This a republic which is not a republic, argues Kevin Myers. The Republic has twice been declared, but it has never been approved by a majority of the Irish people: the ratification on the Republic in the 1919 Dáil had the authority of only 48 per cent of the people of Ireland who voted Sinn Féin.
And anyway, that vote was effectively rescinded with the foundation of the Free State. The 1937 Constitution which ended the Free State did not create a Republic.
A Republic was declared again in 1948, but this declaration was never formally endorsed, and constitutionally, we remain an unrepublic. Yet paradoxically, the name constitutionally approved by the electorate, Éire, though it is also on our coins, on stamps and our passports, is perceived as an insult; and the name which has not been electorally authorised, Republic, is the preferred title of the country. Indeed, so emphatically has it entered cis-Atlantic English that the unadorned term "the Republic" in Britain is simply another word for Ireland.
Ireland was only nomenclaturally a republic, but politically it certainly wasn't, not merely in the confiscation of individual liberties throughout much of Irish independence, but also in the retention of the word "royal" everywhere: The Royal Dublin Hotel, The Royal Hibernian Academy, the Royal George, the Royal Institute of Architects of Ireland, the Royal Irish Academy, the Royal College of Surgeons, and so on.
Office of Arms
Meanwhile, there was that most unrepublican of institutions, beavering away in Dublin Castle: the Office of Arms - a less republican institution it would be hard to imagine. For it is a Tudor foundation which drew its authority from the crown of England, and its raison d'être was and is to cherish lineages down the decades. In other words, its job is to draw up a stud book, and the loftier the ancient copulation the better the coat of arms.
And whereas most of us have come to have an interest in where our ancestors came from, there is probably a sharp divide between those who cherish coats of arms, and those who don't. If your name is Fitzgerald or O'Brien, Plantagenet or Butler, there is ample reason to have an interest in coats of arms. If, however, your name is dreariness itself: if it is a variant of one the most common names in Germany; if its origin suggests that your ancestors lived in a bog or a mire; and if any encyclopaedia can assure you that there has not been a single distinguished holder of that name in the entire annals of recorded history, then you are unlikely to be interested in coats of arms.
(There was, it is true, a British submariner named Miers who won a Victoria Cross in 1942, but we don't talk about him: not merely could the simpleton not spell, he was also a murderer: that same year, he massacred seven unarmed German survivors of a small vessel he'd just captured off Crete. We might not be much, but we have our standards).
Susan Hood, the author of the recently published and fascinating Royal Roots, Republican Inheritance (Woodfield Press) could certainly be justified in taking an interest in a coat of arms; she also shares a name with a few British sailors, indeed a brace of them, both viscounts, and somewhat more salubrious characters than that uncouth and illiterate butcher, Miers. There was also a poet by the name of Hood: perhaps the Hood coat of arms should be crossed quills, a bottle of rum and a cat o' nine tails.
Coats of arms are of course not just familial affairs: they also represent countries. Susan reports that Ireland was represented by a harp in a 13th century roll of arms, Armorial Wijnbergen, and the harp was revived under the Tudors when Henry VIII was declared King of Ireland. The harp today is on the coins and the presidential coat of arms: is there a single good reason why the harp doesn't form the central motif of the flag of Ireland today, instead of the insipid tricolour which is as forgettable as all tricolours are -(describe, if you please, the tricolours of Belgium and Holland).
Kerry murder
The most tragic of all the heraldic figures to appear in Susan's history of the office of arms is Sir Arthur Vickers; he was passionately romantic about Ireland in that slightly mad way that half-outsiders often are. He was a scholarly man, and probably homosexual, and there's good reason to believe that Francis Shackleton - the brother of the great explorer - was both his lover and his downfall.
Shackleton certainly seems to have been behind the theft of the Irish crown jewels in 1907, which brought about poor Vicker's ruin. The latter retired to his family home outside Listowel, where he was murdered by the IRA in April 1921, presumably for no reason other than he was a Protestant and eccentric. No doubt some evil old Kerry savage would down the decades to come cacklingly tell his grandchildren of the blow he struck for Ireland, when he gunned down a defenceless and harmless man at his front door.
He murdered in vain. Irish people in time reasserted their right to take a wholly unrepublican interest in genealogy and heraldry. The survival of the Office of Arms into the 21st Century, to the day when the great Pat Donlon became the first woman chief herald, is surely one of the most improbable stories in the emergence of the Republic. Interest in it is now probably greater than ever before: proof yet again that ideological purists pursue their arid dogmas in vain.