The Foundation of the State Conference in UCD

This is a report on the Foundation of the State Conference in UCD which I attended earlier in this month. It was published in the library Staff Update. I may as well get a blog post out of it.

Foundation of the Irish State Conference, 2-3 December

My great-grandmother stopped speaking to her own son because he married a Free Stater. My father, when he was a boy, sabotaged the public address system at an event where De Valera was speaking (and got a hiding from Kevin Boland for doing so—or so he said).

I don’t mention these snippets of family history because they are unusual, but rather the opposite. Many of us have similar stories in our background; grandparents and great-grandparents who were heavily invested in the struggle for independence or one or other side of the Civil War.

It seems such a shame, then, that the centenary of these events has aroused so little public or media interest. It’s true that Covid occupied a large swathe of that period—although, since that meant we all had a lot more time on our hands, that hardly seems a good enough explanation.

Happily, UCD has been an exception to this lack of attention, and this month the Foundation of State conference provided one of the highlights of the Decade of Commemorations.

I attended both days of this two-day conference, and I’m happy to report that it was a triumph—a truly satisfying, many-sided, almost exhaustive examination of the Irish Free State’s foundation. The presence all the way through of sign-language interpreters was particularly admirable, as was the inclusion of a whole session completely in the Irish language.

The first day was held in the O’Reilly Hall, which looked very impressive with an enormous Christmas tree in the corner. (The Finnish ambassador to Ireland Raili Lahnalampi, who spoke at one point on the parallels with Finnish independence, joked that we must have put it there to make her feel welcome, since spruce is so widespread in her country. She also put the bloodiness and divisiveness of our own Civil War into perspective—thirty-nine thousand people died in the four-month Finnish Civil War in 1918). The second day was held in the Fitzgerald Chamber in the Student Centre.

The conference was opened by the Taoiseach Micheál Martin. The Taoiseach is a history graduate, and his personal interest in the subject was obvious. He gave an excellent speech in which he asked wgy the 6^th of December—the date the Constitution of the Irish Free State was ratified and came into effect in 1922, and indeed the date the Anglo-Irish Treaty came into effect the year before—has never been a focus of celebration, either for the country in general or for any single political tradition within in. The answer, he said, was that nobody was particularly happy with the circumstances of independence, even the strongest supporters of the Treaty. He suggested, however, that there was much to celebrate in the foundation of the Irish State—for instance, the foundation of the Garda Síochana and the public legitimacy they enjoyed, the preservation of democracy, and the fact that extreme left- or right-wing movements never gained traction here as they did in much of Europe.

Speaker after speaker over both days emphasized the difficulties involved in setting up the new state. Bláthna Ruane, of the School of Law, in answering a question as to why Ireland preserved the Common Law tradition in framing its new legal system, said it was a “no-brainer”; there was simply no time to do anything else. John Fitzgerald emphasized the importance of advice from the British Treasury in the Free State’s economic survival.

Many speakers emphasized the achievements of the new State. Joseph Brady of the School of Geography praised Marino, which was the first local authority housing estate in the country, as still the best example of public housing in Ireland. (In my view, Dr. Brady’s was the most interesting of all the talks.) Of course, not all was rosy in new Ireland. Mary Daly’s contribution was a sobering reminder of how very far 1920’s Ireland was from a welfare state.

On the other hand, all three speakers in the Irish language sessions emphasized the huge achievement that had been made in saving the native tongue from extinction. Regina UÍ Chollatáin, chair, said she had no doubt that compulsory Irish in school had played a crucial role in this.

The conference ended in a fascinating and lively discussion between Diarmuid Ferriter, Marie Coleman, and Brigid Laffan. The importance of archives for commemorations was emphasized.

The conference wasn’t without its weaknesses. There was, for my money, rather too much emphasis on fashionable identity politics. On the whole, however, it was a fitting retrospective of a crucial moment in our history, and I left with a deeper appreciation of the huge efforts and sacrifices involved in creating the new State.