Ebook: Republicans and imperialists : Anglo-Irish relations in the 1930s

In December 1928 Lionel Curtis was advising his friend Winston Churchill about the forthcoming volume of his memoirs, The Aftermath. Looking back at that turbulent decade after 1914, Curtis wrote: ‘The making of the Irish Treaty in 1921 was one of the greatest achievements in the history of the Empire. But the steps by which effect was given to its provisions was an even greater achievement, so great that one is almost tempted to believe in the intervention of a special providence. One gets the feeling that the curse which bedevilled Anglo-Irish relations for 700 years was deliberately lifted. The credentials of both men for indulging in such optimism seemed impeccable, for they had been intimately involved in the negotiations which had led to the signing of the 1921 Treaty: Churchill had been one of the signatories and Curtis had been secretary to the British delegation. Four years later Eamon de Valera and Fianna Fail came to power in Ireland and the mutual congratulation of Curtis and Churchill turned suddenly and swiftly to alarm.
For ten years the Treaty had been regarded as a magnanimous gesture of Brit¬ ish statesmanship. It had granted long-awaited independence to twenty-six counties of Ireland, now called the Irish Free State, which also became a self- governing dominion within the British Commonwealth. The six predominantly unionist counties of North-East Ulster remained part of the United Kingdom, but with their own parliament. The ‘Irish Question’, saturated with decades of bitter party warfare, finally began to drift away from the tides and swells of British politics. In 1932 British ministers could look back on ten years of comparative harmony with the government of W.T. Cosgrave. But even as Curtis was writing to Churchill in 1928 the foundations of the Treaty settlement were beginning to rock, for only the year before the leading opponents of the Treaty settlement, Eamon de Valera and his new Fianna Fail party, had decided to enter the parliamentary arena. It was a decision which was to have moment¬ ous implications not just for the future of the new state, but also for the Anglo- Irish relationship so laboriously constructed in 1921.
Though successive British governments congratulated themselves on the benefits of the 1921 settlement, in Ireland independence, as enshrined in the Treaty, proved incomplete and tragically divisive. Though the Irish delegates had accepted dominion status, it had never been their ultimate goal, and the symbols of that status, among them the oath of allegiance to the King and the appointment of a Governor-General, aroused fierce hostility from the Treaty’s opponents, while exciting no particular enthusiasm from its supporters either. Though its impact was by no means clear at the time, the partition of Ireland was another potentially destructive force undermining the 1921 settlement. The Treaty, followed so soon by a bloody civil war, was not so much a cause for congratulation in Ireland as a poison seeping through Irish political life. The government of W.T. Cosgrave achieved only a precarious stability. Its achieve¬ ments on the international stage, particularly in the shaping of the Commonwealth, were distinguished but fatally lacked public appeal. The reality of independence possessed by the new state was disputed by a sizeable minority of its citizens, and when de Valera re-entered politics in 1927 the fundamental question posed in 1921 surfaced once again: what was the relationship with Britain to be?