Page 16 - GAHS Journal Volume 9

CREATING A NEW STATE

In the war of independence, the Irish people were on their
own. Not a single foreign government, not the US, not France,
not Germany, nor even the Soviet Union, could afford to alienate
or offend the British Government, one of the key peace-making
powers at Versailles. What support Ireland could garner was
from public opinion, and, though victorious, Britain post-war
faced a lot of problems: domestic industrial peace, colonial
unrest, and above all heavy indebtedness towards America. In
the last resort, with Northern Ireland secure, the rest of Ireland
was expendable.

A lot of new countries experience civil war. Lee Kuan Yew,
long-time Prime Minister of Singapore explained the
phenomenon as the lack of long-standing legitimacy attached to
a new form of government, which has to meet the challenge to
its authority. There was a cost to independence, short- and long-
term, the long-term one having been the propensity of self-
perpetuating paramilitary groups to take the law into their own
hands on the basis of a spuriously concocted legitimacy. One of
the objects of the decade of centenaries, as defined by the
Government-appointed Expert Advisory Group, chaired by Dr
Maurice Manning, is to hear the different narratives and to
extend our sympathies, without having to abandon our loyalties.
It is to the credit of the State and the Government that last year
the centenary of the Rising was commemorated in a dignified,
sympathetic and inclusive manner, and hopefully the sequel will
be treated similarly.

The main achievement of the Irish Free State was to build
solid civil institutions, to which nearly all political groupings came
to adhere, and to retain public support for them. Extending
independence and gaining respect for it abroad was a slow
process, but it was successfully achieved through some intense
periods of pressure.

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