Birth of a State: The Anglo-Irish Treaty. By Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh and Liam Weeks

Abstract

Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh’s and Liam Weeks’ Birth of a State aims to return the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty to the forefront of twentieth-century Irish history. This follows by a few years after their well-received edited volume on the Treaty entitled The Treaty: Debating and Establishing the Irish State. Their new work argues that the Treaty was the best compromise that Sinn Féin could get at the time, but it ended up having a deleterious effect on Irish politics because of its content and the reception it received from significant elements within Irish politics. The reappraisal of the Treaty that Weeks and Ó Fathartaigh wish to initiate involves putting it in its historical context, instead of solely viewing it from the retrospective sense of dashed expectations that have surrounded later popular and historical interpretations of Irish independence. After noting the lack of any annual commemoration of the Treaty’s signing, the authors observe that ‘for many, the Treaty is associated with failure’ (p. 2). They also observe that many of the aspects of the Treaty that were marked as failures at the time—partition, continuing membership in the empire—were eminently predicable in the contemporary context, as most Sinn Féiners knew that an all-Ireland republic was not feasible.