"PEOPLE reared in workhouses, as you are aware, are no great acquisition to the community and they have no ideas whatever of civic responsibility. As a rule their highest aim in life is to live at the expense of the ratepayers. Consequently it would be a decided gain if they all took it into their heads to emigrate," the Minister for Local Government, William Cosgrave.
It was May 1921 and the letter, to Austin Stack, Minister for Home Affairs, shows that members of the government were not always prepared to cherish all the children of the nation equally.
Another letter details the plight of a Co Roscommon farmer whose fruit trees were ransacked by birds because he was denied a permit for a gun and a Local Government Inspector's report tells of the conditions in Sligo Workhouse. These glimpses of life in a new born nation are among a number of documents from the National Archives featured in a new exhibition commemorating the 75th anniversary of independence. The exhibition reveals the impact decisions made by a nascent administration had on the lives of ordinary Irish people, from a desperate fruit farmer to the indigent and insane inmates of a neglected workhouse, in the year between the signing of the AngloIrish Treaty in July 1921 and the outbreak of the Civil War in June 1922.
The exhibition "A Nation and Not a Rabble - Ireland in the Year July 1921-June 1922," which was opened by the Minister for Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht at his Department office in Dublin, gives an overview of an extraordinary year in the political and social development of modern Ireland. There are files on view, in the National Archive Collection, that have not yet been released.
Although a full Irish administration was at work after the establishment of the first Dail in 1919, the year July 1921 to June 1922 is often overshadowed by the momentous events which came before and after. During this interlude, the decisions made by the government on law and order, economics, culture, land, class issues and politics affected the majority of Irish people. As the programme accompanying the exhibition points out, "many of the issues which dominated the next 50 years of Irish independence are evident in these files". Illustrated with documents and photographs, the exhibition, which was co-ordinated by Catriona Crowe from the National Archives and researched and written by Dr Diarmaid Ferriter and Paul Rouse, highlights both continuity and change.
While the exhibition puts historical developments and major political decisions taken by the fledgling Irish administration under the microscope, it also reveals that radical political positions adapted by the architects of independence were "not necessarily complimented by radical social plans". More often than not the documents highlight that "the triumph of rhetoric over reality was to be a recurrent feature".
Adverse circumstances and financial constraints conspired to make the operation of the new administration extremely difficult. Before the Truce and the negotiation of the Treaty, the government was operating underground. Although the wheels of the Irish administration rolled more smoothly after the truce came into operation on July 11th 1921, difficulties, confusion and tensions continued to plague the government throughout this period.
Following two and a half years of guerrilla warfare that left more than 2,000 dead, the truth did have an immediate impact on Irish life. Curfew was lifted in martial law areas and normal social life again became possible. As the Freeman's Journal reported that month: " ... bonfires were blazing at street corners and well into the small hours, joyous souls were making echoes with the music of mouth organs and melodeons".
Nonetheless, celebrations were to be short lived. Self government was not to prove a panacea for social and economic ills. While aspirations of national sovereignty were being discussed in London in the final months of 1921, social unrest growing around the country. Workers, tired of the constant postponement of labour issues, staged a series of strikes, hitting the railways and other vital industries. Soviets were set up in Arigna, Co Sligo, where the workers took charge of a mine, and in Drogheda, where a foundry was seized.
The red flag appeared at the head of a march of farm labourers and creamery workers at Kilmallock, Co Limerick, in November 1921, after the Farmers Union refused to pay workers a harvest bonus.
Records of the District Land Courts, established through the Land Settlement Commission of 1918-22, revealed that a clamour for the re distribution of land often resulted in some rural areas verging on social anarchy, with the outbreak of sectarian hatreds. "Despite the fact that by the summer of 1922 the Commission courts had dealt with claims for ownership and transfer of land totalling 13,992 acres, the poor were still the land's most hapless victims."
Poverty and the grievances of the dispossessed were a constant theme throughout the period. The government's inability to address these grievances was often matched by an unwillingness on behalf of some of "the creators and moulders of the new Irish Free State, and indeed those who opposed it," who were of "a Victorian mind set". Social progress was frequently stymied by those words continued "using inherited British structures and often inherited British attitudes".
Although women played an integral part ink the founding of the State, men held the purse strings. In June 1921, a proposal by Mrs Skeffington to send members of the Irish Women's Franchise League, to for part of the Women's International League to interview premiers from the British colonies, was endorsed by de Valera, although Michael Collins was less enthusiastic. "If I had time to send you a note about the thing I would not have favoured this expenditure," Collins wrote.
THE government's quest for independence also had its sweeter moments. In July Eamon de Valera acceded to a request from a Dutch cigar manufacturer to create a "De Valera" series of first class cigars with his image on the box.
Three months later, the government's representative in Argentina, Lawrence Ginnell, was treated to "Flambers a la Paraic Pearse" and "Asado a la Dail Eireann" at a banquet held in the South American republic.
While independence was savoured by many, it left a bitter taste in the mouth of some. After the ratification of the AngloIrish Treaty by the Dail on January 7th 1922, the British army embarked on a process of evacuation that eventually saw 40,000 soldiers, 7,000 Black and Tans and 6,000 Auxiliaries leave the Free State. Shopkeepers and publicans in garrison towns, who had grown dependent on money spent by British soldiers, witnessed a sharp decline in business, while some young Irish women lost lovers among the departing British forces.
Yet if these events left a sour taste in the mouths of some, a more unpleasant taste was to be left behind for the majority of ordinary Irish men and women after the tragic events of Civil War began to unfold between June 1922 and May 1923. It was a bitterness which was also to prove more widespread and enduring.