I

Republicanism has been one of the most influential political ideologies in modern Irish history. It was the animating intellectual force behind the United Irish rebellion in 1798; it exerted a crucial influence over Young Irelander and Fenian thought throughout the nineteenth century and played a critical role in unifying the fragile coalition of radical and conservative nationalists who flocked under the Sinn Féin banner in the tumultuous months that followed the Easter Rising. But despite the profound influence of republican ideals in shaping Irish political and social life, the concept has been remarkably undertheorized by historians of the revolutionary period. In most cases, republicanism is depicted as code for a range of ideas, usually perspectives rooted in national or sectarian prejudice; seldom does one find republicanism treated seriously as a sophisticated political ideology in its own right. Tom Garvin, for instance, has characterized the Irish republican tradition as ‘nationalist, separatist, vaguely socialist and sometimes Caesaro-papist’.Footnote ¹ Search for ‘republicanism’ in the index of R. F. Foster's Modern Ireland, meantime, and readers are advised to consult the entries on ‘Anglophobia’, ‘Catholicism’, and ‘nationalism’.Footnote ² Such depictions have the effect of reducing republicanism to a series of attitudes or inchoate emotional responses to political events, a circumstance highlighted by the prominent anti-Treaty activist C. S. Andrews in his 1982 memoir, Man of no property: ‘Over the years Republicans of whatever kind have acquired the image of being anti-intellectual; they live, it is said, on their ignorant emotions.’Footnote ³ Furthermore, on the handful of occasions when Irish republicanism has been subjected to meaningful scrutiny, the tenor of analysis has tended to be deeply moralistic. As Richard Bourke observed when reflecting on an enduring ‘anti-intellectual strain’ in Irish history-writing: ‘relevant doctrines tend to be blamed rather than discussed: blamed, that is, for their consequences, or their “intrinsic” tendencies’.Footnote ⁴

Clearly this propensity to conflate republicanism with a crude brand of insurrectionist, anti-British nationalism was shaped significantly by the fraught intellectual climate that characterized Irish public life against the backdrop of the Troubles, the name given to the period of intense political violence in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s up to the 1998 Good Friday Agreement. The claim of the Provisional IRA, an Irish republican paramilitary organization established in 1969, to be ‘the inheritors of [the Easter Rising of] 1916 because they have the same spirit of freedom which motivated the 1916 rebels’, impacted profoundly upon scholarly analysis of the Irish republican tradition.Footnote ⁵ Indeed, it is only in the two decades following the ratification of the Good Friday Agreement that the Irish republican tradition has been subjected to rigorous interdisciplinary scrutiny. Drawing on the insights of the Cambridge School of intellectual history,Footnote ⁶ recent scholarship across several disciplines has effectively situated Irish republicanism in a broader European and transatlantic political tradition with a wide-ranging intellectual ancestry.Footnote ⁷ The politico-ideological complexities of the revisionist debate do not warrant detailed consideration here; its contours and ramifications have already been surveyed comprehensively.Footnote ⁸ It does, however, bear restating that the intense politicization of academic history and literary criticism that occurred against the backdrop of the northern conflict has exerted a profound impact upon the manner in which Irish republican tradition is popularly understood.Footnote ⁹

One effect of this undertheorizing, as Gavin M. Foster emphasized in an essential essay exploring the salience of classical republican thought during the Civil War, is that ‘opposition to the Free State has often been stigmatized as an irrational attitude of intransigence linked to pre-political, ethno-communal atavisms; moral elitism; anti-intellectualism; and anti-democratic views, among other unsavory tendencies’.Footnote ¹⁰ However, historians’ proclivity to conflate republicanism with a tradition of anti-state violence has further had the effect of obscuring the significant strands of ideological and rhetorical continuity that link Treatyite political thought with the pre-1922 republican tradition.

Indeed, Free State Civil War rhetoric, with its resonances of earlier Unionist appeals to order, has formed a cornerstone of several recent accounts of the 1922–3 conflict as the first phase in a Treatyite counter-revolution. Foster, for instance, highlights the ‘remarkable continuity’ that characterizes Free State and earlier British perceptions of the IRA as evidence that the government's prosecution of anti-Treaty dissent was principally shaped by a set of essentially Victorian cultural attitudes connected with social status and respectability.Footnote ¹¹ John M. Regan has argued similarly that the trauma of the Civil War fomented the emergence of a new, Kevin O'Higgins-led ‘conservative consolidationist’ wing within the Treatyite government and party which conceived of the conflict as a moral struggle of ‘good against evil’ elements in Irish society.Footnote ¹² In Regan's formulation, this translated as a clash between representatives of the upwardly mobile, university-educated, Catholic bourgeoisie, who were set to assume the running of the country following the passage of the third Home Rule bill, and those representing more socially and economically disadvantaged groups who perceived themselves as remote from the exercise of political power and who, therefore, aspired to a more fundamental reordering of Irish society after ceding from the United Kingdom.Footnote ¹³ Bill Kissane declared that the Civil War facilitated a ‘restoration of elements of moderate nationalism that had been bypassed during the First World War’, and perceives the Treatyites as endeavouring to construct a ‘new state along principles clearly central to the mainstream brand of parliamentary nationalism before 1918’.Footnote ¹⁴ Anne Dolan described the Cumann na nGaedheal government as a coalition of ‘failed’ revolutionaries who ‘clung nervously to power’ while combating the ‘terrorism’ wrought by ‘the foul agents of extreme republicanism’ with ‘terrorism in uniform’.Footnote ¹⁵ Brian Hanley, meantime, wrote that ‘republicanism (or at least a variant of it) was official state policy in this country from the 1930s until the 1970s’, thus explicitly denying the Cosgrave government any connection with the pre-Treaty republican tradition.Footnote ¹⁶

Clearly these perspectives provide an important counter-interpretation to the democrats-versus-dictators model of the Treaty split that dominated academic historiography in the 1980s and 1990s, a tradition of interpretation that laid stress on the administrative abilities and democratic credentials of the Treatyite government, while emphasizing the militarism, political immaturity, and anti-democratic tendencies of their opponents.Footnote ¹⁷ However, such depictions of the Civil War as a straightforward triumph of a pre-First World War bourgeois liberalism over revolutionary republicanism are as ‘seductive’ in their ‘simplicity’ as earlier, statist renderings of the conflict as a victory for the ‘ballot against the bullet’.Footnote ¹⁸ Republicanism in Ireland, like everywhere else, is a complex, contested phenomenon; it is an ideology capable of including both radical and conservative elements and its meaning can vary widely depending on the context in which it is deployed. For beyond the ‘core idea’ that ‘the affairs of law and government are res publica: public business’, this tradition has proven remarkably difficult to elucidate.Footnote ¹⁹ The leading republican thinkers of the Renaissance and Enlightenment periods differ on almost everything, from whether a republic should foster commerce or seek to restrain economic growth, to whether it should have a propensity for peace or for war. Fundamental matters concerning equality and representation are a subject of fierce dispute; indeed, there is no consensus regarding the most appropriate institutional architecture for a republican system of government.Footnote ²⁰

In light of such ambiguities, scholars have increasingly come to view republicanism as ‘a language, not a programme’, reflecting an increased sensitivity to the many different situations and contexts in which the republican idiom has been employed historically.Footnote ²¹ As Mark Goldie reminds us:

With republicanism thus understood as ‘a broad set of vocabularies or conceptual motifs rather than a systematic doctrine’,Footnote ²³ it becomes extremely difficult to distinguish what Regan characterizes as the authentic republicanism of the revolutionary period from the ‘counter-revolutionary and counter-republican’ impulses that animated Treatyite policy after 1922.Footnote ²⁴

Contrary to Jason Knirck's assertion that ‘the pro-Treatyites had to more or less concede the revolutionary terrain to republicans’, Free State propaganda during and after the Civil War never ceased to invoke the vocabulary of classical republicanism that drove the greater part of nationalism and nationalist movements in nineteenth-century Ireland.Footnote ²⁵ Indeed, even those scholars who emphasize Cumann na nGaedheal's continuity with pre-Treaty nationalist thought, particularly with respect to foreign policy and the Irish language, neglect to acknowledge the enduring influence of republican ideals in shaping Free State Civil War rhetoric.Footnote ²⁶ The sources make clear that the Treatyite leadership never conceived of its programme as a repudiation of revolutionary values; it was those who took up arms against the Free State who were ‘the deserters from Pearse, the deserters from MacSwiney’.Footnote ²⁷ The National Army's attack on anti-Treaty forces occupying Dublin's Four Courts building on 28 June 1922, for instance, was celebrated as ‘A Victory for the People and the Republican Idea’.Footnote ²⁸ Senior Treatyite officials such as Michael Collins and Alfred O'Rahilly argued that the settlement reduced ‘the Irish problem to a matter of lexicography’,Footnote ²⁹ rendering the Civil War a spurious contest over nomenclature: was the Free State ‘to be called Saorstát or Poblacht?’Footnote ³⁰ The anti-Treatyites were further labelled ‘Irregulars’, a term connoting behaviour contrary to that which is normal or established. As Ernest Boyd put it:

Such statements make clear that the Free State leadership never understood themselves to be breaking with the ideology and aspirations that had underpinned the revolution; rather they saw their programme as reorienting and adapting the strategy through which such ideals might be achieved. This perspective is captured pithily in O'Higgins's 1922 injunction that ‘we have reached the stage when we must trust to evolution rather than to revolution for the attainment of our ideals’, a conceit he prefaced by emphasizing that ‘I have not abandoned any political aspirations to which I have given expression in the past.’Footnote ³² The commonplace depiction of the period that followed the signing of the Treaty as one of intellectual atrophy in Irish public life, when ‘a triple alliance between the British government, the Catholic Church, and the Irish middle class’ eradicated ‘any sense of idealism – republican, socialist, or feminist – from the political landscape’, fails utterly to comprehend the scale of the political project that the Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council saw itself as undertaking.Footnote ³³ In its most radical articulation, this amounted to a form of moral crusade aimed at cultivating a new ethos of civic responsibility in the Free State, one that would reform the relationship of citizen to government in a manner appropriate to accommodate the demands of what was conceived consciously as a new, post-revolutionary, post-colonial age. As W. T. Cosgrave reflected in his graveside oration at Arthur Griffith's funeral, the government set out to ‘accomplish the moral regeneration’ of a nation felt to be collapsing into desolation and despair.Footnote ³⁴

This article will highlight the significant strands of theoretical and linguistic continuity that link the Treatyite government and party, formally reconstituted as the Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council in April 1923, with the pre-1922 republican tradition. Challenging the convention that the Free State government repudiated any connection with the republican values of the revolutionary period and aspired merely to resurrect ‘a particular form of liberalism that had its roots in the Home Rule era’,Footnote ³⁵ I hope to show that the Cumann na nGaedheal leadership never ceased to conceive of or present themselves as republicans. Indeed, it is against the backdrop of the chaos and tumult of the Civil War that Free State rhetoric begins to exhibit a peculiar fusion of classical republican concerns regarding the importance of establishing a virtuous, law-abiding citizenry with what can be understood productively as a post-colonial anxiety arising from long-standing doubts concerning the nation's fitness for self-government.

The nature of Ireland's historic relation to the British empire has, of course, long been a source of intense political and academic debate.Footnote ³⁶ As one of the few Irish historians to have engaged with post-colonial theorizations of the Anglo-Irish relationship observes: ‘It is quite debatable if nineteenth-century Ireland was more akin to the Raj or to rural Cornwall.’Footnote ³⁷ However, the sources make clear that the Treatyite government was deeply concerned to counter historic perceptions of the Irish ‘race’ as morally and intellectual inferior to the English.Footnote ³⁸ This circumstance obliges any scholar seeking to understand the range of intellectual forces that shaped Treatyite politics to treat such anxieties seriously and to account for the many varied and complex ways in which a deep-seated sense of doubt regarding the ‘fitness’ of the Irish ‘race’ for sovereignty shaped the government's reception of pre-Treaty nationalist ideals.

Republicanism provided the Treatyite government with a popularly recognizable vocabulary from which it could draw to articulate and legitimate its programme of post-revolutionary moral and civic reform: a project aimed, ultimately, at vindicating the nation's historic claim to ‘fitness’ for self-government by cultivating classical virtues of temperance, wisdom, moderation, and justice among the citizens of the Free State. By highlighting the prominence of the vocabulary of classical republicanism in Treatyite propaganda throughout the Civil War, I hope to demonstrate that, when members of the Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council described themselves as republicans, they meant it, and never conceived of their politics as a repudiation of revolutionary values. The genuineness of the Treatyites’ claim to republican status must be factored into any analysis of the range of ideological forces that shaped the Irish Civil War. Such a perspective has the potential to deepen significantly our understanding of the nature of the relation of the Cosgrave government to the pre-Treaty nationalist tradition, complicating perceptions of 1922 as the onset of a counter-revolution.

II

The Civil War had a profoundly demoralizing impact on the fledgling Free State. In addition to claiming somewhere between 2,000 and 4,000 lives, it devastated the country's communications infrastructure and cost an already impoverished exchequer more than £50 million to prosecute.Footnote ³⁹ The conflict further exerted a heavy psychological toll on a government party that was acutely conscious of how the state's slow descent into civil war appeared to substantiate the worst historical misgivings of British statesmen regarding the Irish people's ability to govern themselves. Indeed, one of the most striking features of Free State rhetoric in the months that followed the ratification of the Treaty is a sense of declining faith in the nation's capacity for self-government.Footnote ⁴⁰ The dire tenor of such reflections suggests that, faced with the chaos and tumult of Civil War, a number of senior government officials were moved to reappraise their attitude to the colonial assertion, vigorously contested during the revolution, that Irishmen might lack the moral discipline for autonomous administration. In March 1922, for instance, the senior Free State diplomat Michael MacWhite remarked bitterly that:

The brooding, disconsolate tenor of such commentary, deeply evocative of the language used in anti-Home Rule propaganda, illustrates vividly the extent to which aspersions cast over the national character under the Union continued to play on Irish minds following the passage of the Treaty. As Foster, for instance, has suggested, the commonplace emulation of colonial discourses observable in Free State perceptions of the anti-Treaty IRA may be understood productively as a manifestation of the post-colonial dynamic, theorized by Frantz Fanon and others, whereby the nationalist revolutionaries who assume power following the historic moment of decolonization emulate attitudes and rhetoric associated with the imperial structures that preceded them.Footnote ⁴² This psychological reflex might go some way towards explaining ‘the laboratory atmosphere’ that has been identified as one of the most ‘peculiar characteristic[s] of Irish political thinking’, a persistent and demoralizing ‘fear that the country might slip back – and quickly – into a state of nature with political institutions toppled and rival populations at each other's throats’.Footnote ⁴³ As Fanon argued: ‘The effect consciously sought by colonialism was to drive into the natives’ heads the idea that if the settlers were to leave, they would at once fall back into barbarism, degradation, and bestiality.’Footnote ⁴⁴

Clearly such anxieties exerted a profound influence over Treatyite political thought during the Civil War; indeed, there was a widespread sense that the forces of violence and brutality unleashed during the war against the British state had corroded the spiritual constitution of the Irish body politic, rendering ‘the people’ unprepared ‘to face the realities of the situation arising out of the adoption of the Treaty by the Second Dáil’.Footnote ⁴⁵ P. S. O'Hegarty, for instance, a member of the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) Supreme Council, who became secretary of the Irish Department of Posts and Telegraphs in 1922, conceived the conflict in religious terms as an inevitable outcome of a ‘moral collapse’ that began with the onset of revolution:

The government consequently determined that a dramatic reformation of the national character was required to stave off the threat of state failure, a programme aimed at ‘restoring not merely order, but a different point of view altogether in the Nation at large’.Footnote ⁴⁷ As O'Higgins put it: ‘The problem is psychological rather than physical, we have to vindicate the idea of law and order to government, as against anarchy.’Footnote ⁴⁸

This project was communicated strikingly in a language connoting clear ideological continuity with the pre-1922 republican tradition, reconfiguring classical ideals of civic virtue and the common good in a manner appropriate to what was conceived consciously as the dawning of ‘a new Irish era’.Footnote ⁴⁹ For, although republicanism is associated with concepts of popular sovereignty, democracy, anti-clericalism, and anti-monarchism, and is commonly aimed at ensuring the protection of the basic liberties of the citizen through the provision of a written constitution and the institutionalization of robust checks and balances on executive power, the history of republican politics shows that there are as many conceptions of republican thought as there are of liberalism, socialism, or conservatism.Footnote ⁵⁰ Contemporary theories of republicanism have consequently come to focus upon the idea of a system of governance that selects all that is best in divided or factional interests and distils them in the name of the public interest or the common good. Of course, the nature of the common good, and the character of the balance struck between individual liberties and the pursuit of communal interests is a complex one.Footnote ⁵¹ Indeed, the relation of republicanism to liberalism remains a source of vigorous interdisciplinary contestation.Footnote ⁵² As Blair Worden reminds us, however, ‘It is as a politics of virtue that republicanism most clearly defines itself.’Footnote ⁵³

There can be no doubt that republicanism has historically derived much of its ontological and discursive shape from a distinctive account of freedom as ‘non-domination’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Indeed, Foster has argued forcefully that parliamentary opposition to the Anglo-Irish treaty was rooted in the ‘classical Roman tradition’ of republican thought in which liberty is defined ‘neither [by] total self-mastery nor simple freedom from interference, but [by] the very absence of structures of mastery [altogether]’.Footnote ⁵⁵ But even acknowledging the centrality of the so-called ‘neo-Roman’ conception of liberty in shaping parliamentary opposition to the Treaty, scholars should be wary of following Foster in depicting the anti-Treatyites as the sole exponents of republican ideals in Free State politics. In the first instance, it is not obvious from the Dáil debates that pro-Treaty politicians such as Collins and Griffith renounced an adherence to the ‘neo-Roman’ understanding of liberty as non-domination. As far as the senior Treatyites were concerned, the British commonwealth of nations, as distinct from the British empire,Footnote ⁵⁶ was a coalition of co-equal sovereign states that would guarantee the Free State's legislative independence owing to the fact each member had a self-interested concern with protecting the sovereignty of the others.Footnote ⁵⁷ As Griffith stated: ‘the guarantee Ireland has now for her security against England is the joint guarantee of Canada, Australia, and the Dominions. Any invasion of our rights is an invasion of theirs.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Such was the logic underpinning the core Treatyite contention that the settlement conferred on the Free State the ‘substance’ of republican freedom, if not its symbols, and provided the legislative foundations on which a full, constitutional republic could be achieved in the future.Footnote ⁵⁹ It guaranteed the Free State a condition of negative liberty, described explicitly as ‘freedom from interference’, and provided, therefore, the ‘bedrock’ from which the Provisional Government could work to achieve the form of republican liberty ‘dreamed of by Wolfe Tone’ and ‘foreseen by Thomas Davis’, that is: ‘freedom from any outside enemy’ and even the merest threat of domination.Footnote ⁶⁰ Such statements make clear that the pro- and anti-Treaty camps clashed, not over a divergent set of fundamental ideological principles, for both sides retained a rhetorical commitment to democratic and republican ideals, but over the extent of the symbolic and material concessions that could be countenanced in pursuit of the shared aim of a sovereign, thirty-two-county republic. This circumstance lends weight to Philip Pettit's contention that political ideas, such as republicanism, are most effectively theorized as ‘languages or discourses’ because

III

Perhaps the most vivid illustration of the Treatyites’ enduring adherence to republican ideals can be observed in the government's discourses on citizenship following the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1922, notably in their obsessive focus on concepts of civic virtue and the common good. For, although contemporary theorists principally distinguish republicanism from liberalism based on its articulation of a distinctive concept of freedom as ‘non-domination’, all agree that the maintenance of such liberty is contingent upon the development of a highly politically active citizenry motivated by an altruistic commitment to the common good. This vision runs entirely counter to the archetypical liberal emphasis on the individual capacity for self-determination and the imperative of state neutrality. Indeed, the liberal neutrality thesis suggests that the community, in whatever form, ought not promote or dictate to the individual any particular conception of the ‘good life’.Footnote ⁶² Republicanism, by contrast, is rooted in the fundamental Aristotelian conviction that ‘a state's purpose is not merely to provide a living but to make a life that is good’, and this ‘good’ can only be realized in and through participation in self-governing communities.Footnote ⁶³ The emphasis on participation is key: republicans are highly aware of the fragility of a system of government that places extraordinary moral demands on its citizens and are conscious of the fact that a free state can swiftly descend into tyranny if the public grows negligent or complacent. It is imperative, therefore, that all members of a political community participate actively in public life and hold power to account to prevent their institutions from stagnating and corrupting.Footnote ⁶⁴

Moreover, such active participation is only likely to come about if citizens are possessed of a high degree of ‘civic virtue’, generally defined as a deep-seated sense of loyalty to the interests of the community that transcends an individual citizen's natural impulse to prioritize private concerns.Footnote ⁶⁵ Virtue, republicans argue, must be cultivated through state education and strengthened by participation in communal activities and active public service.Footnote ⁶⁶ In chapter two of De l'esprit des lois (1748), for instance, Montesquieu divides all governments into republics, monarchies, and despotisms, and highlights in each a dominant ‘principle’ or ‘spring’ which animates the spirit of the polity. In the case of republics, ‘virtue’, defined as a ‘love of the laws and the homeland’ and a ‘continuous preference of the public interest over one's own’, is identified as ‘the spring that makes republican government move’. He further declares that: ‘It is in republican government that the full power of education is needed.’Footnote ⁶⁷ This Greek or Aristotelian strand of republicanism, so central, for instance, to J. G. A. Pocock's seminal account of the tradition,Footnote ⁶⁸ is overlooked entirely by Foster, who discusses republicanism narrowly in terms of the ‘Machiavellian or neo-Roman’ conception of liberty excavated by Quentin Skinner.Footnote ⁶⁹ Skinner, of course, challenges Pocock on the centrality of Aristotle in shaping modern republicanism, emphasizing the influence of Cicero and the Codex of Justinian. However, both scholars recognize that the concept of virtù, which has its roots in the Graeco-Aristotelian ideal of arete,Footnote ⁷⁰ and the imperative that citizens participate actively in political life to guard against corruption, has formed a cornerstone of republican rhetoric throughout history.Footnote ⁷¹

This aspect of the classical republican tradition, focused on citizens’ virtue, formed a central tenet of Irish republican rhetoric throughout the nineteenth century. David Dwan, for instance, has argued that the politics of Young Ireland, the group that formed a cultural nationalist adjunct to Daniel O'Connell's Repeal Association in the 1840s, ‘drew its model of freedom from a civic republican tradition in which a life of active citizenship was a necessary condition of self-realisation’. While Young Ireland struggled to reconcile its ‘Aristotelian’ conception of the ‘good life’ with ‘the institutional realities of modern politics’, the group's obsessive focus on virtue, defined as ‘the pursuit of the common good over the satisfaction of strictly private interests’,Footnote ⁷² exerted profound influence over the vision of republican liberty and citizenship articulated by the IRB, the secret, oath-bound, fraternal organization that emerged as ‘the central influence’ in shaping separatist nationalist thought between 1858 and 1924.Footnote ⁷³ Owen McGee, for instance, has argued that the republicanism of the IRB can be understood productively as ‘a form of political morality’, emphasizing how, ‘rather than being a simple insurrectionary conspiracy’, the organization was deeply concerned ‘to instil in the Irish masses’ a set of ‘essentially moral, self-improving lessons’ concerned with the duties and responsibilities of citizenship, stressing that ‘civic virtue cannot thrive in a culture that emphasized individualism and self-fulfilment’.Footnote ⁷⁴

This tradition of republican thought did not perish in the decades that followed the abortive Fenian Rising of 1867, even as the parliamentary agitation for Home Rule grew ascendant.Footnote ⁷⁵ There can be no doubt that propagandistic portrayals of Irish republicanism as a uniquely coherent intellectual tradition connecting the United Irish rebellion of 1798 with the Easter Rising of 1916 are misleading.Footnote ⁷⁶ Irish republicanism, no less than the French tradition to which it has always been so closely aligned, evolved and adapted in response to changing social and political circumstances over the course of the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁷⁷ Indeed, socialist republicans such as James Connolly were far less concerned with classical concepts of civic virtue than with abolition of capitalism and ‘wage slavery’.Footnote ⁷⁸

Nevertheless, the classical language of the Young Ireland movement remained prominent in the rhetoric of many senior Sinn Féin and IRB officials after the turn of the twentieth century. The Sinn Féin founder Arthur Griffith, for instance, invoked Montesquieu explicitly to declare ‘that a country is prosperous, not in proportion to its fertility, but in proportion to its freedom’,Footnote ⁷⁹ and used his address at the inaugural 1905 party conference to call for the institution of a properly republican system of education in Ireland. The British education system, Griffith declared, ‘is founded on the inversion of Aristotle’, for instead of seeking ‘to make men patriots’, which was the ultimate ‘end of education’, young Irishmen were taught by ‘the professors of Trinity [College] not to take Aristotle literally’ and were consequently ‘rendered unfit for service’ as citizen soldiers of a republic.Footnote ⁸⁰ He concluded:

Patrick Pearse, the iconic leader of the Easter Rising and the most important republican intellectual of his generation, expanded upon this theme in an influential 1916 pamphlet entitled ‘The murder machine’. Condemning the corruptive influence of a system of ‘slave education’ designed to produce not good citizens but ‘good slaves’, he declared that ‘A new education system in Ireland has to do more than restore a national culture. It has to restore manhood to a race that has been deprived of it.’Footnote ⁸² Drawing from the classical, Aristotelian equation of masculinity with public virtue, Pearse invokes the concept of ‘manhood’ as a biological metaphor for self-government, and the moral and intellectual competencies that render men fit to bear the extraordinary demands of republican citizenship.Footnote ⁸³ At the core of this project of civic re-education is a determination to imbue the ‘young souls, young minds, young bodies’ of Ireland with ‘the largest measure of individual freedom consistent with the common good’, thus ensuring that the future citizens of an Irish republic are prepared to sublimate their own personal interests to the common weal and that ‘the young men of the nation stand organised and disciplined’, prepared always ‘to make the ultimate sacrifice’ in the interests of the community.Footnote ⁸⁴

Such perspectives were undoubtedly shaped by the soteriological concepts of regenerative sacrifice that became ascendant among Catholic and nationalist intellectuals across Europe in the decades around the First World War. However, the heavy emphasis that republican thinkers such as Pearse placed on concepts of self-sacrifice cannot be understood properly in isolation from their writing on subjects such as sovereignty and the duties and responsibilities of citizenship.Footnote ⁸⁵ Thus, when Pearse's writing is assessed as part of a broader republican tradition deeply concerned to promote a new ethos of civic morality in Ireland, his discourses on sacrifice would seem to have less to do with some ‘irrational’ or ‘pathological’ impulse to ‘self-immolation’ (as Seán Farrell Moran, for instance, suggestsFootnote ⁸⁶) than with a classical republican concern to safeguard the ‘rights and liberties [of] every man and woman within the nation’ by offering up one's life in defence of such freedoms.Footnote ⁸⁷ Bloodshed was only a ‘cleansing and sanctifying thing’Footnote ⁸⁸ insofar as it inspired public virtue and enhanced the right of the sovereign nation to seize ‘effectual ownership and possession of the soil of Ireland’.Footnote ⁸⁹

This classical conception of republican citizenship was echoed regularly in the rhetoric of Pearse's contemporaries. Michael Collins, for instance, wrote and spoke frequently of the imperative that citizens cultivate ‘the spirit of sacrifice’ and ‘the courage to die’ that ‘ensured the maintenance of the [republican] ideal’ in nineteenth-century Ireland, and invoked ‘the teachings’ of the influential Young Ireland intellectual Thomas Davis to insist that such a virtuous community of ‘self-respecting, self-reliant men and women’ could only exist where citizens are educated that they ‘may be free’.Footnote ⁹⁰ Michael Tierney, a future Cumann na nGaedheal T.D. (1925–32) and President of University College Dublin, elaborated this theme in his 1920 publication Education in a free Ireland. Stressing that ‘we cannot propose to build an Irish Republic upon a vacuum’ and must, therefore, endeavour to cultivate a coherent ‘National philosophy’, he explicitly invoked Pearse to stress that an independent Irish government must focus its educational resources on ‘the production of good citizens’, not mere ‘economic machines’.Footnote ⁹¹ ‘The first provisional government of a new Irish Republic must be based on something, it must have an all-embracing economic and social policy, and it must educate its citizens’, Tierney declared. In addition to cultivating a ‘wideawake’ and highly politically active citizenry, one possessed of the ‘perpetual watchfulness’ that is required to guard effectively against political corruption, he suggested that the state must further seek to promote ‘a sort of discipline like that which the Spartans inculcated in their youth, and [which] Plato adopted for his ideal commonwealth’ because ‘the chief part of the individual's function [in society] is to be a citizen’ acting in the interests of the political community.Footnote ⁹² ‘Once State activity ceases to be political it becomes merely the activity of private individuals for selfish ends … [and] there is something wrong somewhere’, Tierney argued. ‘If, therefore, the State has rightly anything to do with education, education must have something to do with politics’; it must instil in the nation's youth a conviction that ‘True democracy is not that which asserts the unbounded liberty of the individual to despoil others, but that which puts the Christian ideal of duty to others in the foremost place.’Footnote ⁹³

In such statements, of course, it is possible to detect a blending of classical republican concerns regarding the importance of establishing an active and selfless citizenry with a more personalist and communitarian worldview grounded in Catholic social thought.Footnote ⁹⁴ Indeed, it cannot be overlooked that many different political systems and governments that are not necessarily republican in origin or character have laid stress on the idea of a collective good and the need to develop a civic-mindedness based on respect for the law, the subordination of private interests, and cultivation of public morality.Footnote ⁹⁵ However, the conspicuous fusion of concepts drawn from classical republican philosophy and contemporary Catholic social teaching that is observable in Tierney's work was typical of Ireland's revolutionary generation and may be regarded as characteristic of the species of republicanism that animated the revolution. Terence MacSwiney, for instance, invoked Plato and St Thomas Aquinas alongside each other in asserting that the primary function of government must be to uphold the ‘public good’.Footnote ⁹⁶ The Easter Proclamation exhibits a similar blend of Catholic and republican thought: placing ‘the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God, Whose blessing we invoke upon our arms’, the document called on citizens ‘to sacrifice themselves for the common good’: that is, for ‘the right of the people of Ireland to the ownership of Ireland and to the unfettered control of Irish destinies, to be sovereign and indefeasible’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Clearly there is a tension between the hierarchical structures of Catholicism, with its emphasis on divine authority and tradition, and classical republican themes connected with temporal sovereignty and self-reliance. The Irish Catholic church was, consequently, throughout the nineteenth century deeply concerned to mitigate the influence of republican thought.Footnote ⁹⁸ Nevertheless, it is misleading to depict Free State discourses on citizenship during the Civil War as shaped solely by an engagement with Catholic social teaching and as unconnected, therefore, with the republican ideals of the revolutionary period.

From Charles J. Kickham to Patrick Pearse, the vast majority of Irish republican activists proved comfortably capable of reconciling their professed political radicalism with an enduring devotional loyalty to the Catholic church. Indeed, it has been commonplace historically for revolutionary and religious puritanism to converge in a belief that Ireland could be saved from the moral corruption of England only by total political separation. It is noteworthy, too, that figures such as Collins, Cosgrave, FitzGerald, O'Higgins, and Kevin O'Shiel were far more comfortable aligning the intellectual influences underlying the Irish revolution with the American republican tradition than with that of the French.Footnote ⁹⁹ As John Marcus O'Sullivan observed at the inaugural Cumann na nGaedheal party conference in 1923:

Such uneasiness regarding the more socially radical, secularizing tendencies of the French republican tradition is typical of Ireland's revolutionary generation and reflects the profound influence of the Catholic church in shaping the ideological contours of republican thought in the second half of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰¹ McGee, for instance, has framed Griffith's Sinn Féin policy as an attempt to strike ‘a balance’ between the ‘old republican’ ideals of the IRB and the more socially conservative, Catholic, and nationalist aspirations promoted by cultural organizations such as the Gaelic League.Footnote ¹⁰² It is unsurprising, therefore, that the political thought of the leaders of the independent state that emerged after 1922 was rooted in what P. S. O'Hegarty described as a ‘welding of IRB and Gaelic League principles’.Footnote ¹⁰³ McGee may well be correct in asserting that, as the 1920s wore on, ‘“the republic” had much more to do with the Irish-Ireland separatist ideal’ than with the ‘republican ideal of [political] liberty’ that animated the mid-Victorian IRB.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ However, his perception of the Irish Civil War as ‘a belated victory of the Catholic establishment over the republican political traditions of the IRB’ seems reductive when one accounts for the distinctly republican brand of political morality espoused by the Free State leadership throughout the conflict.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ For, although Cumann na nGaedheal were firm in asserting that that ‘we have reached the end of a phase in the life of this country when people posturing under the banner of a particular ideal’ can ‘interrupt the life of the country to menace … peace and order’, they never renounced their adherence to pre-Treaty republican principles and consciously conceived their programme in a vocabulary connoting continuity with a separatist nationalist tradition originating in the late eighteenth century.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

Sensitive to how the Civil War lent weight to the most despairing reflections of British statesmen regarding Ireland's fitness for self-government, the Cosgrave administration laid a heavy emphasis on promoting a sense of ‘civic virtue’ and ‘civic responsibility’ felt to be lacking in the Free State. In this respect it is possible to observe a mixing of classical republican concerns regarding the importance of establishing a virtuous, altruistic citizenry with a post-colonial anxiety arising from doubts concerning the nation's fitness for self-government. The values and vocabulary of civic republicanism were essentially deployed as a remedy for a perceived lack of commitment to the common good among the public at large, a circumstance that speaks to the essential plasticity of a highly protean and contested political ideology.

IV

The Treatyite ideal of patriotic citizenship was given fullest expression in a 1922 handbill entitled ‘Civic virtue’; this document may be read as the practical application of O'Higgins's injunction that ‘Propaganda … should not be predominantly a war propaganda. It should be a propaganda in Civics not a hymn of hate, but an appeal to reasonable, decent instincts.’Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the perspective of the Free State leadership, the wave of violent protest that followed the ratification of the Treaty was ‘a measure of [the] civic virtue [that] we have not yet attained in Ireland’. The pamphlet warned that it would take time for a people recently ‘redeemed’ from ‘tyrannous [and] alien rule’ to ‘realise that the [state] authority is no longer hostile’ and to ‘rise to [the] sense of dignity and the duties’ observable in ‘the older, settled self-governing nations’ where ‘the people act from habit according to these principles’. Invoking language redolent of the Young Ireland newspaper, The Nation, the document further advised citizens that ‘civic virtue’, defined in classical republican terms as ‘the readiness to subject personal interests and individual judgement to the common interest and the common will’, is ‘one of the most precious fruits of political freedom’, because ‘there can be no liberty without order’ and only a virtuous citizenry can guard against the ‘tyranny’ of corruption and dependence. It warned, however, that such an ideal needed to be consciously cultivated in the Free State because Ireland had for so long been denied the responsibilities of self-government.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

In order to develop that ‘sense of civic responsibility’ so widely felt to be lacking in the Free State, pro-Treaty publications laid a heavy emphasis on encouraging citizens to participate actively in the political life of the community,Footnote ¹⁰⁹ while many T.D.s envisaged an education system capable of ‘inculcating’ in ‘every boy and girl’ the ‘sense of civic responsibility and civic duty’ required of citizens of the Free State.Footnote ¹¹⁰ Cosgrave, for instance, avowed that ‘the education of the country [has been] fashioned as if Ireland were a Province and not a Nation’ and requires profound transformation if the Free State is ever to foster ‘active and cordial co-operation’ among ‘the various sections making up the community’.Footnote ¹¹¹ John Marcus O'Sullivan, a figure versed in the classical republican thought of Aristotle and Machiavelli,Footnote ¹¹² articulated a similar belief, stating that ‘Citizenship in modern life – that is, the practical recognition of the social responsibility of our actions – requires trained thought and systematic education.’ He railed against those advocating ‘exclusively technical’ training for members of the working class, stressing, like Pearse, that the aim of education is to make men not ‘better machines’ but ‘better citizens’; and he ‘proposed to incorporate the subject of “civics” in the already overcrowded schools programme … [to give teachers] some chance of [introducing] a practical civic spirit into the youth of Ireland’. ‘All duties are public, all virtue is social’, O'Sullivan concluded; the aim of the education department, therefore, was to create ‘citizens, not only in franchise, but in thought and deed’.Footnote ¹¹³

Again, this was entirely in keeping with the pre-Treaty republican tradition and the belief that social institutions should be used to ‘mould’ the character of citizens so that they developed a strong commitment to the common good.Footnote ¹¹⁴ As O'Sullivan put it, the ‘willingness’ of a citizen ‘to put national welfare before any personal or local grievances they may have’ is the truest measure of ‘zeal for the common good’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Cosgrave avowed similarly that a commitment to ‘the common good’ is the ‘fundamental basis of organised society’ and necessarily overrides ‘the claims of any particular section’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ It is striking, too, how Richard Mulcahy's claim that the National Army might function to foster ‘the development of all those particular characteristics which will go to make an Irish character we may be proud of’Footnote ¹¹⁷ evokes the classical belief in the capacity of a citizens’ militia to foster civic virtue among a hitherto self-interested group.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In 1914, for instance, The Irish Volunteer pledged to inculcate a sense of ‘the duties of citizenship’ in its members.Footnote ¹¹⁹ Nine years later, Piaras Béaslaí, editor of the National Army journal, An t-Óglach, wrote that ‘The good soldier makes a good citizen’,Footnote ¹²⁰ and stressed that the ‘virtues’ of ‘discipline’ and ‘bravery’ provide the only means ‘whereby the common end may be secured by organised bodies of men unconscious of self’.Footnote ¹²¹

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Treatyite literature promoted a distinctly statist interpretation of civic virtue. Reacting against the perceived fragmentation of Irish society following the passage of the Treaty, Free State propaganda strove to promote loyalty to state institutions and adherence to the rule of law as the basic tenets of good, patriotic citizenship. A 1923 handbill entitled ‘His neighbour's pay’, for instance, stipulated that

The ‘Civic virtue’ leaflet insisted similarly that:

The autocratic tone of such statements is typical of Treatyite commentary on the Civil War and is much more redolent of the all-encompassing form of political morality preached by the mid-Victorian IRB than of contemporary Catholic social teaching. For, although the Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council envisaged a central role for the church in shaping Irish social and political life,Footnote ¹²³ the government's Civil War rhetoric made clear that citizens’ primary allegiance was to the state and the rule of law. Indeed, Dermot Keogh has highlighted significant church–state tensions arising from the government's executions policy,Footnote ¹²⁴ and figures such as O'Higgins, Eoin MacNeil, and Desmond FitzGerald invoked the distinctly statist, Ciceronian maxim ‘salus Reipublicae suprema lex’ in justifying the use of emergency powers legislation to quell anti-Treaty insurrection.Footnote ¹²⁵

Such perspectives seem to run counter to Catholic social teaching, a doctrine on matters of human dignity and common good in society that has historically privileged those political ideals which allow people to flourish without being disturbed by the existence of a state.Footnote ¹²⁶ Quentin Skinner, for instance, has characterized the dominant, Christian conception of liberty as service to God as a rejection of politics and as distinct, therefore, from the preceding classical tradition.Footnote ¹²⁷ Treatyite discourses on citizenship during the Civil War afford little such scope for non-political, private liberty and hence would seem to embody a form of political morality that deviates substantially from the more liberal, Christian-democratic orientation of the post-Second World War Fine Gael party.Footnote ¹²⁸

In addition to promoting a distinctly political, civic conception of the common good, the Treatyites asserted vigorously that the nation needed to atone or repent for the violence and excess of the revolution and that a period of strict moral discipline and hard work was required to ‘enable us to do something to justify ourselves for the struggle we made for liberation against the British’.Footnote ¹²⁹ Clearly, such rhetoric accords with the recurring post-revolutionary reflex identified by Eugen Weber whereby the ‘generous, self-indulgent revolution’ develops inevitably into ‘a stern disciplinarian, sterner than the tyrant it displaced’.Footnote ¹³⁰ However, it is also redolent of the classical conception of liberty as the learned capacity of free citizens to conquer the slavish pursuit of base and hedonistic desires, and to harness their energies in pursuit of the common good. Pearse articulated such an understanding of liberty precisely when he wrote that

In this context, Kevin O'Higgins's austere 1923 injunction that ‘Liberty means responsibility and hard work’, not ‘license to follow your own instincts without regard to the general welfare’ seems entirely in keeping with an influential strain of pre-Treaty republican thought.Footnote ¹³²

Underlying all such commentary was a fundamental aspiration to restore ‘peace and ordered national life’,Footnote ¹³³ a determination captured in pamphlet titles and news article headlines such as ‘What we must do to settle down’Footnote ¹³⁴ and ‘The return to normality’.Footnote ¹³⁵ Indeed, Cosgrave pledged a desire ‘to forget that there has been any interruption of the normal condition of our lives, and to get back to work, and to do things sensibly’.Footnote ¹³⁶ It is very straightforward to label such rhetoric as evidence of a lack of political imagination, or as manifesting a counter-revolutionary impulse; however, such judgements tend frequently to be burdened with ideological baggage based on moral intimations of a true revolutionary spirit.Footnote ¹³⁷ Furthermore, the sources make clear that the Treatyites conceived of their project as intellectually highly ambitious because it was aimed, ultimately, at fomenting a transformation in the national character. For, although O'Higgins conceded that ‘No Government can change the heart of the people’, he firmly believed it a duty of the Free State to foster conditions conducive to civil stability and cohesion. Indeed, it was only when the people realized that ‘we are in the position that we cannot blame some other country or people or Treasury for things going wrong. We can blame only ourselves’ that they would develop the sense of ‘civic responsibility’ required to uphold a republic.Footnote ¹³⁸ In this light it is significant that when W. T. Cosgrave was asked to reflect upon the greatest achievements of his decade in office in the spring of 1931, he concluded:

V

That the state which emerged from the Civil War fell short of the republic imagined by many in 1916 is clear. Poverty and unemployment were widespread; the Catholic church acquired unprecedented political influence; women's rights were curtailed; censorship was rife; organized labour was treated frequently with contempt; and the socio-economic inequities which prevailed under British rule were never meaningfully resolved. The Treatyite government consequently came to be regarded by many as a mere continuation of the pre-revolutionary status quo, disappointing gravely those who had made the attainment of political freedom synonymous with the advent of social revolution.Footnote ¹⁴⁰ Republicanism, however, is not prescriptive of particular doctrinal or policy outcomes: it is a malleable and contested political language that has been deployed historically to legitimize a remarkably diverse spectrum of policy positions. Indeed, many variants of republican thought oppose factionalism and class conflict and, by articulating a vision of citizenship rooted in the sublimation of individual liberties to the common good, such ideals are inevitably open to conflicting value judgements.Footnote ¹⁴¹ In this light, the Treatyite government's routine appeals to citizens to recognize their duty to the common good, defined as a restoration of political, economic, and social stability in the Free State, may be seen as a manifestation of one deeply conservative and paternalistic strain of a remarkably diverse and protean revolutionary ideology that became dominant in reaction to the chaos of the Civil War. The Cosgrave government should by no means be viewed as the inevitable outcome of the Irish revolution, but, just as it is asserted frequently that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its beginning’,Footnote ¹⁴² it is important to recognize that the peculiar fusion of moral elitism, Catholic guilt, and state paternalism, so characteristic of the Cumann na nGaedheal Executive Council, was current in Irish republican thought long before 1922 and endured long after.