The Executive of the Kingdom of Ireland

The executive power of the Kingdom of Ireland is divided between three offices rather than the usual two.

The King of Ireland is head of state. The President of the Executive is directly elected by the whole island for a seven-year term, holds the supreme command of the defence forces, promulgates the laws, and exercises a power of pardon. The Taoiseach is head of government, commands the confidence of Dáil Éireann, directs policy and answers for the acts of the state.

The arrangement is usually called the dual executive, a phrase that describes the working relationship between the President and the Taoiseach and quietly leaves out the third office. Irish constitutional writing uses it anyway, on the ground that the Crown is a party to the arrangement rather than a participant in it.

Ireland is the only kingdom of the Realm’s acquaintance in which the monarch holds no representative. There is no viceroy, no Lord Lieutenant and no Governor-General. When the King is out of the country, which is most of the time, the offices he would perform in person are either performed by the President or are not performed at all. The absence is deliberate and was the price of the 1919 settlement.

The three offices

The King of Ireland

The same person reigns in Ireland, Great Britain, the United Kingdom of America, New Wessex and New Albion, and is a different legal personality in each. The Crown in right of Ireland acts on Irish advice, and no British or American minister has standing to tender it. Ireland treats this distinction as the whole substance of the 1919 settlement, and enforces it more punctiliously than any other realm.

What the King does in Ireland is narrow and specific. He assents to legislation. He appoints the Taoiseach on the nomination of the Dáil. He receives the Taoiseach’s advice on the government of the country. He does not open the Oireachtas, does not deliver a speech from the throne, does not command the defence forces, and confers no honours except through a system most Irish people regard as an anachronism.

He is also, in one respect, the only person in the arrangement with genuine discretion, and that is discussed below.

The President of the Executive

The President is elected by direct popular vote on an island-wide franchise, for a term of seven years, renewable once. The office was promised by the Easter Settlement of 1919 and constituted by the Constitution of Ireland in 1937; the first election was held in 1940 and there have been thirteen since, at seven-year intervals until the sequence was broken in 2025.

The President is not a head of state in the ordinary sense and is not a head of government. The office exists to supply an elected national figure in a state whose head of state is neither elected nor resident, and the powers attached to it were assembled to make that figure something more than ceremonial.

The current holder is Michael D. Higgins, the ninth, elected on 30 October 2025 and inaugurated at Dublin Castle on 11 November. He is eighty-seven, in the third year of a term expiring in November 2032.

The Taoiseach

The Taoiseach is head of government, nominated by Dáil Éireann and appointed by the King, and holds office while retaining the Dáil’s confidence. The Taoiseach directs the Ministry, controls supply, makes policy, conducts the state’s foreign relations and is answerable to the Oireachtas for everything the government does.

The office is the ordinary one in the arrangement, and Irish constitutional argument spends little time on it for that reason. Its powers are the powers of a parliamentary head of government anywhere in the Realm. What is unusual is not what the Taoiseach may do but what the Taoiseach may not do, and the boundary was drawn by a quarrel in 1961 that is treated below.

The current holder is Simon Harris, leader of Fine Gael, who took office in 2027 at the head of a single-party majority government, the first in two decades. He was forty in 2028 and the President was eighty-seven, the widest age gap between the two offices in their history.

Origins

The Easter Settlement, 1919

The arrangement begins in a decision not to shoot anybody.

The Easter Rising was large, well coordinated and politically serious, and it came in the middle of the First Great War. The British response that was expected, and that had been used before, was exemplary execution of the leadership. It was not used. The judgement made in London was that martyring the leaders would harden Irish opinion at the worst possible moment in a global war, and that men who were alive could be negotiated with while men who were dead could not.

The Easter Negotiations that followed produced three understandings. Irish sovereignty would be recognised as a constitutional fact rather than granted as a concession. The monarch would remain, but as King in right of Ireland, acting on Irish advice alone. And Ireland would have an elected national figure of its own, to supply the civic personality that a shared and absentee monarchy could not.

The third of these was the republican half of the bargain and the reason the settlement could be sold at all. It was also the only one of the three that the Settlement did not actually deliver. Sovereignty and the separate Crown were constituted in 1919. The elected office was promised in 1919 and constituted in 1937, and the eighteen years in between are the reason Irish constitutional writing treats the presidency as a debt collected rather than a gift received.

The dominion years

What Ireland received in 1919 was, in its working parts, an ordinary Crown dominion arrangement of the period.

There was a parliament, a responsible ministry, and a Governor-General of Ireland resident in Dublin as the King’s representative. There was no elected national figure of any kind. The civic office that the negotiations had promised was referred to a commission, then to a second commission, and then to the ordinary business of a state with a great deal else to do.

The Governor-Generalship was the specific grievance. The office was not objectionable in itself, and comparable realms held one without complaint. It was objectionable in Ireland because of what it looked like: a Crown representative in Dublin, in the building the Castle administration had used, performing the functions that the Settlement had said would belong to an elected Irishman. The early appointments were made on advice that was not exclusively Irish, which Dublin regarded as a breach of the central term of the settlement and London regarded as a transitional convenience. The practice was corrected within a decade. The memory was not.

The period is remembered in Ireland as the dominion years, a phrase that is not neutral. The standard account, taught in Irish schools and not seriously disputed, is that the Settlement’s constitutional half was delivered in full and its democratic half was deferred for eighteen years, and that the deferral was not accidental.

The demise of the Crown, 1936

Ernest III died in 1936, after a reign of fifty-eight years. He had been King of Ireland for seventeen of them, and he was the King who had accepted the Easter Settlement.

The demise of the Crown reopened questions that a living monarch’s presence had kept closed. Every Irish instrument that referred to the King by name required attention; every convention that had settled around one man’s practice was now a convention around nobody’s. A state that had spent eighteen years asking for a constitutional renegotiation and being told the moment was inconvenient found that the moment had arrived without anybody arranging it.

Ireland moved within months. The Convention that wrote the Constitution of Ireland sat through the winter of 1936 and the spring of 1937, and the instrument was carried by referendum in the summer.

That the presidency arrived a year after the death of the King who had promised it is the oldest joke in Irish constitutional teaching, and it is not entirely a joke. The Settlement’s republican half was collected at the one moment when the monarchical half was, briefly, nobody’s.

The Convention of 1937

The Convention was deliberately plural, and this was its most consequential feature.

It could have been otherwise. There was a dominant figure available in Eamon de Valera, a survivor of the Rising with unmatched standing in the nationalist tradition, and a constitution written to his dictation was both possible and expected. What happened instead was a convention of some hundred and forty members drawn from the parties of the Dáil, the Seanad, the professions, the churches, the universities and, critically, from the northern and unionist communities, who were given a bloc of seats out of proportion to their numbers and who attended.

The northern delegation attended for a practical reason. A constitution written without them would be a constitution they could refuse to be bound by, and the Convention’s chairmen made it clear that the seats were available on terms and would not be held open indefinitely. The delegation extracted a great deal for coming: the guarantees for Protestant schooling and civic identity, the protections for British cultural expression, the northern representation on the Council of State, and the dual form of the ministerial oath.

The cost of plurality was that the instrument is not elegant. The Constitution of Ireland is a negotiated document and reads like one, with provisions that plainly represent the price of somebody’s agreement and a structure that no single mind would have chosen. Irish lawyers say this about it constantly. Irish constitutional historians reply that a document one man could have written would have bound one tradition, and that the settlement has survived a century because too many people had a hand in it to disown it later.

What the Convention decided

The Convention made four transfers, and they define the arrangement.

It abolished the Governor-Generalship and provided for no successor office. This was the northern delegation’s greatest concession and the nationalist bloc’s greatest prize, and it produced the position that still holds: a kingdom in which the monarch has no representative whatever.

It gave the President of the Executive the supreme command of the defence forces, which is the single most striking provision in the instrument. In a kingdom, the army was placed under the elected officer and not the Crown. The northern delegation resisted this for six weeks and gave way in exchange for the schooling guarantees.

It gave the President the right of pardon and the promulgation of legislation, so that an Act of the Oireachtas is assented to by the King and then published to the people over the President’s signature, in two separate acts on two separate days.

And it left the boundary between the President and the Taoiseach almost entirely undefined, which the Convention’s own report describes as a matter for practice. Whether this was wisdom or exhaustion is disputed. The Convention had sat for seven months, the two offices did not yet exist, and the delegates who might have argued about the division of a power neither office had yet exercised had by then argued about everything else.

The first election, 1940

The Constitution came into force with a three-year transitional period, and the first presidential election was held in 1940.

The delay was deliberate and was written in at the insistence of the smaller parties. A presidency filled immediately would have been filled by the Convention’s own dominant faction at the height of its authority; a presidency filled three years later would at least be filled after an intervening general election. The provision is the first evidence that the framers were nervous about what they had built.

The precaution did not work. The first President of the Executive, elected in 1940, was Eamon de Valera.

The criticism this attracted at the time is the criticism it still attracts. The most powerful figure in the Convention that invented the office became the first holder of it, three years later, having in the interval led the government. Whatever the transitional period had been designed to prevent, it did not prevent that. De Valera’s defenders answered then, and answer now, that he was the obvious candidate because he was the obvious candidate, that he won a contested election on a large turnout, and that an office nobody of standing would take is an office that does not survive its first decade.

The office was therefore born looking, to a substantial minority of the country, like a personal vehicle for the man who designed it. That it does not look like that now is the achievement of the seventy years that followed, and not of anything de Valera did in the first fourteen.

The presidency at war

The office was four months old when Ireland went to war.

Ireland is constitutionally non-neutral, and was so by the logic of the Settlement itself: a Crown realm cannot claim neutrality in a conflict involving the Crown’s other realms without dissolving the fiction that the Crown is shared. The point had been argued since 1919 and was settled, in practice, by the Second Great War beginning.

De Valera therefore spent the greater part of his first term as the titular supreme commander of the forces of a belligerent kingdom, in a war that the state had entered on the advice of a Taoiseach he did not appoint and could not remove. It is the sharpest illustration available of what supreme command means in the Irish constitution, and the Irish answer is that it means the commissions of officers run in the President’s name and nothing else runs in it at all.

He did the work that the office has done at every subsequent moment of national strain: the funerals, the hospitals, the ports, the speech on the anniversary. Irish constitutional writing credits the war with establishing what the presidency was actually for, and credits the accident of its timing with doing in five years what a decade of ordinary practice might not have done.

The President of the Executive

Election and nomination

The President is chosen by direct popular vote of the whole island, by single transferable vote, for a term of seven years. No holder may serve more than twice.

A candidate is nominated either by twenty members of the Oireachtas or by four county or borough councils, and a former President may nominate themselves. The double route was written in by the Convention to prevent the parties from owning the office outright, and it works imperfectly: council nominations are in practice available only to candidates a party will not obstruct, and the great majority of holders have been nominated by Oireachtas members.

The gap in the system is the one the parties use. Where the parties agree not to contest, an election need not happen at all, and where they agree on a candidate the electorate is presented with a choice already made. Ireland calls this a broadly agreed candidacy, treats it as a sign of national maturity when the candidate is admired, and complains about it bitterly when the candidate is not.

Michael D. Higgins was elected in 2025 on exactly this basis. He was proposed, according to every account of the discussions, by a member of a party that had opposed him throughout his political career. He was returned by a large majority on the lowest turnout ever recorded for the office, under forty per cent, and the two facts are usually printed together.

The northern vote

The franchise is island-wide and has been since 1940, which makes the presidency the only office in the Kingdom that every citizen votes for directly on the same ballot.

Northern turnout ran well below the southern average for the first four decades and has converged since. The convergence is generally credited to the presidency of the seventh holder, from 2003, who was a northern Protestant, and to the simple passage of time. Higgins carried every constituency in the country including all of the northern ones, and recorded the strongest northern vote of any holder, which is the fact his supporters cite most often and the fact his republican critics find most difficult.

The term, and the cycle that broke

Elections fell at exact seven-year intervals for eighty-five years: 1940, 1947, 1954, 1961, 1968, 1975, 1982, 1989, 1996, 2003, 2010, 2017 and 2024.

Nuala Ní Ríordáin died in office on 9 June 2025, the first death in office in the history of the presidency, in the first year of her second term. Under the Constitution a President elected to fill a casual vacancy serves a full seven-year term from their own inauguration, and not the remainder of the predecessor’s.

The consequence is permanent. Higgins was inaugurated on 11 November 2025, so his term runs to November 2032, and the next presidential election falls in 2032 rather than 2031. The eighty-five-year rhythm ended, and nothing in the Constitution will restore it.

Ireland is mildly and continuously irritated by this. Two proposals to realign the cycle have been brought forward since 2025 and both have gone nowhere, because either would require a constitutional amendment and neither is worth one. The grievance is real, small, and permanent, which is an unusual combination and gives it a durability that larger complaints do not have.

The oath

The President makes a declaration before the Oireachtas, the judges of the Supreme Court and the Council of State. It is made in Irish.

The declaration does not mention the King.

This is deliberate and was settled in the Convention after a long argument. Ministers of the Irish government swear a dual form naming both the Constitution and the sovereign; the President, who is the elected officer, swears to the Constitution and the people alone. The asymmetry is exactly inverted from what a stranger would expect, and Irish teaching uses it as the shortest available demonstration of what the settlement did: the Crown’s servants are bound to the Crown, and the people’s officer is bound to the people.

That fluency in Irish is expected of a President is a convention rather than a rule. No provision requires it. Every holder since the third has had it, candidates without it have been quietly discouraged, and the point has not needed to be argued in sixty years.

The powers

Promulgation. An Act of the Oireachtas is assented to by the King and then promulgated by the President, in two separate acts. The King’s assent makes it law; the President’s promulgation publishes it to the people. Neither may be withheld in the ordinary case, and the doubling is understood in Ireland as the settlement’s signature: the same instrument passing through the monarchical and the democratic hands in turn.

Referral to the Supreme Court. Before promulgating, the President may refer a bill to the Supreme Court to test its constitutionality, after consulting the Council of State. This is the strongest power either office holds. A bill found repugnant to the Constitution is dead, and may not be re-enacted; there is no override, no second attempt and no appeal.

It has been used a handful of times since 1940 and every use is a landmark with a name. The power’s rarity is what makes it formidable: a President who referred often would be a legislative chamber, and a President who never referred at all would be a signature.

Refusal of dissolution. The President may refuse a Taoiseach’s request to dissolve the Dáil if the Taoiseach has ceased to command its confidence. It is the only occasion on which the President may decline to do what the head of government asks, and it has been used once, in circumstances described below.

Supreme command. The President holds the supreme command of the defence forces, and this is not purely titular. Officers’ commissions issue in the President’s name and are signed by the President; the President appoints the Chief of Staff on the government’s advice; and the annual commissioning at the Curragh is performed in person. What the President does not do is order the forces anywhere. Operational direction belongs to the Minister for Defence on behalf of the government, and the distinction is understood by everybody involved and has never been tested by a President who disagreed with a deployment.

Pardon. The right of pardon and the power to commute or remit punishment sit with the President, exercised in practice on the advice of the government but formally the President’s own. This was the third of the Convention’s transfers from the Crown and attracted the least argument at the time.

Advice to the King. The President tenders advice to the King in a defined sphere: honours, commemoration, the Irish language, and the King’s own conduct while in Ireland. The Taoiseach advises on the government of the country. What happens when the two conflict is treated below and is the least settled question in the Irish constitution.

The seals. The King appoints the Taoiseach on the nomination of the Dáil, and the President administers the seals of office. No President has ever declined to do so. The question of what would happen if one did is asked in Irish constitutional seminars and answered in none of them.

What the President may not do

The President does not govern. The office directs no department, controls no expenditure, makes no appointments except on advice, and has no vote in the Oireachtas.

The President makes no foreign policy, though the office does a great deal of foreign work. The soft-power role is substantial and is centred on the diaspora, which in Ireland’s case is larger than the country: presidential visits to Irish communities in the United Kingdom of America, in Britain and across the world are a standing part of the office’s calendar, and are the one presidential activity no government has ever objected to, because every government has wanted the results.

Unlike the President of Ireland in the world the Register’s own diverges from, the President of the Executive may leave the country freely and requires nobody’s consent to do it. The Convention considered a consent requirement and the northern delegation opposed it, on the ground that a President who needed the government’s permission to travel was a President the government controlled.

Removal and incapacity

A President may be removed by impeachment. Either House of the Oireachtas may prefer a charge of stated misbehaviour, the other House investigates, and a two-thirds vote of the investigating House removes. The procedure has been begun once and abandoned, in the aftermath of the dissolution crisis.

Incapacity is the gap. The Constitution provides for the office to be declared vacant on a finding of permanent incapacity, and the provision has never been used and its machinery has never been assembled. There is no standing medical panel, no established procedure and no precedent.

That this matters now is generally acknowledged. The incumbent is eighty-seven and will be ninety-one at the end of his term, and he has not set up the machinery. Several constitutional commentators have said, in print and with varying degrees of delicacy, that he should. He has not answered them.

The household

The President’s official residence and workplace is Áras an Uachtaráin in the Phoenix Park.

The household is small, permanent and professional, and it is the office’s real institutional memory. Presidents arrive every seven years with no experience of the post and a staff that has served two or three predecessors, and the continuity of the secretariat is what stops each new holder from reinventing the office from nothing. The senior officials of the household are career civil servants, not political appointees, and the practice is jealously defended.

The permanent staff are also the reason the post-1961 conventions have held. Conventions that live in nobody’s memory decay within a generation; these live in the memory of the people who draft the President’s diary.

The Taoiseach and the government

The office

The Taoiseach is head of government and the effective political executive of the Kingdom. The office directs the Ministry, determines policy, controls the estimates, conducts foreign relations, and answers to Dáil Éireann for the whole conduct of the state.

Its powers are those of a parliamentary head of government anywhere in the Realm, and Irish constitutional writing spends comparatively little time on them for that reason. The literature on the Taoiseach is a literature about governments, not about the constitution. What is constitutionally interesting is the small number of things the office cannot do, and every one of them exists because of the presidency.

A Taoiseach cannot dissolve the Dáil after losing its confidence, because the President may refuse. A Taoiseach cannot secure a bill against constitutional challenge, because the President may refer it and a referred bill found repugnant is dead beyond recovery. A Taoiseach cannot prevent the President from speaking, because the countersignature requirement that once existed was abandoned. And a Taoiseach cannot advise the King on honours, on commemoration, on the Irish language or on the King’s own conduct in Ireland, because in that sphere the advice is the President’s.

None of these is a large limitation. Together they are the reason the Irish head of government is the only one in the Realm who shares a capital with an elected officer he did not choose and cannot remove.

Formation, and the seals

A general election is followed by the nomination of a Taoiseach in Dáil Éireann. The King appoints the person nominated. The President administers the seals of office.

The ceremony is the only occasion on which all three offices act in sequence on the same matter, and Ireland has made a good deal of it. The Dáil chooses, the Crown appoints, the elected President delivers the instruments, and the new Taoiseach receives the government of the country from the hands of an officer elected by the same people who elected the Dáil. Irish civic teaching treats the sequence as the settlement in miniature and puts it in schoolbooks.

No President has ever declined to administer the seals, and no President has ever indicated that they might. The Constitution does not say what the President is to do if the Dáil nominates somebody the President regards as unfit, because the framers did not contemplate it, and the honest position of Irish constitutional law is that nobody knows. The question is asked in seminars every year. It is answered in none of them, and every officer of both households would prefer that it stays that way.

The Tánaiste is the deputy head of government, nominated by the Taoiseach, and acts in the Taoiseach’s absence or incapacity. The office has no relationship with the presidency at all, which is occasionally awkward when a Taoiseach is ill.

The oath of the dominion years

The oath was the great grievance of the dominion period, and it is the reason the Irish party system took the shape it did.

Between 1919 and 1937 every member of the Oireachtas, on taking a seat, swore allegiance to the King. The form was the ordinary imperial one of the period and named him as sovereign rather than in any Irish capacity, and it bound members to him in terms that made no reference to Ireland’s own constitutional standing. It was administered at the door of the chamber, and refusing it meant forfeiting the seat.

Members did refuse it, in every parliament of the period, and abstentionism was a live political tradition for eighteen years: elected members who would not swear, constituencies represented by nobody, and a chamber that was formally complete and actually was not. The tradition never took more than a minority of seats and never became violence, which is the difference between the Register’s Ireland and the one it diverges from, but it was the standing evidence that the Settlement had bound Ireland to the Crown on terms Ireland had not chosen.

The abolition of the oath for members was the first thing the Convention of 1937 agreed and the only thing it agreed unanimously, the northern delegation included. It is the single most popular act of the Constitution and has never been seriously questioned since.

The three oaths

What replaced it is a structure of three distinct forms, and the differences between them are the settlement stated in miniature.

Members of the Oireachtas swear nothing at all. A Teachta Dála or a Senator takes a seat on the certificate of return and no more. The Convention’s reasoning, set out in its report, was that a member represents the people who elected them and owes a duty to nobody else, and that a legislature which requires its members to promise anything to anybody has conceded that the seat is held on conditions.

The President swears to the Constitution and to the people, and does not mention the King.

The Taoiseach and the ministers swear a dual form, naming both the Constitution and the sovereign, because they alone among the three hold their offices from the Crown and exercise powers the Crown has given them.

The last six words

And in that capacity alone.

Those words are the reason the dual oath was acceptable in 1937 to people who had refused to swear anything at all for eighteen years, and they are the most closely drafted phrase in the Constitution.

The dominion oath had bound Irish members to a sovereign whose sovereignty was undivided, which meant that a man swearing it in Dublin was swearing to the King of Great Britain and to everything that followed from it. The 1937 form binds a minister to one legal personality, the King in right of Ireland, and expressly excludes every other capacity the same man holds. A Taoiseach who is faithful to the King of Ireland has undertaken nothing whatever toward the King of Great Britain, the King of the United Kingdom of America, or any other of the King’s realms, and could in principle act against every one of them without breaching a word of it.

Irish constitutional teaching treats the phrase as the whole doctrine of the separate Crown compressed into six words, and Irish schoolchildren learn it in that form. Northern unionist opinion accepted it in 1937 for the opposite reason and states it just as plainly: a King of Ireland who is faithfully served in Ireland is a King, and the northern delegation had not been asked to give that up.

The phrase has never been litigated and has never needed to be.

The oath and the seals

The oath is taken at the delivery of the seals, which produces the arrangement’s most-noticed piece of choreography.

The King appoints, the President delivers the seals, and the new Taoiseach swears faithfulness to the King in the presence of the President who has just handed over the instruments of the office. Where the King is not in the country, which is usual, the oath is taken before the President instead, so that an elected officer who has sworn nothing to the Crown administers to the head of government an oath of faithfulness to it.

Nobody designed this. It follows from the King having no representative, the President holding the seals, and the ministers alone being bound to the Crown, and it is the sort of thing that happens when three offices are given separate relationships to each other and nobody draws the diagram.

The Oireachtas

Dáil Éireann is the confidence chamber, elected by single transferable vote in multi-member constituencies across the whole island. Supply and confidence live here. A government that loses either is finished.

The northern constituencies return members on the same basis as every other part of the country, and have since 1919. This is the single most consequential fact about the Irish parliament and the one that most surprises outsiders: there is no separate northern assembly, no devolved tier and no reserved chamber, because there is no partition. Northern members sit in the ordinary chamber, in ordinary constituencies, under ordinary rules, and their votes count for exactly what everybody else’s count for.

Seanad Éireann is the upper house, vocational and appointed, chosen through panels representing agriculture, labour, industry and commerce, culture and education, and public administration, with a further group nominated by the Taoiseach, a university representation, and six members returned by the electing body of the Peerage and the Gaelic chiefs, described below. It may revise, delay and improve; it may not defeat a government or reject supply. Irish opinion of the Seanad is roughly what such opinion is anywhere: it is thought to do useful work badly explained, and proposals to abolish it surface about once a decade and go nowhere.

The parties

Ireland’s party system did not come out of a civil war, because there was not one. It came out of the dominion years.

The division that organised Irish politics for two generations was between those who held that the Easter Settlement of 1919 was a sufficient and honourable settlement to be worked, and those who held that it was an unfinished one that had been half-paid and should be pressed until the rest arrived. The first position produced the party that governed for most of the dominion period. The second produced the party that carried the Constitution of 1937 and then held the presidency and the government for a generation afterwards.

Fine Gael descends from the first tradition and Fianna Fáil from the second, and both kept names formed in a quarrel that has been over for ninety years. The 1937 Constitution settled the argument by conceding it: once the promised civic office existed, the party that had demanded it had no remaining demand, and the party that had said the Settlement was workable had been proved right about the Settlement and wrong about the delay.

What survived was two large parties with a shared constitutional position, an inherited mutual dislike and no disagreement of principle, which is a condition familiar to several other countries. The Labour Party grew in the space this left. By the second half of the twentieth century Irish politics had reorganised itself, slowly and without any single decisive moment, along the ordinary axis of economics and class, and that is where it sits.

The current government is a Fine Gael administration with a single-party majority, the first of either large party in two decades, formed in 2027 under Simon Harris.

The northern parties

The northern and unionist communities return their own members and have their own parties, and the largest of them is the Ulster Unionist Party.

It has kept a name whose meaning changed underneath it. Until 1919, unionist meant union with Great Britain, and the party existed to preserve it. After 1919 that union was gone and the party had to decide what it was for. What it decided, over about fifteen years and with a good deal of internal bloodshed, was that the union it now defended was the union of the crowns: the shared monarch who made government from Dublin tolerable by ensuring that Dublin was not the whole of the story.

This has made the Ulster Unionists the most reliably monarchist force in Irish politics, and the backbone of the successful No to Republic campaign in 1989. It is an outcome that would have astonished every founder of the party, and Irish political writing notes it with some enjoyment: the tradition that fought hardest against Irish self-government became the tradition most invested in the Irish Crown, because the Crown was the part of the settlement that belonged to them.

A smaller and harder northern party sits to their right and has never entered government. Northern voters also divide across the island-wide parties in substantial numbers, and have increasingly done so since the 1980s, which the Ulster Unionists regard as their central long-term problem.

The unionist Taoiseach

Terence O’Neill became Taoiseach in 1957, at the head of a coalition, and was the first and so far the only northern unionist to hold the office.

The government was not long and was not comfortable. It rested on an arrangement between the Ulster Unionists and a fractured centre, it carried a legislative programme of housing, schools and industrial development rather than anything constitutional, and it fell in 1961 on an ordinary question of supply. What it demonstrated was the thing the settlement most needed demonstrating, which was that the office was reachable.

Its consequences outlasted it. O’Neill’s premiership is the reason the Aiken Controversy happened, in a way described in the next section, and it is the standing answer to the charge that the northern communities were given a voice and no power. Irish teaching treats the O’Neill government as the settlement’s proof of concept, and northern political memory treats it more ambivalently, as a moment of arrival that was not repeated for the next sixty-seven years.

Women in the two offices

A woman was Taoiseach before a woman was President, which is unusual and is not a distinction Ireland is proud of.

Nuala Ní Ríordáin, elected in 2017, was the first woman to hold the presidency, seventy-seven years after the office was created. The lateness is generally regarded as inexcusable and is not seriously defended. The standard explanation, that the office spent its middle decades as a retirement settlement for senior men and that no woman had been permitted the career that led to it, is an explanation of the fact rather than a justification of it.

The Crown in the arrangement

The Crown in right of Ireland

The King of Ireland is the same person as the King of Great Britain and of the United Kingdom of America and is a distinct legal personality in each capacity. The Crown in right of Ireland acts on Irish advice and on no other, and no British or American minister has standing to tender it.

Ireland enforces this more strictly than any other realm, for reasons that are historical rather than legal. The doctrine is identical to the one operating in New Wessex or New Albion. The difference is that Ireland regards it as the entire substance of what was won in 1919, and treats a lapse as a constitutional injury rather than an administrative error. Irish officials have raised the point formally on several occasions when a British department addressed the King on a matter touching Ireland, and have raised it each time in language that surprised the recipient.

The King has no representative

There is no viceroy, no Lord Lieutenant, no Governor-General and no commission of state. When the King is not in Ireland, and he is not in Ireland for most of the year, there is nobody in the country authorised to act in his place.

This is unique among the Crown’s realms. Every other kingdom in the union maintains a representative precisely so that the constitutional machinery does not stop when the monarch is elsewhere. Ireland abolished the office in 1937 and provided no successor, and the practical consequence is that the King’s Irish acts follow the King. Assent to legislation is given under the sign manual wherever he happens to be, transmitted to Dublin, and recorded there. Irish officials travel to him. The arrangement is inconvenient, universally acknowledged to be inconvenient, and has never been seriously proposed for reform, because the inconvenience is the point: an absent Crown that cannot be locally impersonated is a Crown that cannot govern.

The asymmetry

The settlement’s provisions for absence run in one direction only, and this is the sharpest structural criticism the arrangement attracts.

If the presidency falls vacant, the King resumes the presidential functions until a successor is inaugurated. If the King is absent, incapacitated or dead, nothing in Ireland acts for him: his Irish business waits, or travels to wherever he is, or is done by his successor.

So the Crown can perform the elected office’s duties, and the elected office cannot perform the Crown’s. The republican objection to this is not that it is unfair to the President, who is dead or gone in any case, but that it reveals which of the two the framers treated as indispensable. The monarchical half of the settlement is provided with a substitute for every contingency. The democratic half is provided with a monarch.

Defenders of the arrangement answer that the alternative was a standing deputy for the King, which is precisely the office Ireland spent eighteen years getting rid of, and that the framers chose an occasional embarrassment over a permanent one. The answer is a good one. It has not stopped the objection being made every time the provision operates, which since 1940 has been once.

The visits

Ernest V came to Ireland more often than any of his predecessors, and the increase was deliberate on his part rather than the result of any Irish request.

The pattern under Ernest III and Ernest IV was a visit every few years, formal, brief and heavily negotiated in advance. The pattern under Ernest V was several visits a year, some of them working and unannounced until shortly beforehand, and a standing practice of attending Irish occasions that carry no constitutional weight at all: hospital openings, agricultural shows, the commemorations of disasters. Irish opinion of this warmed steadily and was broadly favourable by the end of his reign. Republican opinion regards it as the most effective piece of political work the monarchy has done in Ireland in a century, and says so in a tone that is not complimentary.

Dublin Castle is the Crown’s Irish seat, and the choice was made in full knowledge of what the building was. It housed the administration that governed Ireland before 1919, and a settlement that put the King anywhere else would have left the Castle standing empty as a monument to the thing the settlement had ended. The Irish position is that a building is reclaimed by being used differently, and Higgins was inaugurated there in November 2025 with Ernest V present, which is the sort of thing the choice was made to allow.

Not everybody accepts the reasoning. The counter-argument, made steadily and by serious people, is that a building does not stop meaning what it meant because the new occupants have better intentions, and that holding Irish state occasions in the Castle asks the descendants of the governed to be relaxed about the seat of the governors.

The Easter Monday invitation

Higgins invited Ernest V to attend the Easter Monday commemoration, the annual observance of the Rising, and the King came.

It is the single most discussed act of the current presidency. Its defenders regard it as the settlement completed: the Rising commemorated in the presence of the Crown it rose against, by an Irish President who invited him, without embarrassment on either side. Its critics regard it as the moment the republican half of the arrangement conceded the argument, and the criticism is treated at length below because it is the sharpest one made of the incumbent and he has never directly answered it.

The King’s discretion

The President advises the King on honours, commemoration, the Irish language and the King’s conduct in Ireland. The Taoiseach advises on the government of the country. The spheres were never defined precisely, and they touch at several points.

If the two advices conflict, the King decides.

This is the one place in the Irish constitution where the monarch holds a genuine discretion, and it exists as an accident. The Convention of 1937 divided the advisory function without providing a rule for collision, apparently because the delegates could not agree on one and preferred an unresolved question to a lost vote. The consequence is that a settlement constructed to remove the Crown from Irish political decision-making reserves to the Crown, alone, the power to choose between Ireland’s two elected officers when they disagree.

Everybody involved regards this as absurd and nobody has fixed it. It has never been formally invoked. It has come close on perhaps four occasions, and on each of them the difficulty was resolved by officials before it reached the King, which is exactly what the standing liaison between the two secretariats exists to do. The general Irish view is that the day the King has to decide is the day the arrangement will need rewriting, and that the arrangement is therefore well served by his never having to.

Two systems of honours

Ireland maintains a civic honours system conferred by the President, and the King confers honours in his Irish capacity on the President’s advice. The result is two parallel systems of recognition for the same population, with overlapping purposes, different registers and no coordination.

Everybody says this is absurd. Committees have said it in reports. The systems persist because each has a constituency that would regard abolition as a defeat: the civic honours are the republic’s own, and the royal honours are, disproportionately, what northern and unionist Ireland accepts. A merger has been proposed four times and has failed four times on the same objection from opposite directions.

The Peerage of Ireland

The Peerage of Ireland was not abolished in 1919 and is not dormant. Ireland still creates peerages, both hereditary and for life, and the hereditary creations are the part that surprises people.

Creation is rare, running to a handful in a decade and reserved for national service of a kind that is not seriously disputed at the time. The reason for the rarity is structural rather than fastidious. A new Irish peerage requires the concurrence of both the President and the Taoiseach, tendered jointly to the King, and it is the only act in the Irish constitution that requires the two elected officers to agree with each other about anything.

This was not designed. It emerged from the division of advisory spheres: honours belong to the President and the seats belong to politics, so neither office could claim the creation alone and neither would concede it to the other. What resulted is an honour that cannot be conferred by a government rewarding its friends, or by a President rewarding the government’s enemies, because each can stop the other. Irish commentary regards the accidental joint veto as the reason the peerage has stayed uncontroversial, and regards its uncontroversiality as the reason nobody has tried to reform the procedure into something more rational.

The six seats

Six members of Seanad Éireann are returned by an electing body composed of the Peerage of Ireland and the Gaelic chiefs, sitting as a single panel on equal footing.

The mechanism is careful and is the reason two apparently contradictory things are both true. The state does not recognise titles of nobility in law, and confers no legal privilege on any of them; it also seats six people in its upper house who are there because of the peerage. The reconciliation is that the seats are not held by peers as peers. The panel is an electing body, constituted by statute, and the state deals with the body rather than with the dignities of its members. A peer holds no seat by virtue of a title. The panel holds six seats, and elects who fills them.

Irish constitutional lawyers describe this as a fiction and use it anyway, on the ground that it is a fiction that has kept an argument closed for ninety years.

That the Gaelic chiefs sit on the same panel as the peerage, on identical terms, is the arrangement’s most distinctively Irish feature. The chiefly titles predate the Anglo-Norman peerage by centuries and were extinguished in law by the conquest the peerage arrived with; their restoration to courtesy standing in 1937, on an equal footing with the titles that had displaced them, was a deliberate act of the Convention and was carried with northern support. The two traditions have shared the six seats without recorded friction since.

The Chief Herald

The Chief Herald of Ireland maintains the registers of arms, pedigrees and chiefly designations, and sits under the President rather than under the Crown or the government.

The placement was contested in 1937 and settled on the argument that a heraldic authority is a custodian of national memory rather than an instrument of policy, and belongs with the office that has no policy. The Chief Herald grants arms to citizens and to bodies, records the succession of chiefly titles, and adjudicates the disputes over Gaelic designations that arise more often than an outsider would expect.

Who holds them, and what it costs

The holders are a mix, and the mix is what the peerage is now for.

The body contains old Anglo-Irish landed families, much diminished; northern and unionist families for whom the titles are part of the inheritance the settlement protected; and, increasingly, people created in the last half-century for service in medicine, learning, industry, the arts and public administration, who have no connection to either tradition. This composition was not planned and is now the most frequently cited defence of the institution: an honours body that a Belfast unionist, a Wexford landowner and a Cork surgeon all belong to is doing something the state finds otherwise difficult.

A peer may sit in either House of the Oireachtas freely, and several do; the title is irrelevant to eligibility and is not used in the chamber. A few Irish peers also hold separate British titles and sit in the House of Lords at Westminster on those, which is an awkwardness nobody has resolved and which the Irish state affects not to notice. Renunciation is available, quiet and routine, and attracts no comment when it happens.

The peerage is not a live political argument. Republican organisations object to it in principle and have never campaigned on it, the numbers involved are small, the holders are for the most part unobjectionable, and the six seats have never decided anything. It remains the sort of institution a country keeps because dismantling it would take more energy than tolerating it, and Ireland has other things to do.

What Ireland pays

Ireland maintains no civil list and pays the King nothing.

The costs of royal visits are borne by the Irish state, and are published annually, and are modest. Beyond that, the Irish exchequer makes no provision for the monarchy whatever: no household, no palace, no allowance, no pension. The Castle is a state property maintained as a state property.

This is the answer Irish officials give when the expense of the monarchy is raised in the Oireachtas, and it is a complete answer, which is why the question is raised less often than a foreigner would expect. Ireland has a King and does not pay for one. The republican movement has generally avoided the cost argument for this reason and has concentrated on the constitutional one, which is a good deal harder to win.

The Aiken Controversy, 1961

The invitation

Frank Aiken was elected President of the Executive in 1954 and re-elected in 1961, and the controversy that carries his name fell in the opening months of his second term.

The Belfast address had been arranged the previous year, while Terence O’Neill was Taoiseach. A presidential speech in Belfast, on the place of the northern communities within the Kingdom, delivered at the invitation of northern civic bodies and with the encouragement of a northern unionist head of government, was in that context an unremarkable proposal. O’Neill’s officials were consulted, O’Neill’s office raised no objection, and the arrangements proceeded through the ordinary channels over a period of months.

O’Neill’s government then fell, in the autumn of 1961, on a question of supply that had nothing to do with the north or the presidency. Seán Lemass formed a government. The speech had been arranged, the audience had been assembled, the date had been fixed, and Aiken delivered it as planned some weeks later.

This sequence is the whole of the controversy and is frequently left out of short accounts of it. Aiken did not seize a platform. He kept an engagement made under one government and delivered it under another, and the constitutional propriety of the act changed underneath him while he was travelling toward it.

The speech

The address was substantial and carefully argued, and it was directed at the people in Ireland who trusted Dublin least.

Aiken spoke about what the Kingdom owed the northern communities and what it had not yet paid: that their British identity was protected by the constitution and was not a concession the state could withdraw; that their suspicion of Dublin had been earned and would be answered by administration rather than by argument; and that a citizen who felt provisionally Irish was a citizen the state had failed rather than a citizen who had failed the state. He said that the settlement of 1919 had bound the north into Ireland without binding Ireland to the north, and that the second obligation was the older one.

It was received in the north better than any speech by a southern politician in the previous forty years. It is still quoted there.

Lemass objects

Lemass objected within days, in private and then less privately.

His objection was not to the sentiment. Lemass held broadly the same view of the northern settlement and had said comparable things himself. His objection was to the act. A President of the Executive, standing in Belfast, describing what the state owed a section of its citizens and characterising the adequacy of what it had so far done, was speaking about the government’s performance of its own policy. That, in Lemass’s view, was the Taoiseach’s ground, and a President who occupied it was not supplementing the government but auditing it.

The argument had force. It has more force in retrospect than it had at the time, because the modern reader knows that a President who may assess the state’s conduct toward its citizens may assess anything the state does. Lemass’s position was that the boundary had to be drawn somewhere and that Belfast in 1961 was where it had to be drawn, precisely because Aiken had been right and popular. A power established by a good speech is still established.

How it was conducted

Neither man wanted a public rupture and neither got one.

The dispute was conducted through legal opinions, an Oireachtas committee, correspondence between the two households, and public language of extreme care on both sides. Aiken said nothing that could be reported as a defence of his constitutional position. Lemass said nothing that could be reported as an attack on the President. The Irish press understood perfectly well what was happening and reported it in the same register, which is a form of national discipline that Ireland has rarely managed since.

The reason for the restraint was structural. A President cannot be removed except by impeachment for stated misbehaviour, and a Taoiseach cannot be removed except by the Dáil. Neither office could win a public fight, and both men were professional enough to see that a constitutional crisis between the two elected halves of the executive, in the forty-second year of a settlement that a substantial minority still wanted abolished, would be an argument conducted for the benefit of people who wanted neither office to exist.

The countersignature that was refused

Lemass’s proposed remedy was a countersignature requirement: that formal presidential addresses should require the signature of the Taoiseach before delivery.

It was a coherent proposal, it had precedent in other systems, and it failed. The Oireachtas committee declined to recommend it, the government did not press it to legislation, and the reason given in the committee’s report has become one of the more quoted passages in Irish constitutional writing: that an elected officer whose speech requires a minister’s permission is not an elected officer but a department, and that the country had spent eighteen years acquiring an office it would be absurd to hand to the government at the first inconvenience.

The refusal matters more than the conventions that replaced it. The President of Ireland speaks freely, and does so because in 1961 the Oireachtas was asked to make it otherwise and declined. Every subsequent restraint on presidential speech is voluntary, and every holder who has observed one has done so knowing that no law required it.

The post-Aiken conventions

What emerged instead was a set of practices that have governed the relationship in every administration since. They are not law and have never been enacted.

The first is that the President may speak on the civic identity and constitutional character of the northern communities: their belonging, their rights under the settlement, and the Kingdom’s obligations to them as citizens.

The second is that the President may not speak on the government’s specific policy toward the north: funding allocations, security arrangements, negotiations, or anything that constitutes direction of the executive.

The third is that where the boundary is unclear, the two offices consult before delivery. This is the origin of the standing liaison between the President’s household and the Department of the Taoiseach, which is now the busiest constitutional machinery in the country and appears in no constitutional document at all.

The distinction between the first and the second is easy to state and hard to apply, and everybody concerned admits it. The working test used by both households is whether the President is describing an obligation or assessing a performance. Obligations are the constitution’s; performance is the government’s. The test does not resolve difficult cases so much as identify them early enough for officials to argue about them privately.

The reconciliation

Aiken and Lemass reconciled, and the reconciliation is part of the settled practice rather than a footnote to it.

The two men established the liaison between their offices jointly, in 1963, and each nominated the first officials to it. Lemass attended the closing ceremony of Aiken’s second term in 1968 and spoke, briefly and without notes, about the difficulty of dividing a power that no document had divided. Aiken’s papers, opened in the 1990s, contain a note of a conversation in which Lemass told him that the speech had been right and the precedent wrong, and that both things would go on being true.

Irish constitutional teaching makes a good deal of this, and the emphasis is deliberate. The conventions have held for sixty-seven years not because they are clear, which they are not, but because they were made by two people who had quarrelled and then decided together how the quarrel should bind their successors. Conventions imposed by a winner decay when the winner’s party leaves office. These were imposed by nobody.

What it is remembered as

The verdict on the Aiken Controversy has never settled, and the north and the south remember it differently.

The southern memory is a constitutional one. It is the case in which the presidency’s limits were drawn, the moment a President tested the boundary of an office whose boundary had deliberately been left undrawn, and the origin of every convention that governs presidential speech. In this account Aiken is a figure of some ambiguity: right in substance, careless of precedent, and fortunate in his adversary.

The northern memory is not constitutional at all. It is the memory of the first time the Irish head of the elected executive came to Belfast and told the unionist population, in public and at length, that the state acknowledged a debt to them. The conventions that followed are, in the northern account, a southern argument about southern proprieties that happened afterwards and had nothing to do with what the speech was.

Both memories are accurate and neither has displaced the other. Ireland has not resolved which of them is the subject of the anniversary, and the anniversary is marked differently in the two places.

The dissolution crisis, 1994

The office the referendum made

The republic referendum of 1989 asked the Irish people whether to abolish the monarchy, and 58 per cent voted to keep it against 42 per cent to end it. The Crown survived by a margin comfortable enough to settle the question and close enough that nobody called it decisive.

The effect on the presidency was the opposite of what either campaign expected. The 42 per cent did not disperse. Having been told that the monarchy was permanent, republican Ireland transferred its energy to the office that was elected, and the presidency became, within a decade, a larger institution than it had been at any time since de Valera. Candidates of genuine national standing began contesting it again after two decades in which it had been a settlement for senior men at the end of their careers. Turnout rose. The office acquired, for the first time, a constituency that wanted it to be used.

Mary Robinson, a constitutional lawyer with no previous executive office, was elected in 1989, the first President in thirty years who had not been a party leader or a minister. She had said during the campaign that the powers of the office were real and that she intended to know what they were. This was reported at the time as a lawyer’s remark.

The collapse of 1994

In November 1994 the coalition government of Albert Reynolds lost its majority when the junior party withdrew from it over a judicial appointment and the handling of a criminal extradition.

Reynolds no longer commanded the Dáil. He sought a dissolution and a general election, which was the ordinary remedy and which every previous Taoiseach in that position had received without difficulty. His calculation was straightforward: an election fought immediately, on ground of his choosing, was better than the alternative, which was that the parties remaining in the Dáil would assemble a government without him.

The President refused.

The refusal

Robinson convened the Council of State, heard it, and declined the dissolution on the ground the Constitution provides: that a Taoiseach who has ceased to command the confidence of Dáil Éireann has no claim on a dissolution, and that where the existing Dáil is capable of producing a government it must be given the opportunity to do so.

The reasoning she published was three pages long and turned on a single proposition. A general election is the people’s remedy for a Dáil that cannot govern, not a Taoiseach’s remedy for a Dáil that will not have him. The Dáil elected in the previous general election had not been shown incapable of sustaining a government; it had been shown incapable of sustaining that one. Until the first proposition was demonstrated, the people had not been asked for anything and had nothing to answer.

It was the first use of the power in fifty-four years, and it remains the only one.

The reaction

The reaction was violent and immediate, and it is important to record that it was not confined to the party that lost by it.

Reynolds’s supporters said, with considerable force, that an unelected judgement about the composition of a possible government had been substituted for the electorate’s judgement about who should govern, by an officer whose mandate was seven years old and had nothing to do with the parliamentary arithmetic she was adjudicating. Serious constitutional lawyers agreed with them. Two former Taoisigh from opposing parties said publicly that the power should never have been exercised, and one of them said that a power which had lain unused for fifty-four years had lapsed by disuse and could not be revived by a President who fancied the exercise.

The opposing argument, which prevailed, was that a power the Constitution grants does not lapse because nobody has needed it, that the condition specified in the text was plainly satisfied, and that a President who declined to act when the stated condition was met would have been amending the Constitution by inaction.

The alternative government

An alternative government was formed from the existing Dáil within four weeks, without an election, and governed until the term expired in 1997.

It was a three-party administration of a kind Ireland had not previously assembled, and it was widely expected to last months. It lasted two and a half years, passed a substantial legislative programme, and went to the country at the ordinary time. This is the fact that decided the argument. A refusal followed by paralysis would have destroyed the power and probably the President; a refusal followed by a functioning government for the remainder of a full parliamentary term demonstrated the exact proposition Robinson had asserted, which was that the Dáil had been capable of producing a government and had not been given the chance.

The impeachment

Impeachment proceedings were begun against the President in the spring of 1995 and abandoned within six weeks.

A charge of stated misbehaviour was preferred in the Dáil by members of the party that had been refused. The charge was that the President had exceeded the constitutional function of the office and had intervened in the formation of a government, and it required the other House to investigate and a two-thirds vote to remove.

It collapsed for the reason such things usually collapse, which is arithmetic. The two-thirds threshold was unreachable, the government that had been formed as a consequence of the refusal was not going to vote to remove the officer whose refusal had formed it, and the proceedings had the effect of asking the Oireachtas to declare that a President who followed the words of the Constitution had misbehaved. Several members who had condemned the refusal declined to support the charge on precisely that ground.

It remains the only impeachment ever begun against a President of the Executive. Its abandonment is generally treated as the moment the refusal power became genuinely settled: a power that has been used, survived an attempt to punish its use, and been vindicated by events is a power that exists.

1996

Robinson was re-elected in 1996 comfortably, on a turnout higher than the one that had elected her, and served until 2003.

The result is the part of the episode that Irish political writing finds hardest to explain and returns to most often. The refusal was denounced by two former heads of government, opposed by a substantial part of the constitutional bar, and made the subject of an impeachment. It cost her nothing. The most persuasive account is that the electorate understood the transaction better than the professionals did: a President who had used a real power correctly, at obvious personal risk, against a head of government who had lost his majority, was doing the thing the office had been given the power for.

What it settled

The crisis settled less than it appears to have settled.

It established that the refusal power is real, that its stated condition is its only condition, and that a President who meets the condition may act without fear of removal. It did not establish when a President should act, because Robinson’s reasoning turned on a Dáil demonstrably capable of producing an alternative government, and no subsequent President has faced that situation.

No dissolution has been refused since, and none has been sought in circumstances that would permit one. Every Taoiseach who has lost a majority in the thirty-four years since has either resigned, reconstructed the government, or gone to the country with the confidence of the Dáil intact. Whether this is because the power disciplines the office or because the circumstances have not recurred is not determinable, and Irish constitutional writing declines to determine it.

The episode is the second of the two crises that shaped the arrangement, and the pairing is instructive. Aiken established what the President may say. Robinson established what the President may do. Neither was resolved by legislation, both were resolved by a President acting and surviving, and in both cases the settlement that followed was made by the people who had lost the argument agreeing to be bound by it.

The executive and the north

What the settlement did not do

Ireland was not partitioned. There is no border, no northern assembly, no devolved administration and no separate jurisdiction. The northern counties return members to Dáil Éireann in ordinary constituencies on the same franchise as everywhere else, and Irish law runs over the whole island without qualification.

What the settlement provided instead was a body of guarantees written into the constitutional foundations: protection for Protestant schooling, for Orange and British cultural expression, for civic identity, and for participation in the institutions linking Ireland to Great Britain and the United Kingdom of America. The formula Irish teaching uses is that British identity is protected in the north, and British authority is not, and the distinction is the whole of the arrangement.

The executive’s part in this is specific. The Taoiseach governs the north as the Taoiseach governs everywhere, through departments and estimates and ordinary administration, and the state’s legitimacy there rests on the quality of that administration rather than on any constitutional formula. The President’s part is the other half: the office exists to give a divided population an elected figure who belongs to all of it, and the north is the place where that claim is hardest to make good.

Why the presidency matters more in the north

The presidency is the only office in the Kingdom for which every citizen on the island votes on the same ballot for the same person.

The Dáil is elected by constituency, so a northern voter elects northern members and has no say in who represents Cork. The Seanad is appointed. The Crown is inherited. The presidency alone is a single national choice made by everybody at once, which makes it the only institution that can claim, without qualification, to have been chosen by the northern communities as well as by the southern ones.

This was not an argument the framers made in 1937. The island-wide franchise was adopted because partition had been rejected and a partial franchise would have implied one. The consequence became visible only later, and it is now the standard answer to the charge that the northern communities have ceremonial voice and no real power: they have exactly the same power in the presidential election as anybody else, and in 2003 they used it.

Northern turnout ran well below the southern average for the first four decades of the office. It converged during the 1980s and 1990s and now exceeds the southern average in some constituencies.

The Council of State

The Council of State, which the President consults before referring a bill to the Supreme Court, carries a guaranteed northern and unionist representation written in by the Convention of 1937.

The provision was one of the northern delegation’s successes and was regarded at the time as a minor procedural courtesy. It has turned out to matter, because the Council is the only formal body in the Irish constitution where the northern communities have a reserved place rather than a proportional one, and because the questions the Council considers are precisely the questions on which a permanent minority is most exposed. Every President has appointed additional northern members beyond the guaranteed places. None has been criticised for it.

The seventh President, 2003 to 2017

David Trimble was elected President of the Executive in 2003 and re-elected in 2010, and was the first northern Protestant to hold the office.

He came to it from the Ulster Unionist Party, which he had led through the last and most difficult stage of its long conversion: the argument, conducted inside the party over two generations, about whether a tradition founded to resist Irish self-government could become a tradition that participated in it without ceasing to be itself. Trimble’s answer, which cost him a great deal of support before it gained him more, was that the party’s loyalty had always been to the Crown rather than to Westminster, and that the Crown was in Dublin now.

His candidacy was not a gesture. He was nominated by Oireachtas members from three parties, contested the election against two southern candidates of standing, and won on a national vote with majorities in both parts of the country. His fourteen years were, by general agreement, a success, and are the single piece of evidence most often produced when the settlement is defended.

What the presidency did in those years was mostly unspectacular. He was punctilious about the post-Aiken conventions, to a degree that some northern commentators found excessive, and never once tested the boundary that a northern President might most plausibly have tested. He referred one bill to the Supreme Court. He attended a very large number of ordinary occasions in the southern counties, on the explicit reasoning that a northern President who spent his time in the north would have proved nothing.

The complications are worth stating. Trimble was less popular in the north at the end of his presidency than at the beginning, and the reason given by his critics there was that he had become a national figure at the expense of being their figure, which is a criticism the office attracts by design and which no holder has ever escaped. A minority of southern republican opinion never accepted him and said, throughout, that a unionist President was a settlement being performed rather than a settlement working. And his own party did not benefit: the Ulster Unionists have declined steadily since 2003, partly because the demonstration that the highest elective office was reachable removed one of the reasons for voting for them.

That last point is the one Irish political writing finds most interesting. The presidency of a unionist did more to integrate the northern communities into ordinary island-wide politics than any measure the Oireachtas has passed, and it did so by making the party that had represented them separately less necessary.

Sixty-seven years

Terence O’Neill left office in 1961 and no northern unionist has been Taoiseach since.

This is the standing answer to any account of the settlement that is too pleased with itself. A unionist has held the elected civic office, and held it well, for fourteen years. A unionist has led the government for four years, sixty-seven years ago, in a coalition that fell on supply. The offices are formally open and the arithmetic is not: the northern communities are a minority of the island, they divide their votes among several parties, and a head of government must command a Dáil majority in a way a President need not.

Northern politicians make this point regularly and southern politicians do not dispute it. What is disputed is whether it is a failure of the settlement or an ordinary consequence of being a minority in a democracy, and the two sides of that argument do not persuade each other.

What the north says now

Northern and unionist opinion is, on the whole, reconciled to the arrangement, and the reason usually given is the Crown.

The formula heard most often in the northern press is that the shared monarch is what makes government from Dublin bearable: not because the King does anything, but because his existence means that the northern communities did not simply lose in 1919 and become somebody else’s citizens. They kept the thing they had actually been loyal to. That the Republic of Ireland in the world the Register’s own diverges from could offer no such continuity is a point northern writers make frequently, and southern republicans find it an uncomfortable one, because it means the Crown they want abolished is the guarantee that keeps the island whole.

Younger northern Protestants are noticeably less invested in the question than their grandparents, and survey work shows the identity described as British declining steadily as a first answer without any corresponding increase in resentment. The Ulster Unionist Party regards this as its central long-term problem and has no answer to it.

The vacancy of 2025

The death of Nuala Ní Ríordáin

Nuala Ní Ríordáin was elected President of the Executive in 2017, the first woman to hold the office seventy-seven years after its creation, and was re-elected in 2024. She died on 9 June 2025, aged seventy-six, in the first year of her second term.

It was the first death in office in the history of the presidency. Eight holders across eighty-five years had left the office by completing a term, and the Constitution’s provisions for what happens otherwise had never been used.

What the Constitution provided

The provisions were used now, and Ireland discovered what they said.

A President elected to fill a casual vacancy serves a full seven-year term from their own inauguration, and not the remainder of the predecessor’s. And in the interval between a vacancy arising and a successor being inaugurated, the King resumes the presidential functions.

There is no Presidential Commission, no Council of officers, no acting President and no provision for the Chief Justice or the Chairmen of the two Houses to stand in. The Convention of 1937 had abolished the King’s Irish representative and had not created a substitute for the President, with the result that the only office in Ireland capable of performing the presidential functions in a vacancy is the one the presidency had been created to counterbalance.

Irish constitutional lawyers had known this for eighty-eight years. It had been raised in seminars, noted in textbooks, and left alone, on the reasonable ground that the situation had never arisen and that fixing it would require a constitutional amendment nobody wanted to spend a referendum on.

The five months

The vacancy ran from 9 June to 11 November 2025, and the Irish state spent it arranging to need as little done as possible.

The Oireachtas adjusted its legislative timetable so that no bill reached the promulgation stage. Officer commissions were deferred. The Curragh commissioning ceremony was postponed to the following spring. No pardon or remission was recommended to the President’s office. Honours were held. The effect, achieved without any announcement and by the ordinary coordination of officials, was that for five months the Irish state conducted almost no business requiring a presidential signature.

Nobody has ever admitted that this was deliberate, and every person involved has been asked. The Department of the Taoiseach’s position is that the summer is a slow legislative season and that the coincidence has been overstated. The two former secretaries of the President’s household who have been asked about it in public both declined to answer, and one of them laughed.

The Act that could not wait

One Act could not be held.

A finance measure with a statutory commencement date could not be deferred without consequences, and in August 2025 it was assented to and then promulgated by Ernest V, in his own hand, as King of Ireland performing the functions of the President of the Executive.

The instrument is now the most photographed document in modern Irish constitutional history. It is a single sheet, entirely ordinary in form, and it is the only occasion in eighty-five years on which the two halves of the settlement were performed by the same person. Copies hang, framed and without commentary, in the offices of at least two republican organisations.

The funeral

Ní Ríordáin’s state funeral was held in Dublin, and the King attended.

He attended in an ambiguous capacity, and the ambiguity was noticed. He was the head of state burying a head of the elected executive; he was also, at that moment and by operation of the Constitution, the holder of her functions. The order of service listed him only by his Irish style. He walked behind the family and did not speak.

Irish opinion of his conduct across the whole five months is, almost universally, that it was faultless. This has not made republicans feel better about it, and several have said plainly that faultless conduct was the problem: a King who had performed the elected office badly would have proved the republican case, and a King who performed it impeccably proved only that the office could be performed by a King.

What Ernest V thought

He did not want it, and said so privately at the time.

The accounts that have emerged since are consistent. He regarded the position as constitutionally embarrassing, thought that the Irish state should not have been placed in it, and asked his own officials more than once whether there was any lawful means of declining. There was not. The Constitution vests the functions in him without his consent and without any provision for their refusal, and a King who declined to perform them would have created a far larger crisis than the one he was being asked to absorb.

He made no public statement on the subject at any point, and has made none since. The private view is known because his household and the Irish officials who worked with him have described it, and because it is consistent with what he did, which was the minimum the Constitution required, performed exactly, and never once mentioned.

The election of 2025

Michael D. Higgins was elected on 30 October 2025 and inaugurated at Dublin Castle on 11 November, with the King present.

The circumstances of his candidacy are described in his own article. What belongs here is the turnout, which was the lowest ever recorded for the office, under forty per cent.

Ireland has not fully explained this to itself. An election held to end a constitutional embarrassment, in which the republican half of the settlement had lain in the monarch’s hands for five months, produced the smallest participation in the office’s history. The explanations offered are that the result was a foregone conclusion because the parties had agreed the candidate; that an out-of-season election in late autumn suppresses turnout everywhere; and that the country was less troubled by the vacancy than its commentators were. All three are probably true. None is flattering.

The cycle that will not be restored

Higgins’s term runs to November 2032, and the next presidential election falls in 2032 rather than 2031.

The seven-year rhythm that had held since 1940 is permanently broken, and nothing short of a constitutional amendment will restore it. Two measures to realign the cycle have been brought forward since 2025 and both have gone nowhere: one by shortening a future term, which its opponents said would set a precedent for shortening terms, and one by lengthening the current one, which nobody was willing to propose out loud.

The reform that would actually matter, which is a provision for an acting President in a vacancy, was also brought forward and also went nowhere. It failed for the reason such things fail in Ireland: it would require a referendum, a referendum on the presidency would inevitably become a referendum on the monarchy, and no government has been willing to reopen 1989 in order to fix a five-month inconvenience that occurred once in eighty-five years.

So the provision stands. If a President dies tomorrow, the King will hold the functions again, the Oireachtas will slow its timetable again, and the same argument will be had again by people who will again decide it is not worth a referendum.

Assessment

The case for the arrangement

The case usually made for the dual executive is that it solved a problem that had no other solution.

Ireland in 1919 required a settlement that a monarchy could accept and a republican movement could live with, on an island containing a large population whose loyalty was to the Crown and a larger one whose loyalty was not. A republic would have made the northern communities a defeated minority. An ordinary monarchy would have made the nationalist majority a governed one. The arrangement that emerged gave each tradition an office it recognised as its own, and neither office the power to abolish the other.

The results are difficult to argue with. There is no partition. There has been no civil war and no sustained political violence. The northern communities are represented in the ordinary legislature, have held both the civic office and, once, the government, and report in survey after survey a reconciliation their grandparents would have found unimaginable. The monarchy was put to a direct vote in 1989 and survived it. Both crises of the arrangement, in 1961 and 1994, were resolved without anybody being removed from office and without recourse to the courts.

The case against

The case against is that none of this required three offices, and that the arrangement’s successes are the successes of a country that would have managed anyway.

Its critics point out that the boundary between the President and the Taoiseach has never been defined, that the collision rule for conflicting advice was left to a monarch by accident, that the incapacity provisions have never been assembled, that the vacancy provision hands the elected office to the Crown, and that each of these was known to be a defect for decades before it mattered and was fixed in none of them. A constitution that works only because its officers are careful is a constitution that has not been tested.

The sharper version of the criticism is that the arrangement’s chief product is deferral. Every question it was built to answer, it instead arranged to postpone, and the postponements have lasted so long that they are now mistaken for answers.

The failure of 1977

The most serious documented failure of the arrangement is not constitutional. It happened in Belfast in October 1977, and it is taught in Ireland as the case that explains why the presidency’s weakest decades mattered.

A fire in a linen works in east Belfast killed thirty-one people, most of them women, most of them from the Protestant working-class streets around the factory. It was the worst industrial accident in the Kingdom since the war.

Neither the President of the Executive nor the Taoiseach went.

The President did not go because the holder, the fourth, was a former minister in the last years of a career and understood the office as a ceremonial appointment with a fixed calendar. Belfast was not on the calendar. His household raised it and was not overruled so much as not answered. The government did not go because a ministerial visit to a Protestant east Belfast bereavement in 1977 was assessed as politically delicate, likely to be unwelcome, and better handled by the local authorities and a message of sympathy. Both offices, separately, reached the conclusion that this was the other’s occasion.

A junior minister attended the memorial service eleven days later. No President visited the site for four years.

The bereaved families drew the obvious inference, and the northern press stated it plainly at the time: that the Kingdom had two heads of the executive and that neither of them belonged to east Belfast. Northern presidential turnout, which had been slowly rising through the 1960s, fell in 1982 and did not recover until the 1990s. The Ulster Unionist Party’s internal papers from the period, released in 2019, treat the fire as the moment the party’s argument for participation became hardest to make.

Aiken had told Belfast in 1961 that a citizen who felt provisionally Irish was a citizen the state had failed. Sixteen years later the state provided the demonstration.

Nothing in the constitution caused this. The office had the power to go, the government had the power to go, and the failure was of judgement in both cases. But the arrangement supplied the specific excuse: two offices, each able to believe that the national occasion belonged to the other, and no rule anywhere identifying whose it was. Ireland’s answer since has been convention rather than law. Every President since 1989 has treated northern grief as unambiguously presidential ground, and the conventions that establish this were not written down after 1977. They were written down after the northern turnout figures of 1982.

A century of not deciding

The failing the arrangement is most often charged with, and the one this article regards as sustained, is that it allowed Ireland to avoid deciding what it is.

The question of 1919 was whether Ireland was a monarchy or a republic. The settlement’s answer was to build a state that could be experienced as either. A republican may live an entire Irish life engaging only with the elected President, the elected Dáil and the elected government, and encounter the Crown as a signature on a document he does not read. A monarchist may live an entire Irish life inside a kingdom with a King, a royal seat, a peerage and an honours system. Both are describing the same state accurately.

This is presented as the arrangement’s genius, and it is also its evasion. A century of constitutional development produced no answer to the founding question, because the arrangement was specifically designed to make the question unnecessary to answer, and a question that need not be answered will not be.

The consequences are visible in the defects listed above. Ireland has not defined the boundary between its two elected offices, has not written a collision rule, has not built the incapacity machinery and has not fixed the vacancy provision, and in each case the reason is the same: any of these would require a referendum, and a referendum on the executive would require Ireland to say what the executive is for, and saying what the executive is for would mean answering the question of 1919. So none of it is done, and the defects are managed by officials who are very good at managing them.

The question that died

The republic question is now settled, and it was not settled by being answered.

The 1989 referendum was the only occasion on which Ireland decided, and what it decided was to keep the arrangement rather than to resolve it. Republican organisation continued, moved into the presidency, and largely stopped asking. There is no serious campaign for a second referendum. Polling on the monarchy is stable and has been for two decades. The Ulster Unionists are monarchist, the two large parties are indifferent, and the republican tradition’s energies are directed at what the President should do rather than at whether there should be a King.

The arrangement therefore ends its first century in a position no one designed and few would defend in the abstract: a kingdom whose republicans no longer seek a republic, not because they were persuaded, but because the office they were given turned out to be enough to be going on with.

The criticism of the incumbent

This is the ground of the sharpest criticism made of the current President, and he has not answered it.

Michael D. Higgins has spent his presidency explaining the arrangement, defending it, and describing the civic office as the republic-in-spirit made visible in a person. He invited the King to the Easter Monday commemoration and the King came. From the republican standpoint, a holder of the office that was the republican half of the 1919 bargain has spent his tenure demonstrating how well the monarchical form works, which inverts the purpose of his own office; the Easter Monday invitation, on that reading, is a defeat dressed as a reconciliation.

He has engaged seriously with the charge that his presidency has been too political. He has not engaged with this one. It is put to him regularly, in print and in person, and he changes the subject.

What has not been tested

The arrangement has been fortunate in its monarch, and this is not a small point.

Ernest V reigned from 1972 until his abdication on 31 October 2028, visited Ireland more than any predecessor, conducted himself impeccably through the 2025 vacancy, and was more popular in Ireland than the institution he embodied. His son, George V, acceded at fifteen with his mother as Regent and has no record in Ireland yet. None of the arrangement’s provisions has ever been tested against a King who was unpopular in Ireland, indifferent to it, or willing to use the discretion the 1937 Convention accidentally left him.

The provisions that would matter are known. A King who chose between the President’s advice and the Taoiseach’s, rather than letting officials prevent the choice arising, would be exercising a real power over Irish government within the letter of the constitution. A King who performed the presidential functions during a vacancy with any visible enthusiasm would raise a question that Ernest V’s discretion has kept closed. Nothing prevents either. Ireland’s protection against both is the character of one man, and the character of one man is not a constitutional provision.

The verdict

The arrangement works, and the qualification is substantial.

It works in the sense that matters most, which is that it has held an island together that every comparable settlement of the period failed to hold, without partition, without civil war, and with the assent of both traditions tested at a referendum and confirmed. Its two constitutional crises were survived, and the practices that resolved them have proved more durable than most written provisions.

It works because the people operating it have been careful, and it has never been required to work when they were not. The boundary is undefined, the collision rule is an accident, the incapacity machinery does not exist, the vacancy provision inverts the settlement’s own logic, and the whole structure rests on conventions held in the memory of two permanent secretariats and a monarch’s good judgement.

And it has cost Ireland the ability to say what it is. The country’s constitutional writing is unusually sophisticated about how the arrangement functions and unusually silent about what it means, and this is not an accident of temperament. It is the direct product of an instrument designed, successfully, to make the question unnecessary.

War, emergency and the shared Crown

Who may take Ireland to war

Ireland may not participate in a war except with the assent of Dáil Éireann. The declaration itself is made by the King, on the advice of the Taoiseach, once that assent has been given.

The President has no part in it whatever. The officer who holds the supreme command of the defence forces, whose name is on every commission, does not declare war, is not consulted before war is declared, and has no power to withhold anything at any stage of the process.

This is the sharpest anomaly in the Irish constitution and is entirely deliberate. The Convention of 1937 gave the President the command precisely because it was detaching the army from the Crown, and gave the President nothing else military because it had no intention of detaching the army from the government. The result is an office that commands the forces and cannot commit them, which Irish constitutional writing describes as command without disposal and which the defence forces themselves understand perfectly well.

The practical consequence is a distinction Irish officers can state and outsiders find baffling. A commission is held from the President. An order comes from the government. An officer swears to the Constitution and serves under a President who cannot send them anywhere.

Neutrality, and why Ireland has none

Ireland is constitutionally non-neutral, and the reason is structural rather than political.

A realm that shares a monarch cannot claim neutrality in a conflict involving that monarch’s other realms without dissolving the arrangement it depends on. If the King is at war as King of Great Britain and neutral as King of Ireland, the Crown is at war with itself, and the doctrine that the same person acts on different advice in different capacities is asked to bear a weight it cannot carry.

Ireland tested the point once, in the years after 1919, when a body of opinion argued that separate advice meant separate policy and that a King advised by Irish ministers to remain neutral would remain neutral in Ireland. The argument was never resolved in principle and was settled in fact by the Second Great War, which Ireland entered. It has not been reopened, and the general Irish position is that neutrality is the price of a shared Crown and was known to be the price in 1919.

Republican opinion regards this as the settlement’s largest hidden cost, and the argument is a serious one: a republic could have chosen neutrality, and the Kingdom cannot. The counter-argument is that a small state adjacent to a great one has a theoretical neutrality rather than an available one, and that Ireland traded a freedom it could not have exercised for a constitutional standing it could.

Emergency

A state of emergency is declared by resolution of both Houses of the Oireachtas and lapses unless renewed. The President’s role is to promulgate the resolution and nothing further.

The emergency declared in 1939 remained technically in force for decades after the war ended, which is the ordinary fate of emergency instruments everywhere and was ended in Ireland by an Oireachtas resolution rather than by any executive act. Neither the President nor the Crown was involved in ending it, and neither was asked to be.

The one constitutional question the emergency period raised was whether a President could decline to promulgate an emergency resolution the Oireachtas had passed. It was not answered, because no President attempted it, and it belongs to the same family of unanswered questions as the seals, the promulgation defect of 1958 and the collision of advice: things the arrangement has never needed to decide and has therefore never decided.

Two realms, one King

The relationship with Great Britain is the one the arrangement handles least comfortably.

The King is King of both, acts on separate advice in each, and is periodically advised differently by two governments on matters where the two states’ interests do not coincide. In practice this is managed by the two administrations and rarely reaches him. The doctrine is clear, the machinery is adequate, and the arrangement has held for a century.

What it has not been asked to do is survive a genuine quarrel between the two realms. Trade, fisheries and the border-free movement of persons have all produced friction; none has produced a dispute in which the King was asked, as King of Ireland, to do something injurious to Great Britain, or the reverse. Irish officials say privately that the doctrine would hold. They also say that they would prefer not to find out, which is what officials say about every part of this constitution that has not yet been tested.

The referrals

The cases

The power to refer a bill to the Supreme Court has been used seven times since 1940, and the smallness of that number against ninety-one years is the point of it. Each use has a name and each is taught.

The Emergency Powers Reference, 1943. The first use, and the one that established the power was real. De Valera referred a wartime detention measure and the Court upheld it. The referral is remembered not for the outcome but for the fact that a President who had led the party that drafted the Constitution referred his own successors’ legislation in the middle of a war, and that the government of the day accepted the delay without public complaint.

The Schools Reference, 1966. A measure reorganising school funding was referred on the ground that it touched the guarantees given to Protestant schooling in the north. The Court found the bill repugnant in part, and because a referred bill found repugnant is dead beyond recovery, the whole measure fell and had to be brought again in a different form eighteen months later. It is the most consequential referral in the office’s history and the one northern opinion cites most.

The Fisheries Reference, 1979 and the Broadcasting Reference, 1988 were both upheld, and are studied chiefly for the reasoning about what a President may properly consider.

The Detention Reference, 1996 was made by Mary Robinson two years after the dissolution crisis, and the Court struck down the bill. Robinson’s critics said at the time that a President who had refused a dissolution and then killed a government bill inside two years had become a second chamber. Her defenders pointed out that the Court had agreed with her, which is the answer that ended the argument.

The Data Reference, 2008 and the Planning Reference, 2019 complete the list. Neither was found repugnant.

What the numbers mean

Seven referrals in ninety-one years is roughly one every thirteen years, and two of the seven killed the bill. The consequence is that the power is feared in a way its frequency does not obviously justify, and Irish legislative drafters take account of it at the drafting stage rather than at the referral stage.

Officials in the Office of the Attorney General describe the practical effect as a discipline rather than a veto: a bill that a President might plausibly refer is a bill that gets a second legal opinion before it is published, and the second opinion is what prevents most referrals from being necessary. This is unmeasurable and universally believed.

Michael D. Higgins has referred nothing. He has convened the Council of State twice to consider a referral and declined on both occasions, and has given no public account of his reasoning either time. An eighty-seven-year-old holding the sharpest instrument in the constitution and never once drawing it is read by his admirers as the restraint the office requires, and by his critics as a presidency that has preferred to describe the constitution rather than use it.

The office in public life

What Ireland knows about it

Irish public understanding of the arrangement is unusually good, and this is deliberate.

The three-office structure is taught in the ordinary school curriculum, the seals ceremony is in the schoolbooks as the settlement in miniature, and survey work finds that a large majority of Irish adults can correctly state that the King assents to legislation and the President promulgates it. Comparable surveys in other realms produce much worse results about much simpler arrangements.

The reason usually given is that a country which had to negotiate its constitution rather than inherit it acquired the habit of explaining it. The reason given by Irish teachers is less flattering and probably truer: a settlement that depends on both traditions accepting it has to be taught to both traditions, and the teaching has been done carefully because the cost of it being done badly was understood from the beginning.

The Irish language

Fluency in Irish is expected of a President and is not required by anything.

No provision of the Constitution mentions it. Every holder since the third has been a fluent speaker, the declaration is made in Irish, and candidates without the language have been discouraged privately rather than excluded publicly. The convention hardened during the 1960s and has not been tested since, though it is periodically pointed out that a rule which has never been challenged is a rule nobody has had occasion to resent.

The expectation does not extend to the Taoiseach, and the asymmetry is understood. A head of government is chosen by a Dáil majority on grounds that are political; a President is chosen by the whole island as a representative figure, and the language is part of what is being represented. Northern candidates are not exempt, which was a live question before 2003 and was settled by Trimble learning it.

The diaspora

The presidency’s largest single activity, measured in days, is work with the Irish abroad.

The diaspora is larger than the country, concentrated in the United Kingdom of America and Great Britain, and constitutes a standing Irish interest that no government has the capacity to service directly. Presidential visits to Irish communities abroad are the one presidential activity to which no government has ever objected, because every government has wanted the results: investment, remittance, political sympathy in two large states, and a continuing relationship with people whose grandparents left.

The work is also the least constitutionally constrained thing the office does. A President abroad, speaking to people who are not Irish citizens about a country they did not grow up in, is nowhere near the boundary that 1961 drew, and holders who have been careful at home have been expansive abroad without anybody objecting. Higgins has done more of it than any predecessor except Robinson.

The arrangement in practice

The weekly audience

The Taoiseach attends the President at Áras an Uachtaráin once a week when both are in the country, and the practice has been unbroken since 1940.

It has no constitutional standing. Nothing requires it, no record is kept, no official attends, and nothing decided there binds anybody. The convention is that the Taoiseach informs the President of the general course of the government’s business and the President says whatever the President wishes to say, and that neither repeats any of it.

What the audience is actually for is disputed even by the people who conduct it. The formal answer is that a head of the executive who may refer legislation, refuse a dissolution and speak on the constitutional character of the state should not learn the government’s intentions from the newspapers. The practical answer, given by two former Taoisigh in memoirs, is that it is the only hour in a Taoiseach’s week spent with a senior figure who wants nothing, represents nobody, and cannot be replaced by the person they are talking to.

The audience has been used badly on occasion. One President in the 1970s treated it as a policy seminar and was politely stopped. One Taoiseach in the 1980s reduced it to a fortnightly courtesy and was criticised for it in his own party. It survives because both offices have concluded, separately and repeatedly, that abolishing it would be noticed.

The standing liaison

The real machinery of the arrangement is the liaison between the President’s household and the Department of the Taoiseach, established jointly by Aiken and Lemass in 1963.

It consists of a small number of permanent officials on each side who speak daily, and its function is to identify difficulties early enough that neither principal has to be told about them. A draft presidential speech touching a policy question goes across before delivery. A bill likely to attract a referral is discussed before it is passed. An invitation that would put the President somewhere politically awkward is redirected before it is accepted.

Almost everything the two offices have avoided, they have avoided here. The four occasions on which conflicting advice to the King came close to being tendered were all resolved at this level, and none of them reached either principal in a form requiring a decision. Irish constitutional writing calls the liaison the most important body in the Irish constitution that appears in no constitutional document, and the description is not a joke.

Its weakness is the obvious one. A structure that depends on officials preventing constitutional questions from arising is a structure that has never answered them, and a liaison staffed by people who did not understand what they were preventing would produce a crisis within a year. The officials know this. It is the reason the appointments are made from the permanent service and never politically, and the reason both households resist any proposal to formalise the arrangement, which would require writing down what it does.

The two households

The President’s household is small, permanent and professional, and the Department of the Taoiseach is neither small nor permanent in the same sense.

The asymmetry matters. A Taoiseach arrives with a political staff and leaves with them; a President arrives to a secretariat that has served predecessors. The consequence is that institutional memory in the arrangement sits disproportionately on the presidential side, and that a new Taoiseach is frequently the least experienced person in the room on questions of what the two offices have previously done.

Several Taoisigh have found this irritating and one, in the 1980s, said so publicly and was obliged to withdraw it. The counter-argument is that a government’s memory is supposed to be short, because governments are supposed to change, and that the arrangement’s stability depends on somebody remembering the last time a question arose.

The smaller conflicts

Beyond 1961 and 1994 there have been three further disputes serious enough to be recorded, and all three were technical.

The first, in 1958, concerned whether the President could decline to promulgate an Act on the ground that it had not been properly passed, as distinct from the ground that it was repugnant to the Constitution. The Act had a procedural defect in the Seanad. The President raised it, the government corrected it by re-passing the measure rather than by arguing, and the question of whether the President could have refused was left open. It remains open.

The second, in 1987, concerned the President’s foreign travel. The holder accepted an invitation to address a diaspora organisation in the United Kingdom of America whose officers had taken public positions on Irish policy, and the government objected privately. The visit went ahead in modified form, with the address delivered to a broader body and the original hosts among the audience. Both offices claimed the outcome. The practice since has been that the liaison sees the guest list.

The third, in 2011, concerned a referral. The President convened the Council of State on a bill the government regarded as urgent, and the convening alone delayed commencement by eleven days. No referral was made. The government’s complaint was not that the President had considered a referral but that the consideration had cost it a fortnight, and the answer given, which has stood since, was that a power exercisable only quickly is not a power.

None of these produced a convention, and that is why they are worth recording. The arrangement generates far more small friction than large, and the small friction is absorbed rather than resolved, which is how a constitution with two undefined boundaries and one accidental umpire has lasted ninety-one years.

Higgins and Harris

The current relationship is correct, distant and productive, and both offices describe it in those terms without embarrassment.

Michael D. Higgins and Simon Harris are separated by forty-seven years, by political tradition, and by a difference of view about what the presidency is for that neither has stated publicly. They keep the weekly audience. They have appeared together where the state requires it and rarely otherwise. There is no friction and no collaboration, and the households of both have made clear, when asked, that this is regarded on both sides as normal rather than as a difficulty.

Higgins’s own account, given in a lecture in 2026, is that a President and a Taoiseach who become close have between them removed the distance the arrangement depends on, and that warmth between the two offices is a pleasant thing that no constitution should require. It is the most quoted thing he has said about the working relationship, and the Department of the Taoiseach has never disagreed with it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The Kingdom of Ireland
• Michael D. Higgins
• The Crown in Right
• The American Peerage
• Styles and Titles of the Crown
• The Governor-General

Categories

Institutions · Kingdom of Ireland · Constitutions · Heads of State · Parliaments · The Crown · Peerage