Democracy and dissent in the Irish Free State: Opposition, decolonisation, and majority rights

By Jason Knirck

A new analysis of the difficulties in normalising opposition in the Irish Free State, this book analyses the collision between nineteenth-century monolithic nationalist movements with the norms and expectations of multiparty parliamentary democracy. The Irish revolutionaries’ attempts to create a Gaelic, postcolonial state involved resolving tension between these two ideas. Smaller economically-driven parties such as the Labour and Farmers’ parties attempted to move on from the revolution’s unnatural focus on nationalist political issues while the larger revolutionary parties descended from Sinn Féin attempt to recreate or restore notions of revolutionary unity. This conflict made democracy and opposition hard to establish in the Irish Free State.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 21, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526166265

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Democracy and dissent in the Irish Free State

Democracy and dissent in the Irish Free State

Opposition, decolonisation, and majority rights

Jason Knirck

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © Jason Knirck 2022

The right of Jason Knirck to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs, and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 6627 2 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Typeset by Newgen Publishing UK

To Jillian Opal Knirck

Contents

Acknowledgements

List of abbreviations

1Democracy, historians, and the civil war

2Opposition and revolution

3Decolonising the state

4Making politics normal

5A slightly constitutional opposition

6Cults of little personality

Coda: multiparty democracy in the Irish Free State

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This one almost got the best of me. Writing this book was a much longer process than originally intended as it transformed from a biography of W.T. Cosgrave, to a piece on the Farmers’ Party, to its current form. As a result, I accrued a significant number of personal and professional debts along the way. First and foremost, I owe a deep debt of gratitude to Mari and Jillian, who tolerated odd working hours, obsessions with obscure Irish political figures, and extended absences from our home. I could not have finished this without their love and support. Mari listened to me expound on, fret about, and despair of this project far more than she needed to and for that I am grateful. She was an invaluable guide throughout the process. Jillian put up with my absences, receiving generally only some Star Wars Hot Wheels from Dublin toy stores in return. I am grateful for that too, and this book is dedicated to her, in the hopes that she will read it and take it to show-and-tell at school.

I have benefited from the able assistance of a number of librarians and archivists as I put together this project. In particular, thanks go to the staff of University College Dublin, the National Archives of Ireland, the National Library of Ireland, and the Burns Library at Boston College. The latter was a wonderful place to work during my sabbatical period as a Burns Visiting Research Fellow at Boston College. It was during my semester there that much of this book started coming together, and I am very thankful to the Burns Library and the Center for Irish Programs for their hospitality, support, and funding. Thanks specifically to James Murphy, Christian Dupont, Rachael Young, Michael Bailey, and Sadie Sunderland-Rhoads for their friendship and support at Boston College. Thanks also to the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Philosophical Society, and the Central Washington University (CWU) School of Graduate Studies and Research for additional funding for this project.

A number of people provided research and editing support for this manuscript as it undertook its long journey to clarity, although the responsibility for any remaining lack of clarity is of course mine. Mckayla (Sutton) Stehr read numerous drafts and helped tremendously in narrowing and focusing the work. Sean Farrell, Michael de Nie, and Katie Omans also read drafts and provided welcome feedback. I also am grateful for my friends and colleagues in Irish studies, who listened to various iterations of this at conferences and symposia and gave me valuable suggestions, in particular Marie Coleman, Paul Townend, Doug Kanter, Jill Bender, Mandy Link, Ken Shonk, Tim McMahon, Cian McMahon, Tim O’Neil, and Mel Farrell. McKayla (Sutton) Stehr and Katie Omans also worked alongside me in Dublin and listened to me jabber excitedly over lunches and dinners about what I had found that day. That rather unscientific process helped me immeasurably in getting my head around this project. Katie also provided considerable support as my research assistant for a year, and the material she found was critical to Chapter 4 in particular. Luke Prpich also helped find sources on the Farmers’ Party.

I am also grateful for my colleagues in the history department at CWU, who allowed me to hide from my chair duties in order to finish this manuscript. Thanks in particular to Roxanne Easley, who is a friend and colleague, and advisor in much of what I do at CWU. I also appreciate the friendship over the years of Beth (Belgard) Carrol, Heidi (Gailey) Nettleton, Patrice Laurent, Rachael (Birks) Morgan, Glen Curtis, McKayla (Sutton) Stehr, and Katie Omans. Thanks also to my mother, my sister, and the extended Roe, DeVine, and Hillestad families for support over the past few years as well.

Abbreviations

1

Democracy, historians, and the civil war

When the Second Dáil approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 by a slim margin, the victorious Treatyites immediately created the Provisional Government mandated by the Treaty and also took over the government of the Dáil, the self-proclaimed revolutionary parliament. The Treaty gave the twenty-six counties of southern Ireland self-government but kept the new Free State within the British Empire and forced its elected representatives to take an oath to the King. After several months of dual government, with Treatyites controlling separate Dáil and Provisional Government cabinets, former minister for defence and fervent anti-Treatyite Cathal Brugha asked plaintively ‘When shall I get the opportunity of explaining my views on this matter with regard to this usurping government that has been brought into existence by the majority?’¹ As the somewhat muddied concept of a usurping majority demonstrates, Irish revolutionaries, despite consistently expressing support for democratic forms, had not particularly worked out a practical approach to the construction of democracy. Disagreements about the powers of the majority and the minority in the Second Dáil pointed to larger uncertainties about the tenets of democracy in postrevolutionary Ireland. Although nearly all Irish revolutionaries envisioned parliamentary government, most contemporary discussion focused on the goals rather than the practices of a future Irish democracy. When politicians did talk about democracy, it was as a nonspecific and general espousal of Wilsonian self-determination. Additionally, revolutionary-era politicians never tired of complaining that the Irish electorate did not sufficiently understand democracy, and all parties spent a great amount of effort in the 1920s trying to explain it to them. Even a cursory glance at the politics of the postrevolutionary years shows that there was neither an actual consensus on the tenets of democracy nor a belief that there was any such consensus. Few emerged from the revolutionary years with a stable notion of what Irish democracy was or should be.

This observation sits uneasily aside most of the literature on the coming of democracy in the Free State, in which there is often an assumption that some combination of the Treaty, the constitution, and the end of the civil war consolidated Irish democracy. The Free State is touted as one of the few states created in the First World War’s wake that successfully preserved democracy throughout the interwar period, and the close of the Irish civil war is often depicted as ending the major threat to the nascent democratic state. There were bumps along the road – the assassination of Kevin O’Higgins in 1927, the draconian restrictions on civil liberties in 1931, and the semi-farcical expansion of the Blueshirts in the early 1930s – but none of these usually seems to threaten the teleological march to stability. The impression is either that democratic values were already instilled in Ireland by the time of the revolution or that the right sort of people emerged as leaders of the new state and fended off challenges from antidemocratic elements.

This book takes a different view. It argues that the consolidation of democracy was a more arduous, longer-term process that spanned the life of the Free State. One of the most difficult aspects of this process was the normalising of parliamentary opposition, as elements of Irish political culture made opposition more difficult to express. First, Irish nationalist political culture since Daniel O’Connell had privileged a broad movement that claimed to speak for a united monolithic nation. Dissent from or opposition to this was seen as either materialistic – opting for the fleshpots of empire – Anglophilic, or an aid to the coloniser, which had long pursued a divide-and-conquer strategy. The late-nineteenth-century Irish Party also never functioned as a loyal opposition at Westminster, as they were generally trying to disrupt or secede from parliament.

In addition, Ireland’s long colonial experience may have familiarised the Irish people with British democratic institutions, but it also engendered deep contempt for those same institutions. Government was often seen as something to be resisted, and the trappings of parliamentary democracy – parties, whips, politicians, and the two-party system – were disdained. By the time of the revolution, this was conditioned partly by anticolonial or anti-British sentiment and partly by growing scorn for what was seen as the corruption and cronyism of the Irish Party. Finally, revolutionaries wanted to create a Gaelic state that would be clearly distinguished from its colonial predecessor. While most revolutionaries certainly undertheorised the Gaelic state, and there has been little analysis of it from historians outside the issue of language revival, it was a powerful concept in shaping the postrevolutionary polity, however ill-defined. Revolutionaries wanted, in modern parlance, to decolonise the state, to create a new state free of British influences and institutions. While we know that they ended up with a state that adopted a number of British parliamentary practices, too much emphasis on the teleology minimises the initial appeal of anticolonial plans to create a state specifically tailored to Irish interests that avoided mere copying of outmoded or unsuited British forms. In short, the development of a democratic culture was difficult in the Free State because of the combination of a desire to decolonise the institutions of state, a political culture that delegitimised opposition as dangerous or un-Irish, and a widespread belief within the political class that democratic culture had been insufficiently internalised by the Irish people.

The process by which opposition was normalised in the Free State shows the difficulties in establishing Irish democracy. Postcolonial and postrevolutionary political culture militated against multiparty democracy, despite frequent affirmations of its merits during the revolution. Sinn Féin leaders worked assiduously to keep dissent under wraps, fearing that open disputes would weaken the revolutionary movement in the eyes of the world and the British Government. There were constant calls for unity from Sinn Féiners, as they believed that this revolution would succeed because its broad nationalist coalition would not fragment or fall prey to British co-option. Sinn Féin also worked to bring potential dissenters – Labour, farmers, and feminists, to name a few – within the revolutionary coalition by promising to address their concerns in a postrevolutionary state.

This remained the model of politics for Sinn Féin even after the disastrous open dispute over the Treaty settlement. Throughout the fractious Dáil debates on the Treaty, there were constant calls to restore unity and unanimity. Most newspapers and public bodies that called for ratification also demanded a unanimous decision, in effect asking anti-Treatyites to approve the Treaty and then oppose Treatyites within the new state. Even after the Treaty passed and Eamon de Valera was ousted as president – the latter decision causing an acrimonious anti-Treatyite withdrawal from the Dáil – there were still pleas for a restoration of unity. Michael Collins in particular made several offers of a coalition to keep order while the details of the new state were being worked out.

Once the new Free State Dáil met, the Farmers’ and Labour Parties, and eventually William Redmond’s National League, articulated a different version of politics, one in which the political spectrum returned to ‘normal’, with competing parties divided largely on economic lines. Both wings of Sinn Féin, though, continued to pine for a unified national movement, in the guises of Cumann na nGaedheal’s big-tent national party of the 1920s, Fianna Fáil’s regenerative national movement, or Fine Gael’s incorporation of the fascist Blueshirts.² Neither wing of Sinn Féin consistently accepted the necessity or legitimacy of opposition until the mid-1930s at least. At first this was depicted as a desire to reconstitute the successful revolutionary coalition, but as hopes for that revival faded, unity was depicted, as it was in the rest of Europe, as a panacea for divisions formed around class or region. The tensions among the nationalist desire for unity, the smaller parties’ hopes for a normal left–right spectrum, and nearly everyone’s nominal commitment to multiparty democracy form the analytical backbone of this book. In short, it traces the slow death of nineteenth-century O’Connellite notions of politics and the eventual normalisation of multiparty democracy under the Fianna Fáil aegis, a process that was quite fraught.

This is not the impression gleaned from much of the literature on early Irish democracy. Some scholars do stress the long-term anti- or nondemocratic tendencies within the Free State. Mel Farrell’s Party Politics in a New Democracy argues that Irish democracy had long-term antidemocratic forces on the left (the Irish Republican Army (IRA)) and the right (the Blueshirts) during its lifespan, but finally stabilised when the moderates in all parties defeated threats from their more radical elements. R.M. Douglas analysed the fascist and antidemocratic Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, the public’s curiosity about which demonstrated popular ambivalence about democracy through the 1940s.³ John M. Regan has argued that both sides in the civil war were equally antidemocratic. The Treatyite interpretation of the civil war as a vindication of democracy, according to Regan, was popularised in academia to serve the presentist goals of dissociating the southern state from its violent origins and delegitimising the violence of the northern IRA after the 1960s.⁴ Regan contends that the civil war was not about democracy or any other grand ideological principle but was instead about the rather less majestic goal of winning and preserving power. He sees the 1920s in terms of counter-revolution rather than revolution, and maintains that civil war occurred because Treatyites turned counter-revolutionary – defined as a willingness to denounce violence undertaken in pursuit of revolutionary goals – before most anti-Treatyites did. To place this in a democratic context is fallacious, according to Regan, because Sinn Féin itself was ‘pre-democratic and personal allegiance matters as much as, and in some instances more than, notions of ideology’.⁵ Even by 1922, ‘the situation … was still revolutionary and therefore terms such as democrat and anti-democrat have little validity’.⁶ In addition, democracy could incorporate more than simple majoritarianism, so assuming that the Treatyite definition of democracy was the only valid one is reductionist and wrongheaded to Regan.⁷ He attempts to remove ideological division over democracy from interpretations of the politics of the Free State.⁸

These works aside, though, most studies of the period emphasise the factors that enabled Ireland’s progression to multiparty democracy, and the relatively quick period after which politics settled down or normalised. Often, the implicit purpose is to demonstrate why and how democracy took root in Ireland when it failed to so do in many other post-Versailles and postcolonial states. On this topic, there have been two major schools of thought. One emphasises structural factors that conditioned support for democracy, many of which were legacies of the colonial era. The other emphasises the attitudes, behaviours, and decisions of political elites.⁹

The structural approach accentuates longer-term factors from the late colonial era that prefigured Irish democracy, including British acts establishing peasant proprietorship and elective local government; Irish familiarity with the practice of Westminster parliamentary elections; a high literacy rate; an existing colonial bureaucracy; and the qualified support of the Catholic Church for democracy, a crucial variance from the Church’s stance in Italy and France. Older works of political science, including those by Basil Chubb, David Schmitt, and Brian Farrell, more openly espouse this position, although its echoes are felt in more recent studies.¹⁰ Chubb and Schmitt each argued that colonial elements, particularly British electoral practices, prepared the Irish body politic for democracy after the Treaty. Brian Farrell identified the creation of the Dáil and its initial mimicking of British parliamentary forms as the crucial colonial inheritance. Farrell wrote ‘a developed political culture was already established prior to independence … there was no revolution involved in the creation of the new state’. He proposed that ‘most of its [modern Ireland’s] political values – as well as its political structures – were not merely modern but were articulated in a distinctively British way’.¹¹ To Farrell, this created a Sinn Féin political class who ‘already leaned towards an orderly process of legalised change, [and] exhibited a willingness to plan and work for the establishment of a new regime within existing structures whose underlying representative and political values they accepted. They were, in a word, democrats.’¹² David Schmitt’s The Irony of Irish Democracy also claimed that the British legacy facilitated democratisation by familiarising the Irish people with democratic processes and institutions. The gradual extension of the franchise and the creation of mass politics meant that elite politicians and the electorate ‘became accustomed to democratic political procedure’ during the colonial period. As Schmitt wrote:

institutionalization, that is the processes by which political structures and procedures acquire value and stability, was substantially completed prior to the establishment of the Irish Free State. Naturally, a fundamental institutional change was involved in the shift of authority from London to Dublin. But basic political procedures such as universal franchise, freedom of speech, and other civil rights and liberties, were already valued by most of the political leaders and the public. Moreover, Irish Free State institutions closely followed the model of the British parliamentary system … Thus the often critical problem in new nations of establishing and maintaining viable political institutions was for Ireland a manageable risk.¹³

Many of these works focus on the prerevolutionary development of Irish civil society as an important harbinger of democracy. Bill Kissane, in particular, contended that civil society played a key role in consolidating the revolution. Kissane claimed:

Irish democracy emerged out of a society that was relatively modernised by 1921, with high levels of education and urbanisation. Moreover, it emerged after a half-century of land reform had thoroughly reformed the Irish agrarian class structure, and by independence had democratic civil society that reached into practically every area of Irish public life. The relative modernity of the Irish state is precisely what distinguishes the Irish case from the less fortunate states in Eastern Europe.¹⁴

Colonial Ireland also had a number of institutions that were independent from the state, including the press, universities, and business interests. These were the building blocks of later civil society.¹⁵ For Kissane, civil society was a necessary but not sufficient condition for democracy to flourish: it was strong enough to shorten and contain the civil war, but could not prevent it altogether, despite multiple attempts to mediate by Labour, the Church, or local government bodies.¹⁶ Tom Garvin makes a similar argument, claiming that Ireland was ready for democracy but that its elites, committed to futile squabbling over the Treaty, were not.¹⁷

Another common line of argument attributes the perseverance of Free State democracy to the democratic convictions of individual Sinn Féin leaders. Much of this has taken the form of praise of W.T. Cosgrave for leaving power peacefully in 1932, testaments to the strength of the Cumann na nGaedheal Government in squelching antidemocratic resistance in 1922–23, or credit to de Valera for entering the Dáil in 1927. Biographies of Cosgrave, de Valera, Collins, Kevin O’Higgins, Richard Mulcahy, and Seán Lemass each emphasise their subject’s fundamental commitment to democracy.¹⁸ Others moved beyond biography to argue that the fluid and overlapping nature of revolutionary politics allowed individuals considerable freedom to chart their own courses. Michael Hopkinson wrote ‘the ill-defined institutional relationships and the speed of the organisations’ growth made for an increased importance for individuals; much depended on personal initiative and character’.¹⁹ Garvin similarly contended that

The extreme centralization of the movement on a narrow group of key leaders, a development made possible because of the revolutionary events which had produced a popular unanimity, meant that divisions in the movement would, initially at least, be likely to follow personality differences and clique lines rather than any underlying ideological or social cleavage.²⁰

To be fair, both Garvin and Hopkinson also look at long-term structural factors, but still characterise the revolution as offering an unusual opportunity for individuals to influence events decisively. The commitment to democracy evinced by these elite individuals thus facilitated democracy.

Some historians who focus on elite behaviour have argued that those on the pro-Treaty side had a deeper commitment to democratic values and consequently that their victory in the civil war cemented Irish democracy. Joseph Curran’s 1980 monograph The Birth of the Irish Free State depicted anti-Treatyites as thoroughly antidemocratic and characterised the civil war as necessary for the preservation of democracy, concluding that ‘costly as it was, the civil war safeguarded the solid gains embodied in the Treaty, and it firmly established democratic rule’.²¹ Joseph Lee’s influential twentieth-century history textbook followed this line as well. Lee saw the fundamental cause of the civil war as ‘the basic conflict in nationalist doctrine between majority right and divine right. The issue was whether the Irish people had the right to choose their own government at any time according to their judgment of the existing circumstances.’ Republicans argued for a version of divine right, according to Lee, thus reducing the civil war to a ‘choice … between democracy and dictatorship’.²² Lee’s book popularised an interpretation of the civil war as a conflict between democratic Treatyites and authoritarian anti-Treatyites.

A fair amount of scholarship identifies the civil war as the crucible of Irish democracy. Books such as Lee’s and Curran’s that equate the success of Treatyites with the success of democracy obviously follow this line, but Kissane and Garvin also place a lot of emphasis on 1922. Kissane saw it as the triumph of Irish civil society over chaos, whereas Garvin, particularly in 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy, described this year as the victory of majoritarian democrats over violent and unpopular republican vanguards. Even Regan, whose work spans a longer time frame, identifies the civil war period as crucial in forming many of the antidemocratic trends that he identifies.²³ In many of these works, there is a frequent assumption, sometimes stated and sometimes implied, that Irish democracy faced its greatest test in the ten months of civil war, and then Irish politics settled into a more standard 1920s story of a fiscally conservative government flailing in the midst of a worldwide economic downturn and the inexorable rise of economic populism.

Collectively, this scholarship has created a vigorous debate about the nature of Irish democracy, but difficulties remain with some of the arguments advanced. Some of the structuralist work, particularly the earlier political science scholarship, gives the impression, often unintended, that the British colonising mission benefited Ireland, smoothly paving the way for subsequent Irish democracy. Whether explicitly or not, such analyses tend to convey that Ireland’s democratic development was relatively easy, at least compared to other postcolonial countries. For Brian Farrell, the British legacy eased the transition because the wholesale adoption of British institutions and political values led to the rapid normalisation of British parliamentary forms. Farrell noted the ‘extraordinary degree of political stability which has been witnessed since the establishment of the state’, a development rooted in the fact that ‘Irish political culture was already developed into an established and sturdy parliamentary mould prior to political independence.’²⁴ Other works that emphasise Sinn Féin’s Irish Party roots, such as those by Ciara Meehan and David Fitzpatrick, also imply, far less overtly, that British parliamentary forms and the Irish Party’s experience with them made Irish democracy less of a struggle to achieve.²⁵

While it is true that previous experience with British rule has served as a predictor for subsequent democratic success, this does not mean that the Irish willingly or unthinkingly imbibed British democratic values and then reanimated them upon the creation of the Free State.²⁶ The colonised did not experience British democracy in the same ways as the colonisers, and Irish politics inherited a healthy suspicion of state institutions and an awareness that political processes can be used to augment the power of a minority. Irish political culture and most Irish voters distinguished the political practices from the legitimacy of the colonial state sponsoring those practices, and so blending legitimacy with practice consequently took quite some time after the revolution. Regardless of the familiarity with electoral processes handed down from the British, Irish politics had not resembled the two-party British system at any point since the rise of O’Connell. Beyond that, Irish politicians across the spectrum claimed to desire a postrevolutionary political system that did not replicate the British system. Insofar as they had absorbed that system, they preferred to reject it. Irish politicians also assumed for years after the Treaty that the public did not understand democracy and required that its basic tenets be explained to them, and at no point was the British system used as an explanatory model for this process. So, while the Irish public may have been familiar with parliamentary elections and rituals, by the late nineteenth century they experienced such campaigns primarily as a means of disrupting parliamentary processes or maximising the influence of an Irish minority. They did not experience them as something to be replicated, however much their system eventually mirrored the British model in crucial ways. And they certainly had no experience with the function of a responsible opposition in such a system. In fact, the organisation into a separate Irish party assumed an eventual secession from Westminster, as any Irish party would otherwise have a permanent minority status.

Overall, the impression given by this literature is that Ireland was on a long democratic path – this is often described as the ‘constitutionalist’ tradition, as against the ‘militarist’ or ‘republican’ tradition of armed insurrection – that was interrupted by the unexpected and somewhat uncharacteristic explosion of sustained extraparliamentary violence.²⁷ While I do not intend to fuel an Irish Sonderweg debate – Ireland clearly had a constitutional tradition that was the major expression of political opposition to British colonialism for significant portions of the nineteenth century – there remains a danger of normalising constitutionalism and the British developmental path to a degree that assumes that a functioning Westminster-style parliament was always the desired end and that departures from that goal required explanation. This underlying assumption becomes clear when one observes that the volume of historical scholarship seeking to explain why people joined the IRA or Sinn Féin vastly exceeds the amount seeking to explain support for the Irish Party. The former works generally identify a conjunction of variables necessary to cause the pendulum to swing toward military resistance: the rejuvenation of Irish language instruction, the frustrations of the First World War and the threat of conscription, the hopes raised and dashed by the Wilsonian moment, the endless delays in Home Rule, and the wartime prevention of emigration.²⁸ The factors explaining the popularity of the Home Rule movement, in contrast, are far less examined and often taken for granted. We assume that it was somehow normal that the Irish Party was on the ascent in 1912 while the Irish Republican Brotherhood’s (IRB) Irish Freedom remained a journal with a small readership. One danger in this kind of normalising assumption is that it exaggerates the importance of military resistance in the story of Irish democracy. If constitutionalism is the norm, and militarism the anomaly, then an analysis of the threats to democracy is necessarily going to focus on the period of armed civil war, and to assume that once arms were dumped the problem was solved.

Problematically, a focus on elite behaviour often unnecessarily narrows the scope of analyses of Irish democracy. Nearly all existing work has been on a handful of Sinn Féin elites. Certainly, if Collins or de Valera or Cosgrave did not possess some loose affection for democracy, it seems less likely that the Free State would have remained democratic. But to argue that was all that was required is to confuse necessary with sufficient. It is hard to see the Dáil gaining legitimacy as a one-party body like Stormont, and therefore any analysis of elite attitudes toward democracy must also include Labour and Farmers’ Party leaders, as well as the grab-bag of former unionists and Irish Party members who joined the Dáil as independents. Without this opposition to Cumann na nGaedheal, however numerically impotent, the Third Dáil would have lacked credibility as a legitimate multiparty parliament. While Sinn Féin and Irish nationalism may have set the tone for much of the political culture, the party did not provide the only important actors in the story.

In addition, significant recent focus on the civil war has clouded analysis of the early years of Irish democracy. First, it privileges advanced nationalist activists in the historical narrative. Archival deposits; witness statements; and, to an even greater degree, the pension records further the foregrounding of these groups. This is not to say that these groups are not worthy of analysis, but rather that there were other political actors – Labour, the Farmers’ Party, independents, Sinn Féin dissidents, former unionists – that were a crucial and often-underplayed part of the story. It also restricts the chronological scope of such studies. The normalising of loyal opposition – in essence, the fixing of the rights of majorities and minorities – took place over a time period that stretched well past 1923. This question was not even partially settled until the mid-1930s, as the entry of Fianna Fáil into the Dáil in 1927, the change of government in 1932, and the rise of the Blueshirts in 1933 forced the roles of political minorities to be again contested and reformulated. Peter Hart argued that we needed to see the revolution as a ‘chronological, spatial, and thematic whole’.²⁹ I would add that this whole extends well past 1923. Finally, too great a focus on the civil war ends up replicating the loudest issues in 1922: the existence of the republic, the legitimacy of particular elections, and the widespread use of extrajudicial procedures. Those issues are, of course, important, but there were many other aspects of the debates over democracy that deserve more emphasis.

This book takes a different approach and reaches a different conclusion. Irish political culture certainly had democratic elements, and the Irish people were familiar with democratic forms via the myriad clubs, societies, and organisations that most of the revolutionary generation passed through with some frequency.³⁰ However, there were also elements of Irish revolutionary political culture that made the transition to democracy more difficult at the national level. The Irish nationalist experience with democracy across most of the nineteenth century, as well as Sinn Féin’s hegemony during the revolution, elevated some ideals and practices that made the specific transition to multiparty democracy in the 1920s more difficult. Chief among these were tenets derived from Ireland’s colonial experience, in particular that governmental structures were there to be resisted and that politics was best manifested through a single united mass movement. This created a push and pull between Sinn Féin paeans to unity – which took on more force in Ireland because of nineteenth-century practices – and the desire from non-Sinn Féin politicians for politics to assume a normal left–right division.

This entails a larger analysis of Irish political culture, which was, despite its origins in the British political system, hostile or antipathetic to the creation of a loyal opposition. Brian Farrell defined ‘political culture’ as

the pattern of individual attitudes and orientations towards politics among the members of a political system … It refers not only to what is happening in the world of politics but what people believe about those events. Political culture is an interpretive filter through which actual political development is perceived and evaluated; it is an ordering of experience.³¹

Tom Garvin, quoting Gabriel Almond and G. Bingham Powell, defined political culture as ‘the psychological dimension of the political system’ consisting of the ‘attitudes, beliefs, values and skills which are current in a political community’.³² These values and attitudes, I argue, worked against the easy development and installation of a loyal opposition and made the process of establishing democracy in the Free State quite difficult.

To analyse this political culture, I study political rhetoric, borrowing from the approaches of a number of historians, particularly historians of the French and Russian revolutions such as Lynn Hunt, François Furet, and Orlando Figes.³³ Hunt argued that ‘all political authority requires a cultural frame or master fiction in which to define itself and put forward its claims’.³⁴ Furet analysed the various French revolutions as contests for legitimacy, while Figes and Kolonitskii similarly argue that the Russian revolution was a struggle between competing symbolic systems.³⁵ I use all of these concepts – the cultural frame, legitimacy, and competing symbolic or value systems – to study the conflict between the notion of multiparty democracy and that of a united nation. National unity was a master fiction for Irish nationalists, and conceding the legitimacy of difference risked weakening their right to speak for an imagined Irish nation. In such circumstances, it was difficult for opposition parties to establish legitimacy.

I also analyse a longer time frame than many previous works, arguing that the difficulties in normalising democracy continued well past 1923 and thus altering what seems an overstated emphasis on the civil war as the trial of Irish democracy. The difficulty in establishing opposition was not entirely rooted in the short-term causes of the civil war, nor