From state-destruction to state-building: the civil service in revolutionary Ireland

ABSTRACT

The civil service is a creation of the state and not of any social or economic forces and has no organic relationship to society. Therefore, when a new state is established a new civil service is also demanded. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution and the First World War, the civil service of the defeated imperial regimes was dealing with this reality. In Ireland, a parallel process of state destruction and state-building occurred. However, unlike the post-Versailles states, the Irish Free State achieved remarkable stability despite experiencing a civil war. It has been proposed that one reason for that stability was that the government of the new state maintained the civil service of the former regime and so ensured continuity in the administration. By reconstructing the experience of the civil service in the period of the Irish revolution that view is challenged.

KEYWORDS:

• Civil service
• Irish revolution
• Irish Free State
• state destruction
• state building
• Treaty Article 10

Introduction

Recent research locating the Irish Revolution 1912–1923 in a global and transnational context has linked events in Ireland with contemporary crises of state destruction and state building (Mannion & McGarry, 2022; Walsh, 2015). This was an era of dissolution for the centuries-old empires of the Habsburgs, Hohenzollern, Ottomans and Romanovs and the creation of a new order of constitutional and democratic nation-states (Gerwarth & Manela, 2014, pp. 1–16). The destruction and building of states raised the question of what should be done with the civil servants of the former imperial administrations in the transition to the new republics. This article examines what happened in Ireland as the Provisional Government took control of the Dublin Castle state administration (Maguire, 2008). It challenges the often-quoted conclusion of Joseph Brennan in his 1936 inquiry into the civil service;

the passing of the State services into the control of a native Government, however revolutionary it may have been as a step in the political development of the nation, entailed, broadly speaking, no immediate disturbance of any fundamental kind in the daily work of the average Civil Servant. Under changed masters the main tasks of administration continued to be performed by the same staffs on the same general lines of organisation and procedure. (Saorstát Éireann, 1936)

Brennan’s anodyne assurance is contradicted by the recollection of Kevin O’Higgins, the Minister for Home Affairs in the Provisional Government and Vice-President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State. Speaking in 1924 of the situation two years earlier he said

The Provisional Government was simply eight young men in the City Hall standing amidst the ruins of one administration with the foundations of another not yet laid, and with wild men screaming through the keyhole. No police force was functioning through the country, no system of justice was operating, the wheels of administration hung idle battered out of recognition by the clash of rival jurisdictions. (De Vere White, 1966, pp. 83–84)

It is sometimes argued that the continuity of the bureaucracy is key in accounting for the survival of democracy and the stability of the independent Irish state, in contrast to the experience of state-building across post-war Europe. According to this view, the Provisional Government led by Michael Collins accepted the inherited tradition of civil service structures and functions of the former British state and thus ensured continuity in government. This means accepting Brennan’s argument that, so far as the civil service was concerned, what happened was not in fact a revolution at all, merely the transfer of the existing state from one political authority to another by permission of the British government. Because of its innate conservatism and its distance from the revolutionary state-building process using the same civil service in fact ensured stability and continuity (Fanning, 1978, pp. 56–58; Kissane, 2002, pp. 15–20). This suggests that Ireland under British rule was administered by a ‘Weberian’ professional, hierarchical, meritocratic civil service outside the sphere of politics that is the mark of a modern and rational state system (Weber, 1922).

This narrative of undisturbed continuity, at odds with the experience across Europe, raises many questions. Did the new government of the independent state simply continue with the same civil service given that every other institution of the British state in Ireland was abolished; parliament, executive, judiciary, police and military; why retain the same civil service? Why accept what was described as an anti-Irish, extravagant, corrupt and rundown administrative apparatus? When we turn to the experience of the Irish civil service in the transnational era of state destruction and state formation, we see it facing a revolutionary hostility to what is seen as an alien civil service allied with a determination to forge a new and more national civil service. Also, accepting Brennan’s view of continuity implies that the civil service itself, distanced from the state-forming process, was merely a passive onlooker, but that was not at all the case. In fact, the Irish civil servants were actively identifying and defending their own interests.

Europe, post-1918

When we look at the fate of the civil service across Europe’s dissolved empires, Brennan’s picture of ‘business as usual’ in Ireland is unique. The Russian Bolsheviks were the first to grapple with this challenge as, after the October revolution and the dissolution of the Provisional Government, they attempted to transform the revolutionary political slogan ‘All Power To The Soviets’ into an administrative system of the Sovnarkom. The argument that if the Bolsheviks failed to obtain the co-operation of an existing state apparatus, too complex to be harnessed by means of terror, they would not be able to manage the administration was countered by Trotsky’s view that the bureaucracy had its own interests and habits and must be ‘smashed and rejuvenated’. Russia, he asserted, ‘must break with the rotten bourgeois prejudice that only bourgeois civil servants could run a state’. The former Tsarist ministries were transformed into People’s Commissariats and the Politburo of the party displaced the Sovnarkom. Through early 1918 about 200,000 party members were placed in the higher supervisory positions in the state administration as state, government, party and society were merged into a single bureaucratic web of power. The consequence was that a crisis of the party became a crisis of government, state and society, as occurred in 1989–1992 (Orlovsky, 1997, pp. 529–533; Rabinowitch, 2007, pp. 54–79).

In the German Empire Wilhelm II, on abdication and by agreement with the new government, directed that the civil service remain in office and aid those now in power to prevent anarchy, famine, and foreign rule. In return, it was guaranteed full salaries and no dismissals for political reasons. The Weimar Constitution Article 129 forcefully stated that the ‘rightfully acquired rights of the civil servants are inviolable’ (Stolleis, 2004, pp. 49–51; 191). Civil servants, many of whom harboured imperial nostalgia and held reservations about the new democratic and republican constitution, by the habit of thought linked legality with legitimacy and continued to serve. The post-war crisis was managed by the continued functioning of the bureaucracy as it was assumed by the new Weimar government that there was in reality no alternative. In the long-term, the failure to infuse the civil service with a democratic-republican ethos, or at least rid it of imperialist mentalities, opened the road for the Nazi purge of Jewish and politically unreliable civil servants in the Civil Service Act of 1933 (Evans, 2003, p. 452).

Austria became a refuge for some of the dismissed civil servants of the former Habsburg empire. However, Austria’s new status as a nation-state enabled it to deny any obligation to these former imperial administrators, making Austro-German nationality a fundamental requirement for readmission into the Austrian public service, excluding non-Germans. In 1922, the League of Nations rescue plan for the Austrian economy pointed out that Vienna as the capital now of a country of six million people had more civil servants than it had as the capital of an empire of fifty million. To qualify for the promised aid the government was required to reduce civil service numbers by at least one-third and to suppress the pay increases recently awarded on the basis of the cost-of-living index (Von Hirschhausen, 2009, pp. 551–572). The impoverished former and serving civil servants later formed a significant element of sympathisers for Austrofascism.

Hungary endured a bewildering transition from a dual monarchy empire to a nation-state, rapidly going through being a democratic republic, a Soviet communist republic, surviving Red and White terror and foreign invasion, counter-revolution, and the reinstatement of monarchical forms in the Horthy regency. The imperial civil service continued, its membership enduring political purges and reinstatement, and also budgetary purges caused by the economic crisis of hyperinflation. Demobilised war veterans demanding posts added to the pressure brought by the number of refugee civil servants expelled from the Romanian territories of the former empire. Nonetheless, the new governments achieved significant transformations in the civil service. The old status structure was abolished with all civil servants reappointed to a new grade structure, resetting career progression to a new start that favoured Magyar nationals. Equal pay for men and women performing the same duties was conceded (Bavouzet, 2020).

In the former Habsburg Slavic territories the new republics took control of the mainly German-speaking administration, localising the centre of state power from Vienna and nationalising the civil service. In Slovenia the German language was abolished for administration and Germans dismissed (Zeman, 1977, pp. 222–251). In Trieste, those Italian civil servants who had been dismissed for disloyalty by the Habsburg military authorities after Italy joined the Entente in May 1915 were reinstated. The inherited imperial civil servants were required to apply for retention and prove their identity as Italian. For some, the most efficient way of asserting an Italian identity was to join the new Fascist movement lead by Mussolini (Bresciani, 2021, pp. 182–200). Czechoslovakia took a more pragmatic direction, retaining and adapting the imperial civil servants, but then utilising rapid promotions to advance Czech nationals (Miller & Morelon, 2019).

Alsace, a part of the imperial Reich for fifty years and almost entirely German-speaking, saw an exodus of the former higher civil servants and state employees as it was reintegrated into France. Commissions of ‘triage’ determined the national loyalties of the remaining civil servants. Alsatians, mainly German-speaking, where they found themselves reinstated lost their positions and seniority to French-speaking counterparts from the French interior. Continuity was sacrificed with increased centralisation of administration in Paris to get over inefficiencies, leading in time to demands for greater local autonomy (Fischer, 2010, pp. 128–151).

Loyalty to the nation-state replaced loyalty to an imperial dynasty as national self-determination became the principal, if not exclusive, source of political legitimacy. In all these new republics the key question was one of nationality, ‘what are you’? The ‘nationalisation’ of the civil service was usually determined by language, culture, and by education. Self-declaration was insufficient and national identity was subject to examination by the authorities. The vague concept of ‘race’ determined by blood began to gain credibility. Oaths of loyalty to the new states proved difficult in border areas where national and ethnic belonging had not yet been determined or were contested (Zahra, 2008).

Irish civil service after the union

The Act of Union had created a united parliament and state, but Ireland retained a separate administration, centred in Dublin Castle. In formulating the union of the two countries Prime Minister William Pitt had given little thought to how the two administrations would merge. Clearly, it was irrational to have two separate administrations in Dublin and London both doing the same task. Attention had in fact been drawn to this administrative anomaly in the immediate aftermath of the Union of 1801. With the union of the Irish with the British exchequer in 1817 Irish financial departments with the customs and excise all came under the central control of London. The survival of the separate Irish administration and the Viceregal Court of Dublin Castle with local control of patronage appointments to the civil service was in some measure compensation to the Protestant ascendancy that had lost prestige with the abolition of the Irish parliament. Though the separate Dublin Castle administration was identified as anomalous with London's ignorance of Ireland, always seen as racially and culturally different and inferior, allied with government inertia and apathy, ensured the two countries remained separate. As a state-building venture, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland was, therefore, a failure from the start (Hoppen, 2016; Jackson, 2012).

After the Union, the structure of government in Ireland mirrored that of a crown colony. The Lord Lieutenant, unlike the Crown which his office represented, was a political appointment dominated by the ruling party. The Chief Secretary of Ireland was also a political office and one whose authority overlapped with that of the Lord Lieutenant. Lord Lieutenants and Chief Secretary, successful and unsuccessful, changed with the change of government. The Chief Secretary answered to parliament for the Irish administration, but he did not control it (Flanagan, 1984). The under-secretary, his office permanently placed in Dublin Castle, was considered head of the Irish civil service (Parliamentary Papers, 1868-1869, L. 70. 1). Thomas Larcom, one of the most effective holders of the post, described the Irish under-secretary as being in effect the Irish government, often an abler man than the political head, the CSI, more experienced and the real master of the apparatus (NLI, 8 September 1860). However, it would be a mistake to suppose that the Irish executive had a single recognised head, even the most powerful political figures could not control the whole of the apparatus (O’Halpin, 1987, p. 7).

As well as a poorly focussed authority at the top, the state apparatus in Ireland had many deep internal divisions, displaying a random institutional design and complexity. The eleven United Kingdom departments rose like islands in the surrounding sea of the twenty-nine wholly Irish departments, and this division between British and Irish was the most fundamental one. Some of these departments were under the direct control of the Treasury in London, and relatively free of Dublin Castle supervision. These were the Board of Works, the Local Government Board, the Department of Trade and Industry, and also the Land Commission (Chief Secretary, 1918). However, because of the distance from Whitehall, these departments operated as virtual fiefdoms with their heads free of any but the most cursory control. They each had their own budget, frequently exceeded, and recruited their own staff. The rank-and-file of the Irish civil service was frustrated by the persistence of sectarianism and patronage by these departmental heads, which blocked promotion for Catholics and stifled ambition. Investigations by a parliamentary committee confirmed that in Ireland appointments by qualifying examination to civil service positions were a rarity and that the vast majority of higher civil servants were appointed by nomination (NA, Parliamentary Papers 1913, p. 893). Recent research demonstrates a very limited ‘Greening’ of the Castle administration as suggested by Lawrence. Instead, as shown by Campbell, there was a recrudescence of ‘Orangeism’ in relentless sectarian appointments at the highest levels in the final years of the Castle regime (Campbell, 2009; McBride, 1991).

Gladstonian reform of the Irish administration

Gladstone’s home rule bills of 1886 and 1893 represented ambitious attempts to reform the Irish administration. In public, Gladstone presented home rule as a great moral question of justice for Ireland, but in private he presented it as a necessary reform of an Irish administration that was profligate and beyond control (Maguire, 2010). One of Gladstone’s great achievements was his establishment of the minimal state as a central value in British public life during his 1868–1874 government with the state’s core function in raising and spending taxes achieving a moral as well as a fiscal dimension (Maloney, 1998, pp. 12–16; Parry, 2000, pp. 94–112). Through strict Treasury control of all spending and full parliamentary accountability for the money spent expenditure was curtailed. However, this was not the case in Dublin Castle. Gladstone argued that, as the Irish electorate did not have to bear the cost of the expansion in the state’s responsibilities in Ireland, its political representatives in Westminster could court popularity by freely demanding more and more state activism. A home-rule parliament, it was hoped, would impose the necessary discipline on the executive by linking Irish expenditure directly to Irish taxation. Financial autonomy would teach the Irish the virtues of frugality. This, it was expected, would require a cull of the Irish civil service by a home-rule government.

Gladstone’s 1886 home rule bill anticipated that the vast bulk of the civil service in Ireland would be transferred to the home rule administration. Under the heading ‘civil powers’, the draft bill envisaged that the Irish assembly should have complete power to pass ‘any bill touching civil offices in Ireland and the mode of appointment thereto’. Under the heading ‘executive powers’ he anticipated that all the civil service appointments already made would continue unchanged until altered by statute, except that the costs would now be charged upon the consolidated fund for Ireland (Matthew, 1990, pp. 671–672). The bill provided that the Irish civil service would continue to hold the same offices, with the same or analogous duties, at the same salaries, allowances and pensions as before but the cost would be charged to Irish custom and excise receipts or to the consolidated funds. It allowed for voluntary retirement but after only two years of service under the home rule government. Pensions in the cases of retiring or dismissed civil servants were to be calculated by the Treasury, but existing and future pensions would so far as possible be drawn out of Irish revenues. The proposed Irish parliament would bear the future cost of the Irish civil service plus any pensions consequent on dismissals, thus ensuring a prudent and cautious approach to both dismissals and recruitment. Thus, it was generally understood that a home rule governed Ireland would have complete control of its civil service and that this would lead to a significant reduction in numbers.

As part of their training civil servants were invested with a profound sense of an obligation to give their undivided allegiance to the state (Chapman, 1988, pp. 92–107). The home rule debate irrevocably broke the close identity between the Irish civil service and the state. Despite the insistence that there was a single United Kingdom civil service, no civil servant could now be in doubt that Ireland was different and that they, as Irish civil servants, were considered not only separate but also dispensable. The Irish civil service had to learn very quickly to think of itself as a corporate body united across all ranks by the threat of dismissal implied in the rhetoric of home rule.

The General Committee of the Irish Civil Service was formed in response to the 1893 home rule bill, representing every department and grade in the Irish civil service. It worked to make the status and security of the Irish civil service an issue within the home rule debate. By persistent but discreet lobbying within the corridors of power, it succeeded in winning a gradual extension in each home rule proposal, 1893, 1912, 1917 (the Convention report), and 1920, for the security of the status, pay, promotions and pensions of the Irish civil service. Most significantly of all it succeeded in winning Article 10 of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in 1921 in which the vested interests of Irish civil servants were transformed into rights that were legal and therefore defensible at law. These included guarantees for pay and conditions, with very generous compensation for civil servants who were dismissed or who simply chose to retire because they did not wish to serve the new government. This was then written into the Constitution of the Irish Free State, in Article 77, a clause which converted their previous status as serving at the ‘pleasure of the Crown’ into a contractual relationship with constitutional rights. This conferred on all civil servants legal and therefore defensible status. Irish civil servants succeeded in achieving a status far more secure than any they enjoyed under the previous regime and far in advance of that of their fellow civil servants under the British governments of the post-war period (Maguire, 2008, pp. 182–195).

The end of Castle rule

That the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, as a state-building initiative, had failed was made evident by the revolution that began with the 1916 Rising. David Lloyd George reported to the House of Commons in the immediate aftermath of the Rising that the existing system of government in Ireland had broken down (Parliamentary Debates, 3 May 1916). The royal commission of inquiry into the Rising, chaired by Lord Hardinge, utterly damned the entire Dublin Castle administration as ‘anomalous in quiet times, and almost unworkable in times of crisis’. The heads of the Irish administration, Augustine Birrell, the CSI, and Sir Matthew Nathan, the under-secretary, resigned and a military regime was instituted under General John Maxwell. Meanwhile, Lloyd George tried to inveigle Irish nationalists and unionists to accept an immediate implementation of home rule for the twenty-six counties. Having failed in that, the Irish Convention was convened in the hope that some solution would emerge. Meanwhile, the opportunity to reform the administration, which all admitted was an urgent task, slipped away.

In the absence of any initiative, the old administrative system reasserted itself as H.E. Duke (a sixty-one-year-old English barrister and Unionist MP with no ministerial experience) was appointed CSI with Robert Chalmers, famous for being the rudest man in Whitehall, as under-secretary (Peden, 2004). Dukes was lauded by Prime Minister Herbert Asquith as bringing to the position a judicial mind, a firm hand, administrative capacity, sympathy with the Irish people and a strong desire to promote an Irish settlement. His first task, according to Asquith, was to undertake a careful survey of the whole administrative situation with all its possibilities (Parliamentary Debates, 31 July 1916). There is no evidence that any such survey was undertaken. Both Chalmers and Duke made it clear to the staff in Dublin Castle that they had reluctantly agreed to come to Dublin and expected to be bothered as little as possible (Robinson, 1923, pp. 245–246). Chalmers was not going to waste his time and expertise on reform of the Irish administration and by October was gone back to Whitehall. Castle government returned to Ireland, advised and assisted by a civil service that only some weeks previously had been condemned as useless.

In May 1918 Sir John French, 1st Earl of Ypres, who had displayed an unacceptable level of incompetence as a field commander on the war front, was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. He made the formerly ceremonial position the real centre of political decision-making with little resistance from the pliable CSI, Ian MacPherson. He tried to purge the civil service of any officials with Sinn Féin sympathies, which meant all Catholics in the administration came under suspicion (McBride, 1991, p. 260) He surrounded himself with a clique of ultra-loyalist and imperialist officials and cut out the Catholic under-secretary James MacMahon.

The appointment of French, a military man, was supposed to herald an iron fist policy in enforcing conscription in Ireland. Instead, he provoked a massive mobilisation of Irish resistance to conscription that fed into the decisive victory of Sinn Féin in the December 1918 general election.

The counter-state

Revolutions, to be successful, depend more on the failure of the state than on the actions of the revolutionaries. The IRA guerrilla campaign could ensure its own survival, but it could not topple a state. As ‘self-determination’ replaced ‘home rule’ as the ideology of Irish nationalism it was the failure of the British state in Ireland that created the conditions in which the revolutionaries succeeded in taking state power. The decision of the successful Sinn Féin candidates in the December 1918 general election to assemble in Dublin’s Mansion House and to declare themselves, as Dáil Éireann, the legitimate government in Ireland was the key revolutionary action. Sinn Féin, as it moved from being cultural to a statist movement, was the first Irish party to explicitly give a state form to the historic demands of Irish nationalism for separation. Sinn Féin’s strategy was not aimed at simply destroying British state power but rather at its displacement by a national state power. Rebellion was part of popular political culture, but state-building was not. As a revolutionary strategy, originally conceived by Arthur Griffith and encapsulating a strategy and an objective in a simple slogan that was also a name, Sinn Féin aimed to construct a more democratic and effective form of Irish state than the hated Dublin Castle regime. Sinn Féin, despite the rhetoric of a Gaelic tradition, was thoroughly modern in situating nationalism within an Étatisme that gave priority to the state, not the nation, in achieving revolutionary objectives (Laffan, 1999, pp. 214–265). It undermined the claim of the British state in Ireland to legitimacy by portraying that state as alien, oppressive and exploitative and by successfully countering its status as a progressive and enlightened force in Irish society and the wider British Empire. By the time of the January 1922 ‘surrender’ Dublin Castle was stained with ‘Black and Tanism’ and viewed with contempt whilst Dáil Éireann basked in the glow of the Dáil courts and police, a local government department that was pushing through reforms, the appearance of an energetic program of industrial development; all presented to the world by a thoroughly modern and effective propaganda department. As W.E. Wylie, the law advisor to the government put it, ‘the people no longer see the government as THE government, they believed in Sinn Féin’ (NA, Wylie to Anderson, 3 August 1920).

The revolutionary administration

For a government to function requires a civil service. The Dáil had in Arthur Griffith’s The resurrection of Hungary: A parallel for Ireland some guidance on how a revolutionary counter-state should organise its civil service (Griffith, 1918). Griffith detailed how, once stripped of nepotistic and corrupt recruitment practices, a national civil service would have a profound impact on Irish education and would offer an attractive alternative to the British and Imperial services for young Irish men (Davis, 1974, p. 133). The programme of the re-organised Sinn Féin party of 1917 adopted the Griffithite policy in Article (F) ‘the creation of a National Civil Service embracing all the employees of County Councils, Rural Councils, Poor Law boards, Harbour Boards and other bodies responsible to the Irish people, by the institution of a common national qualifying examination and a local competitive examination, that was at the discretion of the local bodies (Mitchell & O’Snodaigh, 1985, pp. 35–36).

The Sinn Féin party was an obvious source for staff but one with constitutional difficulties. The party executive in 1917 included several civil servants (Laffan, 1999, pp. 190–193). Michael Collins and Éamon de Valera, who were to come to such fundamental disagreement, were at one on the necessity of separating the party from the state apparatus. Not only was it undemocratic, but it was also recognised that the fundamental weakness of the castle administration was its saturation in party politics. Collins objected to two of the staff of the local government department being elected to the Second Dáil in May 1921. De Valera from the earliest days of Dáil Éireann worked to exclude members of the party from positions within the state apparatus (Laffan, 1999, p. 283, p. 321).

In choosing its civil service one further source available to the Dáil ministry was the dismissed and former civil servants of the British government. Former civil servants would be already well-versed in the intricacies of record-keeping and bureaucratic procedures. A properly indexed and ordered record system would be well able to bear the brunt of the loss of officials through arrest and imprisonment. Former civil servants of the British regime who had been dismissed for participating in the 1916 Rising or for refusing to take the oath of allegiance in 1918 were recruited to the Dáil civil service (Hehir, 1952; Thunder, 1950, p. 3). Of all the Dáil officials it was these former civil servants who were to prove the most successful in developing a career in the Free State bureaucracy, with some rising to the highest posts in the civil service of the independent state.

Procedures in the Dáil departments were, of necessity, informal and non-hierarchical. There was no apparent division of work into clerical, administrative and executive classes, nor was there clear grading of salaries or promotional posts. Salaries were determined in an ad hoc manner by the Cabinet and, if we take a salary as reflecting grade and status, were not any higher than that of the clerical grades in the British civil service. The lowest paid were the couriers, despite the danger of their work, next the typists, above them the equivalent of the clerical assistants (NAI, 17 October 1919; 27 February; 31 May 1920). Ministers themselves acted as an administrative or first division rank. Just as in the case of Dublin Castle officials, the Dáil civil servants soon found that inflation was rapidly eroding the value of their salaries and a co-ordinated request for a general salary increase was met by the Cabinet in June 1920 with some generous increases (NAI, 10 June 1920).

As the Conservatives and Unionists in cabinet came to dominate Irish policy the deepening militarisation of Dublin Castle fatally weakened the apparatus. The early months of 1920 brought Ireland to the point of crisis. The soldiers appointed to govern Ireland; Colonel Ormonde Winter, Chief of Intelligence; General Hugh Tudor, head of the Royal Irish Constabulary; General Nevil Macready, Commander-in-Chief of the army; General Gerald Boyd, head of the Dublin Metropolitan Police and Brigadier Frank Crozier, head of the Auxiliaries; all sent to Ireland to defeat Sinn Féin by military repression, found themselves filling an administrative vacuum (Macready, 1925, pp. 448–449). Sir Hamar Greenwood, the new CSI, reported to Cabinet in May 1920 that his real difficulty was ‘the inadequacy and sloppiness of the instruments of government’ (Middlemas, 1971, pp. 16–18). An investigation of the Irish administration took place in May 1920 under Sir Warren Fisher, permanent secretary of the Treasury and head of the British civil service (O’Halpin, 1989). His report on the Irish administration, which he described as ‘woodenly stupid’, referred to the failure of administration and statecraft; the absence of an understanding of the role of a civil servant; ‘to inform to advise and to warn’ (O’Halpin, 1987, pp. 207–208). The Irish administration was overwhelmed by those who thought that there was nothing more to be done than to defeat the gunmen and that no political initiatives were required. The group of die-hard Unionists that had dominated Dublin Castle and who advised a complete militarisation of the administration were retired and a new elite group of senior civil servants led by Jonathan Anderson was installed. This group, referred to by one observer as a junta, ensured better political coordination between Dublin and Whitehall but did little to reform the anarchic structures of the Castle departments.

The post-1918 British civil service reforms

Between 1915 and 1919 a series of government reports into the organisation of Whitehall rationalised and restructured the entire British administrative machine into a highly centralised bureaucratic apparatus. As part of this, the British government established, in July 1919, the National Whitley Council for arbitration with the civil service. Civil servants now had a determining rather than consultative role in their own work conditions. The council agreed a new classification for the entire civil service to be applied across the UK with each official being allocated to administrative, executive, and clerical classes with each class structured into grades (Gallagher, pp 48-55; Red Tape, August, 1919). A Higher Executive Officer, grade two, would be able to move seamlessly from one government department to another as the work demanded would be sufficiently similar. The emphasis on class and grade organisation of the Whitley scheme was a break with Irish organisational traditions, which were emphatically departmental. Because the Irish departments had in effect a single political head, the Chief Secretary, the permanent heads had little interference in how they ran their departments and so every Irish civil servant’s career depended to an uncomfortable degree on their head of department. The Haldane ‘machinery of government report’ of 1918 and the Bradbury report of 1919 laid the foundation for modern governance and the principles that govern the relationship between the officials and their ministers to meet the complex requirements of post-war government. The civil service offered expertise whilst the minister exercised authority. Bradbury’s report saw the creation of the Establishment Division of the very reactionary British Treasury to oversee the pay and organisation of the civil service.

The British government suggested that Fisher’s investigation into Dublin Castle was merely to prepare the ground for implementing in Ireland the recently approved recommendation of these various reports. Some work was done by Sir Percival Waterfield on reclassifying the Irish civil servants according to the Whitley scheme but there was no attempt at large-scale reform. In reality, this elite group was busy preparing the ground for negotiations with Sinn Féin and the offer of Dominion status (Hopkinson, 1999; ‘Periscope’, 1922, pp. 188–190).

Meanwhile Walter Long’s Government of Ireland bill, which would establish three centres of administration with a Council of Ireland and two local parliaments in Belfast and Dublin, began to make its passage through parliament. Of the political forces then shaping Ireland the only one that saw virtue in the 1920 Government of Ireland Act (the Partition Act) were the Ulster Unionists. The key figure in turning the 1920 Act into successful regime-building was James Craig. Craig saw little virtue in the 1920 Act as such and simply used it as the means to the end of Ulster Unionist autonomy in a six-county Northern Ireland (Mansergh, 1991, pp. 153–154). Craig was amongst the more ‘state-minded’ Irish politicians of his times. He succeeded in creating out of the Ulster Volunteer Force what was in effect an armed force of the state, the Special Constabulary, to guarantee the security of Northern Ireland before the statelet itself came into existence. A skilled administrator and negotiator rather than an original thinker, the record shows that he had a keen insight into the importance of securing early control of administrative machinery. The Ulster Unionists had long lost faith in Dublin Castle and worked to recruit a new civil service loyal to the Belfast regime using a few hand-picked from Dublin but relied mainly on recruiting from local applicants sponsored by the loyalist institutions (Townshend, 2021, pp. 156–182).

The provisional government and the civil service

In a memorandum drafted in the midst of the Treaty debate, on Christmas Day 1921, Griffith outlined a strategy whereby the Dáil Éireann government would continue to function during the provisional government and then, after the establishment of Saorstát Éireann, take over the administration;

the provisional government would do nothing to consolidate the Castle system of administration by filling vacancies etc., but would on the contrary let that system wither and die and allow the Dáil system to grow and strengthen … by the time the new constitution was in operation the Irish system of administration would have superseded the Castle system. (NAI, Taoiseach, S/26 [25 December 1921])

The process of the transfer of the state apparatus in Ireland was initiated in the early afternoon of 16 January 1922 as a Dáil Éireann delegation, led by Collins, entered the Privy Council chamber in the upper yard of Dublin Castle and handed a signed copy of the Treaty to Viceroy (and Viscount) Edmond FitzAlan, thus becoming the Provisional Government of Saorstát Éireann. The Provisional Government then returned to the Mansion House, announced it had accepted the ‘surrender of Dublin Castle’ and issued its first directive ordering that

all Law Courts, Corporations, Councils, Departments of State, Boards, Judges, Civil Servants, Officers of the Peace, and all Public Servants and functionaries hitherto under the authority of the British Government shall continue to carry out their functions unless and until otherwise ordered by us. (NAI, ‘transfer of services..’,16 Jan 1922)

The Treaty dismembered the UK and weakened the British Empire. The anti-monarchism of Irish republicanism was an existential challenge to British identity, the empire, and the UK state that all revolved around a monarchist framework and so could not be accommodated, despite being the ‘self-determined’ choice of the people. Dominion status however allowed the Irish Free State to leave the United Kingdom by moving the territory into a new monarchist state structure within the empire (Jones, 2022, pp. 262–288). The debate on the Treaty from December 1921 to January 1922 had focused on the symbolic Crown and oath, failing to note that the Treaty abolished the power of Westminster and Whitehall over the Irish administration. Home rule had promised to limit the departments of state that any Irish administration would control, so for instance, Ireland would not control the revenue commissioners, the Post Office, customs and excise, the Land Commission, or the police force. Under the Treaty the entire state apparatus was transferred to the Provisional Government, including the military facilities. The Brennan Report’s number of 21,035 transferred civil servants is deceptive as it includes the postal workers, then classified as civil servants. The number transferred of what today would be considered the true civil service, was 6,403, a very small state apparatus reflecting the dominance of Whitehall in the Irish administration. For the Irish civil servants, the Union had come to an end, London was no longer in charge and they were now in the hands of a native government. Irish separatists had assumed control of the state with the power to award the loyal and punish the disloyal (Foster, 2015, pp. 172–202).

As soon as the Treaty was approved by the Dáil the civil service trade union leaders Conn Murphy and Michael Gallagher wrote to the secretary of Dáil Éireann, Diarmuid O’Hegarty, introducing themselves as representing the new ‘Executive Committee of the Conference of All Associations of Irish Civil Servants’. They offered a detailed fifteen-page memorandum on the current situation of the Irish civil service and its relationship with the Dublin Castle government, the Belfast regime and the Provisional Government. The civil servants’ memorandum was entirely positive and optimistic about the situation of the civil service. The civil service would not only willingly serve the Provisional Government but would help it secure power over the administration as it undertook the task of social transformation towards a new Irish Ireland.

What the civil service wanted was autonomy from the other elements of the state (especially political parties) with neutrality in appointments and promotions, which would be strictly by merit. This contrasted with the Dublin Castle system which was rank with sectarianism that kept Catholics out of higher grades. Also, they wanted a move away from the English caste system of classes and grades toward a far less hierarchical and more dynamic ‘One-Grade service’, as outlined in Sinn Féin policy, which would better suit the smaller Irish state. In the Cabinet, the correspondence from the civil service associations welcoming the Provisional Government was noted but ignored.

There was at the same time an intense discussion within the Provisional Government on the future civil service of the Irish Free State. This, as demonstrated in Griffith’s Christmas Day memorandum quoted above, was characterised by outright hostility to the existing Castle civil service and a determination to replace it. The Provisional Government would take control of the existing civil service and then isolate it. All business would be directed to the civil service under the control of the Dáil Éireann ministries. Collins indicated that he looked forward to replacing the ‘alien and cumbersome administration’, scrapping the inherited civil servants and replacing them with fresh ‘Gaelic’ ones (Collins, 1968, p. 27). J.J. (Ginger) O’Connell, Assistant Chief of Staff in the IRA at the time of the Treaty and a supporter of Collins, proposed a virtually militarised civil service, urged a purge of those civil servants ‘with the wrong outlook’, an immediate imposition of salary ceilings, big cuts in staffs and a government directive to ‘bring all public servants under thorough discipline and prohibit and make criminal strikes by government employees’ (NLI, O’Connell Papers).

The Provisional Government, in order to counter the anti-Treaty accusation that it was merely a cloak for the continuance of the British regime, shunned Dublin Castle and even considered its complete demolition ‘to rub into people here and everywhere that the new Government is not going to be Castle Government in any form’ (NAI, Taoiseach, 16 January 1922). An abrupt drive to centralise political control of the civil service saw the fifty-one scattered departments and offices of the Castle administration gathered under the control of nine ministries, including a new Department of Finance, ending their autonomy and establishing control under the members of the Provisional Government (NAI, Chief Secretary’s Office Registered Papers, 1921; Provisional Government, 16 January 1922; Taoiseach, 16 January 1922).

Eoin MacNeill prepared a detailed memorandum outlining a proposal to ‘make the fact of the change of government penetrate every cell and fibre of the old governmental system’. At the heart of his scheme was a supervisory commission of a small number of the best men in the civil service qualified by their ‘sound national outlook’ (and he offered some suggestions) to act as a kind of watchdog over the senior civil servants, unconsciously echoing the strategy adopted by Lenin and the Bolsheviks in taking control of the Tsarist administration.

The outbreak of the Civil War in June 1922 prevented the sweeping institutional changes that were being planned for the Irish administration. The Provisional Government now had to assert control, not only over the IRA but also over the Castle administration and the remnants of the revolutionary Dáil departments. With the Dáil, Sinn Féin and the IRA all split, some of the staff of the old Dáil departments, many of them also members of Sinn Féin and the IRA, were no longer seen as reliable in the eyes of the Provisional Government. The legitimacy of the Provisional Government was being challenged and there were instances of insubordination and refusals to obey instructions. Oaths of loyalty to the Provisional Government were now demanded of civil servants while failure to account for one’s movements could lead to dismissal. In all about 400 dismissals occurred (Dáil Debates, 24 June 1924).

Perhaps the most important reason that the Provisional Government abandoned plans to create a completely new national civil service was that the immediate task facing the fledgling state was waging war, the most state-defining activity of all (Tilly, 1975, pp. 3–89). In the debate on the election of Griffith as President of Dáil Éireann to succeed de Valera, Collins referred to the difficulties faced by many governments of the newly created states across Europe. This underlined his fear that the new Irish government could, like them, face collapse before they had a chance to become securely established (Dáil Debates 10 January 1922). With the Provisional Government concentrating on the growing military threat of the anti-Treaty IRA, its control of civil government weakened as the state became more militarised. Collins, O’Higgins, O’Hegarty, Joseph McGrath and Fionán Lynch were transferred from civil government to the army and the Provisional Government seemed to exist only as a facade for their War Council. The survival of the new state now depended on the army, not the civil government. George Gavan Duffy emphasised to General Richard Mulcahy the danger that lay in creating the impression that the ‘men who matter have gone to Portobello leaving only a feeble residue in Merrion Street’. There was a real danger that the military alone would become the expression of state authority in the emerging Free State as was happening across the post-imperial new republics of central Europe.

No challenge to the authority of the state was tolerated. In September 1922, faced with a strike by the Post Office workers, the government responded as if the strike was inspired by its ‘Irregular’ opponents rather than by discontent with pay. The Provisional Government recruited pensioners and the unemployed to act as strike breakers and issued a statement that

the government does not recognise the right of Civil Servants to strike. In the event of a cessation of work by any section of the Postal Service picketing such as is permitted in connection with industrial disputes will not be allowed.

The other civil service organisations remained aloof from the strike but the assertion that they had no right to strike made a deep impression and causing fear. It seemed to reflect the growing autocratic attitude of the government. The first issue of Iris Seirbhíse an Stáit, the journal of the Irish Civil Service Federation, of January 1923 recorded that

At the time of the Treaty the civil service had been enthusiastic at the prospects of an efficient national civil service, and celebrated the camaraderie which had infused the Gaelic League which, it was hoped, would now infuse the nation and its civil service … However, one year later the mood was one of foreboding. National freedom meant an attack on workers, on trade unions and on the civil service.

As 1923 dawned, and the Irish Free State came into being, the initial enthusiasm of the civil service was being overtaken by suspicion and defensiveness.

Independent Ireland and the civil service

The remodelling of the civil service of the independent state was subject to competing political visions as to whether it would be an egalitarian instrument of republican ambition or an imitation of British Treasury practice. Early in 1923, Professor Henry Kennedy of UCD was asked to study recruitment in the civil service generally and to suggest a system of recruitment for the public services of the Irish Free State. Influenced by the recent Canadian civil service reforms he proposed a simplified organisation for a single local and central civil service and suggested that recruitment and control of the civil service, including pay, should lie with a single non-political public service commission. This was very much in the Sinn Féin tradition and would have been warmly welcomed by the civil service associations. This reasonable suggestion was rubbished by the Department of Finance, which dismissed the report as uninformed, mistaken and even unconstitutional in its suggestions. The best system in the world, Finance suggested, was the British system where the Treasury reigned supreme on civil service matters. Kennedy’s report, holed below the waterline, sank without a trace. The departmental Whitley Councils were abolished.

The Dáil debates on the Ministers and Secretaries Act reveal the lingering suspicion within the executive council about the reliability of the inherited civil service and doubts about its willingness to embrace the revolution that had swept over it (Dáil Debates 11 December 1923). Blythe was quite frank in expressing his doubts about the willingness of the civil service, ‘which was not created as a Civil Service for an Irish State’, to accept ministerial control (Dáil Debates, 11 December 1923). Within the Cumann na nGaedheal party Seán Milroy voiced a general suspicion about the ‘rump of officialdom of the old regime’ which was still in power in the civil service (Regan, 1999, p. 200). In what was becoming a predictable contribution to any debate on the civil service the Farmers’ Party TDs used the bill to demand cuts in civil service pay (Dáil Debates, 6 December 1923). It is also clear that it was generally accepted that the state would seek to reduce its presence in Irish society and that, after the initial pressure of reconstructing the state was complete, the Oireachtas would have little to do and might meet at most for three or four weeks in two or three sessions a year (Dáil Debates, 11 December 1923).

The Civil Service (Regulation) Act of 1924 established the Civil Service Commission to recruit future civil servants by open competitive examinations. For the civil service, this was the most significant achievement of the new government. The act also empowered the Minister of Finance to make, change or revoke regulations for establishing the classification, remuneration, conditions and terms of service of the civil servants. Thus while the Civil Service Commission controlled recruitment the minister would remain solely responsible for management of the civil service. In line with the general expectation for a minimal state apparatus, Blythe expected that the Commission would have very little work to do and the commissioners would be very much part-time positions (Dáil Debates, 23 November 1923).

In the Dáil, the opposition, whilst approving of the Commission, proposed that it ought to report to the Free State parliament rather than to the Minister for Finance and that control of the civil service to lie ultimately with the Dáil as the legislative assembly rather than with the executive. The intent was to make the management of the civil service of the new state subject to a detailed code enshrined in legislation rather than to ministerial prerogative (Dáil Debates, 26 July 1923).

During the debate on section 9 of the bill, which empowered the Minister of Finance to make regulations for the control of the civil service, Blythe expressed an ‘ultra-montane’ view of the relationship between the state and the civil service, arguing the state should have absolute sovereignty in dealing with the civil servants, essentially denying any contract. It was his view that the executive could brook no interference in dealing with civil service organisations (Dáil Debates, 23 November 1923). Essentially, Blythe wanted to import into the new Ministry for Finance the customary authority of the crown over the civil service in Great Britain. However, unlike in Britain, where civil servants were entirely ‘at the pleasure of the crown’ the Irish civil servants had certain statutory rights and not merely personal rights. Their conditions were not variable at the whim of the minister (Dáil Debates, 27 February 1924). The executive council strongly supported Blythe’s resistance to attempts by the Oireachtas to interfere in his control of the civil service (NAI, Executive Council, 9 January 1924).

These debates showed a depth of unthinking hostility to the civil service which never abated and which all parties indulged into a greater or lesser degree (Dáil Debates, 23 November 1923, 25 November 1925). Even the Labour Party joined in. Speaking in the July 1924 debate on the estimates, Labour deputies William Davin and Richard Corish attacked the civil service as an unreformed and domineering ‘Castle’ apparatus that needed to be ‘cleared out bag and baggage’. The underlying assumption of these pronouncements was that the civil service of the Irish Free State ought to be a minimalist one and certainly should be smaller than that handed over by the Treaty. Inheriting pre-independence nationalist suspicion of the Castle apparatus as an alien intrusion, government policy was to reshape the civil service into a smaller, centralised administrative rather than executive bureaucracy. The new state’s civil service was viewed as an essentially administrative machine that dealt with simple repetitive tasks rather than as a source of expertise and advice.

Finance established itself as the dominant department and the flag bearers of orthodoxy. From then on the history of the civil service of the independent Irish state could be summarised as a struggle between the Department of Finance and the civil service associations. Finance, a completely new department for Ireland, aped the structures and attitudes of the Whitehall Treasury. Its structures and procedures were exactly the same as the Whitehall Treasury, though the British department was bigger and more complex by many multiples. It also retained the complex, hierarchical class and grading structure of the British civil service, though this was less about the task being undertaken than it was about intimidation and control. A civil servant who showed a little fight could spend an entire career languishing as a Higher Clerical Officer, grade two.

Article 10 of the Treaty and the civil service

For many civil servants the hostility of the new government and especially the Department of Finance, was more than they could bear and so they decided to take advantage of the provisions of Article 10 of the Treaty that promised that

the Government of the Irish Free State agrees to pay fair compensation on terms no less favourable than those accorded by the Act of 1920 to judges, officials, members of the police Forces and other Public Servants who are discharged by it or who retire in consequence of the change of government.

Under Judge Wylie, a committee processed these applications for retirement and calculated the pensions due. As the cost of these pensions mounted, reaching over £250,000 per annum for 2,386 former civil servants by the mid-1920s, a furious Blythe described Article 10 as the worst article of the Treaty. He therefore welcomed a legal challenge to the operation of the Wylie committee by two civil servants in what became known as the ‘Wigg-Cochrane case’ and ordered the committee to cease meeting. The two civil servants contended that the pensions and compensation offered by the Wylie committee were not ‘fair compensation’ promised by the Treaty. This curious case, in which the civil service associations sued the government in defense of the Article 10 rights of Wigg and Cochrane, ended with their successful appeal to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in the British House of Lords, the supreme court of the British Empire. By appealing to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council the civil service of the Irish Free State was seen as undermining the Irish Supreme Court and Irish national sovereignty.

The Privy Council decision, delivered on 3 May 1927 gave Wigg and Cochrane the compensation and pensions they had demanded by agreeing that the Article 10 rights of the transferred officers were indeed constitutional rights. For the Cumann na nGaedheal government the Wigg-Cochrane decision was far more than a dispute about pensions. The argument that the Treaty, in the words of Collins, gave the ‘freedom to achieve freedom’ that had been the founding axiom of the government now rang hollow as the Wigg-Cochrane verdict underlined the ultimate decision-making power of British institutions as arbiters of the Treaty.

The exodus of civil servants under Article 10, many of them senior grades, opened up opportunities for rapid advancement to those remaining. Clerks who had languished under the Castle regime were promoted within a few years to the most senior positions in the new departments. Under the Fianna Fáil governments, they also were appointed as directors of the new state-sponsored enterprises. The management of these innovations in state-directed development was recruited primarily from the civil service, underlining the absence of a native entrepreneurial class but also the calibre of the civil servants. This developmental leadership brought the civil service into a role that reflected its own view of itself. This new form of state power necessitated a new image of the civil servant, professional and technocratic, and the shedding of any suspicion of a colonial remnant. The role of the civil service in independent Ireland was now to be to assist the state-building process and to be recognised as an engine of social change, to be used to reshape Irish society and economy.

Conclusion

It is noteworthy that the civil service of Ireland is the only one created in the post-1918 era that has maintained continuity with that same process of state construction. All the others were swept away. However, the explanation offered by the Brennan Commission and repeated by historians and political scientists since, of continuity in the civil service being a basis for stability, has been disproved. The new state inherited a muddle of institutions and authorities in the castle regime, subject to unpredictable interventions by London and riven by sectarianism and political rivalries. It was remodelled in a turmoil of competing political objectives and visions and was generally regarded with suspicion. The sensible model of the Canadian civil service, much in line with Sinn Féin principles, was ignored in favour of an inappropriate and reactionary Whitehall Treasury model of complex classes and grades under Finance control. An explanation for the stability of the newly independent state must be sought elsewhere. On the positive side, the Cumann na nGaedheal government avoided creating a civil service corrupted by political clientelism, an almost inevitable consequence of decolonisation elsewhere. It is also very striking that the revolutionaries that turned to active politics almost all chose the path of engagement in the uncertain world of electoral politics. Very few chose what must have been the tempting option of granting themselves a new career in the emerging civil service. The creation of a non-corrupt and technically competent civil service must rank as a major achievement of the Cumann na nGaedheal governments. The Fianna Fáil government built on this inheritance but re-oriented the civil service toward a developmental role, which reflected the civil service’s own vision of its relation to Irish society.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Maguire

Martin Maguire is a adjunct research fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy, UCD; visiting research fellow at the Trinity Research Centre for Contemporary Irish History, TCD. Current research interest is on the transition to independence and the evolution of the Irish state; small state creation and survival in the twentieth century; negotiating revolution by state civil services.