Sir, – As a boy in Co Antrim I often heard grown-ups talking about the Free State. All I knew about the Free State was that some people went to it occasionally by bus on mystery tours presumably to buy things that were cheaper. Looking back on it now, the Free State as far as the tours were concerned was probably somewhere south of Newry. However, the word South was never used. If it had, it would probably have been an abuse of the word, as it frequently is by some of today’s broadcasters.
How often do we hear that the lottery has been won by someone in the south? As there is no capital letter in the word that is broadcast, where is the south to people in Donegal, to the people of Dublin or Galway, or to people farther south? And those who use it to refer to the Republic forget that Donegal, the most northerly point on this island is in what they call the South. Similarly, there are those on radio who refer to the UK when they mean Britain. Or do they mean England, forgetting that Britain consists of England and Wales, that Great Britain is England, Wales and Scotland, and that the UK is Great Britain and Northern Ireland.
Some British broadcasters now use in the same sentence “Ireland and Northern Ireland” to distinguish the two parts of the island.
Of course, they also refer to Londonderry, whereas we just called it Derry. All very confusing.
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However, it wasn’t until I heard a broadcast by the noted historian and author RTÉ’s David McCullagh that I remembered adults in my boyhood in Ballymena speaking of the Free State, a name that had long been discarded by their neighbour.
David recalls that from the Treaty to the introduction of the 1937 Constitution, the official name was the Irish Free State. Lloyd George, he says, pointed out during the Treaty negotiations that the heading of the notepaper of the Dáil’s Republican government was “Saorstát Éireann”, which could be translated either as the Republic of Ireland or the Irish Free State. “Constructive ambiguity at its best”, David adds.
He goes on to say that the anti-Treaty side disputed this and when de Valera got the chance he changed the name of the State in his Constitution to simply read “Ireland”, thereby implicitly including the North. When John A Costello “declared the Republic” in 1948, he couldn’t change the name of the State without changing the Constitution, so he introduced legislation saying that “the description of the State shall be the Republic of Ireland”.
The Irish Free State had a long after-life. Republicans continued to refer contemptuously to the 26-county government and its supporters as “Staters”, while many northerners, particularly but not exclusively unionists, continued (and continue) to refer to the “Free State”.
Some indeed continue to do so. Not long ago, a man in Ballymena, seeing the Dublin reg on our car said, “I see you’re from the Free State”.
At a time when new words like Brexit and backstop are freely used, some things, it seems, never change. – Yours, etc,
TOM McCAUGHREN,
Terenure,
Dublin.