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Diarmaid Ferriter: Long-enduring democracy does not guarantee good government

Irish State has failed to deliver a wider social contract in the 100 years since the third Dáil sat for the first time

One hundred years ago today (September 9th), the third Dáil finally met, following the June 1922 general election. As an occasion, it is not remembered as much as the dramatic events of the early weeks of the Civil War. When those accepting the authority of the Dáil met on September 9th, the mood was sombre, not least because of the deaths of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins the previous month.

There were some theatrics. Laurence Ginnell, the only TD present from the anti-Treaty republican ranks and who attended at the behest of Eamon de Valera to query the constitutional status of the assembly, repeatedly asked if “anyone will tell me with authority whether this is Dáil Éireann or a partition parliament... is this Dáil for the whole of Ireland?”

He was eventually thrown out and the business of electing WT Cosgrave as head of government proceeded. He was the first of 15 heads of government from that date until now as our democracy has endured, unbroken. We are part of a small global club of democracies that can make that claim; as the late political scientist Peter Mair often pointed out, by the time of the second World War, southern Ireland “was the only successor state created after the end of the first World War to have retained a democratic government”.

There was nothing inevitable about this, especially given the Civil War; the meeting of the third Dáil had been prorogued on five occasions due to the tumult and further postponements or worse might have continued. In that sense, it is worth reflecting on the contributions of some of the TDs that day because of what was asserted about the importance of democracy. Eoin Mac Neill said: “My view of the Irish government, under present conditions or any future conditions, is that no matter what its condition may be, when it becomes the Irish government, it is not the government of a party, it is the government of a nation; it is responsible to all sections of the nation and every party. Every section has an equal right to exercise its influence, its controlling influence, its criticising influence upon the government.”

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There was a nobility to such words during fraught times. Of course, that Dáil and its successors witnessed rancorous comment and personalised insults; the Civil War also generated long-lasting legacies in relation to intolerance of dissent, excessively centralised government, a power vacuum into which the Catholic Church moved and a deep hostility to the idea of women in public life.

Long-enduring democracy does not guarantee good government; we only have to look at the debasement of British and American politics (56 prime ministers and 46 presidents respectively) in recent years to see that, and in many respects what we experienced here was a stagnant stability. But there has also been a degree of maturity about a social contract of some significance, apparent most recently during the Covid pandemic; there is no way there would have been sustained partying in government buildings in Dublin at a time when the elite chums drank their plonk in Downing Street in displays of astonishing contempt.

Yet we have also endured the failure to properly deliver a wider social contract which, on this day 100 years ago, the leader of the Labour Party, Thomas Johnson, called for. He sought a “reassertion of the implication and intentions of the Democratic Programme of Dáil Éireann [the First Dáil in 1919]... are we going to stand on the protestations or professions of the past few years that the new Ireland will be a bigger Ireland and that democracy would not be merely a political democracy but have some relationship to the social combinations... the social relations generally?”

Promises buried

That Democratic Programme had specifically referred to the importance of housing and an equitable approach to health and welfare; the promises were buried, as is still painfully apparent, and it is those long-term failures that have shifted the base of Irish politics, a process likely to continue.

It is also true that Mac Neill’s talk in 1922 of the “nation” was problematic. The third Dáil was indeed a partition parliament, and there was also a contested partition parliament in Belfast. A plethora of recent books on the possible logistics, form and likeliness of a united Ireland are a reminder of the legacy of a century of division but also of the complications around possible future unity. That will be a significant test of a second century of our robust democracy, but it is likely in the short term to take second place to what was also painfully apparent in September 1922: a public yearning for what Tom Garvin termed “unheroic things”.

In September 2022 such things are the challenge of staying economically afloat as energy, housing, childcare and climate-change costs have the potential to sorely test even resilient 100-year-old democracies.