ABSTRACT
Many states have institutionalized tyranny, oppressing those who by race or inclination would rise against the center, but few democratic states have to cope with resistance beyond the generation of convulsion. Since the establishment of the Irish Free State in December 1922, no serious political organization has considered an alternative to democracy. Yet since 1922 Irish governments have been troubled by the presence of unreconciled Irish Republicans, organized overtly and legally as the Sinn Fein Party and covertly as the Irish Republican Army (IRA). During the autumn of 1931, the IRA did not react to the arrests by recourse to the gun, in large part because of the impending general elections in February 1932 that gave Fianna Fail seventy-two seats to Cumann na nGaedheal's fifty-seven. It is in fact the Northern events that give the present IRA a legitimacy related neither to the old rituals nor the old attitudes.
