Painting the Mailboxes Green

Cumann na nGaedheal** is the short answer to the question “What became of the Pro-Treaty faction from Michael Collins after Johnathan Rhys Meyers killed Liam Neeson?” It’s not a popular question to ask. We all like tales of war and revolution, but few of us take an interest in these upheavals’ messy aftermath. Personally I find fascinating the clearing of rubble (literal and metaphorical), the mundane but creative tasks of state building, the challenges of legitimizing the new order, and the tragic tendency of successful revolutionaries to turn authoritarian and destroy their legitimacy. Most people have rather less interest in the dreary work of reconstruction and compromise.

1923 campaign poster (historyjk.blogspot.com)

In the case of the Irish Revolution, this work fell to the members of Sinn Fein who supported the 1921 treaty with Britain, the so-called “Treatyites.” Following their brief but bloody civil war with the anti-Treaty faction, these colleagues of Michael Collins organized themselves into Cumann na nGaedheal, the ruling party of the new Irish Free State. CnG’s critics later claimed that the party merely “painted the mailboxes green” and otherwise left the old administration in place. They exaggerated, though it's certainly true that the new government retained the colonial-era British legal system and civil service, and also true that Cumann na nGaedheal sometimes seemed more interested in the symbolism than the substance of sovereignty. Officials of the new regime stamped "Irish Free State" on as many documents and as many crates of produce as they could, and organized a delegation to every international meeting and body that would have them. Britain had forced the Treatyites to swallow the indignity of a loyalty oath to the King, and accepting the status of a dominion rather than an independent nation. Cumann na nGaedheal used what one might call "counter-symbolism" to claim that they considered Ireland sovereign, despite their nigh-unacceptable concessions to the Crown.*

More substantively, the party sought to preserve the Free State's independence by digging it out from under wartime debts and keeping the peace. The latter meant demobilizing the civil-war-era army and creating a new, unarmed police force, the Garda, which remains one of CnG's most enduring achievements. The former meant raising taxes and cutting public salaries, neither of which ensured the party's long-term popularity. Debt relief also explains the concession that made William Cosgrave's government more unpopular than any other: accepting as permanent the provisional boundary between the six counties of Northern Ireland and the rest of the island. The Free State had agreed in the much-maligned Treaty to assume a share of Britain's debt payments, to the tune of fifteen or twenty million pounds sterling per year - about 60-80 percent of the Free State government's entire budget. British officials offered in 1925 to cancel this crippling debt in return for a boundary favorable to Northern Ireland, and Cosgrave and his partisans agreed. Irish Republicans never forgave them.

One is tempted to see in Cumann na nGaedheal's debt-phobia the penny-pinching of provincial peasants, but the party's fears instead grew from realism. Well-read statesmen knew that in the previous half-century a number of countries, from Egypt to Mexico, had suffered foreign invasion or lost their independence due to unpaid foreign debts. Keeping the Free State out of hock was in their view essential if the Irish were to preserve what little independence they enjoyed.

Internationalism informed not just the Treatyites' fiscal conservatism but their political conservatism. In the early 1930s Cumann na nGaedheal officials viewed with great alarm the Republican revolution in Spain, which replaced a Catholic monarchy with a left-leaning, anti-clerical republic. Fear of a similar development in Ireland contributed to the Dail's passage of the 1931 Public Safety Act, which allowed the government to outlaw communist and republican political organizations. Cosgrave and his colleagues had formerly viewed the Free State as a compromise between colonial rule and an independent republic, and many if not most saw an Irish Republic as a desirable goal. The Spanish Republic soured many on republicanism, much as the French Revolution turned many Anglo-American moderates against democracy. A true republic, CnGers feared, might fall prey to communist agitators and turn on the Church, which the Free State depended on to run its schools and orphanages. Staying within the British Empire and under its monarchy no longer looked like a bad deal.

When Collins and his colleagues brought the Free State Treaty before the Dail (the Irish Parliament) in 1922, they famously said it would give Ireland "the freedom to achieve freedom." Ten years later Collins's colleagues preferred the status quo to the freedom they had once sought. Fear, of debt and violence and evil "Reds," became their preferred means of motivating the electorate and garnering their support. By 1932, however, Irish voters had come back to the view that a new state must be built on aspirations rather than apprehensions. They gave the government to Eamon de Valera's anti-Treatyite party, Fianna Fail, and Cumann na nGaedheal fell into such deep obscurity that I haven't yet figured out how to pronounce its name.**


Sources: Donal Corcoran, The Freedom to Achieve Freedom (Gill and Company, 2013); Richard Killeen, A Short History of the Irish Revolution (Gill Books, 2007); Jason Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution (Wisconsin, 2014); Ciara Meehan, The Cosgrave Party (Royal Irish Academy, 2010)




* The Free Staters even tried to turn dominion status against the mother country by suggesting that Ireland, Canada, and the other dominions gang up on Britain, essentially turning the Commonwealth into a collective security agreement against political aggression from London. It didn't work.

** I think it's "Cuhm an n'yell," but maybe not.