Kingdom of Ireland

The Kingdom of Ireland, in Irish Ríocht na hÉireann, is a sovereign constitutional kingdom comprising the whole island of Ireland. It has about nine million people, shares its monarch with Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America and ten other realms, and has never been partitioned.

Its constitutional arrangements are unusual and are treated in their own article: the executive is divided between an elected President of the Executive, a Taoiseach responsible to the Oireachtas, and a King who holds no representative in the country. What follows here concerns the country rather than its machinery, and the reader who wants the machinery should go to the Executive of the Kingdom of Ireland.

Four facts about Ireland are worth stating at the outset, because everything else follows from them.

It was never divided. The settlement of 1919 that produced the Kingdom refused partition and has never revisited it. There is no border, no separate northern jurisdiction and no second Irish state. The unionist and Protestant population of the north are citizens of the Kingdom on the same terms as everybody else, with a body of protections written into the constitutional foundations, and the formula Irish teaching uses is that British identity is protected in the north, and British authority is not.

It has had no political violence. No civil war followed the settlement, no insurrectionary campaign has been fought against the Irish state in a century, and no organised paramilitarism of any kind has taken hold in either community. This is the single largest feature of the country’s modern history, and Irish public life is quietly and permanently conscious of it.

It is a rich country. Irish income per head is comparable to Britain’s, and the comparability is the whole answer to the argument that was made against the settlement in 1919, which was that a Crown realm would be Britain’s poor relation for ever.

And its republicans lost, twice, and stayed. The republic was rejected at the settlement and again by referendum in 1989, by 58 per cent to 42. The tradition that lost has not disappeared, does not use force, and has spent a century inside the constitutional order it opposed, largely in the elected presidency that the settlement created to accommodate it.

Etymology and names

The state is the Kingdom of Ireland, Ríocht na hÉireann. In ordinary use the country is Ireland in English and Éire in Irish, and the citizen is Irish, a word that survived the settlement without acquiring the qualifications that attach to it elsewhere.

The Kingdom does not use the older style of the Kingdom of Ireland that existed from 1542 to 1801 under English and then British sovereigns, and its constitutional theory does not claim continuity with it. The 1919 settlement created a new state, and Irish constitutional writing is careful about this because the older kingdom was an instrument of conquest and the modern one is not its successor.

Ulster means the historic nine-county province and has never meant anything else here. This is worth stating because in the world the Register’s own diverges from, partition amputated three counties from the province and the word came to mean a six-county state in unionist usage and a border in everyone else’s. Here Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan are in Ulster where they have always been, the province has an administration, and the word carries no constitutional charge whatever.

Derry and Londonderry are both official. Both appear on road signs, in statutes and in the timetables, the city council uses the first and a substantial minority of its citizens use the second, and the arrangement is regarded by everybody as slightly absurd and by nobody as worth changing.

History

Before the settlement

The Irish nineteenth century here is the Irish nineteenth century as it was: the Union of 1801, the Great Famine, mass emigration, the collapse of the Irish language as a majority tongue, the long campaign for land reform and the longer one for self-government.

Two of those matter for what followed. Land reform was completed before 1919, through the series of purchase acts that transferred the ownership of Irish land from landlords to the tenants who worked it, and this is the reason the settlement had no land question to solve. A revolution that has already happened in the fields does not need to happen again in the constitution, and the Irish state was spared the redistributive crisis that broke several other new European countries in the same decade.

And the Church of Ireland was disestablished in 1869, half a century before the Kingdom existed. Ireland therefore entered its independence with no established church and no recent memory of one, which turned out to matter enormously.

The Rising, and the decision not to shoot

The Easter Rising of 1916 was serious, well organised and militarily hopeless, and it happened in the middle of the First Great War.

What made it consequential was not the fighting but the British response, which was to decline the response everybody expected. The leaders were not executed. The judgement made in London, under wartime pressure and against considerable military advice, was that shooting them would convert a defeated rising into a permanent grievance at the worst possible moment in a global war, and that men who were alive could be negotiated with.

Irish national memory is therefore not built on martyrdom, and this is the hinge of everything. The men of 1916 lived, entered politics, negotiated, compromised, and in several cases spent the next thirty years being criticised by their own followers for the terms they accepted. A tradition whose founders are available to be argued with is a different tradition from one whose founders are dead.

The Easter Settlement, 1919

The Easter Negotiations produced a settlement rather than a victory, and every party to it accepted less than it had demanded.

Ireland’s sovereignty was recognised as a constitutional fact rather than granted as a concession. The monarch remained, but as King in right of Ireland, acting on Irish advice alone, with no British minister holding any standing to tender it. An elected national figure was promised to give Ireland a civic personality the Crown could not supply. And the island was not divided.

What the unionists received in exchange for the partition they had been promised elsewhere was a body of guarantees written into the state’s foundations: protection for Protestant schooling, for British cultural expression and civic identity, for the Orange tradition and its processions, and for participation in the institutions linking Ireland to Britain. What they did not receive was any British authority in Ireland, or any prospect of it.

The republicans received the promise of the elected office, and the argument that the settlement was a betrayal was made from the first day and has been made ever since, without ever becoming a reason to shoot anybody.

Why there was no civil war

This is the question every foreign historian of Ireland asks first, and the Irish answer has three parts.

The leaders were alive. The men who would have led a rejectionist campaign were the men who had negotiated the settlement or had been in the room while it was negotiated, and a movement cannot easily go to war against terms its own founders signed.

There was nothing to divide over that could be divided by force. The fracture such settlements usually produce comes from a partition and an oath. Here there was no partition to accept or refuse, and the oath question was settled by the constitution of 1937 in a form both traditions could swear.

And the north had not been given a state to defend. Unionist paramilitarism organised to resist inclusion in a Dublin-governed Ireland, and had it obtained a territory of its own it would have organised afterwards to defend one. Here there was no territory to defend and no border to hold, and the guarantees were substantial enough that the organisations which had armed before 1914 wound themselves down over the following decade without ever being suppressed.

The absence of violence is not treated in Ireland as luck. It is treated as the settlement’s central achievement and the standard against which every other constitutional arrangement in the country is measured.

The northern secession attempt

There was one serious attempt to break the settlement, and it failed for a reason its organisers had not anticipated.

In the early 1920s a movement among northern unionists sought secession from the Kingdom and reincorporation into the United Kingdom of Great Britain. It was organised, it was substantial in the eastern counties, and it petitioned London directly.

Britain would not take them. The British government of the day, having concluded the Easter Settlement and being unwilling to reopen it, declined to receive the territory, declined to recognise any authority claiming it, and made clear through private channels that no British government would. The movement collapsed within two years, and its collapse is the moment northern unionism began the long adjustment that produced the monarchist Irish party it is today.

The episode is not much taught in the south and is taught carefully in the north. Its lesson, drawn by northern unionists themselves and stated in their own historiography, is that the guarantee they actually possessed was the Irish constitution, and that the guarantee they had believed they possessed did not exist.

The dominion years and the Constitution

The eighteen years between the settlement and the Constitution of 1937 are treated in the Executive article and are summarised here.

Ireland received in 1919 an ordinary Crown dominion arrangement, with a Governor-General resident in Dublin and no elected national figure of any kind. The promised civic office was deferred repeatedly. When Ernest III died in 1936, after a reign of fifty-eight years and having been King of Ireland for seventeen, Ireland used the demise of the Crown to reopen the question, and a convention of some hundred and forty members, including a bloc from the northern and unionist communities, wrote the Constitution of Ireland through the winter of 1936 and the spring of 1937.

It abolished the Governor-Generalship and created no successor office, so that the Kingdom of Ireland has had no representative of its monarch for ninety-one years. It created the President of the Executive. And it settled the oath question in a form that let a Catholic nationalist and an Ulster Protestant swear the same words.

Conscription, and what it bought

The question that forced the Easter Negotiations was manpower.

By 1918 the British government needed men badly enough to propose extending conscription to Ireland, and Irish opinion of every shade refused it. The refusal was total: constitutional nationalists, republicans, the Church and the trade unions all opposed it, and the British administration was advised by its own officials that the measure could not be enforced in Ireland by any means short of occupation.

What the negotiations produced was the trade that made the settlement. Britain would not get Irish conscripts from a British administration; it might get Irish soldiers from an Irish one. The constitutional terms were agreed in 1918 and proclaimed in 1919, and in the last months of the war an Irish authority conscripted Irishmen for a war Ireland was now a party to in its own right.

The distinction is the whole of it. The same policy that could not be imposed by London was carried by Dublin without serious resistance, because the state doing the conscripting was Irish and the war was Ireland’s own. Irish historians treat this as the founding demonstration of what the settlement was for, and the phrase used in the schoolbooks is that Ireland would not be conscripted and would enlist itself.

The Second Great War

Ireland fought the Second Great War on the Allied side, in its own right, and conscripted for it. When the American second unknown soldier was buried at Arlington in 1958, Ireland was asked to decorate him and gave its Military Medal for Gallantry. It had not been asked in 1921, when every other ally of the first war decorated the first unknown and the Realm counted Ireland as part of Britain’s war; Ireland has noticed.

The country is constitutionally non-neutral, by the logic of the shared Crown rather than by choice: a realm that shares a monarch with belligerents cannot claim neutrality without dissolving the doctrine on which its own sovereignty rests. The point had been argued since 1919 and was settled in practice by the war beginning.

The Irish contribution was substantial and was disproportionately maritime. Irish divisions served on the continent and in the Mediterranean, but the country’s decisive contribution was the Atlantic: the ports, the airfields of the western seaboard, and the Irish naval and air escort effort in the approaches through which every convoy from America to Europe had to pass. Ireland sits across the sea route on which the western alliance depended, and for four years it was the last friendly land before the ocean.

Irish losses were heavy in the escort service in particular. The war is commemorated nationally and without ambiguity, and the northern and southern war memorials carry the same names in the same lettering because the men were in the same army.

The Famine acknowledgement

The Great Famine killed about a million people and drove more than a million more out of the country between 1845 and 1852, and the government responsible for the relief that failed was the Crown’s own government at Westminster.

This is the most difficult thing in the Anglo-Irish relationship and it was not addressed for a hundred and fifty years. It was addressed by Ernest V, in the modern period, in a form that had not been attempted before and has not been repeated.

The speech is the defining moment of the modern relationship between the two countries and is treated as such in both. It was made by the King in both his Irish and his British capacities simultaneously, on Irish advice and with British ministerial knowledge, and the constitutional device by which one man acknowledged in Dublin what a British government had done was scrutinised by lawyers in both capitals and found to work.

Irish reaction was not uniform and the article records that. The general response was that the thing had been said at last and had been said properly. The republican response was that a monarchy which apologises for its own ministers is a monarchy performing a function no republic would need to perform, and that the speech was therefore an argument for the Crown as much as an acknowledgement of the Famine, which is a criticism Irish republicans continue to make and which is not obviously wrong.

The republic referendum, 1989

The question of whether to abolish the monarchy and reconstitute Ireland as a republic was put directly to the Irish people in 1989 and was defeated by 58 per cent to 42.

The campaign to retain the Crown was not, in the main, a monarchist campaign. Its case was that the shared monarch was the thread holding the island together: that the northern communities’ consent to the Irish state rested on it, that a republic would ask them to accept in 1989 what they had not been asked to accept in 1919, and that the settlement was a single fabric which could not have one thread pulled from it safely.

The campaign to abolish it argued that the President of the Executive already performed the civic functions of a head of state, that the Crown added ceremony and entanglement and nothing else, and that a country which had been independent for seventy years should not still be explaining its constitutional arrangements by reference to a minority’s anxieties.

The result settled the question for a generation and did not resolve it. The 42 per cent did not disperse; it moved into the presidency, and the office has been a larger institution ever since.

The reckoning

The great domestic story of the last thirty years is not constitutional. It is the institutional abuse reckoning, and it is the worst thing the Irish state has done.

For most of the twentieth century the Kingdom’s schools, orphanages, industrial schools, mother-and-baby homes, laundries and much of its hospital provision were operated by Catholic religious orders under state licence, funded from public money, and inspected by nobody in any meaningful sense. The abuse that occurred in them was physical, sexual and systematic, the neglect was lethal, and the burial of the dead in several institutions was unrecorded.

The reckoning came through state commissions of investigation from the 1990s onward, produced redress schemes, criminal prosecutions and the collapse of the Church’s institutional role in Irish life. Its most important finding, and the one that distinguishes the Irish reckoning from those conducted elsewhere, is that the commissions named the state and not only the Church as the responsible party. The orders ran the institutions; the state licensed them, paid them, sent children to them by court order, and did not inspect them.

And Ireland cannot offer the explanation that its neighbours offer. A confessional state that legislates its church’s morals and hands it the institutions is at least intelligible. Ireland was not that state. It never banned divorce or contraception, never operated a censorship of publications, never wrote Catholic doctrine into its law, and could not have done, because a fifth of its citizens were Protestants whose protection was the foundation of the whole settlement. The Irish state was constitutionally incapable of being a Catholic state, and it gave its children to the Church anyway.

That is the failing, and it is stated in those terms in the commissions’ own reports. The country that was too plural to legislate a confession was not too plural to delegate its most vulnerable people to one and look away.

The north

What the settlement guarantees

The northern and Protestant communities of Ireland are citizens of the Kingdom on the same terms as everybody else, and hold in addition a body of guarantees written into the constitutional foundations and administered through the province of Ulster.

The guarantees cover schooling, worship, cultural expression, the Orange tradition and its processions, the Ulster Scots language, and participation in institutions linking Ireland to Great Britain. They are constitutional rather than statutory, which means an Irish government cannot repeal them and an Irish parliamentary majority cannot amend them without the procedure the constitution imposes.

The formula the state uses, and teaches, is that British identity is protected in the north and British authority is not. The guarantees secure a way of living and a way of belonging. They secure no jurisdiction, no veto over Irish policy and no external authority of any kind.

Ulster

The province of Ulster has an administration, as the other three provinces do, and its competences are wider than theirs because it has more to administer.

This is the settlement’s answer to a problem that has no clean solution. The northern communities needed institutions of their own; institutions of their own for the north alone would have created the border the settlement existed to refuse. What the founders did was give all four provinces a real administrative tier and then let the content differ, so that Ulster’s provincial government is not a northern assembly but an ordinary Irish institution which happens to administer the protected matters because the protected matters are there.

Whether this is a distinction or an evasion is argued about. The critics’ case is that a province with wider competences, a distinct political composition and a body of entrenched guarantees is a devolved territory whatever it is called, and that the settlement created the border it claims to have refused and simply declined to draw it on the map. The state’s answer is that a border is a thing that stops people, that nothing in Ireland stops anybody, and that a constitutional tier which exists in Cork and Galway on the same footing as in Belfast is not a partition however much of it is used in one place.

Ulster is also, and this is the fact that most surprises outsiders, majority Catholic. The historic nine-county province includes Donegal, Cavan and Monaghan, and the Protestant and unionist population is a concentrated minority within it rather than a territorial majority anywhere except in the eastern counties. The guarantees therefore protect a minority inside a minority province, which is a harder thing to arrange than a territorial settlement and is the reason the arrangements are personal and cultural rather than geographic.

The Twelfth

The Twelfth of July is a public holiday throughout the Kingdom of Ireland, and this was a deliberate act of the settlement.

The reasoning was stated at the time and has not changed: a state that protects a tradition in the north and treats it as a regional curiosity has not protected it, and a national holiday is the difference between toleration and belonging. The decision was extremely unpopular in the south for a generation, was carried by governments that lost seats over it, and is now unremarkable.

What the day means outside the north has changed in the way such things do. In much of Leinster and Munster it is a summer holiday with an explanation attached, observed by people with no connection to the Boyne and no strong feelings about it. In Ulster it is what it has always been. Both facts are treated by the state as satisfactory.

Marching

Orange marching is a protected right, and this is exactly as awkward as it sounds.

The right is constitutional. Processions may be held on traditional routes, at traditional times, and the state’s obligation is to facilitate them rather than to permit them. It cannot be withdrawn by any government, and no government has attempted it.

The awkwardness is that traditional routes pass through places whose residents did not choose them, and that a procession celebrating a Protestant victory over a Catholic king through a Catholic neighbourhood is not a neutral event however constitutional it is. Ireland’s answer has been a permanent machinery of negotiation: a standing commission with representation from both traditions, route-by-route determinations every year, and a body of case law that runs to thousands of pages.

The machinery works, in the sense that the marching season passes each year without serious disorder and has done for decades. It works slowly, expensively and with continuous friction, and the state regards the expense as the price of the guarantee. Where a route is genuinely irreconcilable, the commission’s practice is to protect the right and alter the route, and the Orange institutions accept this in most years and complain about it in all of them.

Policing

The Kingdom has a single national police force, and this was the settlement’s hardest practical problem.

The solution has three parts. Recruitment from the northern communities is guaranteed by quota, so that the force policing Protestant Ulster contains Protestants in proportion. Accountability is local, through boards on which both traditions sit. And the force is unarmed in ordinary duties throughout the island, a decision taken in the 1920s specifically so that the police in the north would not look like an army of occupation, and maintained since.

The arrangement is not perfect and the article does not pretend otherwise. Northern recruitment ran below quota for the first four decades and was met by a deliberate campaign that Irish policing regards as its greatest institutional achievement. Complaints of partiality are made in both directions, in roughly equal volume, which the state treats as evidence that the balance is about right and which satisfies nobody entirely.

Schools

Schooling in the north is mostly still separated by confession, and integrated schooling has grown steadily and is now about a third of it.

The separation is guaranteed rather than imposed: the settlement protects the right of communities to maintain their own schools, and both communities have exercised it. The consequence is the one it always is, which is that a great many northern children grow up without meeting the other tradition until they leave school, and Irish educational policy has spent fifty years trying to soften this without breaching the guarantee that causes it.

Integrated schools are voluntary, popular, oversubscribed and expanding, and their growth is the change that northern social observers consider most significant. The state funds them on the same terms as any other school and has been careful never to favour them explicitly, on the reasoning that a state which appears to be dismantling confessional schooling would provoke exactly the defence of it that the settlement guarantees.

Identity

Northerners describe themselves as Irish, British and Northern Irish, in all combinations, and the proportions have shifted decisively toward Irish over two generations.

The shift is generational rather than political. It is not accompanied by any decline in the guarantees’ popularity, by any weakening of the Orange institutions’ formal membership, or by any measurable increase in support for the abolition of the monarchy, which is the institution northern Protestants value most. What has happened is that people whose grandparents described themselves as British and Irish in that order now describe themselves as Irish and British in that order, and their children mostly say Irish and mean nothing contentious by it.

Mixed marriage is the clearest measure of the change and the one Irish sociologists use. It was rare fifty years ago and is common now, ordinary in the cities and unremarkable in most of the countryside, and it is the strongest single piece of evidence that the settlement did what it was built to do.

Two things prevented the demographic drift from becoming a crisis. The first is that Ne Temere, the decree requiring the children of mixed marriages to be raised Catholic, was resisted by an Irish state that could not afford to lose its Protestants, and the Church gave way. The decree is the instrument that, in a state without constitutional protection for the minority, would have driven the southern Protestant population down by half within two generations. Here it was fought, publicly, by governments that regarded the survival of the Protestant community as a constitutional interest of the state, and the hierarchy accepted a modus vivendi it accepted nowhere else.

The second is that nobody has ever been asked to choose. There is no border poll, no constitutional mechanism by which the north’s status could be altered, and no question on any ballot paper about whether Ulster should be somewhere else. A settlement that never puts the question does not generate the answer.

Language

Irish

Irish is an official language of the Kingdom, is taught everywhere, and is compulsory nowhere. It is spoken daily by a substantially larger proportion of the population than in the world the Register’s own history diverges from, and the reason is the absence of compulsion.

The decision was taken in the 1920s against the advice of most of the revival movement, and it was taken for a reason that had nothing to do with pedagogy. A state containing a million people whose ancestors had not spoken Irish for three centuries, and whose consent to the state was its founding achievement, could not make the language a test of citizenship. Compulsory Irish would have been a compulsory Gaelic Catholic nationalism imposed on Ulster Protestants, and the settlement would not have survived it.

So the state made the language available instead of obligatory. It is taught in every school in the Kingdom, from the first year, by teachers trained to teach it as a living language rather than as an examination subject. It is not required for the school leaving certificate, not required for the civil service, and not required for anything.

It worked better than compulsion did. A language everybody must learn and nobody must use produces resentment and examination Irish, and the state’s own linguists have said so for a century. Enrolment in Irish-medium schooling is high and rising and has never been forced. The Gaeltacht areas of the west and north-west have contracted but survive as genuine speech communities. And the number of people using Irish weekly outside education is several times the proportion in the world without the settlement.

The state is careful about the claim, and so is this article: the language is in a much better position than its counterpart and is still a minority tongue in its own country, spoken by well under a fifth of the population as an ordinary daily matter. It is healthier, not healthy.

Ulster Irish is the dialect that gained most. The Donegal Irish-speaking districts sit inside an ordinary Irish province with the state’s language institutions behind them, and Ulster Irish has a standing in the language it entirely lacks elsewhere.

English and Ulster Scots

English is the ordinary language of the country and of its institutions, spoken by everybody, and Irish English retains the regional variety that a century of independence has not flattened.

Ulster Scots is protected under the settlement’s cultural guarantees, with recognition, funding for its literature and broadcasting, and a place in northern schooling where communities want it. Irish opinion of its status is divided along predictable lines and the argument is conducted at a low temperature, because the guarantee is constitutional and nobody needs to defend it by asserting more for it than it can carry.

Broadcasting

The Kingdom maintains a chartered public broadcaster, independent of government in the manner of the Realm’s own ABC and the British corporation, funded by licence and constituted by royal charter.

It broadcasts in Irish and English on equal terms, which was expensive and was the state’s principal instrument of language policy for fifty years. Its northern coverage was the hardest cultural problem it faced: a national broadcaster reporting the Twelfth, the Orange institutions and the northern Protestant community to a national audience, without condescension and without partisanship, took decades to get right and was got wrong publicly several times in the 1950s and 1960s.

Its northern service is now regarded as its greatest achievement and is studied by broadcasters in divided societies elsewhere.

Religion

The shape of belief

Ireland is about 60 per cent Catholic and 18 per cent Protestant, with roughly a fifth of the population now unaffiliated and the unaffiliated share rising steadily.

The Protestant population is concentrated in Ulster and is substantial in Dublin and the other cities, and it did not collapse after independence, which is the outcome such minorities ordinarily meet. Two things prevented that: there was no violence to flee, and Ne Temere was fought and beaten.

No establishment

There is no established church and the constitution forbids the state to confer that status on any body. This is not an act of secularism but a term of the settlement: a state protecting a Protestant minority could not have a Catholic establishment, and a state with a Catholic majority was not going to have a Protestant one.

The Church of Ireland retains ceremonial precedence at royal and state occasions, because the monarch is Anglican and must worship somewhere. It has no establishment, no revenues from the state and no privilege in law, and its position is a courtesy attached to the Crown rather than a status attached to itself. Irish Catholics find this unremarkable and Irish Anglicans find it slightly embarrassing, since precedence without establishment is a dignity that reminds everybody of a status the church lost in 1869.

The Catholic Church

The Church was the largest institution in Irish life for most of the twentieth century and is not now.

Its power was never legislative. It could not write its doctrine into Irish law, and the article has set out why: a fifth of the country was Protestant, their protection was the state’s founding purpose, and no Irish government could have legislated a confession without breaking the settlement. There was no ban on divorce, no ban on contraception, no censorship board and no constitutional recognition of a special position.

Its power was institutional, and it was enormous. It ran the schools, the hospitals, the orphanages, the industrial schools and the homes, under state licence and with state money, and the state did not inspect them. The reckoning described above ended that, transferred the schools to the state, and reduced the Church to what it now is: a large voluntary body with declining attendance, considerable charitable activity, moral authority that it spent and has not recovered, and no institutional role in the machinery of the state.

Mass attendance has fallen on the European pattern and faster than in most of Europe, which Irish sociologists attribute directly to the reckoning rather than to secularisation in general.

The other churches

The Presbyterian Church is the largest Protestant body, concentrated in Ulster, and is the confession with the deepest roots in the northern Protestant community. The Church of Ireland is the second, more evenly spread and more socially mixed than its reputation suggests. Methodists and the smaller reformed churches make up most of the remainder.

The Jewish community is small, old and concentrated in Dublin. Ireland’s Muslim population has grown with immigration since the 1990s and is now larger than the Jewish one.

Society

A liberal country, and an early one

Ireland liberalised on divorce, contraception, sexuality and marriage early, and the reason is that it had less to liberalise from.

A state that never enacted confessional legislation had no confessional legislation to repeal. Divorce was available under the ordinary law from the beginning, contraception was a matter for doctors rather than for the criminal code, and there was never a censorship of publications board to abolish. The country’s social conservatism was real and was social rather than legal: it lived in families, parishes and employers rather than in statutes, and it eroded in the ordinary European way and on a slightly earlier schedule.

By now, Ireland’s social attitudes are comparable to its western European neighbours’, with the usual gradient between Dublin and Belfast on one side and the rural west and the northern countryside on the other.

Class and the land

Irish society is unusually flat by European standards, and the reason is that the land question was settled before independence.

The purchase acts of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries transferred the ownership of Irish land from a landlord class to the families who farmed it, and by 1919 the great estates had largely been broken up by law and by purchase rather than by revolution. The new state therefore inherited a countryside of owner-occupiers, and the redistributive crisis that convulsed most new European states of the 1920s did not arise here.

The Ascendancy that stayed

The Anglo-Irish Ascendancy did not leave, because nothing happened to make it leave.

A revolutionary decade would have burned the country houses and frightened out the class that owned them, and the southern Protestant gentry would have ended as a social formation. Here there was no burning, no revolution and no expulsion, and the class simply continued into a country that had stopped needing to argue with it.

The big houses are lived in. Many are working farms, some are hotels, a number are open, and a surprising proportion remain with the families that built them. The class itself has thinned economically, as landed classes everywhere have, and has assimilated into the ordinary Irish professional and agricultural middle class to the point where its distinctiveness is a matter of accent, school and cousinage rather than of wealth or power.

It is also visible institutionally, because the Peerage of Ireland was never abolished and its members sit as part of the electing body that returns six senators. An Irish peerage confers no privilege in law, and the survival of the class that holds most of it is the reason the peerage looks less like an anachronism here than it would in a country where the gentry had been driven out.

Emigration, and the return

Emigration was heavy until the middle of the century, on the pattern that had emptied Ireland since the Famine, and then it reversed.

The population of the island in 1919 was about four and a half million after seventy years of continuous decline. It is about nine million now. The turn came in the postwar decades with industrial employment, and accelerated with the service economy, and Ireland has been a country of net immigration for thirty years.

Emigration has not stopped. It continues among the young, to Britain and America chiefly, at a level that produces a permanent low-level anxiety in Irish public discussion and a recurring political argument about why a rich country still exports its graduates. The honest answer, given by Irish economists and disliked by Irish politicians, is that a small country with an open frontier to two much larger economies will always lose some of its young, and that the ones who come back bring more than they took.

Economy

Industry first, then services

The Irish economy is a wealthy western European one with income per head comparable to Britain’s, and it arrived there by a route no other small European country took.

It began with real industry. The north-east of Ireland was one of the great industrial regions of the nineteenth century: shipbuilding and heavy engineering at Belfast, linen across Ulster, ropeworks, tobacco and the trades that clustered around them. In the world the Register’s own history diverges from, partition cut that region off from the island it sat on, and the resulting economy was a small industrial enclave attached to a large agricultural country by a customs frontier.

Here the border was never drawn. Belfast’s industries kept their island hinterland, their labour supply and their internal market, and the Irish state inherited an industrial base rather than building one from nothing. This is the single most important economic fact about the Kingdom and it compounds across a century.

The decline came anyway, and was managed. Shipbuilding and linen contracted from the middle of the century for the reasons they contracted everywhere: containerisation, Asian competition, synthetic fibres and the end of the coal-and-steam economy. The Irish state had thirty years’ warning, an unusually concentrated industrial region, and the fiscal capacity to act, and the transition was handled through retraining, regional investment and a deliberate policy of moving new industry to the affected districts. It was not painless. It was not the catastrophe that overtook comparable regions elsewhere, and the north-east did not become a permanently depressed area.

Then came the services. From the 1970s and accelerating through the 1990s, Ireland moved into pharmaceuticals, medical devices, financial and professional services, software and the creative industries, on the pattern familiar across northern Europe.

What Ireland did not do

Ireland is not a low-tax haven for foreign corporations, and this is a deliberate policy of the state.

The reason is the industrial base. A small country with no industry, no capital and a recent history of emigration has very few instruments with which to attract investment, and corporate taxation is the most powerful of them. Ireland was not that country. It had Belfast, it had an educated workforce, it had a century of manufacturing and an intact industrial culture, and it competed on those.

The consequence is an economy whose figures mean what they say. Irish national accounts are not distorted by the profit-shifting that makes some other countries’ figures famously unreliable, Irish output figures mean approximately what they say, and Irish tax revenue rests on activity that actually happens in the country. Irish officials are quietly and thoroughly pleased with this, and say so more often than is graceful when the subject comes up at the European Concert.

The steady climb

There was no Celtic Tiger, because there was no preceding poverty of the necessary depth.

Ireland’s growth over the century has been steadier and less dramatic: no decade of spectacular acceleration, no property mania of the kind that wrecked its counterpart in 2008, and no corresponding collapse. Irish economists describe the trajectory as boring and mean it as praise, and the country’s public finances have been conservative to a degree that its own left has spent forty years complaining about.

Agriculture

Agriculture is a major part of the economy rather than a cultural residue.

Ireland exports dairy and beef at scale, and its grassland farming is among the most efficient in Europe. The sector is politically powerful out of proportion to its share of employment, in the way farming is everywhere, and Irish governments handle it with the care that implies. The food processing industry that grew around it is substantial and is one of the country’s larger export earners.

Shipbuilding, still

The Belfast yard is still working. It is a fraction of its former size, builds specialised vessels rather than liners, and survives on naval, offshore and marine-engineering work. Its survival is partly commercial and partly a matter of national feeling: successive Irish governments have judged that the yard’s closure would be a symbolic event in the north out of proportion to its economic weight, and have acted accordingly. Irish industrial policy is candid that this has cost money.

Money and trade

The Irish Pound was pegged to sterling for most of the century and floats now. The peg was the arrangement of a small economy trading overwhelmingly with a large neighbour, and its ending in the later twentieth century was the moment Irish monetary policy became genuinely independent.

Ireland is in a customs union with Great Britain and has been since the settlement. Goods move without tariff or check, the two economies are deeply integrated, and the arrangement predates and is separate from the European Concert. Ireland’s Concert membership is political and economic; its British relationship is closer, older and more practical.

Ports and rail

Dublin is the largest port and handles most of the container traffic. Belfast is the second and is the industrial port. Cork has the deep water and takes what the other two cannot.

The railway network is far better than its counterpart’s, for the simple reason that no border ever cut the lines. The Dublin-Belfast main line is an intensively used trunk route rather than a cross-frontier curiosity, the western and northern lines survived the twentieth-century closures in numbers that the other Ireland’s did not, and the network was electrified on the main routes from the 1980s.

Energy

Ireland has wind, water and very little else, and has built its energy policy on that fact.

The island has no coal worth the name, no oil and no gas of consequence, and spent the twentieth century importing fuel. It also has the best wind resource in Europe, and Irish policy since the 1990s has been the systematic exploitation of it: onshore first, offshore since, with the interconnection to Britain and the Continent that intermittent generation requires. The country is now a net exporter of electricity in good weeks and a net importer in bad ones, and the argument about storage is the standing technical controversy of Irish public policy.

Housing

Housing is the dominant domestic political issue of the 2020s, exactly as it is in the other Ireland.

The causes are the ordinary ones: population growth, household formation, planning restriction, construction capacity lost in the recessions and not rebuilt, and thirty years of net immigration into a country that did not build for it. The pressure is worst in Dublin and severe in Belfast, Cork and Galway.

Ireland has one structural advantage its counterpart lacks, which is that it has two large cities rather than one. Belfast absorbs demand that would otherwise fall entirely on Dublin, the state has a second centre to direct investment toward, and the regional imbalance between east and west is real but shallower than the other Ireland’s. This has softened the crisis. It has not solved it, and no Irish government of the last fifteen years has been thought to have handled it well.

Regional balance

The island’s wealth is concentrated in the Dublin corridor and the Belfast region, with Cork as a third pole and Galway a fourth.

The poorer parts are the western seaboard, the midlands and the border counties of the north-west, and the state has run regional development programmes at them for sixty years with the mixed results such programmes produce everywhere. The imbalance is less severe than in the other Ireland, because Belfast is a genuine economic counterweight rather than a city in another jurisdiction, but the west is still poorer than the east and the young still leave it for Dublin.

Geography

The island

Ireland is a saucer: a central lowland of bog, pasture and lake, rimmed almost the whole way round by coastal uplands, with the mountains at the edges and the flat country in the middle. It is a shape with consequences. The rivers drain inward and then out through gaps in the rim, the interior floods, and the country’s settlement has always clung to the coasts and the river mouths.

The Shannon is the longest river in these islands and drains the midlands through a chain of lakes to a great estuary on the west coast. The Bann drains Ulster through Lough Neagh, which is the largest lake in the archipelago and, being shallow, unspectacular and surrounded by six counties that all touch it, a permanent minor problem of administration.

The uplands are modest in height and severe in character: the Donegal highlands, the Antrim plateau with its basalt coast, the Mournes, the Wicklow mountains behind Dublin, the Galtees and the Kerry ranges that hold the highest ground in the country.

Climate and land

The climate is oceanic, mild, wet and remarkably even, with a small annual range and a great deal of cloud. Frost is rare on the coasts and snow is an event.

The consequence is grass. Ireland grows grass better than almost anywhere in Europe and grows very little else easily, which is why the agriculture is pastoral, why the dairy and beef industries are what they are, and why the landscape looks the way it does.

The bogs of the midlands and the west are the country’s most distinctive habitat and were its fuel for centuries. Large-scale peat extraction ended in the twenty-first century after a long argument between the energy industry, the conservation movement and the midland communities that depended on it, and the restoration of the cutaway bogs is now one of the larger environmental undertakings in the country.

Provinces and counties

Ireland is divided into the four historic provinces of Ulster, Leinster, Munster and Connacht, each with a provincial administration, and beneath them into the thirty-two counties, which are the units of ordinary local government and of everything else that matters, including the loyalties that decide sporting allegiance.

The cities

Dublin

Dublin is the capital and the largest city, with something over two million people in the metropolitan area, which is to say rather less than a quarter of the Kingdom.

It is a Georgian city that spent the nineteenth century as the second city of an empire it did not govern, and the twentieth as the capital of a state that had to invent most of what a capital needs. The result is a city of great eighteenth-century set pieces, a nineteenth-century commercial core, and a large twentieth-century administrative and residential expansion that architectural opinion has never much liked.

It holds the Oireachtas, the courts, the departments, the Bank, the universities and the greater part of the financial and professional economy. Dublin Castle is the Crown’s Irish seat, which is a building with a history nobody in Ireland pretends about: it was the centre of British administration in Ireland for seven hundred years, and the state’s position is that a building is reclaimed by being used differently rather than by being left empty.

Belfast

Belfast is the second city, and it is a genuine counterweight rather than a provincial capital.

It grew from a town to a metropolis on linen, shipbuilding and engineering in the space of a century, and it looks it: a nineteenth-century industrial city of red brick and civic ambition, with a river, a shipyard, a set of enormous cranes that are now protected monuments, and a hinterland of mill towns that grew up with it.

Its industries declined and were managed down rather than abandoned, and the modern city is a mixed economy of engineering, aerospace, medical technology, services and a substantial university sector. It is the largest city of Ulster, the centre of northern Protestant life, and about as Catholic as it is Protestant in its overall population.

The city’s relationship with Dublin is the ordinary relationship of a second city with a capital: mutually essential, mildly resentful, and expressed almost entirely through sport and complaints about infrastructure spending.

The others

Cork is the third city and behaves like a rival rather than a subordinate, which its inhabitants regard as their principal civic characteristic. It has the deep-water harbour, a substantial pharmaceutical and technology sector, a university, and a settled conviction that it is the real capital.

Derry, in the north-west, is the fourth city and the one whose modern history is most different here. Partition would have left it a majority-nationalist city marooned against a border with its natural hinterland in another jurisdiction, and its twentieth century would have been grim. Here its hinterland is Donegal, which is in Ulster and in Ireland, and Derry is an ordinary regional capital rather than a cul-de-sac.

Limerick, Galway and Waterford complete the list. Galway is the largest town of the west, the gateway to the Gaeltacht, and the country’s principal centre of Irish-language life outside the speaking districts themselves.

Culture

Literature

Irish literature is out of all proportion to the size of the country, and has been since the revival.

The settlement changed less than might be expected, for the reason that most of the canonical work was written before it, regardless of it, or about matters it did not touch. The revival preceded independence. The modernists left anyway: writers leave small countries and Paris is Paris, and a Joyce who had no censorship to escape would still have gone.

What the settlement did change is the shape of the twentieth-century argument. Irish writers of the middle century did not have to spend their careers fighting a censorship board, because there was not one, and the energy that went into that fight elsewhere went into other things here. And the great subject of modern Irish letters is not exile or clerical suffocation but the settlement itself: what a country owes to a bargain that spared it, and whether a nation that accepted a king to keep an island is the nation it set out to be.

The northern tradition

There is a distinct northern Protestant literary and cultural tradition, and it is recognised as Irish culture rather than as something adjacent to it.

That recognition took decades and was resisted in both directions: by a southern literary establishment that regarded Irish writing as a Catholic and Gaelic inheritance, and by northern Protestant writers who were not certain they wanted to be claimed. What settled it was time, the national broadcaster, and a generation of northern writers who declined to choose.

Music

Irish traditional music is a living popular tradition rather than a preserved one, played in ordinary places by ordinary people, with a formidable international reach.

The northern tradition of flute and fiddle bands, the Ulster ballad repertoire and the marching band culture sit inside the national musical picture rather than outside it, which is a small thing that took a long time.

Sport

The GAA dropped its bans early, and this is the single most consequential cultural decision of the settlement’s first fifty years.

The association was founded as a nationalist cultural institution, and associations of that kind ordinarily exclude members who play foreign games and bar the police and the army. Here the police were Irish from 1919 and the army was Irish from 1919, and a rule excluding them was a rule excluding Irishmen from an Irish organisation. The bans went in the 1920s and 1930s, over serious internal opposition, and northern Protestant clubs exist, compete and are unremarkable.

Gaelic football and hurling are the mass participation sports, organised by county, and the county championships are the country’s principal shared civic ritual.

Every national team is an all-island team: football, rugby, cricket, hockey, everything. This is the settlement’s most visible everyday success, and it is the form in which most Irish people encounter the constitutional arrangement most often.

The two anthems

The state anthem is Amhrán na bhFiann, the Soldier’s Song, and it is a republican marching song written by men who intended to fight the British.

Its retention was contested and was carried on the argument that a state which discards the songs of its own founding has told its republicans that they lost twice. It is played at state occasions, at the opening of the Oireachtas, and at any event where the Kingdom of Ireland is being represented as a state.

For shared and sporting occasions the Kingdom uses a second anthem, adopted in the middle of the century and belonging to the whole island rather than to one tradition within it. It is sung at internationals, at the all-island championships, and at any occasion where the state is not the subject and the island is.

The arrangement is inelegant, was arrived at after fifty years of argument, and is described by the Irish themselves as the least bad solution available. It has one considerable virtue, which is that nobody is ever required to stand for a song about killing their grandfather.

Two flags

The Kingdom flies two flags together: the tricolour, green, white and orange, and the Royal Standard of Ireland.

The tricolour’s meaning is literal here in a way it never quite became elsewhere. Green for the nationalist tradition, orange for the Protestant and unionist one, white for the peace between them: that was the design’s stated intention when it was made in the nineteenth century, and in this Ireland it is a description of the constitutional order rather than an aspiration.

The Royal Standard flies beside it at state occasions, on public buildings and wherever the Crown is represented. Government practice is that the two are flown together or not at all, a rule adopted deliberately so that neither can be used to make a point about the other.

The national day

Saint Patrick’s Day is a genuinely shared national day, and it was deliberately built as one.

Patrick belongs to both traditions and always did, which is the fact the settlement’s designers used. The day is a public holiday, the parades are civic rather than confessional, and the Orange institutions and the GAA both take part in the national parade at Dublin without anybody finding it remarkable, which took about forty years.

The Twelfth of July is its counterpart and is also a public holiday, and the two days are the clearest statement the Irish state makes about what it thinks it is.

Education, health and institutions

Schools

Schooling is universal, free and compulsory to sixteen, and it is administered by the provinces with national standards and national funding.

The great structural change of the last thirty years was the transfer of the Church’s schools to the state, which followed the abuse reckoning and was carried through with a speed that surprised everybody including the government that did it. The Catholic Church had owned or managed the majority of Irish primary schools since before the state existed; it now manages very few, and the transfer was accompanied by a settlement over property and pensions whose terms are still occasionally litigated.

Confessional schooling survives where communities want it and pay for the difference, which in practice means the northern Protestant school sector and a smaller Catholic voluntary sector, both funded on the same terms as any other school. Integrated schooling in the north, described above, is about a third of the northern sector and growing.

Irish is taught in every school from the first year and is compulsory nowhere.

Universities

The Kingdom’s universities are old, well regarded and unusually numerous for a country of nine million.

Trinity College Dublin is the oldest, founded in 1592, and spent three centuries as a Protestant and Ascendancy institution from which Catholics were effectively excluded. That history did not end at independence and was not resolved by legislation; it was ended by a Catholic hierarchy that stopped forbidding attendance and by a state that funded the college on the same terms as every other, and Trinity is now an ordinary national university with an extraordinary library.

The National University federation covers Dublin, Cork, Galway and Maynooth. Queen’s Belfast is the great northern university and the largest in Ulster, and its position in a unified state is straightforward in a way its counterpart’s is not: it is a national university that happens to be in Belfast.

The system is free at the point of entry for undergraduates, competitive, and the country’s principal export industry in the sense that it educates a great many people who then leave.

Health

Ireland has a universal health service, free at the point of use, funded from general taxation and built after the Second Great War.

Its construction was the young Kingdom’s largest domestic undertaking and was fought over bitterly, chiefly by the Catholic hierarchy, which regarded a state medical service as an intrusion on the family and on the Church’s own hospital network. The government of the day won, and the reason it won is instructive: a state with a Protestant fifth could not be told what to do by a Catholic bishop in public without the whole settlement being visibly at stake, and the hierarchy’s opposition was therefore a losing position from the moment it became a public one.

The Church’s hospitals were absorbed over the following decades, the last of them during the reckoning. The service is adequate rather than excellent, with the waiting lists and capacity problems familiar across Europe, and it is the second most reliable subject of Irish political complaint after housing.

The regency of 2028

After the loss of the King’s aircraft (Kittyhawk), on Tuesday 3 October 2028 the Oireachtas passed, in a single day, an Act declaring the King incapable of performing the royal functions in Ireland and making Queen Christina Regent. She acts only on the advice of Ireland’s own ministers, is paid nothing for it, and took the oath at Columbia Palace on 7 October. On 31 October 2028 the Oireachtas gave effect to the King’s abdication under the common terms of the Compact realms, and George V became King of Ireland at six in the evening London time, his mother acting for him as Regent until 2 May 2029.

Defence and foreign relations

The defence forces

The Irish defence forces are small, professional and disproportionately naval, and the reason is geography.

Ireland sits across the western approaches to Europe. The convoy routes of the Second Great War ran past it, the submarine cables run past it now, and the air and sea corridors between America and the Continent pass over and around it. What the Kingdom can usefully contribute to its own security and everyone else’s is maritime patrol, surveillance and the policing of a very large exclusive economic zone, and that is what it has built.

The army is a light professional force sized for territorial defence, aid to the civil power and overseas deployment. There is no conscription and has not been since the Second Great War. The air corps is small and configured for maritime patrol and search and rescue.

There are no British forces or facilities in Ireland, and their absence was one of the settlement’s absolute terms. Ireland conceded a great deal in 1919 and did not concede this, on the reasoning that a foreign garrison is the difference between a kingdom and a possession. No treaty ports were retained, no bases were leased, and no British formation has been stationed in Ireland since.

Outside the alliance

Ireland is not a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, and this is the largest anomaly in its external position.

The alliance’s membership test is Atlantic geography and willingness, and Ireland satisfies both completely: it is the most Atlantic country in Europe and is constitutionally incapable of neutrality. It is nonetheless outside, because accession would require an Irish government to sign a treaty committing Irish soldiers automatically to a war declared by nobody in Dublin, and no Irish government has been able to carry that. The obligation Article IV creates is precisely the obligation the Easter Settlement was written to prevent the Crown from imposing, and a Taoiseach proposing it would be asking the Oireachtas to do voluntarily what the dominion years were spent resisting.

The practical position is the one described in the Executive article: a state that would certainly fight, has no obligation to, and receives no guarantee. Alliance planners assume Irish facilities that no treaty provides, Irish planners assume British and American cooperation that no instrument requires, and both assumptions are probably correct.

Great Britain

The relationship with Britain is warm and slightly complicated, in the manner of siblings who both did well.

The two states share a monarch, a customs union, a common travel area and an open frontier of the mind if not of the map. Irish and British citizens move freely between the two countries, work in each other’s economies without formality, and are educated across the water in large numbers in both directions. Political rights do not travel: an Irish citizen in Britain does not vote in British elections and a British citizen in Ireland does not vote in Irish ones, a distinction settled early and maintained deliberately.

What makes it complicated is the history, which is not resolved and is no longer raw. The Famine acknowledgement did a great deal. The Crown does a great deal, in a way republicans find galling: a shared monarch means the two countries cannot pretend to be strangers, and the institution that Irish republicanism most objects to is the institution that most reliably keeps London civil.

The United Kingdom of America

The relationship with the United Kingdom of America is closer than the British one in feeling if not in trade, and the reason is demographic.

Irish emigration to America ran for a century and a half and the Irish-American population is enormous. Irish governments have cultivated it continuously, Irish consular provision in the Realm is disproportionate to the Kingdom’s size, and the American political relationship is warmer, easier and less encumbered than any other Ireland has.

There is no treaty and no alliance. Ireland is not in the ATO and has no bilateral defence arrangement with the Realm. What exists is trade, investment, family, and a great deal of goodwill that both states are careful not to overdraw.

The European Concert and the League

Ireland is a member of the European Concert and of the League of Nations, and takes both seriously in the way small states do.

Its Concert position is consistent and predictable: in favour of the Concert’s development, in favour of a Concert defence competence because that is a capability Ireland could actually join, and permanently attentive to anything that might dilute a small member’s vote. Its League participation is conscientious and is disproportionately concentrated in peacekeeping, where Irish contingents have served continuously for sixty years and where the country’s position outside the alliance is an asset rather than an embarrassment.

That last point matters more than its size suggests. A state that belongs to no bloc, holds no territory, has no colonial history of its own and can be trusted by both sides is useful, and Ireland has built a modest and genuine international vocation on being it.

The uncomfortable part

Ireland has no colonial history as a state and makes a point of it, and the point is not quite as clean as it sounds.

Irishmen served the British Empire in very large numbers, as soldiers, administrators, engineers, missionaries and police, and the Irish contribution to the governing of other people’s countries was substantial and long. This is acknowledged in Irish historical writing and is a subject Irish ministers do not raise abroad. The Kingdom never held a colony. A great many of its people helped to hold somebody else’s.

Assessment

The settlement worked

The Easter Settlement worked, and the article states this without qualification because the record does not require any.

The island was not partitioned and has not been. No civil war followed the settlement and none has occurred since. No insurrectionary campaign has been fought against the Irish state in a hundred and nine years, no paramilitary organisation has taken hold in either community, and no Irish government has ever had to suspend the ordinary law to hold the country together. A million unionists were bound into a state most of them did not want, and the great majority of their grandchildren describe themselves as Irish without resentment and without having been asked to stop being anything else.

The country is prosperous, its income per head comparable with Britain’s, which answers the economic argument made against the settlement in 1919. It is democratic without interruption. It put its own constitutional arrangement to a direct vote in 1989 and the arrangement survived on a majority that was comfortable rather than crushing.

Against the alternative that actually happened elsewhere, the comparison is not close.

What it cost

Two things, and the article names both.

The republicans lost, and lost permanently. A tradition that had fought for a republic was given a kingdom, and then given an elected office inside it, and has spent a century making the best of an arrangement it never wanted. It has done so without violence, which is to its enormous credit and is also the reason nobody has ever had to take it seriously. A movement that will not shoot and cannot win a referendum is a movement that can be accommodated indefinitely, and it has been.

And the settlement’s success is inseparable from a decision made in London. The leaders of 1916 were not executed because a British government judged it inconvenient to execute them. Everything the Kingdom of Ireland has been built on rests on that judgement, and it was not Ireland’s to make. Irish historians say this and do not enjoy saying it.

The failure

The worst thing the Irish state has done is the institutional abuse, and the state’s own commissions have said so.

Its particular character here is set out above and bears restating in the assessment, because it is the point at which the settlement’s virtues and the state’s failure meet. Ireland could not be a confessional state. Its constitution, its purpose and a fifth of its citizens made confessional legislation impossible, and no Irish government ever attempted it. There was no ban on divorce, no ban on contraception, no censorship board and no special position for any church.

And the same state licensed, funded and fed children into institutions run by a church it could not otherwise obey, and did not inspect them for sixty years. The plurality that protected Irish Protestants from a Catholic state did not protect Irish children from a Catholic institution, because the state never thought to apply it there.

That is the failing, and the absence of the usual excuse is what makes it worse rather than better.

What kind of country

Ireland is a small, rich, unusually settled country with a constitutional arrangement nobody would design from first principles and that everybody living under it has stopped noticing.

It is a kingdom whose republicans are accommodated, a Catholic country with no established church, a state that celebrates the Boyne and the Rising as public holidays eleven weeks apart, and the only country in Europe whose national broadcaster covers an Orange parade and a Gaelic football final in the same week without either being a political act.

Its monarchy is secure and slightly beloved, which would astonish the men of 1916 more than anything else about the country they started. Polling on the Crown has not moved appreciably in thirty years. The institution is understood, correctly, as the thread that keeps the island whole, and it is valued most by the community that was most opposed to Irish self-government and least by the community that fought for it, which is the settlement’s final and most characteristic irony.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Executive of the Kingdom of Ireland
• Michael D. Higgins
• The United Kingdom of Great Britain
• The Atlantic Treaty Organization
• The European Concert
• Styles and Titles of the Crown

Categories

Nations of the World · Monarchies · Crown Realms · Western Europe · Ireland