Vanished Kingdoms: The Rise and Fall of States and Nations (117 page)

The central cause of the civil war had lain in the decision to sacrifice the Republic. The tragedy was all the greater since ‘feeling in the country at large was far more decisively in favour of the Treaty than in the committed republican atmosphere of the Dáil’.
⁴⁵
In this regard, Roy Foster has written reprovingly of ‘the obsession with “the Crown”.
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The fact is that two opposing groups were obsessed with the Crown: the Irish ultra-republicans and the British establishment. Constitutionally, the Anglo-Irish settlement introduced a system that was halfway between the abandoned Home Rule project and full sovereignty. What it most nearly resembled was the separate but dependent ‘Kingdom of Ireland’, abolished in 1801 to make way for the Union.

In the final phase of the civil war, which continued into the late spring of 1923, exasperated Free State ministers adopted ruthless measures to fight violence with violence. Once masters of their own legislation, they introduced an Emergency Powers Act which sanctioned summary executions. Before the fighting petered out, the forces of the Free State had killed more IRA men than the British ever did. Erskine Childers was among the victims.
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De Valera, having denounced the treaty and praised the ‘Legion of the Rearguard’, was arrested and interned.
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Not surprisingly, most of the songs generated by the Irish Civil War emanated from the defeated republicans. The Free Staters, though they won, had little to crow about. ‘The Drumboe Martyrs’ laments one batch of executed victims, while the satirical ‘Irish Free State’, ‘which ran up the red-white-and-blue’, accurately reflects republican bitterness. Yet nothing offended republicans more than the Free State’s adoption of the green-white-and-gold tricolour of the late Republic:

Take it down from the mast, Irish traitors,

It’s the flag we republicans claim.

It can never belong to Free Staters,

For you’ve brought on it nothing but shame.

Why not leave it to those who are willing

To uphold it in war and in peace,

To the men who intend to do killing

Until England’s tyrannies cease?

You have murdered our brave Liam and Rory,

You have murdered young Richard and Joe.

Your hands with their blood is still gory,

Fulfilling the work of the foe.
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Taken together, the Anglo-Irish War, the Anglo-Irish treaty and the Irish Civil War changed the face of southern Ireland. After 1919, large numbers of Anglo-Irish landowners, the backbone of British rule, left their estates and never returned. After 1922, the treaty made provision for the orderly exodus or retirement of British officials, whom the Free State compensated. The survivors of fratricidal slaughter were left in a state of deep trauma that took decades to heal.

In March 1924, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford died in Cambridge, where he had been Professor of Music for almost forty years. He was a musician of the highest standing both as conductor and composer; his contribution to church choral music in particular passed into the standard repertoire.
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But the professor had equally produced a lengthy series of collections of Irish folk songs and of Irish-inspired compositions. For he was an Irishman, born in Dublin, who never cut his roots. His works included a comic opera,
Shamus O’Brien,
six orchestral
Irish Rhapsodies
,
Irish Fantasies
and
Six Irish Sketches
for violin,
Intermezzo on the Londonderry
Air for organ, a
Limmerich ohne Woerte
under the pseudonym of Karel Drofnatski, and three song cycles for voice and piano:
A Sheaf of Songs from Leinster
,
Six Songs from the Glens of Antrim
and
An Irish Idyll
:

In summer time I foot the turf

And lay the sods to dry;

South wind and lark’s song

And the sun far up in the sky.

I pile them on the turf stack

Against the time of snow;

Black frost, a gale from the north.

Who minds what winds may blow?

Now winter’s here, make up the fire,

And let you bolt the door.

A wind across the mountains,

And a draught across the floor.

…

I see myself a barefoot child,

I see myself a lad,

When the gold upon the gorse bush

Was all the gold I had.

I do be having some fine old dreams

Of days were long ago,

When the wind keens, the night falls

And the embers glow.
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Stanford was witness in his generation to the deep interpenetration of English and Irish life.

The Irish Free State could not have experienced a worse start, and acute problems pressed on many fronts. The coffers, for example, were virtually empty, and confusion reigned over the nature of the Free State’s monarchy. Some sources list George V and his two sons, Edward VIII and George VI, as ‘kings of Ireland’.
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In the light of subsequent Commonwealth practice, this looks logical. But contemporary documents contain no such title. In reality, the exact relationship between the Free State and its monarch had been left curiously (and perhaps deliberately) ambivalent. Article 4 of the treaty laid down an oath of allegiance to be taken by all members of the Dáil, binding them ‘to be faithful to HM King George V… in virtue of the common citizenship of Ireland with Great Britain… and her membership of the British Commonwealth of Nations’.
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The so-called National Anthem also caused trouble. ‘God Save the King’ is a royal anthem, not a national one, and nowhere does it mention the country whose monarch God is asked to save. More seriously, the words were still the same as in Britain. In consequence, they stuck in many an Irish throat. Though the Free State bands would dutifully play the melody on official occasions, it was often met either with stony silence or with counter-chants. Gaelic-speakers usually sang ‘The Soldier’s Song’. Others preferred a favourite from the American Civil War, sung to the rousing tune of ‘Tramp, Tramp, Tramp – the Boys are Marching’:

‘God Save Ireland,’ said the heroes,

‘God Save Ireland,’ said they all.

Whether on the scaffold high

Or the battlefield we die,

Oh, what matter when for Erin dear we fall.
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From its inception the Free State was closely intertwined with the Roman Catholic Church, which, thanks to the exodus of Anglo-Irish Protestants, garnered the loyalties of 93 per cent of the population. The Church, having supported Parnell and the Home Rule Bill, had formally condemned the IRA’s violence, and after the civil war it was the only institution with the resources to assist an impoverished government in the fields of education, healthcare and social reform. The majority of schools were run by Catholic orders, which insisted on Catholic instruction in the classroom. In 1924 divorce was banned and the sale of contraceptives made illegal; abortion was unavailable. After 1930, most Irish hospitals were funded by a sweepstake whose tickets were routinely distributed by priests and nuns, and the Eucharistic Congress of 1932 was treated as a state event. Suggestions have been made that the loss of royal ritual made people more susceptible to the charms of religious ritual.
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The authoritarian ethos of the Irish Church could not be easily contested. For practical purposes, the ecclesiastical Index of banned books functioned as a system of state censorship. Ulster Protestants had always held that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’, and the Free State’s early years did little to discredit the equation.

Nonetheless, during the rest of the 1920s, the two parts of Ireland settled down to an uneasy truce in which open conflict was avoided. In the North, which was more industrialized, competition for work in a sluggish post-war economy led to increasing and blatant discrimination against Catholics in key enterprises such as the Belfast shipyards. A government plan to introduce non-sectarian education was blocked by opposition from Protestants and Catholics alike. In the South, where over half the population still worked the land, the government put its mind to maximizing agricultural commerce, especially with Britain, and to relieving social poverty. Gaelic education represented another priority, which addressed the demands of cultural nationalism. ‘The prosecution of the Irish language became the necessary benchmark of an independent ethos.’
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At the same time, care was taken to strengthen democratic stability round the Dáil, the Free State army and the unarmed police, the
Garda Síochána
. When Éamon de Valera re-emerged from detention to found Fianna Fáil in 1926, promising to promote republicanism through the Free State’s institutions, he caused the Sinn Féin movement to splinter yet again. From then on, republicans still bent on armed struggle were reduced to a very small rump.

No privileged status was offered to the Roman Catholic Church, despite its long-standing ties to Irish nationalism. Some Catholic politicians harboured anti-clerical tendencies, just as many Catholic priests had shunned the IRA. In any case, the British guardians of the treaty, conditioned by the Protestant Ascendancy, were unwilling to envisage a theocratic state on Britain’s doorstep. So Free State leaders had to be cautious.
Taoiseach
Cosgrave expressed his country’s undying allegiance to the papacy, but the more extreme advocates of Catholic control were disappointed. Deep-seated tensions between Church and State in Ireland did not surface for over half a century.
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With some delay, the British government responded to the division of Ireland by passing the Royal and Parliamentary Titles Act (1927). Ever since his pre-war coronation, George V had used the formula of ‘king of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, of the Dominions, and of other realms beyond the seas’. Now the initial part of his title was changed to ‘king of Great Britain, Ireland, the Dominions, and…’.
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The replacement of the first ‘and’ by a comma pointed unambiguously to Ireland being accepted as a separate realm. In consequence, the king was advised to accept the nomination of the next governor-general from the Irish government, not from the British. At the Imperial Conference of 1926, when the structures of the British Commonwealth were first mooted, the Irish Free State was listed among its constituent dominions, alongside Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. Cosgrave participated without apparent demur.

The 1930s witnessed a republican revival. Membership of the Commonwealth did not give the Free State any marked benefits; and, as the Great Depression deepened, socio-economic ills in Ireland mounted. After five years’ preparation, De Valera’s Fianna Fáil, drawing on pro-republican sympathies that had gone underground since the civil war, won the election of 1932, and formed a radical government. For its party anthem, it had adopted the melody and bilingual lyrics that had been sung before the General Post Office in 1916. The original words of ‘
Amhrán na bhFiann
’ were in English:

Sons of the Gael! Men of the Pale!

The long-watched day is breaking;