For readers planning to attend or to tune into Staging the Treaty, Theo Dorgan’s restaging of the Treaty Debates (see pp 6–7), a spoiler alert—it ends badly. Within six months its terms would provoke a bitter civil war in what was to become the Irish Free State, and its other malign outcome—partition—is still with us a century later. How, then, are we to judge the Treaty on its own terms, in its own time? In most military conflicts, the side that leaves the field—as the British did from most of Ireland—is deemed the loser, and, as Brian Hanley points out (pp 14–15), the United Kingdom lost proportionally as much territory as did Germany after Versailles.
In addition, the Treaty granted the Free State complete fiscal freedom—commercial, industrial and financial; control of land systems; and the power and freedom to develop the resources and industries of the country. But another spoiler alert—that ended badly, too, at least until the 1960s, if not the 1990s, owing to the ultra-conservative economic policies pursued by successive Irish governments, whether nominally pro- or anti-Treaty. The Treaty can hardly be blamed for that.
One more spoiler alert: the most compelling argument in favour of the Treaty, that it gave ‘the freedom to achieve freedom’, has been vindicated. Within twenty years its most obnoxious features—the oath, the governor-general, etc.—would be gone, although that’s only clear with the benefit of hindsight. Moreover, the outcome—an independent sovereign republic—is precisely what the anti-Treaty side had argued for.
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