‘We have gone through quite sufficient in this distracted country’: the Royal Dublin Society and the new Irish state 1922–32

ABSTRACT

Following the Irish War of Independence, 1919–21, and the ratification of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1922 the Irish Free State left the United Kingdom. Its leaders had been revolutionaries, whose explicit objective had been to overturn British authority in Ireland. Whilst the British ceded control of most of the island to the new state, an Anglo-Irish, Protestant, elite remained. The Royal Dublin Society (RDS) was the most prominent institution of it. As such, it might be expected that relations between the RDS and the new Irish state would be adverse. However, they were excellent. Drawing largely on the recently catalogued RDS archive, this article explains a seeming incongruity. It does so with general reference to the theme of agricultural development and specific reference to the agendas of the RDS and the new state; the role of key figures; the British foot-and-mouth disease crisis of the 1920s; and the response to partition. It also tests the academic discourse on what the Irish Revolution represented in socio-political terms, and the position of the former Protestant plutocracy in post-independence Ireland.

KEYWORDS:

• Irish Revolution
• Irish Free State
• Britain
• Protestant
• agriculture
• Cumann na nGaedheal

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh

Mícheál Ó Fathartaigh is a political and agricultural historian, lecturing currently for Boston University. He is the author of Birth of a State: The Anglo-Irish Treaty (with Liam Weeks, Irish Academic Press, 2021) and Developing Rural Ireland (Wordwell Books, 2021).

Mel Farrell

Mel Farrell is a political historian. He is the author of Party Politics in a New Democracy: The Irish Free State, 1922–37 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017) and was recently a co-editor, with Elaine Callinan and Thomas Tormey, of Vying for Victory: The 1923 General Election in the Irish Free State (UCD Press, 2023).