By Daniel Mulhall
If you visit Thomas Jefferson’s magnificent home at Monticello near Charlottesville in Virginia and view his grave, its inscription may puzzle:
Here was buried
Thomas Jefferson
Author of the
Declaration
Of
American Independence
of the
Statute of Virginia
For
Religious Freedom
and father of the
University of Virginia
It makes no mention of the fact that he was the third president of the United States.
TWO DECLARATIONS
The words that Jefferson wrote in the Declaration’s second paragraph—‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’—are among the most famous political statements in world history. It is fair to say that Ireland’s Declaration of Independence, issued on 21 January 1919, rings far fewer bells, even in Ireland, where it is overshadowed by the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916.
The philosopher John Locke (1632–1704) is generally acknowledged to be Jefferson’s principal inspiration, but the ideas of Irish-born Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) were also an important influence. Hutcheson has been described as ‘probably the most influential and respected moral philosopher in America in the eighteenth century’. His entry in the Dictionary of Irish Biography (DIB) highlights his view that ‘the people have a right to resist when the ruler exceeds his constitutional power and invades their rights’. That’s how many Americans viewed King George III in 1776.
While the composition of the 1776 Declaration is a storied event, there is no lore surrounding the genesis of its Irish equivalent. Indeed, we are even unsure who its author was. It emerged in the short space between the transformational election of December 1918 and the inaugural meeting of Dáil Éireann the following month. According to the nationalist historian Dorothy McArdle, who lived through that era, the documents approved by the first Dáil were composed by a committee made up of the lawyer George Gavan Duffy (who had represented Roger Casement at his trial for treason in 1916), the writer Piaras Béaslaí and the political activist Seán T. O’Kelly. All three have significant entries in the DIB but with no mention of their role in compiling the Declaration. The entry for O’Kelly credits him with revising the Dáil’s Democratic Programme, toning down an initial draft produced by Labour leader Thomas Johnston.
O’Kelly was no Jefferson, but he did go on to occupy some of independent Ireland’s most senior positions during a long political career—president, tánaiste and minister for finance. Like Jefferson in 1776, O’Kelly was in his 30s in 1919, which shows that both the American and Irish Declarations created conditions for younger figures to assume political leadership.
JEFFERSON’S DECLARATION
While Enlightenment ideas ran strongly through the élite strata of colonial society in eighteenth-century America and influenced the tenor of American independence, the Revolution was primarily a product of the geographical distance between Britain and its transatlantic colonies. Divergent interests bred powerful resentments on both sides. The American Revolution succeeded because, once they acquired the will to do so, the thirteen colonies were strong enough and sufficiently far away to be able to defy the London government. Ireland did not possess such assets.
The American Declaration is rightly renowned for the powerful ideas and soaring prose of its opening paragraphs, but the bulk of the document consists of a litany of complaints directed at King George III. The monarch is accused of ‘a history of repeated injuries and usurpations’ which threatened to put the thirteen colonies ‘under an absolute tyranny’. The charge sheet includes refusing to assent to laws passed in the colonies ‘for the public good’, dissolving colonial legislatures, interfering in the judicial system, maintaining standing armies in America without local approval, appointing officers to harass the public and imposing taxes without consent. The Irish Declaration was able to put the case against Britain far more pithily: ‘for 700 years the Irish people has never ceased to repudiate and has repeatedly protested in arms against foreign usurpation’. There was no need for a drawn-out argument favouring independence because the case had already been well established in the minds of those who were elected in 1918.
Why was it necessary to mount such an elaborate case to facilitate the attainment of the truths so brilliantly enumerated by Jefferson’s pen? It’s because independence was not an open and shut case in 1770s America. After all, the thirteen colonies had existed contentedly under British rule since the early seventeenth century. Americans had fought on the British side in what they called the French and Indian Wars (1754–63). Among those who distinguished themselves in uniform during that conflict was George Washington.
Almost all of those who took part in the Congress in Philadelphia in 1776 saw themselves as British (or English), and proudly so. Jefferson wrote that he would rather ‘be in dependence on Great Britain, properly limited, than on any nation upon earth’. The Declaration divided Americans, many of whom remained loyal to the Crown and fought on its behalf. The significant loyalist faction included Benjamin Franklin’s son, William. Americans, as one historian has put it, ‘portray their revolution … as the triumph of high-minded ideals in the face of imperial overreach, as a unified and unifying nation-building struggle’, when what actually followed the 1776 Declaration was a bloody seven-year war in which five times as many Americans died per capita as died in the Second World War. At the war’s end, one in 40 Americans went into permanent exile. There is a sense in which America’s revolutionary struggle was its first civil war.
American independence changed the world, but it didn’t have too many imitators. In the 143 years between the American and Irish declarations of independence, freedom movements transformed Latin America as a succession of independent states divided up Spain’s New World empire. In Europe, a number of new states emerged in the Balkans in the late nineteenth century owing to the decline of the Ottoman Empire. Interestingly, none of Europe’s fledgling states followed America’s route by forming a republic. Bulgaria, Montenegro, Romania and Serbia all became monarchies when they were freed from Turkish control.
IRELAND’S FREEDOM STRUGGLE
The 1916 Proclamation asserted Ireland’s historic right to independence in language that still reads well today: ‘In the name of God and the dead generations from which she receives her old traditions of nationhood, Ireland, through us, summons her children to her flag and strikes for her freedom’. If Ireland had a Thomas Jefferson, it was probably Patrick Pearse, whose embrace of Gaelic revivalism provided a spur to revolution in Ireland in ways not dissimilar to the impact of the Enlightenment on eighteenth-century American political thought.
Those who convened in Philadelphia in 1776 were breaking new ground, creating something that had no precedent in the world at that time. In the Irish case, the newly elected members of parliament viewed themselves as part of a nationalist tradition that stretched back to the late eighteenth century. Indeed, in their own minds they were part of a much older tradition of resistance to British rule. They were restoring an ancient nation to its proper status. This is reflected in the opening paragraph of the Declaration they adopted in 1919: ‘… for 700 years the Irish people has never ceased to repudiate and has repeatedly protested in arms against foreign usurpation’; English rule in Ireland was ‘based upon force and fraud and maintained by military occupation against the declared will of the people’. Echoing the American Declaration, its Irish counterpart insisted that only the elected representatives of the Irish people had the right to make binding laws. And there was another echo of Jefferson’s Declaration in the demand for the evacuation of ‘the English garrison’ from Ireland.
Although there is no soaring passage to match Jefferson’s evocation of humanity’s inalienable rights to ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’, the Irish Declaration does contain an aspirational agenda: ‘to promote the common weal, to re-establish justice … and to constitute a national policy based upon the people’s will with equal rights and equal opportunity for every citizen’. The Address to the Free Nations of the World, adopted with the Declaration, was clearly aimed at an American audience with its evocation of Ireland’s status as ‘the gateway to the Atlantic’ and as ‘the last outpost of Europe to the west’. The Dáil’s Democratic Programme contains the clearest echoes of the American Declaration with its desire for Ireland ‘to be ruled in accordance with the principles of Liberty, Equality and Justice for all’.
CONCLUSION
The American Declaration came at the beginning of a new era in world history. Irish independence came at the end of that era, as war and revolution, twentieth-century style, remade the world at Versailles, just as the Treaty of Paris had done 136 years before.
In the second half of the nineteenth century America became a factor in Irish politics, as post-Famine Irish immigrants and their descendants supported Irish causes. British concern about the capacity of Irish America to complicate UK–US relations played a part in Britain’s decision to negotiate the Anglo-Irish Treaty.
Ireland’s Declaration of Independence is clearly a cousin of its American counterpart. It is rooted in a rich vein of nationalist thought that reached back to what Roy Foster has called ‘the radicalization of Irish political life’ under ‘the impact of America’ and the ideals of Jefferson’s Declaration. The idealism of the founding documents of the USA and Ireland has not always been delivered upon. Is it the case that emerging countries declare themselves in poetry but deliver more prosaically?
Daniel Mulhall is a retired Irish diplomat and author. His latest book is Pilgrim soul: W.B. Yeats and the Ireland of his time (New Island Books, 2023).
(This is a summary of a lecture delivered on 2 April 2019 at the Jefferson-inspired Rotunda Room at the University of Virginia, when the author was Ireland’s Ambassador to the USA.)
Further reading
H. Hoock, Scars of independence: America’s violent birth (New York, 2017).
G. Wills, Inventing America: Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence (New York, 2018).
G. Wood, The American Revolution: a history (London, 2003).