A difficult birth

"December 6: Birth of Irish Free State", read the banner headline in The Irish Times of December 6th, 1922. "The Irish Free State is in being."

The announcement appeared above a page festooned with solemn portraits of the last Lord Lieutenant, Viscount FitzAlan; the last Lord Chancellor, Sir John Ross; and the last Chief Secretary for Ireland, Sir Hamar Greenwood, whose name, according to author Tim Pat Coogan, would pass into Irish folklore - telling a Hamar - as a synonym for lying.

Alongside was an interview with the new Governor-General, Mr T.M. Healy, KC, who, according to a sub-heading, managed to be both "Grave" and "Gay" on the occasion. The only official communication he had had from the Irish Government in the previous two days, he revealed, "was on the matter of the cattle trade". Plus ca change . . . So what did he think of his new social obligations? "Well, at all events, I have not to kiss babies," he replied happily.

Still, something momentous had occurred. On the previous day, December 5th, the bills giving effect to the Constitution under the terms of the Treaty received the Royal Assent in the House of Lords.

A year before, in the early hours of December 6th 1921, the Treaty of Peace between Great Britain and Ireland had been signed at Downing Street. It provided for the setting up of a Free State in Ireland with the status of a Dominion and was signed on behalf of the Irish delegation by Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins, Richard Barton, E.J. Duggan and George Gavan Duffy. In doing so, they brought back not the republic but the next best thing: the "freedom to achieve freedom".

Back home, however, the news was greeted with consternation in some quarters. There may have been disagreement about what exactly a republic meant, as Prof Patrick Lynch put it in The Course Of Irish History, but those who sought the republic knew what it didn't mean; it didn't mean accepting a treaty which required an oath of allegiance to a British king.

On January 7th, 1922, a rancorous Dail voted to accept the Treaty by 64 votes to 57, upon which Eamon de Valera announced that he intended to resign. An incandescent Mary McSwiney gave a flavour of opposition bile, denouncing the outcome as "a betrayal, a gross betrayal; and the fact is that it is only a small majority, and that majority is not united; half of them are looking for a gun and the other half are looking for the flesh-pots of the Empire. I tell you there can be no union between the representatives of the Irish Republic and the so-called Free State."

Though the result of the vote was greeted with cheering in the streets, inside the House, hard men - once blood brothers - broke down and wept. A country already crushed by anarchy, the collapse of industry and 130,000 unemployed, was set for civil war.

A general election in June 1922 endorsed the pro-Treaty position. Undaunted, the anti-Treaty forces stepped up their opposition and plunged the country into a civil war that would continue until May 1923.

On the day the Irish Free State came into being, only two of the five Irish signatories to the Treaty were in Leinster House: Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith were dead, and Richard Barton was in prison. Throughout the new-born State, the raids, shootings, bombings and killings of Irishmen by Irishmen continued.

The papers were filled with reports of men being dragged out of houses and shot. Seventy-seven Irregulars, as the anti-Treaty forces were known, would be executed between mid-November 1922 and May 1923.

"For a hopeless ideal," commented the Governor General, "de Valera has tried to cut his country's throat . . . The damage to property amounts to £30,000,000, the damage to railways alone is £2,000,000. Futile, unintelligible . . . "

In the North, in 1922 alone, 232 people including two unionist MPs, were killed, nearly 1,000 wounded and more than £3 million worth of property destroyed. Meanwhile its prime minister Sir James Craig was insisting, to no-one's surprise, that there wasn't a hope of the six counties coming under the control of the Dublin Parliament. Concern was at such a pitch that Wexford Corporation resolved to ask the Archbishop of Melbourne to come here at once and offer his services as peacemaker.

It is hardly surprising then that Ireland's most notable day - the words of President William T. Cosgrave - was notable mainly for its gloom. An Irish Times correspondent had proposed a national holiday but hearts clearly weren't in it. A leader writer harked back to the "intense excitement" during the fight for Home Rule and how the "triumphs of Mr Gladstone and Mr Asquith were celebrated by torchlight processions and by bonfires ablaze on a hundred hills".

But little exuberance marked this day. "Freedom comes to us at the last, not blithe or smiling, but with a countenance severe and even tragic. Therefore, we greet her cordially, indeed, and hopefully, but without exultation. Whatever comfort her cornucopia may hold, she comes to a sad abode."

And so the day began with the first Governor-General of Ireland, T.M. Healy, being sworn in by Lord Chief Justice Molony at Gleann Aluinn, Healy's Chapelizod home, where the oaths administered included one of allegiance to the King. Healy in turn administered the oath of office to the Speaker of the House of Deputies, Prof Michael Hayes, before entertaining the party to luncheon.

That evening, at Leinster House, where the first assembly of Dail Eireann, as established by the Free State Act, was due to take place at 5 p.m., security was tight. All the approaches were patrolled by "strong parties of national troops on foot" and plain-clothes men subjected everyone to close scrutiny. The public was not admitted to the galleries.

A small gathering of spectators witnessed the arrival of deputies at the Kildare Street entrance where a new flag was hoisted in honour of the occasion. Fraught with historic import it may have been, but according to a rather jaded reporter, for those who did manage to penetrate "into the fastnesses of the Royal Dublin Society's Theatre, there was nothing to mark the change from the old to the new".

Not to put a tooth in it, it was "a very dull affair. There were no `incidents'; there was no fuss; there was not even a point of order by Deputy Gavan Duffy. It was the most decorous meeting of the Dail that I ever attended. The dead past apparently has buried its dead; gone for ever are the hectic nights and days of Earlsfort Terrace."

To begin with, the Free State was late in arriving, the red benches still empty at 5 p.m.

"Mr Kevin O'Higgins sat in solitary state on the Treasury Bench, and a boredlooking official wandered round the Strangers' Gallery on the search apparently for some potential Guy Fawkes."

At about five minutes past the hour, Labour's Thomas Johnson appeared, "carrying a brand new pigskin despatch case", followed in a rush by the remaining members. Although Irish Times journalists on the day counted 80 in all (eight less than the number which had supported the Provisional Government), later reports said that 82 had been sworn in.

Of the missing six, two were later reported to be ill; the Republican views of others were well known. Present were "the newly-wed Adjutant-General O'Sullivan, looking very spick and span in a well-cut uniform, and General Pierce Beasley, obviously ill-at-ease in civilian attire. The ministerial benches showed a full muster - President Cosgrave, alert and businesslike as ever; Mr O'Higgins, slightly cynical and bored, and General Mulcahy in tunic and slacks."

At 5.15 p.m., the Speaker, Mr Hayes, arrived at the clerk's table to administer the oath. Cosgrave stepped forward to the table and with a Testament in his right hand and a copy of the dreaded oath in his left, read over the words of the affirmation.

"All ears were strained to hear the words of the first oath in the Irish parliament and when the President handed over the Testament to Mr O'Higgins, who was waiting behind him, everybody seemed to look at everybody else in relief, as much as to say: `Well, that's it, at any rate'." An hour later, all the members had taken the oath and signed the roll.

So the deed was done and the sky hadn't fallen in. Still, a feature of the day was Labour's need to explain itself. Its chairman, Frank Johnson, rose to say that the party recognised the act of taking an oath of declaration as a formality, which implied no obligation other than the ordinary obligations of every person who accepted the privileges of citizenship. It took the oath, as it accepted the Treaty, under protest, and reserved to itself the right at any time to break it.

The catch-all formula, however, wasn't entirely successful. Notable absentees on the day were Patrick Gaffney and Liam de Roiste. The elections of Prof Michael Hayes as Ceann Comhairle and W.T. Cosgrave as President passed with flattering comments and without opposition. Then, to applause, the President of the first Free State Cabinet rose to address the House.

"On this notable day, when our country has definitely emerged from the bondage under which she has lived through a week of centuries, I cannot deny that I feel intensely proud to be the first man called to preside over the first Government which takes over the control of the destiny of our people, to hold and administer that charge, answerable only to our own people and to none other; to conduct their affairs as they shall declare right without interference, not to say domination, by any other authority whatsoever on this earth . . . "

He lamented the unnecessary sufferings and bloodshed which had been inflicted on the people at the behest of a small minority . . .

"Twelve months which might have been spent conserving the fruits of our struggle, have been wasted in resisting the mad efforts of those who first called upon the people to throw aside these fruits and go again into the battle, and then took up arms in order that they might by violence and tyranny wrench from the people what they have won . . . "

They had set "their own narrowness, or what they would call intellectualism, against the broad good sense of the people", he said. Much of the speech was taken up with "North East Ulster", with earnest reassurances that "nobody in the Free State cherishes this crude wish [to force unwilling portions of Ulster into the Free State] save that small minority who support the calamitous policy of Mr de Valera and his Irregulars, with whom, of course, those who have the faintest idea of conditions in Ireland would never think of confusing us."

But he also quoted Lloyd George's remarks of December 1921, which he interpreted to mean that Ulster should not coerce the majority of the inhabitants of Tyrone and Fermanagh into staying within its community: ". . . We must not, cannot, forget our solemn pledges to those great sections of the population in the six counties who do want us . . . "

Cosgrave then nominated to the Dail the other six members representing the Executive Council. They were Kevin O'Higgins, Minister for Home Affairs; Eoin MacNeill, Minister for Education; General R. Mulcahy, Minister for Defence; Ernest Blythe, Minister for Local Government; Joseph McGrath, Minister for Trade and Commerce; and Desmond FitzGerald, Minister for External Affairs. Cosgrave nominated himself as Minister for Finance.

After some discussion and mild protest about the abolition of the Ministry of Labour, he went on to announce his 30 Senate nominees. They included seven peers, a dowager countess and five baronets and knights as well as luminaries such as William Butler Yeats and Sir Horace Plunkett.

There was also a slew of "leaders of commerce and industry" connected with railway management, tobacco cultivation, the wine and spirit trade, horse racing, big game hunting and yachting. The Irish Times approved his choices on the basis that they fulfilled the agreement that the Senate shall be composed of "citizens who have done honour to the nation by reason of useful public service or who, because of special qualifications or attainments, represent important aspects of the nation's life".

"Certainly," said the editorial of December 7th, "the President has kept faith with the Southern minority, some of whose ablest and most influential members figure in his list."

And there the business ended on the first meeting of a Free State Dail - no longer a Provisional Government but the Chamber of Deputies of the Oireachtas.

Within days, a member of the House and close friend of the late Michael Collins, Sean Hales - whose brother Tom was in the ambush party that killed Collins - would be murdered outside the Ormond Hotel. As a reprisal, Rory O'Connor, Liam Mellows, Joseph McKelvey and Richard Barrett, who had surrendered after the fight for the Four Courts the previous June, would be executed in Mountjoy.

And, as expected, Northern Ireland under Sir James Craig would take formal steps to exclude itself from the Irish Free State.