Irish Free State Research Articles

CULTURAL MEMORY IN : The Fate of Noel Lemass

It is suggested that Beckett's imagination functioned outside history. Here, reading in political context, I want to query the usefulness of such a claim, especially if it is applied in an unreflective way to Beckett's entire oeuvre. By reading Mercier and Camier's actions against the violent events surrounding the birth of the Irish Free State, a period figured in the text by the fate of Noel Lemass, I want to suggest that Beckett's work is, in fact, working within historical structures, albeit in a manner that is deliberately obscured.

Philip O’Leary. Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State, 1922–1939. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004. Pp. 753. $95.00 (cloth).

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The State on Display: The 1924 Tailteann Art Competition

The Irish Free State that was brought into existence in 1922 was not the state that had been dreamt of by the insurgents of 1916, nor the state imagined by those that had fought in the Anglo-Irish War. The new state was partitioned, and many of those who remained true to the idea of the republic sought to challenge the Treaty settlement through force of arms in a bitter and bloody civil war. Even after the truce of 1923, the Cumann na nGaedheal government was continually challenged by its anti-Treaty opponents both outside, and after 1927, from inside, the Dáil. The decade of Cumann na nGaedheal government from 1922 is a remarkable period. Faced by an intransigent opposition which, at times, remained committed to violence, the government had to set about the task of rebuilding the state and much of its infrastructure, while also seeking to make the wider world aware of the existence of a newly independent Ireland. Given the challenges that the government faced, it achieved much, and it is a testimony to the success of its state-building activities that power was, in due course, peacefully transferred to Fianna Fáil after its victory in the 1932 election. A specific state-sponsored spectacle was undertaken by the government in the 1920s—the games and competitions of Aonach Tailteann, and in particular, its art competition of 1924.1 The art competitions shed new light on our understanding of the Irish Free State in the years immediately after independence. Such cultural schemes, events, spectacles and symbols as the Aonach Tailteann and its art competition were attempts by the government to create a feeling of consensus in the Irish population and to encourage an identification with the new state. The Cumann [End Page 50] na nGaedheal government used a variety of functions, the art competitions among them, to deflect public criticism of the poor state of the Irish economy, the problems associated with the Treaty settlement, and the slow pace of rebuilding the infrastructure after years of conflict. The government developed and supported a range of broadly defined cultural schemes, events, spectacles, and symbols to impart enthusiasm for the newly independent Ireland, no matter how imperfectly it had been formed. The competitions shed light on the state of Irish art in the wake of the period of revolution, and they demonstrate which forms of artistic representation were being favored in the context of state building. More generally, the staging of an art competition within Aonach Tailteann represents an attempt by the state to present an image of itself for domestic and international consumption that embraced positive aspects of the Irish tradition for creativity, rather than the negative and destructive imagery of war and death. The staging of the art competitions is also instructive in showing how far the artists of the Free State had progressed in the creation of an Irish national style—a question that had dominated artistic debate in Ireland in the years prior to the First World War. The national style debate was important in the context of a broader understanding of an Irish culture that had been promoted during the cultural revival, aspects of which would be employed by the state in the 1920s in an attempt to create a clear identity for the new state that was Irish, rather than British. The Aonach Tailteann art competition demonstrates not only how the government used public events to assist the project of nation building, but also how the meanings attached to such events by the press and other observers provided art with an ideological purpose around the question of a national style. The Cumann na nGaedheal government committed itself, and a proportion of its scarce fiscal resources, to the staging of a whole series of initiatives that attempted to encapsulate and symbolize the creation of the nation. These events were projected to a domestic and international audience. At home, the aim was to...

Ireland’s Unique Electoral Experiment: The Senate Election of 1925

The 1925 election to the Irish senate was unique in the history of electoral systems: the whole territory of the Irish Free State was used as a single, nation‐wide constituency for the election of 19 senators, by means of the single transferable vote system of proportional representation, from a general electorate. The procedure used was widely seen at the time as a failure, and the experiment was never repeated. This article, based on a reconstruction of the results of the election, revisits two important issues. First, it reassesses the character of the mechanism used in this election, and concludes that its critics overstated their case. Second, it evaluates the election against one of its originally declared yardsticks: its capacity to ensure that Ireland’s small ex‐unionist (and largely Protestant) minority would have a powerful voice in the second chamber. Although the election was not a success in this second respect (a failure that was in part due to the nomination process), it nevertheless offers important and original evidence of the extent to which party hegemony may be challenged in elections of this kind by powerful sectional and regional interests.

ARENSBERG, Conrad M. and Solon T. Kimball, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY IN IRELAND (3rd ed. with a new introduction by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley)

ARENSBERG, Conrad M. and Solon T. Kimball, FAMILY AND COMMUNITY IN IRELAND (3rd ed. with a new introduction by Anne Byrne, Ricca Edmondson and Tony Varley). Ennis, County Clare, Ireland: Clasp Press, 2001, 417pp., 33 Euro hardcover.Anyone who has read about the Irish family or comparative family studies over the last 60 years should be acquainted with this classic. This edition contains previously unpublished background and evaluative information in its introduction. The book is based upon the first in-depth study of Irish families conducted in the early 1930s by two anthropological doctoral students as part of the Harvard Irish Study. The results of their Social Anthropological Survey of rural families in County Clare were first published in 1940. The patriarchal authority, stem-extended families and inheritance patterns, arranged marriages, and co-operative kin and neighbor networks portrayed contrasted sharply with most contemporary descriptions of families and community in other western nations.This first all encompassing treatment of Irish families received international attention and became the most common historical reference cited for Ireland. Many scholars considered the book a classic and their portrayal of the Irish family as definitive. The acceptance of their portrayal was both broad and enduring. Damien Hannan, the Irish sociologist and family scholar who devoted a good deal of research effort to assessing their portrayal and updating it, has noted that their work was continuously reproduced as being typical of Irish families for much of the Twentieth Century. Its definitive status was bolstered by the publication of the second edition in 1968 that extended their earlier claim that Ireland was homogeneous indeed. The six chapters they added to this edition described the families in the town of Ennis as being very similar to those found in the countryside. In the late 1940s, a study of Dublin families by Alexander J. Humphreys' essentially complemented their portrayal. Humphreys in his 1966 book, New Dubliners: Urbanization and the Irish family, used Arensbdrg afld Kimball's family descriptions as a baseline. He found a radical continuity between their families and his urban families and he detected no ideological and only modest organizational differences.The original intent of William Lloyd Warner, Director of the Harvard Irish Study, was to select an area that was nationally of Ireland. After he surveyed all 26 counties in the Irish Free State in 1931, Warner recommended County Clare as being representative 'in microcosm' of Ireland as a whole (p. …

BOOK REVIEW: James H. Murphy.IRELAND: A SOCIAL, CULTURAL, AND LITERARY HISTORY, 1791-1891. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003.

Reviewed by: Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891 Sara L. Maurer (bio) Ireland: A Social, Cultural, and Literary History, 1791–1891, by James H. Murphy; pp. 224. Dublin and Portland, OR: Four Courts Press, 2003, €65.00, $65.00, €24.95 paper, $23.95 paper. Two hundred years after George IV allegedly announced that Maria Edgeworth's Castle Rackrent (1801) had at last given him some real knowledge of his Irish subjects, those of us who consider our business the nineteenth-century British Isles still seem in want of a [End Page 466] reliable guide to Ireland. James H. Murphy writes to fill that need. He describes his book's purpose as twofold: on the one hand to elaborate the social context of nineteenth-century Irish literature in order to stimulate new currents of research in that field, and on the other "to report on current thinking and research on nineteenth-century Ireland from a variety of disciplines" (1). In the second endeavor, his book succeeds admirably, providing a brief but clear guide to the basic features of Irish life for those with little prior knowledge of it. Yet while Murphy presents the entire book as "based on a synthesis of current scholarship" (2), in his first stated purpose—stimulating research in nineteenth- century Irish literature—his book provides a more idiomatic view of Irish literature than he admits. This is not to say that Murphy's account of literature is not worthwhile, but rather to say that much like King George before us, we should be wary of taking any view as wholly representative when we educate ourselves on Ireland. At its best Murphy's overview reads like an animated conversation with a generous dissertation advisor, eager to point out an array of historical facts, cultural trends, and recent scholarship, as well as to suggest how these call for more in-depth investigation. Murphy offers a rapid-fire roundup of some of the most prominent features of the nineteenth-century Irish landscape; Ribbonmen, hedge schools, Daniel O'Connell's monster meetings, famine depopulation, religious factionalism, Fenians, the Home Rule movement, Paddy stereotypes, and the Gaelic Athletic Association are all concisely introduced and explained. Where scholarly opinion diverges, Murphy lists the competing theories, summarizing, for instance, schools of thought on the composition of the agrarian agitators known as Whiteboys, multiple explanations of why Tridentine Catholicism was so fervently embraced by the Irish, and debates about possible factors in the outbreak of the Land War. For scholars familiar with the British nineteenth century, but unschooled in Irish history, this book presents the basics in an easy day's read and provides a useful point of departure for further research. The volume concludes with a fifty-page bibliography of key scholarship on the Irish nineteenth century, grouped by topics such as "religion," "social life," and "land," as well as by individual literary authors. Most noteworthy about Murphy's work is the way its chronology avoids standard narratives that treat the Irish nineteenth century as either too British to count as Irish history at all, or else as one long prelude to Irish modernism and the Irish Free State. By starting his book with the first stirrings of rebellion that culminated in the 1798 uprising, Murphy crafts a historical vision of the century as begun on Irish initiative, rather than a century defined by the British imposition of the Act of Union in 1801. By ending before the Irish literary revival of the 1890s, Murphy is able to deal with the literary material in his book on terms other than whether it prefigures or fails to live up to Irish modernism. This is an Ireland that matters to a Victorian studies audience, an Ireland whose culture and history aren't simply idling in wait of their apotheosis in the twentieth century. Given this rather innovative organization, the most disappointing aspect of the book is its complete segregation of gender into the penultimate chapter, which provides a brief litany of how women's lives changed over the course of the century. Murphy knows this topic well (he coedited Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland with Margaret Kelleher [Dublin, Irish Academies Press...

Gaelic prose in the Irish Free State, 1922-1939

Gaelic prose in the Irish Free State, 1922-1939

Politics in the irish free state: the legacy of a conservative revolution

This article is based on the premise that the social and political foundations of the geopolitical entity known as the Irish Free State was of a conservative nature, unique in Western Europe. Of course, conservative forces also featured prominently in the early twentieth-century in other European countries. However, they were counterbalanced by forces of opposition sufficiently powerful to generate a social and political balance that was practically nonexistent within the Irish Free State. When exploring the root cause of Ireland's conservative politics, I identify an ideological connection between the lack of radical forces in the Irish Free State and the revolution through which it was established. In other words, the 1916–23 Irish Revolution indisputably laid the foundations of the ideas that were to become the dominant ideology in southern Ireland during the 1920s and 1930s.

Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State 1922-1939

Gaelic Prose in the Irish Free State 1922-1939

“THE ARTIST WHO STAKES HIS BEING IS FROM NOWHERE”: Beckett and Thomas MacGreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats

Thomas MacGreevy felt that Jack B. Yeats's art was a repository of Irish national consciousness, and that it could act as a basis for the articulation of a uniquely Irish post-colonial identity. Samuel Beckett was strongly opposed to such a view, describing Yeats as an artist from nowhere. I explain this divergence of views in terms of Beckett and MacGreevy's different cultural positioning in the Irish Free State, and suggest that Beckett's views are indicative of the way in which he himself wished to be read vis-a-vis the cultural narratives of identity being espoused in 'Irish Ireland'.

Ireland's "Proclaimed" Dramatist: Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976)

Dramatist, businessman, and senator, Frank J. Hugh O'Donnell (1894-1976) made noteworthy contributions, largely unrecognized today, to Irish arts, indus try and politics during the Irish Literary Revival and the following two decades.1 He is not to be confused with Frank Hugh O'Donnell (1846-1916), the Home Rule member of parliament, who penned the notorious pamphlet Souls for Gold attacking Yeats's Countess Cathleen in 1899.2 An exploration of O'Don nell's life and work reveals his formative impact on Irish amateur drama. His nationalistic play Dawn Mist (1919) earned the distinction of most proclaimed [banned] play, during the Anglo-Irish War (1919-1921). In the fertile climate of the Irish Literary Revival, even a minor writer like O'Donnell could, and did, contribute to cultural nationalism and help to promote the cause of Irish independence. Furthermore, from 1926 through 1946, local ama teur dramatic competitions absorbed much of his energy. In a major two-part radio address, The Drama and Ourselves (1926), O'Donnell argued for the cre ation of a centralized, national amateur dramatic federation and competition. O'Donnell's legacy to Irish arts is well worth uncovering. He worked stren uously in the mid-i940S to promote Irish industrial design and to establish a Ministry of Arts and Crafts. It might be advanced that after the Treaty, he was, de facto, a minister of arts in the Irish Free State before such a post existed in the New Ireland. Horace Plunkett had been the first and only minister of arts in Ireland's provisional government during the Anglo-Irish War. post was abolished shortly after the creation of the Free State.3

Defending democracy? The legislative response to political extremism in the Irish Free State, 1922–l39

The Irish Free State was both victim and survivor of the general crisis of European democracy in the inter-war era. Born into civil war in 1922, it saw repeated bouts of instability and political violence, the emergence of radicalised movements on the left and right in the 1930s, and the subsidence of political unrest late in that decade. In this period the state’s reliance on emergency legislation to deal with subversion was obviously an indication of the persistence of unrest, and such laws have usually been seen as an inescapable part of the state’s pursuit of authority and legitimacy. On the other hand, the Irish case is also an example of how a state’s political development can be affected by civil war, since the continuities in the state’s legislative response to political extremism, from 1922 onwards, are too strong to ignore. Of course, the Free State was also one of the few new democracies to survive the period with its democratic institutions intact, but from the outset this achievement was accomplished through the paradox of withholding the conventions of democracy until the period of crisis would pass. One view is that this was the price to be paid for countering the threat to democratic government posed by subversive organisations, while such organisations themselves argue that they remained subject not to a ‘government of laws’ but to ‘a government of men’. As in other situations, the legitimacy of such legislation was inextricably linked to the case governments made for there being a state of emergency, but such arguments were always deeply contested. Either way, the whole issue of emergency legislation reveals both a confused understanding of the requisites of constitutional government in Ireland, and the need to appreciate the complex nature of the decisions states make in an era of violent conflict.

Joyce's Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses (review)

Reviewed by: Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses Richard Brown Joyce’s Revenge: History, Politics and Aesthetics in Ulysses. Andrew Gibson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xii + 306. $80.00 (cloth). Andrew Gibson's is easily one of the most serious of academic books to have appeared on Joyce in recent years. It is densely researched, full of ideas, and well embedded in current academic questions, and is sure to become a familiar point of reference in future debates as well as a standard to which subsequent researchers will have to aspire. There's a good deal more packed into it than can be represented comfortably in a short review. The author's abilities as a chapter-by-chapter reader of Ulysses, as a fluent narrative theoretician and as an impressively informed cultural historian are not at all in doubt; moreover they merge impressively here as in relatively few other books on Joyce. Gibson reads Joyce's work attentively and scrupulously, contextualizes it precisely (while still provocatively), and theorizes it more subtly than is usually the case in Joyce criticism. There's an especially responsible focus on the Irish historico-political contexts that are contemporary with the setting of Ulysses. Gibson revisits the dustier shelves of Joyce's wide-ranging and substantial literary interests so that, remarkably, Ulysses seems at once more Irish and also in a way more English, more political and yet more intellectual, than it has ever seemed before. What Gibson takes (to my mind rather conventionally) to be the demons of contemporary criticism—liberalism and cosmopolitanism—he sternly rebukes. His own work on "Nausicaa" and "Penelope" notwithstanding, he treats many of the recent advances in contemporary cultural and gender studies somewhat disparagingly as "a bit of sex and street life" (23). The book couldn't be accused of ignoring Joyce's lightness or his humor. On the contrary it repeatedly defines much in Joyce's literary practice as a kind of subversive Irish political humor. This Gibson extrapolates in part from H. P. Kelly's book Irish Bulls and Puns, which, as he presents it, we may no longer be able to dismiss or even enjoy as a bit of harmless fun. Rather Gibson sees both it and Joyce through the preternaturally resonant Nietzschean concept of ressentiment . It goes without saying that this is an impressive and suggestive combination of the funny and the deeply serious. However, there may be a danger in essentializing Joyce and Irish literature as fundamentally vengeful in intent; to do so threatens to lock them both into an Oedipal paradigm that may ultimately entrap as much as liberate. I suppose it is a tribute to this [End Page 837] book to say that I was tempted to quote a couple of examples of Kelly's funnier "bulls" here but, after reading Gibson, it was harder to see them in any other than this complex Nietzschean light. This isn't primarily a book about Joyce's place in the modernist literary picture, neither is it a book about the local political contexts of those places where Joyce wrote Ulysses. It's much more concerned with the represented world of Ulyssesand with the actual cultural micro-politics of the fictional place where that book is set. According to this kind of approach, Joyce didn't leave Dublin at all, in his imagination, but worked at Irish nation-building through Ulysses just as his contemporaries were doing through nationalist debate and insurrection and subsequent political work. Both things (literature and politics), Gibson quite rightly suggests, may be understood as types of "creation" (97). Consequently, for Gibson, Joyce's portrait of his native city is not fixed in late Victorian sepia, but is better understood (in the manner of Enda Duffy et als) in terms of the coincidental congruence of the dates of the book's eventual publication for Joyce's birthday and the declaration of the Irish Free State. The cost of this approach is that Zurich doesn't get a mention, Paris appears only as the place which Stephen recalls having visited in "Proteus," and Trieste is merely a place where Joyce happened to be writing journalism while...

"the Artist Who Stakes His Being is from Nowhere": Beckett and Thomas Macgreevy on the Art of Jack B. Yeats

Thomas MacGreevy felt that Jack B. Yeats's art was a repository of Irish national consciousness, and that it could act as a basis for the articulation of a uniquely Irish post-colonial identity. Samuel Beckett was strongly opposed to such a view, describing Yeats as an "artist from nowhere". I explain this divergence of views in terms of Beckett and MacGreevy's different cultural positioning in the Irish Free State, and suggest that Beckett's views are indicative of the way in which he himself wished to be read vis-a-vis the cultural narratives of identity being espoused in 'Irish Ireland'.

The Rebirth of Tragedy: Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain

The Rebirth of Tragedy:Yeats, Nietzsche, the Irish National Theatre, and the Anti-Modern Cult of Cuchulain Michael Valdez Moses (bio) I am no Nationalist, except in Ireland for passing reasons; State and Nation are the work of intellect, and when you consider what comes before and after them they are, as Victor Hugo said of something or other, not worth the blade of grass God gives for the nest of the linnet. —W. B. Yeats, 1937 I Nearly all theorists of drama from G. W. F. Hegel to the present assume that the advent of modernity increasingly renders classical forms of tragedy aesthetically moribund and politically irrelevant. According to this historicist view, the dramas of Aeschylus and Sophocles survive, but only as historical artifacts within the culture museum of modernity. They may inspire modern thinkers and artists, but their forms, themes, and contexts cannot be revived except as an exercise in antiquarianism. Friedrich Nietzsche and W. B. Yeats provide striking, if rare instances of the critic and dramatist who refused to accept the historicist premises underlying the modern view of Attic tragedy. Nietzsche, no less than Hegel, regards the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles as antithetical to many of the values and institutions of European modernity, but for that very reason, [End Page 561] in his The Birth of Tragedy, he looks to the modern operas of Richard Wagner as both marking a genuine rebirth of the spirit of classical tragedy and heralding a revolutionary antimodern turn in the cultural history of modern Europe. Yeats, whose dramatic and critical works were influenced by Nietzsche, attempted, in no less hubristic a manner, to effect a rebirth of premodern, ritualized, and aristocratic tragedy within the apparently uncongenial confines of contemportary Irish politics. What Yeats found so attractive in Nietzsche was a shared hostility, even repugnance, to what both men considered the defining features of European modernity, and a common conviction that the forces of modernization might be resisted by bringing about a cultural rebirth of the spirit of ancient tragic drama. Yeats's drama and theatre criticism thus represent a sustained effort, a lá Nietzsche, to resist the notion that aristocratic tragedy and ritual theater are historically irrecoverable. Yeats saw his efforts to assist in the rebirth of ancient tragedy as an essential part of a militant cultural and political program to free modern Ireland from imperial British rule. Yeats's literary midwifery aimed to establish a free and independent Irish nation that would offer a counterweight to the forces of (English or British imperial) modernity. Though nationalism itself might be said to be a distinctively modern ideology, Yeats hoped to cultivate an independent Irish nation on nominally premodern or non-modern grounds. As the twentieth century wore on, however, Yeats grew increasingly disenchanted with the actual Irish Free State that emerged after 1921 and with the forms of Irish nationalism that predominated in the 1920s and 1930s. Oddly, his disappointment did not lead him to abandon, but rather to intensify his efforts to promote an "anachronistic" form of dramatic tragedy, which he imagined would serve as a kind of cultural counterweight to the increasingly modernizing Irish nation-state that came into existence after formal independence. Yeats's continuing efforts to create a ritualistic, heroic, cultic, and antidemocratic form of dramatic tragedy from 1916 onwards represented his vigorous attempt to cultivate an "alternative" form of Irish modernity that was as much at odds with the British imperialism (and English culture) as it was with the predominant and increasingly official strains of modern Irish nationalism of the 1920s and 1930s. As a founding member of the Irish Literary Theatre in 1899, and later a leading dramatist, co-director, manager, and polemicist for the Irish National Theatre Society (founded in 1902 and better known after 1904 as the Abbey Theatre), Yeats looked to an "ancient" form of tragic verse drama to play a leading, even decisive role in revivifying and remaking Irish national culture at a time when prospects for Irish Home Rule, to say nothing of Irish national independence, were bleak. But despite his dominant position in the Abbey Theatre in its early years, Yeats ultimately found that his own heroic verse...

Parliamentary Democracy in Ireland

AMONG the currently signficant themes in Irish parliamentary democracy are corporatism, clientelism, corruption and centralisation. The last mentioned may seem ironic because the government has made great play of moves to decentralise civil service departments but their proposals envisage no devolving of power — just office relocation. Corruption and clientelism are, however, well established as focal points of comment on Irish politics. Similarly, corporatism has become so embedded in Ireland that the benefits of the social partnership model, as it is called, are evoked at almost all levels of political, social and cultural life. Each of these themes may be related to the size of the Republic, its relative social homogeneity and its pattern of privileged access to power at both an individual and group level. They also resonate with accounts of other small liberal democratic states in the European Union that have to deal with the economic, legal and political constraints on their formal autonomy. Though class differences are downplayed in everyday Irish discourse, the political, administrative and business elites share many social, educational and cultural assumptions. High amongst their common beliefs is a nationalist solidarity that finds expression in the assumption that what is good for business is beneficial to Ireland as a whole. At a rhetorical level, Irish politicians have asked whether the Republic is closer to Boston or Berlin — a dichotomy between low levels of state regulation and taxation on the one hand and comprehensive social welfare provision on the other. The answer is mixed, but it points to some important ambiguities of Irish political life. An understanding of Irish politics is sometimes made more difficult for foreigners by the seeming familiarity of the dominant institutions. The political institutions of Ireland are — for the most part — based on the Westminster model. At its formation in 1922, the Irish Free State inherited an almost complete administrative system, together with other important state agencies. Irish independence has been described as more like a change in regime than a revolution. 1 The Constitution of the Free State was replaced in 1937 but there was significant continuity with the previous one. Each of the institutions referred to in the Constitution — the presidency, the Oireachtas (parliament), the government and the courts — is given specific powers, to be exercised in accordance with the general principles of a British-style parliamentary democracy. However, the Constitution does have some significant non-British features. Most

Estopped by Grand Playsaunce: Flann O'Brien's Post‐colonial Lore

This article seeks to extend our understanding of the Irish writer Flann O'Brien (Myles na gCopaleen, Brian O'Nolan) by reading him from a Law and Literature perspective. I suggest that O'Nolan's painstaking and picky mind, with its attention to linguistic nuance, was logically drawn to the languages of law. In this he confirmed the character that he showed as a civil servant of the cautious, book‐keeping Irish Free State. The Free State, like other post‐colonial entities, was marked at once by a rhetoric of rupture from the colonial dispensation and by a degree of legal and political continuity. I suggest that O'Nolan's writing works away at both these aspects of the state, alternating between critical and utopian perspectives.After establishing an initial context, I undertake a close reading of O'Nolan's parodies of actual legal procedure, focusing on questions of language and censorship. I then consider his critical work on the issue of Irish sovereignty, placing this in its post‐colonial historical context. Finally I describe O'Nolan's treatment of Eamon de Valera's 1937 Constitution. I propose that his attention to textual detail prefigures in comic form the substantial rereadings of the Constitution that have been made in the last half‐century.

The Irish Free State and Collective Security, 1930–6

This paper seeks to assess, in the context of Irish foreign policy at the League of Nations, the Free State's attitude to collective security during the period 1930-6. Ireland's relationship with the League of Nations is charted from the Free State's election to the League Council in 1930 to the declaration before the General Assembly of the League in 1936 by Eamon de Valera that collective security was effectively dead. The impact of the Italian-Abyssinian dispute on the Free State's relations with the international community is examined, and it is suggested that the League's failure to successfully defend Abyssinia's territorial integrity from the aggression of a great power helped crystallise the policy of neutrality formally declared by the Free State soon afterwards. However, while the fallout from the Italian-Abyssinian dispute represents a turning point in Ireland's commitment to securing international order, the retreat from the world stage had begun much earlier. A strand of policy development can be delineated to show that a predisposition to individual state self-help pre-dates the irredentist and isolationist stance adopted by the Free State with the breakdown of the inter-war system. In this sense, the decision to declare a policy of neutrality is perfectly consistent with the development of Irish foreign policy at the League since the Free State became a Council member in 1930.

The Irish Free State and Collective Security, 1930-6

The Irish Free State and Collective Security, 1930-6

Censorship and its Critics in the Irish Free State 1922-1932

Journal Article Censorship and its Critics in the Irish Free State 1922–1932 Get access Senia Pašeta Senia Pašeta St Hugh's College, Oxford Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Past & Present, Volume 181, Issue 1, November 2003, Pages 193–218, https://doi.org/10.1093/past/181.1.193 Published: 01 November 2003