Animosities In A Vacuum

 
by Brendan Clifford,
Church and State; Third Quarter, 2008

 
Oxford University was appealed to by Raymond Crotty (founder of the Irish Sovereignty Movement) to take Ireland in hand intellectually, because the Irish were unable to think for themselves. It has now published a volume on Ireland as part of its Oxford History Of Modern Europe. But, alas, it farmed out the work of writing it to a Stickie academic, who was a political adviser to David Trimble during the years when Trimble was leading the Ulster Unionist Party to disaster, and who has now joined his leader in the House of Lords.

Irish Society Before the Sixties: Insular or Outward Looking?

De Valera returning from the League of Nations. He served as president of the League’s congress in 1932 and of its assembly in 1938.

Editorial Statement,
Irish Foreign Affairs; April-June, 2008

“Every nation, if it is to survive as a nation, must study its own history and have a foreign policy” — C.J. O’Donnell, The Lordship of the World, 1924, p. 145

This is the first issue of Irish Foreign Affairs, a quarterly journal established to comment on foreign policy and on global affairs from an independent Irish perspective.

The Irish State was founded with a core foreign policy idea – the notion of the right of the Irish nation to have an independent state of its own and through that state to make a distinct mark in the world. The limits of this independence were necessarily first and foremost the ability of the state to develop and act free of British constraints.

Until the 1960s, Irish citizens took for granted that this was what the state was about. People knew the Proclamation of 1916 with its foreign policy position, and there was in general a remarkably high level of knowledge about foreign affairs. This knowledge of the world was not derivative of the British liberal media and was informed by commentaries from a uniquely Irish perspective in newspapers such as the Irish Press, various journals, and even in early RTE television.

Irish Hierarchy’s Statement on the Outbreak of the Second World War

The following statement was issued in 1939 by the Irish hierarchy at their October meeting in St. Patrick’s College, Maynooth:

Twenty-one years ago the most widespread and destructive war in history was brought to an end by a solemn pact. But, though war had ceased, true peace, that real and fruitful tranquility desired by all, had not yet been attained.

The terms of the solemn pact were registered in official instruments, but the conditions for true and lasting peace were not stamped on the hearts of men. True peace is the fruit of the two great Christian virtues of justice and charity; but peoples and individuals, to an extent previously unheard of, not only ignored the dictates of the Christian virtues, but even set aside the Founder of Christianity Himself.

The Catholic Bulletin; July, 1928

click above to read in full (pdf)