Ireland (Lonely Planet, 9th Edition) - Fionn Davenport [18]
The situation was hardly better in the Irish Dáil. The Anglo-Irish Treaty was eventually ratified after a bitter debate and the elections of June 1922 resulted in victory for the pro-Treaty forces. But the anti-Treaty forces, united behind de Valera’s leadership, refused to recognise the new state and, within two weeks of the elections, the first clashes between the two sides occurred.
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Neil Jordan’s motion picture Michael Collins, starring Liam Neeson as the revolutionary, depicts the Easter Rising, the founding of the Free State and Collins’ violent demise.
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Almost immediately, a bitter civil war broke out between comrades who, a year previously, had fought alongside each other. The most prominent casualty was Collins himself, who was shot in an ambush in his native County Cork. De Valera was briefly imprisoned by the new Free State government, formed by the new Cumann na Gael (Society of Gaels) party under Prime Minister William Cosgrave, which went so far as to execute 77 of its former comrades. By the time the conflict ground to an exhausted halt in 1923, a legacy of bitter division had been created that would last until the end of the century.
Defeated but unbowed, de Valera boycotted the Dáil before regrouping and founding a new party in 1926 called Fianna Fáil (Warriors of Ireland), which proceeded to win nearly half the seats in the 1927 election.
Fianna Fáil went one better in 1932, winning a majority and remaining in power for the next 16 years. A new constitution in 1937 did away with the oath of allegiance to the Crown, reaffirmed the special position of the Catholic Church within Irish society and once again laid claim to the six counties of the north. De Valera’s decision to stop paying land annuities to the British, as per the terms of the Anglo-Irish agreement, provoked a trade war with Britain that may have done much to assert Ireland’s growing spirit of independence but severely crippled Irish agricultural exports for more than a decade.
Fianna Fáil lost the 1948 general election to Fine Gael (as Cumann na Gael were now known), who proceeded to gazump the Republican credentials of their political rivals by leaving the British Commonwealth and officially declaring the Free State a republic. After 800 years, Ireland – or at least a big chunk of it – was finally independent.
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A History of Ireland by Mike Cronin summarises all of Ireland’s history in less than 300 pages. It’s an easy read, but doesn’t offer much in the way of analysis.
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GROWING PAINS & ROARING TIGERS
Unquestionably the most significant figure since independence, Éamon de Valera’s contribution to an independent Ireland was immense but, as the 1950s stretched into the 1960s, his vision for the country was mired in a conservative and traditional orthodoxy that was patently at odds with the reality of a country in desperate economic straits, where chronic unemployment and emigration were but the more visible effects of inadequate policy. De Valera’s successor as Taoiseach was Sean Lemass, whose tenure began in 1959 with the dictum ‘a rising tide lifts all boats’. By the mid-1960s his economic policies had halved emigration and ushered in a new prosperity that was to be mirrored 30 years later by the Celtic Tiger.
In 1972 the Republic (along with Northern Ireland) became a member of the European Economic Community (EEC), which brought an increased measure of prosperity thanks to the benefits of the Common Agricultural Policy, which set fixed prices and guaranteed quotas for Irish farming produce. Nevertheless, the broader global depression, provoked by the oil crisis of 1973, forced the country into yet another slump and emigration figures rose again, reaching a peak in the mid-1980s.
Nevertheless, European aid was to prove instrumental in kick-starting the Irish economy in the early 1990s. Huge sums of money were invested in education and physical infrastructure, while the renewal of Lemass’ industrial policy of incentivising foreign