Description
Book SynopsisA new analysis of the difficulties in normalising opposition in the Irish Free State, this book analyses the collision between nineteenth-century monolithic nationalist movements with the norms and expectations of multiparty parliamentary democracy. The Irish revolutionaries’ attempts to create a Gaelic, postcolonial state involved resolving tension between these two ideas. Smaller economically-driven parties such as the Labour and Farmers’ parties attempted to move on from the revolution’s unnatural focus on nationalist political issues while the larger revolutionary parties descended from Sinn Féin attempt to recreate or restore notions of revolutionary unity. This conflict made democracy and opposition hard to establish in the Irish Free State.
Table of Contents1 Democracy, historians and the civil war
2 Opposition and revolution
3 Decolonising the state
4 Making politics normal
5 Vote government
6 Cults of little personality
Coda: multiparty democracy in the Irish Free State
Index
