and turning the Irish Free State into the kind of country that he envisaged. He secured a full majority in an election in 1933, and this ensured that he was in office, with a majority, until well after the Second World War.
His main achievements in the 1930s were:
- Abolition of the Oath of Allegiance: This meant that members of the Dail no longer had to swear allegiance to the British Crown.
- Getting rid of the post of Governor-General: This post had been a contentious, albeit symbolic part of the Treaty. The Governor-General had originally been able, in principle, to reserve or deny royal assent to any Dail legislation. By abolishing the post, de Valera meant that all lawmaking power was fully in the hands of the Irish.
- Return of the Treaty ports: In 1922 it had been agreed that Britain needed to retain control of certain coastal ports in Ireland to protect itself. In 1938 de Valera convinced the British that they no longer needed them, and they were all returned to Ireland.
- Debt cancellation: The Treaty had made the Free State liable for a whole series of monies that were owed to Britain. De Valera disagreed, and after fighting a tariff war with Britain in the 1930s, he secured a scaling down of the debt to a one-off payment of £10 million.
What de Valera did effectively, and very controversially, was to rewrite the terms of the Treaty — or at least those parts he objected to. This gave the Free State a greater degree of freedom and control over its own affairs. He didn't withdraw from the Commonwealth however: that step wouldn't be taken until 1948.
The Treaty ports are the best illustration of how de Valera was able to relinquish the hold that Britain had on the Irish state. By getting the ports back in 1938 he ensured that there was no British army or navy presence within the Free State. Most historians argue that this is why Ireland was able to be neutral during the Second World War. If the Treaty ports had still been occupied by British forces they would have been a justifiable target for the Germans.
As it was, Ireland could claim neutrality and there was no reason for the Germans to attack.
When de Valera took office in 1932, he had some hard battles ahead of him before he could create the kind of Ireland he wanted. His goal was to free Ireland from its commitments to Britain that had been agreed in 1921. One of de Valera's biggest gripes was the amount of money that the Free State was supposed to pay Britain every year. The British had argued that the purchase of land, by the Irish, in the late nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, had been done with money borrowed from London. In the 1920s the Irish government had collected the money from farmers in the form of land annuities, and this money had been passed over to the British.
De Valera thought it was ridiculous that Irish farmers should pay money to Britain for Irish land. So he stopped paying. The British retaliated by placing import duties on a whole raft of Irish goods, especially agricultural imports. De Valera, never one to back down, retaliated by putting import duties on British products. The economic war had begun.
The economic war would last until 1938 when it was finally resolved by a one-off payment from Ireland to Britain to settle the debt. In the meantime the Irish economy suffered. It couldn't replace the British export market, and so the national income dropped. De Valera took cows that couldn't be exported from the big farmers (who voted Cumann na nGaedheal anyway) and distributed the meat to his own supporters for free.
While free beef was great for Fianna Fail voters, de Valera's actions in the early 1930s demonstrated how he mishandled the economy and brought about strong opposition from his detractors which would take shape as the Blueshirt movement.
The battles of the Civil War had only been over for a decade when de Valera took power. While anything he did was bound to create opposition from those who had fought against him in the Civil War, he had to act without destabilizing the country. He had to use much of the machinery of the new state — the legal system, the police force, and the army — that he had previously detested to ensure that he stayed in power.
Many people were deeply suspicious of de Valera and Fianna Fail. They worried that the new government would use their power to settle old scores.
Many believed that a simple parliamentary opposition in the form of Cumann na nGaedheal wouldn't be up to the job of stopping de Valera. So in the early 1930s, a new organization, the Army Comrades Association, was formed. The organization wanted to protect the rights of ex-army officers who feared that their pensions would be under threat from the new government that it had fought against a decade earlier. They decided, in line with similar movements in Europe at the time, to wear a colored shirt as a uniform. Ireland now had the Blueshirts.
One of de Valera's first acts in power was to dismiss the head of police, General Eoin O'Duffy, as he didn't trust him. The sacking of O'Duffy proved to de Valera's opponents that he couldn't be trusted to act fairly. O'Duffy became a martyr for the anti-de Valera movement, and he was asked to head the Blueshirts.
O'Duffy would take the Blueshirts deeper into the world of European fascism. He adopted various fascist ways of thinking about politics and the economy (such as plans for a corporate state and a restricted electorate) that he borrowed from the Italian Duce, Mussolini, and began acting like a dictator at the head of his movement. He even convinced Cumann na nGaedheal that he was the future. The party disbanded, and reformed, with the Blueshirts at their side as a new party: Fine Gael.
The battles between the Blueshirts and the government became increasingly violent. Blueshirts died in political clashes, and it looked for a time as if the whole situation would turn into civil war again. De Valera held firm and used the full weight of the law against the Blueshirts. By 1935 the movement was in disarray, and O'Duffy quit. By 1936 the Blueshirts were history.
Once O'Duffy was gone and the Blueshirts stood down, Fine Gael continued as the main parliamentary opposition. They formed the government on several occasions in the second half of the twentieth century. Although completely committed to parliamentary democracy, Fine Gael's roots have never been forgotten, and they are still regularly referred to in the Irish media as the Blueshirt party.
Having got through the first few years in office, and seen off the opposition, de Valera turned to enacting his real dream for Ireland. The greatest step towards a more concrete sense of independence came in 1937. De Valera didn't like the constitution that had been created in 1922, so he decided to write his own. The new constitution — Bunreacht na hÉireann — which is still in force today - contained the following key points:
- The title "Irish Free State" replaced with "Eire".
- The recognition that the island of Ireland (all 32 counties) was a natural territorial unit, and Northern Ireland an artificial creation.
- The British Governor-General to be replaced by a new head of state, the President of Ireland.
- Recognition of the special place of Catholicism in the state.
- Irish recognized, along with English, as the official language of the state.
The constitution brought to life the kind of Ireland that de Valera had fought for during the revolutionary years (see chapter 21), but had not been delivered by the 1921 Treaty with Britain. The constitution was very inward looking and concerned with the internal state of Ireland rather than its place in the contemporary world. De Valera had long argued that Ireland should be self-sufficient and the spirit of the constitution, and the handling of the economy, ensured that the country stagnated until the 1960s. Until the 1960s the Irish economy failed to develop a strong industrial base or entice inward investment into the country. Emigration numbers remained high, and the rate of modernization low.
The 1930s saw the Free State slowly remove itself from its legal obligations to Britain that had been established under the 1921 Treaty. Ireland really came into its own as an independent nation, and was a key member of the League of Nations during the 1930s. De Valera even became President of the Assembly of the League of Nations in 1938 and was involved in many of the discussions that tried to avert World War II.