‘A solemn act of defiance’

The meeting of the first Dáil was as important globally as it was nationally, making Ireland one of only a dozen democracies in the world at the time

FINTAN O'TOOLE

IN 1907, Jawaharlal Nehru, later to become the first prime minister of an independent India, visited Dublin. He was fascinated by a then relatively minor political movement called Sinn Féin. What struck him in particular was its policy of non-violent seizure of power.

“Have you heard of Sinn Féin?” he asked his father in a letter home. “Their policy is not to beg favours but to wrest them. They do not want to fight England by arms, but ‘to ignore her, boycott her, and quietly assume the administration of Irish affairs. . . If its policy is adopted by a majority of the country, English administration will be a thing of the past.”

The idea of quietly assuming the administration of Irish affairs was to be rather drowned out by the violent events of the decade between 1913 and 1923.

In the subsequent story of Irish independence, the drama of armed conflict would always be more vivid than Arthur Griffith’s original idea of beating England by ignoring her. The Sinn Féin that emerged after the 1916 Rising would be a very different animal to the non-violent movement that preceded it.

Yet the basic and breathtakingly bold idea – win a majority and assume the administration of Irish affairs – was to be crucial in the foundation of the State. It has also been arguably more important to the democratic nature of the State that finally took shape. If Ireland emerged from revolution and civil war with an extraordinarily stable parliamentary system, it is thanks in large measure to the decision, in January 1919, to put Griffith’s idea into practice.

In December 1918, Sinn Féin won 73 of the 105 Irish seats in the Westminster general election, virtually wiping out the previously dominant Irish Party.

In January 1919, those TDs who were not in jail or on the run gathered in the Mansion House in Dublin to set up their own sovereign parliament, and to declare a republic. The Irish Times described these proceedings as “a solemn act of defiance of the British Empire by a body of young men who have not the slightest idea of that empire’s power and resources”.

The first part of that assessment was correct. The second was not quite right – the new TDs probably knew well enough how powerful the British Empire was, but they had decided to defy it nonetheless.

The assembly of that first Dáil was far from a simple act of national self-determination. Sinn Féin had actually won 47 per cent of the popular vote – about the same as the Irish Party and the Unionists combined. Sinn Féin, however, won 25 seats uncontested – if there had been a vote in these constituencies, the party’s overall vote would probably have been closer to 70 per cent.

There were, nonetheless, obvious cracks in the facade of national unity. Labour, which had considerable support, had stood aside in the election “in the interest of the nation”.

Sinn Féin had polled poorly in the nine counties of Ulster, where it took less than a quarter of the vote. The invitation to attend the first Dáil that was sent in the name of Count Plunkett to all successful candidates on January 8th, 1919 was comprehensively ignored by the Unionists. These absences would mark the nature of Irish democracy from the beginning – the social demands of Labour would be sidelined and partition would be copperfastened.

Yet, for all these serious qualifications, the assembly of the first Dáil was an event of immense importance. It mattered around the world: Nehru recommended to Mahatma Gandhi in 1920 that the Indian independence movement should adopt a similar strategy. It was a harbinger of the decline of the largest empire the world has ever seen. And it mattered, of course, in Ireland. It mattered that when an Irish State eventually emerged from the turmoil, it had already established a parliamentary system as a source of legitimacy.

Even though the first Dáil struggled to assert its control over the emerging IRA, the Dáil’s very existence validated the idea of Irish democracy. It was hugely important that the Declaration of Independence, adopted by the first Dáil as its founding act, appealed not just to the proclamation of the Republic in 1916 but also to the result of the 1918 election. That importance is clear from a simple, stark, but easily forgotten fact – by 1942, less than a quarter of a century after the foundation of the Dáil, there were just 12 parliamentary democracies in the world and just four in Europe: Sweden, Switzerland, Britain and Ireland. The parliamentary system established by the first Dáil helped to make Ireland an extremely unusual place.

In the 90 years since that system was established, its workings have often been criticised, sometimes justly. It may, ironically, have followed the British system too closely. The balance between the executive (governments) and the legislature (the Dáil and Seanad) may arguably have been tipped too heavily in favour of the former. Local and clientelist concerns may sometimes have crowded out national and international issues. But the vast majority of the Irish people have been glad to give their allegiance, however grumpy or tacit, to the parliament they elect.

In that, the achievements of those first members of an Irish independent and democratically elected parliament have persisted.

We need to be reminded, perhaps, that it took courage, imagination and a magnificent cheek to create these institutions that are now so ingrained in our national life.

In doing so, this publication may help voters not to take democracy for granted and encourage parliamentarians to emulate those imaginative and defiant qualities of the women and men who made them what they are.