Irish Free State
Michael Collins described the Treaty as 'the freedom to achieve freedom'. In practice, the Treaty offered most of the symbols, powers and functions of independence, including a functioning parliamentary democracy, executive, judiciary, a written constitution which could be changed by the Free State, etc. However, in theory, a number of limits existed:
- The British king remained king in Ireland;
- The British Government had a continued role in Irish governance. Officially the representative of the King, the Governor-General also received instructions from the British Government on his use of the Royal Assent, namely a Bill passed by the Dáil and Seanad could be Granted Assent (signed into law), Withheld (not signed, pending later approval) or Denied (i.e., vetoed). Letters patent to the first Governor-General Tim Healy had named Bills that if passed were to be blocked, namely an attempt to abolish the Oath, etc. In reality no such Bills were ever introduced, so the issue never arose.
- The Irish Free State, like all Dominions, had an inferior status to the United Kingdom, which meant, in theory, it could not have its own citizenship (merely a shared Commonwealth citizenship), could not have direct access to the monarch except through a British minister, and had to use the British state's Great Seal of the Realm on all of its state documents, again symbolising its inferior status to the United Kingdom within the Commonwealth.
All this changed in the 1920s. A reform of the King's title, under a Commonwealth Conference decision and given effect by the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act 1927, changed the King's role in each dominion. No more was he King in Ireland, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Instead he became King of Ireland, Australia, etc. So from that change, embodied in the Royal Titles Act, the British king had no role whatsoever in each dominion. His only role was as each dominion's own king, advised in each dominion's affairs by the dominion, not by the United Kingdom. Furthermore, the British government lost any role in either the selection of a governor-general or in advising him. In this manner, the United Kingdom lost the ability to influence internal dominion legislation.
The Free State went further. It 'accepted' credentials from international ambassadors to Ireland, something no other dominion up to then had done. It registered the treaty with the League of Nations as an international document, over the objections of the United Kingdom, which saw it as a mere internal document between a dominion and the UK.
Most dramatically of all, the Statute of Westminster (1931), again embodying a decision of a Commonwealth Conference, enabled each dominion to enact any legislation to change any legislation, without any role for the British parliament that may have enacted the original legislation in the past.
Ireland symbolically marked these changes in two mould-breaking moves:
- It sought, and got the King's acceptance, to have an Irish minister, with the complete exclusion of British ministers, formally advising the king as King of Ireland in the exercise of his Irish powers and functions. Two examples of this are the signing of a treaty between the Irish Free State and the Portuguese Republic in 1931, and the separate (from the UK) act recognising the abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936.
- The unprecedented abandonment of the use of the British Great Seal of the Realm and its replacement by the Great Seal of the Irish Free State, which the King awarded to his Irish Kingdom as King of Ireland, again in 1931. (The Irish Seal consisted of a picture of 'King George V of Ireland' enthroned on one side, with the Irish state harp and the words Saorstát Éireann (Irish for Irish Free State) on the reverse. It is now on display in the Irish National Museum, Collins Barracks in Dublin.)
When Éamon de Valera became President of the Executive Council (prime minister) in 1932 he described Cosgrave's ministers' achievements simply. Having read the files, he told his son, Vivion, "they were magnificent, son". All that remained was British control of a number of ports in the Irish Free State, called the Treaty Ports. However that was an issue not of constitutional law but technical requirements in the Treaty which could be and were renegotiated in 1938 to Ireland's satisfaction.
That freedom allowed de Valera, on becoming President of the Executive Council (February 1932), to go even further. With no British restrictions on his policies, he abolished the Oath of Allegiance (which Cosgrave intended to do had he won the 1932 general election), the Senate, university representation in the Dáil, appeals to the Privy Council. His one major error occurred in 1936 when he attempted to use the abdication of King Edward VIII to abolish the crown and governor-general in the Free State with the "Constitution (Amendment No. 27 Act)". He was told by senior law officers and others that, as the crown and governor-generalship existed separately from the constitution in a vast number of acts, charters, orders-in-council, and letters patent, they both still existed. He had to rush through a second bill, the "Executive Powers (Consequential Provisions) Act, 1937" to repeal all the elements he had forgotten. He retrospectively dated the second act's effect back to December 1936.
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Aftermath of the Irish Free State
In 1937, Éamon de Valera replaced the 1922 constitution of Michael Collins with his own, renamed the Irish Free State to Éire, and created a new 'president of Ireland' in place of the Governor-General of the Irish Free State. His constitution, reflecting the 1930s preoccupation with faith and fatherland, claimed jurisdiction over all of Ireland while recognising the reality of the British presence in the northeast (see Articles 2 and 3). It recognised the "special position" of the Roman Catholic Church, while also recognising the existence and rights of other faiths, specifically the minority Anglican Church of Ireland and the Jewish Congregation in Ireland. Although in retrospect this provision appears sectarian, in 1937 it was viewed by leaders of non-Catholic religions as heading off a state religion and it was condemned by conservative Catholic groups as "liberal". This article was repealed in 1973.
Articles 2 and 3 were reworded in 1998 to remove jurisdictional claim over the entire island and to recognise that "a united Ireland shall be brought about only by peaceful means with the consent of a majority of the people, democratically expressed, in both jurisdictions in the island."
It was left to the initiative of de Valera's successors in government to achieve the country's formal transformation into a republic. A small but significant minority of Irish people, usually attached to parties like Sinn Féin and the smaller Republican Sinn Féin, denied the right of the twenty-six county state to use the name Republic and continued to refer to the state as the Free State. With Sinn Féin's entry in the Republic's Dáil and the Northern Ireland Executive at the close of the 20th century, the number of those who refuse to accept the legitimacy, which was already very small, declined further.
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References
- ^ Anglo Irish Treaty (New York Times). The Irish signatories of the Treaty were described in the Treaty as the "Irish signatories" and the "Irish Delegation". There was no reference to the Government of the Irish Republic so it would be innacurate to describe the Treaty as being between two Governments.
- ^ Southern Ireland became a distinct region of the United Kingdom, by Order in Council on 3 May 1921 (SR&O 1921, No. 533). It was never a state (or pejoratively, statelet). Its constitutional roots were the Act of Union, two complimentary Acts, one passed by the Parliament of Great Britain, the other by the Parliament of Ireland.
- ^ For further discussion, see: Dáil Éireann - Volume 7 - 20 June, 1924 The Boundary Question – Debate Resumed.
- ^ Northern Ireland Parliamentary Debates, 27 October 1922
- ^ Northern Ireland Parliamentary Report, 7 December 1922
- ^ Northern Ireland Parliamentary Report, 13 December 1922, Volume 2 (1922) / Pages 1191–1192, 13 December 1922
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See also
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Further reading
- Tim Pat Coogan, Éamon de Valera (ISBN 0-09-175030-X)
- Tim Pat Coogan, Michael Collins (ISBN 0-09-174106-8)
- Lord Longford, Peace by Ordeal (Though long out of print, it is available in libraries)
- Dorothy McCardlee, The Irish Republic (ISBN 0-86327-712-8)
| Preceded by Irish Republic (declared by Dáil Éireann in 1919) |
Irish Free State according to Irish constitutional theory |
Succeeded by Ireland |
| Preceded by United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland |
Irish Free State according to British constitutional theory |
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