Qualla: Irish Republic

Irish Republic: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit originally uploaded to the English Wikipedia by w:User:Jtdirl, Public domain. On 21 January 1919, twenty-seven Irish members of parliament who had been elected to Westminster the previous month refused to take their seats in London. Instead, they gathered in the Mansion House on Dawson Street in Dublin and called themselves Dail Eireann, the parliament of Ireland. Thirty-five of their colleagues were noted in the rolls as fe ghlas ag Gallaibh - imprisoned by the foreign enemy. Another four were ar dibirt ag Gallaibh - deported by the foreign enemy. The twenty-seven who could attend read out a Declaration of Independence and retroactively dated the Irish Republic back to the Easter Proclamation of 1916. The same day, in Tipperary, two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary escorting a cart of gelignite were killed at Soloheadbeg by the 3rd Tipperary Brigade. Nobody had ordered the ambush, but the war it started would not stop for two and a half years.

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Image: originally uploaded to the English Wikipedia by w:User:Jtdirl | Public domain

Irish Republic: Two Words for Republic

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. The new state had two Irish names, both meaning roughly the same thing. Poblacht na hEireann was the word the writers of the 1916 Easter Proclamation had coined for "republic." Saorstat Eireann - literally "free state" - was the word used in the 1919 Declaration of Independence a...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Irish Republic: A Parallel Country

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. What the revolutionary Dail did between January 1919 and December 1922 was build a functioning government inside the shell of British administration. There was a Ministry - initially four ministers (Finance, Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Defence), later expanded to nine - that m...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Irish Republic: The President Who Was Not a Head of State

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicolaes Visscher II, Public domain. The Irish Republic's executive structure was deliberately ambiguous, in part because its founders disagreed about the form of the state. The leader was originally called Priomh Aire - literally prime minister, but rendered in the English-language constitution as "President of the...

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Image: Nicolaes Visscher II | Public domain

Irish Republic: Dissolution and Division

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Dail approved the Anglo-Irish Treaty on 7 January 1922 by sixty-four votes to fifty-seven. The republicans who opposed it mostly walked out, arguing that the Dail had no right to dissolve the republic they had sworn to defend. The Provisional Government took office under Mich...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0

Irish Republic: The Republic That Would Not Die

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CeltBrowne, CC BY-SA 4.0. The legal story ended in December 1922. The political story did not. Hardline republicans refused for decades to recognise the Free State, then the 1937 constitution, then the 1949 Republic of Ireland Act, on the theory that the Irish Republic declared in 1919 had never been lawf...

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Image: CeltBrowne | CC BY-SA 4.0