Building a state in the shadow of civil war (Part 2)

The crisis, which was also rooted in other "grievances", was quickly averted, but not before the resignation of two ministers and of three of the army's highest-ranking officers. But the "army crisis" never remotely reached Bonapartist proportions where a coup d'etat was threatened. It was the measure of the professionalism of the army that Ireland, unlike other new states, never underwent a phase of direct military rule in its early years. That professionalism was evident during Cosgrave's handing over of power to de Valera and Fianna Fail following the general election in February, 1932.

At the height of the civil war, the Cumann na nGaedheal government was far-sighted enough to establish an unarmed force police which was named the Garda Siochana. That force was initially 4,000 strong and that rose to over 6,500 by the late 1920s and was deployed throughout the country during the civil war.

Cumann na nGaedheal also managed to secure the functioning of a national court system under an independent judiciary. The writ of the government ran throughout the country, helping to establish the rule of law and return the countryside to a sense of "normalcy".

Actions of that kind - the establishment of state institutions - were not likely to make the rafters ring in republican Ireland, no more than the restoration of an efficient national railway and transport system.

An impecunious government, burdened by the debt of civil war destruction, also tackled agricultural reform with the Land Act (1923), which reconstituted the Land Commission. All accounts of the Cumann na nGaedheal government celebrate the building of the successful Shannon Scheme (1925-9) which helped initiate the mass electrification of the country. It was imaginatively conceived and showed real vision for achieving rapid industrialisation.

Post-revolutionary Ireland - living with expectations elevated unrealistically by the political rhetoric of 1919-1921 - did not provide the government with much opportunity to achieve rapid and radical social reform. Emigration continued, 220,591 leaving for the US between 1921 and 1930. Those numbers were reduced radically only when world depression hit in the late 1920s. The Minister for Finance, Ernest Blythe, may have made many good decisions during his tenure but he will be most remembered for his reduction of old age pensions, and for cutting the pay of national teachers and gardai in 1931 - the year before a general election.

His colleague, the Minister for Education, Eoin MacNeill, was an effective and creative manager of a portfolio which established a highly centralised system of educational control. His progressive ideas, and those of his predecessor, for the teaching of Irish have yet to be acknowledged, as have Cumann na nGaedheal's efforts to publish and provide books in Irish at an economical price.

MacNeill's name is more associated with the failure of the Boundary Commission in 1925. Although he was not to blame for the fiasco, he subsequently resigned from his role as Free State representative on the three-man committee. He quit the cabinet when the Irish government signed an agreement with the British and Northern Ireland governments, shelving the commission's findings.

The "failure" of the Boundary Commission was a propaganda victory for the republican opposition. The border remained unchanged and partition remained intact. But "failure" was not a fair reading of the outcome.

However, Cumann na nGaedheal remained particularly poor at ensuring that its own public relations reflected to its ultimate political advantage. Caught up in the affairs of state, the governing party made no attempt to build its own party into a modern organisation.

Cosgrave's government secured greater recognition of Irish independence in the international arena. The government had been swift to join the League of Nations and register the Anglo-Irish Treaty in Geneva as an international agreement. In another multilateral forum, the British Commonwealth, the constitutional creativity of Kevin O'Higgins helped give member states greater legislative independence from Westminster.

Beginning with the Balfour declaration, the process concluded with the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

In 1924, Dublin became the first among the members of the Commonwealth to send an envoy, the UCC Professor of Economics, T.A. Smiddy, to Washington. There was already an Irish High Commissioner in London. The Free State established in 1929 diplomatic relations with France, Germany and the Holy See at ministerial level. Despite Britain's desire to obfuscate the independence of Commonwealth countries in international affairs, Cosgrave's government took full advantage of working on the international stage to demonstrate the country's sovereignty. To that end, Cosgrave also made a number of visits abroad, most especially to the United States in 1928.

Perhaps, too, the Cumann na nGaedheal government of 19221932 has been incorrectly characterised as being conservative. That description deserves to be strongly qualified. There is often reference in the texts to the power of the Catholic church and its influence over film and book censorship and over the prohibition of divorce.

Although Ulysses was not banned in this country when it was published in 1922, the printers working on the Dublin Review refused to set a favourable review by Con Leventhal, who wrote the famous lines in revenge: "a censoring God came out of the machine to allay the hell-fire fears of the compositors' solidarity". Leventhal, not to be bested, published his review in a single issue magazine which he called Klaxon.

That spirit of defiance was matched in the 1920s by a strong censorious spirit which found expression in the hearings of the Committee on Evil Literature in 1926. The state was not supportive of the conservative organisations which favoured radical censorship. This was reflected in the wording of the Censorship Act 1929 - the application of which by far exceeded the terms of the legislation from the 1930s onwards.

However, the Free State remained predominantly Catholic and nationalist in ethos and in outlook. The government was active in the celebration of the Catholic Emancipation Centenary in 1929. Throughout the 1920s, the leaders of the State and the Catholic church were prominent on public and state occasions.

But the intimacy in the relationship between prelates and politicians did not result in the creation of a sectarian or confessional state. Cosgrave's government sought to protect the rights of minority religious groups and fought against church attempts to institutionalise discrimination. That independent frame of mind was displayed in Cosgrave's letter to Cardinal Joseph MacRory on March 28th, 1931: "We feel confident that Your Eminence and Their Lordships the Bishops appreciate the effective limits to the powers of Government which exist in relation to certain matters if some of the fundamental principles on which our State is founded are not to be repudiated. Such repudiation direct, or indirect, would, we are convinced, entail consequences very detrimental to the country's welfare."

Cosgrave and his ministerial colleagues had the strong desire to achieve - with the state of Northern Ireland as a reverse image - a society south of the border characterised by tolerance.

In viewing the 1920s in the round, it is important to stress the success of Cumann na nGaedheal's democratic revolution - the establishment of a liberal democracy and of the institutions of the state - parliament, executive and judiciary. The legacy of Cosgrave and Cumann na nGaedheal was recognised in Dail Eireann by a once arch-rival, Sean Lemass, whose brother, Noel, had been killed by government forces in somewhat sinister circumstances during the civil war. Speaking as taoiseach, Sean Lemass paid a generous tribute to William Cosgrave following his death in 1965; he spoke of Cosgrave's generosity of spirit, the exemplary character of his long life, and of the enduring work that he had done for Ireland. The same could also have been said for the other Cumann na nGaedheal ministers.

William T. Cosgrave, revolutionary, democrat and parliamentarian, had sought to bring to pass a closure of civil war wounds. Cosgrave and his colleagues did so and, in doing so, they did the state some service.

Dr Dermot Keogh is Professor of History and head of the History Department, UCC. His most recent book, Jews in Twentieth Century Ireland - Refugees, Anti-Semitism and the Holocaust, is published by Cork University Press.