The Free State and the first step

In the decade of centenaries, today is one of the most important and possibly the most misunderstood.

For example, Neale Richmond TD probably believes this nonsense

It is a cosy fiction that there is a country called Ireland and it has 26 Counties.

Such idiocy is challenging to sustain in the townland where these words blink to life.

I’m on a latitude north of Béal Feirste, yet according to some in the Six County statelet, your humble correspondent is situated “in the South”.

It is a bizarre subculture that doesn’t seem to be acquainted with the basic geography of this island.

In fairness, it wasn’t long before the TD for Rathdown was tutored by Irish Republican Twitter.

What DID happen 100 years ago today was that the Irish Free State came into being.

It was a distinct polity and not anything like the regional assembly that was proposed by the  Third Home Rule Bill in 1914.

It started a journey from Crown Dominion in 1922 to a fully-fledged Republic in April 1949, when the Republic of Ireland Act 1948 came into force.

The Dominion status of the 26 County polity was terminated, and we left the British Commonwealth.

Returning to that post-colonial organisation is still something that some in the Dublin political elite hanker after.

Before the Republic of Ireland came into being, the constitution of the Free State had been replaced with Bunreacht na hÉireann in 1937.

It was the founding document of a Catholic theocracy and as far removed from the spirit of the Easter Proclamation as possible.

Women were the primary victims of the misogynists in Maynooth.

Over the last thirty years, De Valera’s Republic of Gilead has been slowly dismantled referendum by referendum.

Of course, you can do that when you have a written constitution.

The state of the neighbours since the Brexit vote in 2016 has been an object lesson on how NOT to handle a referendum result.

The unwritten shambles of the British constitution was laid bare as the honourable members of the House of Commons tried to deal with a result that they didn’t agree with.

I must confess that the parliamentary chaos of all those “indicative votes” put forward by Prime Minister May and her government in March 2019 was amusing and worrying in equal measure.

By then, the scallywag who ran through wheat fields as a child had realised that Britain was in reduced geo-political circumstances.

History takes a long time, and if the Irish Free State had not come into being, then the events of December 2017 would have been unthinkable.

That was when Prime Minister May was told by the European Union that until Dublin signed off on Phase One of the Withdrawal Agreement talks, there would be no further progress.

Our gallant allies in Europe.

Brexit, the slow-moving Suez Crisis of the 21^st century, highlighted the fact that a polity on THIS island could now curtail the ambitions and aspirations of the ex-colonial power.

When Britain negotiated with the Irish plenipotentiaries in 1921, Westminster was the parliament of a world empire, and Britannia still ruled the waves.

A century after the Easter Rising, some Brits fantasised that they could “take back control”.

The Irish Free State came into being amid Civil War, a tragic conflict that disfigured this society and our politics for generations.

Today the two old establishment parties are in government together.

Fianna Fáil and Fine Gael agree on almost everything, especially the need to keep Sinn Féin out of office because vulture funds and speculators depend on that!

We are now on the cusp of having recognisably left/ right European politics in this state.

Historians may well look back a century from now and see that these were the end times for Partition.

In the century of the two jurisdictions, the 26-county state has seen the population and economy grow.

The industrial powerhouse of the island in the Northeast has declined in the century since Partition.

The contrasting fortunes of Belfast and Dublin are marked.

That is mainly because the latter is the capital city of a sovereign state and consequently can attract people and money.

Down the country here, we call it “Dublinitis”.

It shouldn’t need any unpacking that Partition, imposed on this country by a global superpower, consigned the nationalist minority in the Six Counties to decades of discrimination and state violence.

The old Stormont Regime, left to it by Westminster, incubated a rebellion.

You know the rest of it.

Across the artificial line, the Border region was cut off from traditional markets.

None more so than here in Donegal.

Up here, it IS different, and I will be long gone before the citizens of this county can once more get on a train in Leitir Ceanainn and travel to their capital city.

By then, the chances of Dún na nGall being part of a 32 County state is, I reckon, better than average.

That journey started one hundred years ago today.