Sinn Fein fought the December 1918 election on a manifesto that committed it to abstention from Westminster and the establishment of an Irish government.
It then emerged that, in a poll that was ten percentage points higher than in neighbouring Britain, Sinn Fein had won 73 of the 105 Irish seats; a higher percentage than the wartime Liberal-Conservative coalition had secured on the other island.
The percentages of the votes cast for the coalition in Britain and for Sinn Fein in Ireland were identical, at 47 per cent. But in the Irish case this figure significantly underestimated support for the victorious group, for Sinn Fein had been unopposed in 25 constituencies, and these included most of Munster.
Clearly, therefore, its overall support in the island exceeded 50 per cent by a considerable margin - one certainly big enough to offset any advantage that the party might have secured through more extensive personation than that undertaken by the Irish Parliamentary Party and the Unionists - personation being at that time a fairly widespread practice in parts of our island.
Thus, although of course Northern unionists claimed an opt-out for six counties within which they then enjoyed more than twice the support of Sinn Fein and nationalists combined, the democratic basis for a Declaration of Independence by the First Dail was unchallengeable.
Secure in their democratic legitimacy, three weeks later the 27 Sinn Fein MPs who were not in prison, (or, as in Michael Collins's case, effectively "on the run") met to establish the Irish government for which they had secured a mandate from the electorate.
Following the release from prison of the other Sinn Fein MPs, that first government was reshuffled at the beginning of April under Eamon de Valera's presidency.
Five months later the Dail was proscribed by the British government and thereafter met in secret on half-a-dozen occasions until enabled to resume its public sessions in August 1921, following the July truce of that year.
The administrative structure established by the underground Dail government, and maintained by it during almost two years of repression, was a truly remarkable phenomenon. ail government in 1919 to '-1921. This process owed much of its effectiveness to the extraordinary administrative and financial capacity of Michael Collins.
But other members of that government, Arthur Griffith in Home Affairs (with the assistance of Kevin O'Higgins) and William Cosgrave in Local Government, were respectively responsible for two quite remarkable achievements of this civil administration in 1920, viz the establishment of the Dail courts and the seizure of control of the local government system from the British administration.
A major reform of local government was undertaken following Sinn Fein's victories in the municipal elections of January 1920 and the county council elections of June and July of that year.
In those elections Sinn Fein won outright control of 10 of the 12 cities and boroughs in the island, including Derry, as well as more than half of the other urban authorities and no fewer than 23 out of 27 county councils.
The underground Dail government then proceeded to clean up corruption and to initiate a standardisation of employment conditions throughout the system, as well as a radical reform of the hospital and welfare system. In some areas it faced, but overcame, considerable resistance to this reform on the part of the local establishment.
The resultant conflict of jurisdictions faced many local councils with serious financial problems, partly because the British government would not make grants to local authorities that transferred their loyalty to the Dail government, but also because in many areas reluctant rate-payers took advantage of the struggle between the rival systems to dodge paying their dues.
Fortuitously, the resultant financial crisis in local administration helped the underground government to carry through its planned reforms, which involved a major hospital amalgamation and rationalisation programme. By the time the Treaty was signed the Minister for Home Affairs, W.T. Cosgrave, was able to report that in all but three counties workhouses had been abolished and replaced by county hospitals and county homes, and that outdoor relief had been replaced by home assistance.
This major social reform was a remarkable achievement for an underground government. Indeed, subsequent Irish experience has suggested that such a major reorganisation of services in such a short period of time would be a major achievement even for an established government operating under normal conditions. For it is not clear that anything on this scale has been attempted again during the eight decades since the foundation of the State.
These and other similar civil achievements of the underground Dail government, often in the face of extraordinary difficulties, reflected the extent to which it commanded the loyalty of the great bulk of the population. It was, of course, helped in this by the hamfistedness of the repressive tactics employed by the British government, above all by their introduction of the Black-and-Tans and Auxiliaries.
Outside the north-east, even those sections of the population originally hostile to Sinn Feinein who were unhappy about aspects of the guerilla campaign mounted by the Volunteers, became so alienated by the violence of the crown forces that they eventually rallied to the Dail government.
The external performance of the Dail government was as impressive as its domestic achievements, as has recently been brought home by the publication of the first volume of Documents on Irish For- eign Policy, covering the four-year period from 1919 to 1922, which I have reviewed at length in the current issue of the London Review Of Books.
A striking feature of this volume is the amount of Foreign Affairs documentation that has survived from the years before the foundation of the State, including the 22-month period when that government was driven underground.
The main purpose of the Foreign Affairs Department between 1919 and 1921 was to seek international recognition of Irish independence. This in fact turned out to be an unrealistic objective, for no other State, not even the infant Bolshevik Soviet Union, was prepared to offend the mighty British Empire by giving recognition to a breakaway fragment of the United Kingdom.
And while there was pressure from Irish-Americans on the US Congress and government, this failed to move Woodrow Wilson either during the Versailles peace conference or later.
What is remarkable, however, is the scale and intensity, and growing professionalism, of the diplomatic effort that was mounted for this purpose by the underground government.
Moreover, in the first half of 1922, after which my father, Desmond FitzGerald, succeeded him in office, George Gavan Duffy laid the foundations of a professional Department which since then has served our State magnificently.
The work of the Department of Foreign Affairs during the earlier underground period was paralleled by the propaganda campaign mounted by the Publicity Department of which my father was head. The remarkable administrative performance of the early governments of the independent Irish State, including the political stabilisation and reconstruction following the Civil War, owed an enormous amount to the work done by some of the civilian ministers of the Dail government established 80 years ago this week.
Their achievements deserve to be commemorated just as much as the parallel guerrilla campaign which eventually persuaded the Lloyd George government of 1921 to concede independence to the Irish State that was established de facto on January 21st, 1919.