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Pete Hodson
enemy. Disaffected separatists who rejected the Anglo-Irish Treaty of
19212 – particularly the partition and Crown allegiance caveats – waged
a pan-Ireland guerrilla campaign which threatened to render the two vulnerable, nascent States ungovernable. The destabilising effect posed by
the Irish Republican Army (IRA) was sufficient enough to induce a belligerent response from both the Parliament of Northern Ireland and the
Oireachtas, despite the far closer ideological affinity between the armed
“recalcitrant minority” (Brown 1981: 46) and the latter administration.
The creation of formidable national defence structures was a feature
common to both States. Prime Minister Craig, as well as President Cosgrave, was determined “to defend the infant democracy by mass killing
if necessary” (Garvin 1996: 163) and neither Government shirked from
the use of force. Authoritarian, highly centralised but constrained by
tight finances, the two Governments were prepared to robustly enforce
law and order and defend the democratic principle that “policy must be
decided by the wisdom or un-wisdom of the majority of the people of
the country” (O’Higgins 1923: 16). The draconian reality of the security apparatus created under Cosgrave and Craig’s leadership contrasted
sharply with such rhetoric of democracy and tolerance. The Special Powers Act (1922) in Northern Ireland and the numerous Public Safety Acts
(from 1922) in the Free State were, for all intents and purposes, virtually
identical. The coercion acts gave both Governments sweeping powers to
protect majoritarian democracy at the expense of civil rights, which in
the Irish Free State included “the use of flogging, but also provided for
the establishment of military courts with the power to execute prisoners”
(Follis 1995: 110).
The Treaty denied Sinn Féin (SF), the successor to the IPP as the voice of Irish nationalism, a thirty-two county State. It also insisted that the new twenty-six county nationalist
State remained symbolically British, thus denying the much-craved republican status.
The refusal of a large minority of SF supporters to endorse this resulted in the division of
SF into pro- and anti-Treaty factions, the main cleavage in southern Irish politics which
remains (though in a much modified form) to the present day.
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