THE meeting in Dublin’s Gresham Hotel to establish an Irish Olympic Committee (IOC) in April 1920 had as much to do with politics as it did sport. Irish athletes had competed with remarkable success at every modern Olympic Games since their revival in 1896, but never under the flag of their own country, instead taking part under the British flag or that of the nation to which they had emigrated.
The founding of the IOC aimed to change that: its goal was to secure the right to Irish representation from the International Olympic Committee at the Antwerp games later that year. Before travelling to Belgium to present Ireland’s Olympic claims in person, the IOC’s first president, J.J. Keane, sought the support and services of the Dáil’s overseas representatives.
However, his efforts ended in failure, falling foul of the conservatism – and political prejudices – of an International Olympic Committee whose decision-making was controlled by a small coterie of member-states that included the UK.
The overlap of Ireland’s Olympic claims with the rise of Sinn Féin and its assertion, following the 1918 election, of Irish sovereignty in the tangible form of Dáil Éireann was no accident. What Ireland was attempting in the sporting sphere was a mirror of what was already being tried politically: the securing of international recognition for a separate, independent Ireland.
A sovereign Irish republic had, of course, been proclaimed in front of the GPO in Dublin at Easter 1916, and the seeking of a wider support for that status had been endorsed at Sinn Féin’s Ard-Fheis in October 1917, but the global context in which Irish self-determination would be considered was radically altered by the fallout from the First World War.
Empires had collapsed, new states and republics had been established in Austria, Czechoslovakia and Hungary by late 1918, with more to follow, and a peace conference had been convened for Paris in January 1919 to set the foundations for a new international order.
Among the ‘big powers’ represented in Paris was the United States, whose President, Woodrow Wilson, had earlier outlined his vision for a post-war world rooted in his ‘fourteen points’ – a set of principles that had at their core the concept of national self-determination. This, of course, was the very basis of Sinn Féin’s 1918 election manifesto and its claims to international legitimacy.
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Unlike pre-war Irish nationalism, which was fixated on Home Rule, London and the machinery of British politics, Sinn Féin’s activity incorporated a more international focus. Sinn Féiners understood themselves as operators on a global stage and acted accordingly. When, for instance, Dáil Éireann met for the first time on 21 January 1919 at Dublin’s Mansion House – just three days after the opening of the Paris conference – it theatrically presented as one of its foundational documents a ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’, which, invoking Wilsonian rhetoric and asserting Irish antiquity and distinctiveness, urged “every free nation to uphold her [Ireland’s] national claim to complete independence as an Irish Republic”.
As its careful choreography intended, this first – and very public – session of the Dáil was geared less to those in attendance than to the outside world, and news of its deliberations circulated widely in the international press. But simply exhorting support for Irish independence did not mean that the cause itself was actually advanced.
The problem for Ireland was that it was seeking severance not from one of the defeated, disintegrating empires but from Britain, one of the big, victorious powers, which actively worked to scupper the efforts of the Irish delegation in Paris
It was notable, therefore, that Foreign Affairs was among the first ministries established by the Dáil (under Count George Plunkett, father of one of the executed 1916 leaders) and that the French-speaking TD, Seán T. O’Kelly, was swiftly dispatched to Paris to establish an office (where he was later joined by George Gavan Duffy), their primary purpose being to present the case on the ground for Irish entry to the peace conference. This, in essence, was Ireland’s first diplomatic mission. It didn’t succeed.
The problem for Ireland was that it was seeking severance not from one of the defeated, disintegrating empires (Austro-Hungarian, German or Ottoman) but from Britain, one of the big, victorious powers, which actively worked to scupper the efforts of the Irish delegation in Paris. No help was forthcoming from the United States either: for all that Woodrow Wilson’s talk of ‘self-determination’ had helped fill Sinn Féin’s rhetorical sails, the American President was reluctant to tackle the Irish question, on the basis, he maintained, that it was an internal British matter.
The failure of the Irish delegates to get a hearing in Paris – always a remote prospect, O’Kelly had quickly concluded – led to a shift in the Dáil’s approach. A presence in Paris was maintained, but diplomatic efforts broadened, with the establishment of a consular network of envoys, official and unofficial, across Europe and beyond.
In London, for instance, Art O’Brien was established as the permanent Irish representative and he combined work on behalf of the Dáil with directing the affairs of the Irish Self-Determination League (similar leagues sprouted in Canada, Australia and New Zealand); in Madrid, Máire O’Brien led the dissemination of Dáil propaganda; Nancy Wyse-Power, daughter of Ladies Land League and suffrage campaigner, Jennie, established a foothold in Berlin; George Gavan Duffy, after a spell in Paris, became Sinn Féin envoy in Rome. The peripatetic TD Dr Patrick McCartan travelled to Moscow in a doomed attempt to muster Russian support, while further afield in South America, the Irish propagandist effort was led by Eamonn Bulfin, Laurence Ginnell and Patrick Little.
This is not an exhaustive list. There were other envoys, other foreign missions and diaspora-led campaigns, such as the race conventions held in Philadelphia, Melbourne and Buenos Aires from 1919. Significant, too, was the protracted presence in the United States of the President of Sinn Féin and Dáil Éireann, Éamon de Valera, who was absent from Ireland for much of the War of Independence following his dramatic escape from Lincoln Prison in February 1919.
De Valera departed for America, land of his birth, in June of that year and didn’t return to Ireland until December 1920: in the intervening eighteen months, he toured extensively, received rapturous receptions in stadiums and theatres, and helped both to raise funds for the fledgling republic – in the form of Dáil ‘bond certificates’ – and whip up a wave of publicity around Ireland’s independence demand.
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De Valera’s gruelling American adventure was not without difficulties, however: announced to US audiences as ‘President of the Irish Republic’, a title he did nothing to disavow, issues of money, personality and political strategy led to a falling out with significant Irish-American figures. De Valera’s determination to influence the programmes of the Democratic and Republican parties in advance of the November 1920 US presidential election, for instance, led him to ignore advice from the influential and politically experienced Judge Daniel Colohan, the effect of which was that neither party committed any mention of Ireland to their campaign platforms. That presidential election – comfortably won by Republican Warren G. Harding – underscored the extent to which, in American politics, Irish issues were always subordinate to domestic political considerations, allowing a relieved British ambassador to the US to crow that “for the first time on record, an electoral campaign has been conducted in the United States without the political ‘crimes’ of England being dragged into the fray”.
And yet there was no shortage of international attention on those ‘crimes’. The excesses of British policy in Ireland in the second half of 1920 – repression and reprisals – were widely publicised in the international press, in part a measure of the effectiveness of the Dáil’s network of envoys, but a consequence, too, of the work of the Dáil’s publicity department and the credibility accorded its output, particularly the factsheet-style Irish Bulletin, by foreign correspondents.
The seventy-four-day hunger strike of Lord Mayor of Cork Terence MacSwiney, which ended in his death in Brixton Prison in October 1920, also reverberated worldwide: the drawn-out, dreadful drama of MacSwiney’s sacrifice was closely followed by a rapt international media, catalysing organised protests and expressions of sympathy and support.
From the United States, for instance, the Jamaican-born nationalist leader, Marcus Garvey, sent a message, early in the hunger strike, to Brixton’s prison chaplain. “Convey to McSwiney [sic] sympathy of 400,000,000 Negroes,” it read. But it wasn’t only the actions of MacSwiney that impressed Garvey: he, like anti-imperialists in Egypt and India, saw in the Irish separatist struggle a cause akin to his own and an example of how to advance ideas of black liberation across Africa, the Caribbean and, of course, the United States.
When the Anglo-Irish war ended in truce and the Anglo-Irish Treaty followed it in December 1921, Garvey was quick to give it his blessing. In a message to lead negotiator Arthur Griffith, he offered congratulations on his “masterly achievement of partial independence for Ireland” and exclaimed, “Long live the Irish Free State”. But just as the Treaty divided the Dáil – it conferred upon the twenty-six counties the status of a ‘Dominion’ within the Empire as opposed to a republic free of it – so too did those divisions manifest among those who had theretofore spearheaded Sinn Féin’s overseas diplomatic efforts, some going so far as to now devote themselves to denying legitimacy to the new Irish Free State overseas.
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The international community determined otherwise. The Irish Free State came into force on 6 December 1922 – the first anniversary of the signing of the Treaty – and the following year, on 10 September, it became a member of the League of Nations, the inter-governmental organisation established out of the First World War to promote international cooperation, peace and security. Entry into the League was, as one approving contemporary chronicler put it, “an express and clear recognition by the world at large of our distinct nationhood and of our newly established freedom and autonomy”. But the Free State that joined the League of Nations was nowhere mentioned in the accession speech delivered in Geneva by William T. Cosgrave, President of its Executive Council.
Instead, Cosgrave made repeated reference to “Ireland”, the partition of which would acquire a more permanent than provisional appearance in 1925 when a boundary commission, born out of the Treaty, failed to result in an adjustment of territorial boundaries to Irish nationalists’ satisfaction.
With the Irish Free State’s internationally recognised border now fixed, the state grasped every opportunity to emphasise that everything was not as it appeared and that it retained a right to represent the whole island. The Olympic Games were one such opportunity. So, when, in 1928, the IOC came looking for £1,000 to support its participation at the 1928 Olympic games – a separate Irish team had first participated in Paris four years earlier – the Irish government weighed up the pros and cons of doing so. In the end, the money was agreed, with the Department of Finance swayed by the fact that the Irish team would represent “not merely” the Irish Free State, but Ireland “as a whole”.
Even for a cash-strapped, cost-conscious Department of Finance, the politics of anti-partition took precedence as “no opportunity”, it was determined, was to be lost in emphasising “amongst the nations the essential unity of Ireland”.
Revolutionary Times, Ireland 1913-23: The Forging Of A Nation by Mike Cronin and Mark Duncan, published by Merrion Press, is out now, RRP £27.99