In 1924 Kevin O’Higgins, the Irish Free State’s minister for justice, delivered an address to the Irish Society at Oxford University, during which he argued that the state was emerging successfully from a period of great turbulence.
He was keen to fashion a narrative of the triumph of those who had accepted the Anglo-Irish Treaty by overcoming the “savage, primitive passion” of their opponents. He also conjured up a memorable image of himself and his colleagues during the Civil War as “simply eight young men in City Hall, standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another not yet laid and with wild men screaming through the keyholes”. That was just one of a number of memorable utterances by O’Higgins during this era; the previous year, in a Dáil contribution on the problem of cattle seizures, he proclaimed that “we were probably the most conservative minded revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution”.
What is missing in this disappointing and dull overview of the Irish state in the first 10 years of its existence is any real engagement with or analysis of how that generation of state builders and defenders viewed their role, given what they had come through during the Irish revolution, as enunciated by O’Higgins. The author makes the point that the establishment of a stable democratic state at this period in Ireland was an achievement unique in Europe, and this “should be a cause for celebration”, but he offers little sense of what it was like to govern at that time. The book is a bland, partial administrative history, lacking adequate appreciation of the importance of archival research that would uncover the sentiments and impulses that drove those who governed.
A further limitation is that too much of the research on this government that has been published previously has been ignored by the author. There is no reference at all, for example, to Ciara Meehan's book The Cosgrave Party: A History of Cumann na nGaedheal 1923-33, published in 2010, and no attempt to engage with the provocative and textured analysis offered in John Regan's 1999 book The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921-36, even the title of which should surely require some robust response. The author occasionally includes interesting observations from some of those involved, but he leaves their assertions hanging, untouched by analysis.
In relation to the centralisation of government, which he correctly identifies as one of the most important developments of this era, he asserts that "there was no formal safeguard or redress from intentional bureaucratic tyranny". These are strong words, but there is no real probing of this and other themes, or any sense given of how they were approached, discussed or debated behind the scenes. There are a number of references to the "scepticism about party politics" of William T Cosgrave, the head of government, but that, too, is inadequately explained. The chapter on foreign policy, which lauds the government's successful "secret and low-key diplomatic action", does not incorporate a single reference to the Documents on Irish Foreign Policy series, volumes of which have been published incrementally for more than 15 years, and three of which deal with the years 1922 to 1932.
There is an abundance of material in the archives of University College Dublin relating to some of the ministers of this period – Kevin O’Higgins, Ernest Blythe, Patrick McGilligan, Eoin MacNeill and Desmond FitzGerald, for example – but very little original archival material is cited in the book. There are references to the collections in UCD, to some Dáil debates and to a few of the State files from the National Archives of Ireland, but not remotely enough.
There is no shortage of blindingly obvious declarations, such as “the environment in which the Garda had to start policing was very difficult”, and no attempt to explain declarations about the supposed character of the state: “the Irish Free State was a bourgeois and republican society”. What did this mean? And surely it is a generalisation too far to assert that civil servants educated by the Christian Brothers were educated towards “acceptance of the existing system with few questions”?
Granted, the overview of the shortage of money and the credit rating of the state is interesting; budgets were balanced, Ireland was “one of the few creditor nations in Europe” and a national loan was successfully floated. There is much worthy focus on land and agriculture, industry, fisheries, the Gaeltacht, education, language, and law and order, but too often the chapters read as more of a listing or balance-sheet exercise than anything else. The author refers to the lack of coherent policy in a multitude of areas, “bad decisions and lost opportunities” in relation to trade, industry and infrastructure, and over-reliance on academics for advice, but, again, there is little feel for the debates that took place.
The assertion that “there were many poor and destitute people” could surely have been elaborated on by looking at sources for the social history of this period, and, in relation to the political parties of this time, how does the contention that “the Irish Free State survived because the government retained the support of the majority of the people” square with the result of the June 1927 election, when Cumann na nGaedheal won 47 seats while the abstentionist Fianna Fáil and Sinn Féin won 49 seats between them? And what of the role of the Catholic Church and its partnership with government, a liaison that was solidified during the Civil War? This theme is not deemed worthy of a separate chapter.
Corcoran does his best to fill out his balance sheet at the end of his laboured account. While asserting that Cumann na nGaedheal in the 1920s “did not plan, fund, communicate, implement or co-ordinate its policies effectively”, it “performed well” given the difficulties it faced. It legitimised the state and established a viable infrastructure for it, meaning that by 1932 it was “stable politically, strong administratively and sound financially”. Overall, he insists, “the Cosgrave government’s achievements were remarkable”.
This conclusion may be valid, or it could be seen as contradicting his other assertions about failures, but, either way, what is lacking in this book is any illumination of the mental process at work behind the edifice of the governments of the 1920s. Given the claims he makes of those administrations, the reader deserves much more enlightenment.
Diarmaid Ferriter's latest book is Ambiguous Republic : Ireland in the 1970s
