ABSTRACT
The study of politics in a typical European state is normally straightforward from one important perspective: we can assume that the boundaries of the state itself are not an issue. But Ireland is different in this respect: the very name of the state has been a contested concept. The territorial extent of Ireland’s frontiers, and the issue of whether these should include Northern Ireland, was for long the subject of bitter political dispute; and the identity of the state itself, and the extent to which it was formally and substantively independent of Great Britain, continued to be matters of contention well after 1922. These questions not only provided a distinctive dynamic to the Irish political process, as we have seen in Chapter 1; they also shaped the structure of the party system that emerged in the new state after 1922, as Chapter 5 has shown.
