State's foundation is worth celebrating

IN 1937, the eminent British scholar Sir Keith Hancock wrote of the Irish Free State: "The Irish Free State under Mr Cosgrave was the objective, the unemotional, scientific intellectual State."

Sir Keith went on to highlight some of the attributes of this State: "It was not enough for this government to create out of chaos an Irish State; the new State must prove itself under every head to be a model State. In face of armed resistance and the persistent disease of political assassinations it vindicated - when necessary with a scientific ruthlessness - the Abraham Lincoln concept of democracy. It established the rule of law grounded on the principle of majority decision. At the same time it safeguarded by an exemplary impartiality and tolerance the rights of the law abiding minority. Its budgets were models of careful prudence."

Sir Keith went on to extol many of its other virtues as he saw them. But there was also a sting in the tail. The new State, he said, "measured up to all the orthodoxies which were prevalent at the time of its foundation". Unfortunately, these orthodoxies were changing, and ironically the qualities which Hancock extolled were used afterwards to play down the achievements of that government or to damn it with faint praise.

History, which can be harsh in its judgments, has also a tendency in the fullness of time - its own time - to be fair. In the case of the Free State he passage of time is producing a more positive and fairer judgment, than had been the case.

To a great extent the leaders of the 1922-32 period were either written out of history or remembered for a series of individual incidents, unfavourably portrayed, rather than being judged against the totality of their achievements. Whether this was due 10 the rewriting of history by the subsequent electoral winners or to the absence of adequate objective historical analysis does not really matter.

ALL that has to be said is that it happened, but the 75th anniversary of the foundation of the State offers an opportunity for a serious reassessment.

The first test of any State is its ability to survive, but even more testing is its capacity to survive with its democratic institutions intact. Many states survived the 1920s but some did so at the expense of democracy. By the end of the 1920s the Irish Free State was the fourth oldest surviving democracy in Europe.

But civil war victory was only part of the story. Bight through the 1920s, even after Fianna Fail grudgingly to the Dail in 1927, the very legitimacy of the State, was under attack. The civil war and its issues lived on, now fought within parliament or from the hustings, but the death of Kevin O'Higgins was a reminder of how fragile was the basis on which so much of our policy was based.

It was easy in subsequent years to caricature the preoccupation of Cosgrave and his ministers with the restoration and maintenance of law and order. But for people whose homes had been burnt, who had family members killed, against whom blanket sentences of death had been issued, such a preoccupation was understandable. It went however much deeper than that.

Kevin O'Higgins in particular saw the simple truth that a country in which taxes were not paid, where the rule of law was ignored, where the bully ruled, would not long survive as a civilised political entity. He and others had seen enough of the anarchy and viciousness which lay so close to the surface, and which civil war conditions had licensed, to realise the simple truth that without an ordered society nothing was possible.

Against the background of civil war and incipient anarchy the decision to establish an unarmed police force, even from today's perspective, was a dauntingly brave one. There may have been much that was rough and ready about the early police force, it may have lacked the polish of neighbouring forces and it may have shown over the years the frailty of all human institutions, but for all of that it has given 75 years of honest service to the Irish people.

Likewise the civilianising of the Army. It is easy to forget how large the Army was, the position of ascendancy it enjoyed, the perks and trappings and, most of all, the possibilities open to relatively young officers in that founding year of 1922. Yet the new government moved with ruthlessness to downsize the Army to make it fully professional, subject to civilian rule, a part of the State and not, as could so easily have happened, a state within itself.

MUCH was made at the time and subsequently of the parsimoniousness of the new State. Ernest Blythe's shilling off the Old Age Pension is the lingering and deeply damaging memory, but it does raise one fundamental question. What ether option had a new government but to balance its books? All the experts decreed that budgets should be balanced, Keynes was not yet in vogue, and even if the Free State decided to go the borrowing route, there were few enough lenders around. In retrospect, Blythe had a better case than he ever bothered to make.

But to see the Cosgrave government as dominated by fiscal conservatism is wrong. The decision to set up the ESB and build the Shannon Scheme was an act of financial audacity and entrepreneurial boldness.

When young Tommy McLoughlin arrived back from Siemens in Germany, he persuaded McGilligan and Cosgrave that unless there was adequate electricity the State would never be able to industrialise and he told them the Irish private sector would never do it. He persuaded the government to invest enormous capital to set up a State company. The result was a sustained assault from every element of the Irish establishment of the day - the banks refused to lend money (until threatened with nationalisation by McGilligan), the Chambers of Commerce shouted "socialism", the engineers saw it as a slur, the farmers cried extravagance, and The Irish Times moaned about German infiltration.

This was no ordinary opposition, it was opposition from the real centre of power and yet the government ploughed on, built Ardaacrusha in (time and at cost and showed greal inventiveness in giving us our first State company.

There were many other achievements of that period, many still awaiting sober historical analysis. There were mistakes and miscalculations, failures and misfits. But on a range of issues, none more than the willingness of young men like Desmond FitzGerald and Patrick McGilligan to use the imperial conferences to make a reality of Michael Collins's stepping stone theory, culminating in the Statute of Westminster, the Free State was bold and self confident. It was a portent of what young confident educated Irish people could do in an international setting.

But also in an age where sectarianism still dominates Northern Irish politics, the Free State government set out deliberately to be an inclusive State. By nominating leaders of Protestantism and unionism to the Senate, Cosgrave was making it a reality. He got little thanks. He was reviled, dubbed "West Brit" and much worse, but he was making a point that sadly was never replicated in Northern Ireland.

Perhaps most of all in terms of contemporary politics the Free State government was characterised by a willingness to tell the truth to hammer home the reality that independence meant responsibility, that nothing was free, nobody owed us a living. We had to do it alone, our way, or not at all. As Hancock said, it may have been magnificent, but it was not always politic. On the other hand, not a bad epitaph and one that grows stronger with each passing day.