The Politics of Utopia: Party Organisation, Executive Autonomy and the New Administration

Abstract

The construction of a new state with enduring democratic institutions, an army subservient to the civil power, an unarmed police force, and a meritocratic civil service free from political interference are seen quite rightly as the great achievement of the treatyite regime between 1922–32. The success in bringing about a viable Irish democracy is all the greater given the historical context of the new state’s birth. For the previous decade Ireland had experienced revolution, accompanied by the militarisation of Irish society. During the course of 1922 a new elite, led until their deaths in August by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, was propelled from being the administrators of revolutionary Sinn Fein’s proto-state to ministers responsible for a well-equipped functioning modern state with a full range of departments. The two regimes were of course very different. The revolutionary Sinn Fein proto-state was of necessity clandestine and other than the Departments of Local Government and Finance its ministries were amateurish or even fictional affairs. Ministers consequently treated their portfolios as parttime or sinecures. It was also a one-party regime supported, manned and protected by revolutionaries with goals which most assumed to be the same. The executive, legislature, administration, army and ancillary departments were elements of a party which had spawned a rebel counter-state to undermine the British civil administration in Ireland.