ABSTRACT
For many in the early years of the 1920s, it was Ireland’s regular recourse to a kind of theatricality, as evident in the legacies and continuing existence of republican and labour militancy, that remained the country’s most acute cultural and political problem. Cardinal Logue lamented that ‘the people of Ireland were running wild after visions, dreams and chimeras and turning the country upside down in the process’ (quoted in O’Callaghan 1984: 227). The unionist-oriented Irish Times described the operation of the first Dáil Éireann as ‘a stage play at the Mansion House’ (quoted in Kostick 1996: 49) and even the guerrilla leader and nationalist politician Michael Collins remarked that Padraic Pearse’s 1916 proclamation of an Irish republic had had an inappropriate ‘air of a Greek tragedy’ about it (Foster 1989: 482-3). Such comparisons were commonplace. Maintaining the counter-state of the first Dáil Éireann while fighting a guerrilla war of independence in the years 1919-21 may well have necessitated a form of politics that was rhizomic, clandestine and decentralized, but the reforming agenda of the new post-Treaty Irish Free State (or Saorstát Éireann) demanded a wholly opposing set of priorities. The challenge facing the nation builders of the new state was that of engendering a form of Irish identity that would be transparent, centralized and constitutional. This challenge
was especially urgent given the limitations to the Irish Free State’s political autonomy: a partitioned, self-governing dominion within the British Commonwealth (Cronin and Regan 2000: 1-2). Moreover, for Cumann na nGaedheal, the main government party and the renamed pro-Treaty wing of Sinn Féin, this was a period of reining in revolutionary expectations and reconciling the population to constitutional government.
