Diarmaid Ferriter: Were the first 100 years of the State a success or failure?

A century ago, on December 6th, 1922, this State formally came into existence, a year after the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty. There was little appetite for celebratory flag-waving given the Civil War atmosphere. Head of government WT Cosgrave spoke of it as “Ireland’s most notable day, when our country has definitely emerged from the bondage under which she has lived through a week of centuries”. But as an Irish Times editorial noted, as a result of war and partition, “freedom comes to us, not blithe or smiling, but with a countenance severe and even tragic”.

What happened in the decades afterwards has prompted narratives of significant success. This State did not just survive the Civil War, it went on to become one of only two states carved out of the upheavals of the first World War whose democracies have endured unbroken, the other being Finland. On the 75th anniversary of the state in 1997, political scientist Tom Garvin suggested: “It is strange that we should take this achievement so much for granted.”

While the wound of partition remained, and for decades the economy stagnated, emigration made a mockery of the desire to keep people rooted to the land, and the power of the Catholic Church and rigid class divisions were suffocating, Garvin argued that ultimately “the Irish revolutionaries-turned-politicians got it more right than wrong.”

[ The Century project: The Civil War ]

There was a peaceful transfer of power between the two sides of the Civil War, broad consensus about the primacy of the political order, the importance of the Constitution, neutrality and eventually, our status as a Republic. The State withstood the assaults many others succumbed to. In time, economic crises and the Troubles were confronted meaningfully; Anglo-Irish relations were reset and improved, European integration embraced, education prioritised and Irish quality of life rated as exceptional by the United Nations. Yet the absence of a sufficiently robust social contract has remained painfully problematic, reflected in the failure to achieve a national health service, the preponderance of a culture of abuse and institutionalisation, and constant housing crises.

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In 2000, when renowned documentary maker Seán Ó Mordha brought his Seven Ages: The Story of the State to television, it was partly to rectify an imbalance; in his words: “The State here was seen from the perspective of Northern Ireland. It seemed to me we had never told our own story in our own terms, from the inside.” But that was partial too; Ó Mordha’s narrative was still largely a statist one, heavily concentrated on the experiences of an elite, often through the prism of the State’s founders and their offspring. Now, the idea of “our own story in our own terms” can mean something very different.

Consider, for example, an association representing soldiers demobilised from the National Army after the Civil War, whose leaders maintained in 1925: “The circumstances of many of our members are so pitiable, some practically in a state of destitution, that between 80 and 100 of them find a night’s shelter in the Phoenix and other public parks of our city and again many of them find no other means of sustenance for their wives and families but to resort to the Dublin Union... these men on giving their services to the State in its hour of need, find on returning to civil life there is no work for them, with the result that thousands are in a state of semi-starvation.”

‘We were flattened’

We have an abundance of archival material like this; documents, letters and personal testimonies that lay bare the betrayal and disillusionment felt by many of the revolutionary generation. Consider, too, from the other side of the Civil War divide, an ex-IRA man living on the aptly named Fenian Street, who wrote in 1933 of his plight as a low-paid civil servant: “As a husband and father of five, one has to live and keep six more... when I followed the dictates of my heart instead of my pocket in 1922 I little thought my country would still keep me living in a single room in a tenement 12 years afterwards.”

Or consider the plaintive lament of Civil War veteran Sheila Humphreys in relation to the status of women in the new State: “We were flattened. We felt the Irish public had forgotten us. The tinted trappings of our fight were hanging like rags about us.”

The mixed dispensation is being assessed by a conference in UCD this weekend to mark the foundation of the State and should give some measure of how a century of statehood can now be framed. In 2000, Ó Mordha suggested the State had grown to “maturity if not quite wisdom”. Reaching the stage of wisdom remains the challenge for the next century of statehood, but that must also involve grasping the reality of the first century, in all its guises.