Historical revisit: Dorothy Macardle, The Irish Republic (1937)

Dorothy Macardle’s vast The Irish Republic first appeared in 1937, the year in which her inspiration and her patron de Valera unveiled Bunreacht na hÉireann, his own monument to pragmatic republicanism. Macardle, in Joseph Lee’s phrase the ‘hagiographer royal to the Irish Republic’, is rather out of fashion as a narrator of and commentator on the emergence of independent Ireland; it appears to be largely committed republicans and those who study them who now acknowledge and draw on her ‘classic’ work. The book itself is long out of print. Yet in its construction, its breadth of treatment, its declared ambition and its obvious subtexts, it stands apart both from militant republican writing of the period and from more formally dispassionate academic works. It is also a monument to the emergence of the ‘slightly constitutional’ politics of the first generation of Fianna Fáil, the party created by de Valera to bring the majority of republicans across the Rubicon from revolutionary to democratic politics. Finally, in its faithful and adoring exegesis of most of de Valera’s twists and turns during his tortuous progress from armed opponent to consolidator of the twenty-six-county state, it provides a possible historical template for laying aside the armed struggle which has contemporary resonances for a republican movement attempting to talk its way into a new form of non-violent politics in Northern Ireland without passing under the yoke of unequivocal decommissioning: in that context, a senior Irish official recently pointed somewhat wistfully to de Valera’s statement of 23 July 1923 (as reproduced by Macardle) that ‘the war, so far as we are concerned, is finished’ (p. 787).