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The state known today as the Republic of Ireland came into being when twenty-six of the traditional counties of Ireland seceeded from the United Kingdom (UK) in 1922. The remaining six counties remained within the UK as Northern Ireland.
The southern state has been known by a number of names. Nationalists established a self-declared "Irish Republic" in 1919 but this never achieved de facto independence. The de facto Irish state was founded in 1922 as the "Irish Free State", but was renamed to simply "Ireland" in 1937. It has been commonly known as the "Republic of Ireland" since becoming a republic in 1949.
Background to independence
Separatism and the Anglo-Irish War
From 1801 until 6 December 1922 the whole of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. In the the late 1910s, after the failure of decades of campaigning by moderate nationalists to win Irish home rule, militant nationalists in the form of the Sinn Féin party and its paramilitary wing, the Irish Volunteers, began to win popular support. In the 1918 general election Sinn Féin won the vast majority of seats, many of which were uncontested. Sinn Féin's elected candidates refused to attend to the UK Parliament at Westminster and instead assembled in Dublin as new revolutionary parliament called "Dáil Éireann". They declared the existence of new state called the "Irish Republic" and attempted to establish a system of government to rival the institutions of the United Kingdom.
The first meeting of the Dáil coincided with the outbreak of the Anglo-Irish War. From 1919 to 1921 the Irish Volunteers (now renamed as the "Irish Republican Army", and notionally the army of the Irish Republic) engaged in guerrilla warfare against the British army and a paramilitary unit known as the Black and Tans. Both sides engaged in brutal acts; the Black and Tans deliberately burned entire towns and tortured civilians. The IRA carried out ethnic cleansing of Protestant communities in the Munster region, as well as burning historic homes.
Northern Ireland was created by the Government of Ireland Act, 1920. This was an attempt to appease nationalists by establishing in Ireland two semi-autonomous states: Northern Ireland and Southern Ireland, both of which were to remain part of the United Kingdom. However, while Northern Ireland became a political reality, the political institutions of Southern Ireland were boycotted by nationalists and so never become fully functional. Eventually a cease-fire was called and negotiations between the antagonists.
Discussions between the British and Irish sides produced the Anglo-Irish Treaty, concluded in December 1921. The treaty created a new system of Irish self government, known as "dominion status", with a new state, to be called the Irish Free State. The new Free State was in theory to cover the entire island, subject to the provisio that Northern Ireland could opt out and choose to remain part of the United Kingdom, which it duly did.
Civil War
Main article: Irish Civil War
The Dáil narrowly passed the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. Under the leadership of Michael Collins and W.T. Cosgrave it set about establishing the Irish Free State, a national, fully re-organised army to replace the haphazard paramilitary IRA and a new police force, the Civil Guard (quickly renamed as the Garda Síochána) which replaced one of Ireland's two police forces, the Royal Irish Constabulary. The second, the Dublin Metropolitan Police merged some years later with the garda.
However a minority led by Eamon de Valera opposed the treaty, on the grounds that did not create a fully indepedent state, or a republic, that it imposed the controversial Oath of Allegiance on Irish parliamentarians and that it provided for the partition of the island. De Valera led his supporters out of the Dáil and a bloody civil war, between pro and anti-treaty sides, followed, only coming to an end in 1923. The civil war cost more lives than the Anglo-Irish War that preceded it and left divisions that are still felt in Irish politics today.
1922 to 1973
After Collins's assassination in August 1922, W.T. Cosgrave assumed control of both the 'Irish Republic' and 'Southern Ireland' governments and both disappeared simultaneously, replaced by the Irish Free State on 6 December, 1922.
The Free State was a constitutional monarchy over which the British monarch reigned (from 1927 with the title "King of Ireland"). The Representative of the Crown was known as the Governor-General. The Free State had a bicameral parliament and a cabinet, called the "Executive Council" answerable to the lower house of parliament, the Free State Dáil. The head of government was called the President of the Executive Council.
In 1932, Eamon de Valera, who had been the nominal leader of the anti-treatyites and who had left Sinn Féin in 1926 to found his own Fianna Fáil party, became President of the Executive Council. He re-wrote the 1922 Irish Free State constitution before proposing an entirely new constitution to the electorate in a plebiscite. On the 29 December 1937 the new "Constitution of Ireland" came into effect, renaming the Irish Free State to simply "Ireland". The Governor-General was replaced by a President of Ireland and a new more powerful prime minister, called the "taoiseach", came into being, while the Executive Council was renamed the "Government". Though it had a president, the new state was not a republic. The British monarch continued to reign as King of Ireland and was used as an "organ" in international and diplomatic relations, with the President of Ireland relegated to symbolic functions within the state but never of outside it.
The state was nominally neutral during World War II, known within the state as the "Emergency", though behind the scenes it worked closely with the Allies; for example the date of the D-Day Normandy landings was decided on the basis of transatlantic weather reports supplied by the Irish state. Despite the offical line of neutrality many Irishmen fought in the war. It is estimated that about 100 thousand men from Ireland took part, with that number roughly evenly divided between Northern Ireland and the southern state. Following the suicide of Adolf Hitler, de Valera controversially offered condolences to the German ambassador.
On 1 April 1949, the Republic of Ireland Act was enacted. The new state was unambiguously described as a republic, with the international and diplomatic functions previously vested in or exercised by the King now vested in the President of Ireland who finally became unambiguously the Irish head of state. Though the official name of the state remained Ireland, the term Republic of Ireland though officially just the 'description' of the new state, came to be used as its name. Under the Commonwealth rules then in force, the declaration of a republic automatically terminated the state's membership of the British Commonwealth. Unlike India, which became a republic at the same time, the Republic of Ireland chose not to reapply for admittance to the Commonwealth.
The state joined the European Economic Community (now known as the European Union) 1973. The same period saw the advancement of the state and several large projects such as the Regional Technical Colleges, National Institutes for Higher Education and the Nuclear Energy Board.
Relationship with Northern Ireland
Irish governments have sought the peaceful unification of Ireland and in recent decades have cooperated with the UK government against extra-legal paramilitary groups such as the Provisional IRA and the 'Real IRA'. Sinn Féin and the Provisional IRA refused until the 1980s to participate in the political institutions of the Republic.
The party has changed its policy stance on the existence of both the Republic and Northern Ireland, serving in the parliament of the former and the cabinet of the latter, as part of the Good Friday Agreement, which set up powersharing institutions within Northern Ireland, North-South instructions and links between the various components of the British Isles. The Irish state also changed Articles 2 and 3 of the constitution to acknowledge both the existence of Northern Ireland and the desire of Irish nationalists for a united Ireland.
National scandals
Both church and state were hit by a number of scandals in the 1980s and 1990s. The revelation that one senior Catholic bishop, Eamon Casey, fathered a child by a divorceé caused a major reaction, as did the discovery of child abuse by a large number of clerics, notably the infamous paedophile Father Brendan Smyth (the incompetent handling of a request for the extradition of Smyth brought down an Irish government in 1994). Another bishop subsequently resigned over his mishandling of child abuse cases in his diocese. Also in the 1990s a series of tribunals began inquiring into major allegations of corruption against senior politicians. Ray Burke, who served as Minister for Foreign Affairs in 1997 was gaolled on charges of corruption in January 2005.
Liberalisation and economic success
Since 1922 the state has become increasingly less conservative. Liberalisation has been led by figures like Mary Robinson, a radical feminist senator who became President of Ireland in 1990 and David Norris, who led the Campaign for Homosexual Law Reform.
In the 1990s the state, which had been gripped by poverty and emigration for most of its existence, became one of the fastest growing economies in the world: a phenomenon known as the Celtic Tiger.
See also
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