Revolutions are ex pensive things, even modest ones like the little revolution which resulted in Irish independence three-quarters of a century ago. There is a myth, mainly derived from 19thcentury Marxists, that revolutions are somehow necessarily "progressive" as well.
If the outcome of a revolutionary process is not "progressive", it is assumed the revolution was somehow betrayed. Thus Trotsky, in his brilliant apologia for himself, The Revolution Betrayed, suggests that Stalin and the bureaucrats hijacked an otherwise wonderful and liberating Russian revolution. In reality the murderers fell out.
Revolutions often throw up regimes as bad as or even worse than those which preceded them. Napoleon Bonaparte, heir to the French Revolution, shed far more blood than poor old Louis XVI; Tsar Nicholas II was a little boy compared to his revolutionary successors, Lenin and Stalin.
Even national separatist revolutions such as occurred all over Europe, including Ireland, in the aftermath of the collapse of the great empires in 1918-22 sometimes resulted in local tyrannies replacing foreign tyrannies.
Hungary, Poland, Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia soon traded democratic institutions for dictator ships. Of the successor states founded at that time, only Finland and Ireland have retained their democratic institutions and civic life continuously to the present day.
It is strange that we should take this achievement so much for granted. Finland, our political twin, fought a bloody civil war in 1918, resulting in the deaths of perhaps 25,000 people out of a population of about four million.
The Irish Civil War was a relatively small affair, involving fewer than 3,000 deaths. Even if we estimate all violent deaths during 1912-23 in the Irish total, we come up with fewer than 7,000 over 11 years.
The financial cost of the Civil War was high, as the IRA was destructive and murderous. The cost of rebuilding infrastructure and compensating victims of the IRA was borne by the taxpayer. In effect, the Civil War took several billion pounds (in today's value) out of the economy in nine months at a time when GNP was less than a third of what it is now.
The caution and conservatism of Irish governments after 1922 can be traced directly to the Civil War. More importantly, the Civil War's psychological and spiritual impact was crippling, particularly among the new political elites. As Sean Lemass said years later, both sides had done terrible things and both sides knew it.
David Neligan wondered later if it had all been really worth it, as did the old IRA veteran in John McGahern's Amongst Women. Denis McCullough of the Belfast IRB, remembered in old age:
We lived in dreams always: we never enjoyed them.
I dreamed of an Ireland that never existed and never could exist.
I dreamt of the people of Ireland as a heroic people, a Gaelic people:
I dreamt of Ireland as different from what I see now - not that I think
I was wrong in this . . .
Partition, although inevitable, came to be seen as a consequence of the Treaty of 1921; in fact it was made deeper by the Civil War, which resulted from the IRA mutiny against the Dail government of Arthur Griffith in March 1922. The Civil War also made it impossible for anyone to talk sensibly in public about the relation ships between the two parts of the island for generations after 1923.
Again, it was Lemass who said privately in cabinet after becoming Taoiseach in 1959: "You know, gentlemen, there always will be a Northern Ireland."
The revolutionaries of 1912-23 had to turn themselves into politicians: an evidently painful and confusing metamorphosis.
The social reality of Ireland in the 1920s was that it was slowly emerging from serfdom and preliterate culture and could only be built up slowly by the gradual and long-term efforts of large numbers of people. Between 1922 and 1960, a legitimate and democratic policy was put together by these "politicians by accident", as a catchphrase of the period had it.
The landmarks in this process were the Constitution of 1922, the defeat of the IRA in 1923, the democratic coming to power of the defeated republicans under de Valera in 1932, the Constitution of 1937, the declaration of the Rep ublic in 1949 and the coming to power of a post-revolutionary generation of politicians around 1960. To this list one might add, in hindsight, the mother-and-child crisis of 1951 which can perhaps be seen as a pyrrhic victory for the Catholic Church.
A certain contempt for the democratic process lingered in Irish political culture for a long time after independence. In part this was fostered by the cult of Padraig Pearse. He and his comrades, after all, had ignored public opinion and had reasoned the people were enslaved and therefore incapable of making a democratic decision.
Similarly, in 1922 de Valera declared that the people had no right to do wrong. All IRAs since have reasoned similarly.
Democratic governments had another rival, the Catholic Church. It had functioned almost as a domestic representative government for so long that it assumed the new democratic politicians would be its servants: many politicians agreed and submitted themselves to the will of the bishops. This is no longer the case.
It was not until a stable and legitimate political order was assembled that questions such as economic, social and cultural development could really be given full attention. If there is dissension about the political order, there can be no consensus about anything else.
Despite their mistakes and sins, the Irish revolutionaries-turned-politicians got it more right than wrong.
Tom Garvin is Professor of Politics at University College Dublin. His books include Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland, 1858-1927 (Oxford, 1987) and 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin, 1996)
A difficult birth: Weekend