The state of Ireland a century ago and now

RTE Radio One’s History Show was in its element last Sunday. Marking the centenary of the sitting of the First Dail at Dublin’s Mansion House on January 21, 1919 — “100 years ago, almost to the day” — it made effective use of the extensive archival material at RTE’s disposal to provide a walk through of events on the day as they happened, together with analysis in studio from various historians.

Newstalk’s Talking History doesn’t have RTE’s back catalogue of interviews with participants in the First Dail to harvest for material, so relied on a more formal roundtable discussion among academics; but that made for absorbing radio too, and presenter Patrick Geoghegan did win bragging rights over his RTE rival, Myles Dungan, by broadcasting on the exact 100th anniversary of that historic event.

Both programmes placed the First Dail very much in the context of the post-World War I peace conference which was about to get under way in Paris at the time, with its emphasis on the right of small nations around the world to self-determination. Participants in that First Dail were keen to gain the solidarity of President Woodrow Wilson, a Democrat with a heavy reliance on Irish-Americans in his party. Nor did the ironies and hypocrisies of that period, with Britain stoutly defending the rights of small countries on the far side of Europe whilst seeking to suppress the same desire for freedom in Ireland, go unacknowledged.

Historian Eunan O’Halpin, whose maternal great grandfather, PJ Moloney, sat in the First Dail as the Sinn Fein TD for his Tipperary constituency, also added a welcome note of caution to the familiar refrain that the Ireland which came along afterwards somehow failed to live up to “the values of the First Dail”, as set out in the Democratic Programme that day.

There were “lots of elections, lots of political parties, lots of manifestos” in the following years at which Irish people could have changed direction if they so chose, O’Halpin pointed out. They didn’t, that’s self-determination too.

It would have been interesting to explore further the parallels between the political situations then and now. In both eras great empires were going through periods of transition; the world order was being reshaped; there was a populist rising against the status quo.

Fine Gael TD Colm Brophy’s condescending attitude towards his constituency colleague Solidarity/People Before Profit TD Paul Murphy on last Tuesday’s Today With Sean O’Rourke was a striking example of how tone deaf the ruling classes still are. He described Murphy's warning about the reintroduction of water charges by the back door as "the political equivalent of Boyzone putting the band back together again, dusting off the old hits".

Whichever of the men is right about water about water charges is beside the point. It was the smug condescension dripping from Brophy’s voice which was most deplorable. How tone deaf does a member of the ruling classes have to be these days to not realise how this highhanded patricianism sounds?