The Evolution and Structure of the Irish State

Abstract

The structure of the Irish State and its development after Independence bear the marks of the post-colonial, semi-peripheral experience. Certainly nationalism and economic vulnerability were influential in shaping the role of the State. Of these influences, nationalism was perhaps dominant, as it often directed State policies down paths which economic interest did not justify. Irish nationalism however, was untypically an agent of stability rather than upheaval. Though the new nation drifted immediately into civil war, the split in the nationalist movement served in practice to shore up constitutional democracy, so that by 1926 the early ‘crisis of legitimacy’ was permanently resolved (Pyne, 1969, p. 50). Such an initial foundation of stability is rare in post-colonial societies and made continuity rather than change the defining characteristic of independent Ireland in its early decades.