The Institutionalisation of National Identity in the Irish Free State

Abstract

The consensus movement that won the right to establish a separate nation-state in the early 1920s was characterised by a primordial communitarian political philosophy and social conservatism. This political and social identity, which represented a move towards a new confidence in national ‘we-feeling’, occurred in a context of insecurity and contradiction. It can be understood in part as a product of the internal rationalisation of the movement impelled by perceptions of needs, the distribution of social power, revulsion at war, the martyrology of revolution, unprecedented prosperity, and the international context. It was in part also the movement’s response to problems in its external environment. The dominant problems in this environment were, on the one hand, the power of both the British State and Irish Unionism to block a political settlement that would be satisfactory to all strands of Irish nationalism and, on the other, the unresolved social question in Ireland. The euphoria of inclusive we-feeling, both of its own and its unionist other, led Irish nationalism away from a dialogical politics with other political and confessional traditions on the island. The social question was suppressed: propertied conservatism and social injustice were never to receive a fundamental challenge.KeywordsPublic SphereNational IdentityIdentity ProjectIrish SocietyCatholic ChurchThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.