The name ‘the Republic of Ireland’ trips off the tongue. No such place exists.

When he was asked during the Spanish Civil War to contribute to a set of statements by writers on the conflict, Samuel Beckett’s reply was typically laconic. Beckett’s response came on a card on which was printed simply UPTHEREPUBLIC! As a declaration of support for the Spanish republic in its fight against the military uprising led by General Franco, this could hardly be more straightforward and unambiguous. But at a more private level, the message also carried something else that was typical of Beckett, a sardonic irony. For one of the great Irishmen of the twentieth century, it was easier to declare support for a Spanish republic than for an Irish republic. By taking possession of an Irish slogan that had been used by both Sinn Fein and Fianna Fáil, and that had little appeal for him, Beckett was making a joke on both himself and Ireland. He knew very well that in Ireland being a republican meant something quite different from what it meant in a broader European context. Beckett thus summarised in thirteen letters the strange situation of a country in which people who regarded themselves as republican might be at odds with the political realities of the republic itself.

The notion of republican democracy has deep roots in Irish political history and, after the 1916 Rising and its proclamation of an Irish republic, it became the emotional framework within which the Irish state emerged. The Irish Republic existed both as a goal that would be realised some day, when Ireland was united, and as a theoretical reality in the state that took shape between the early 1920s and the late 1940s. On the level of rhetoric, appeals to ‘the Republic established in 1916’ have always had a heady potency.

It is instructive, however, to consider what the putative founders of the Republic thought it should be. The first Dáil of January 1919 – the most representative parliament that had yet sat in Ireland – was the institutional heir to the would-be revolutionaries of 1916. It adopted the Democratic Programme, which is striking for the way it defines a republic not by what it is but by what it does. And what it does is overwhelmingly concerned with the treatment of the most vulnerable citizens – the young and the old.

In fewer than 600 words, the Democratic Programme sets out a number of principles, both theoretical and practical. It affirms that ‘all right to private property must be subordinated to the public right and welfare’. It sets down the governing ideals as ‘Liberty, Equality, and Justice for all’. It declares the right of every citizen to an ‘adequate share of the produce of the Nation’s labour’. Turning to the practical values of public policy, it boldly affirms that ‘It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing, or shelter’. And if the welfare of children is to come first, the second and third priorities will be care for the elderly and the creation of a decent health system:

It is not accidental that the Democratic Programme was barely referred to again. (Politicians much preferred the vaguer, more grandiose rhetoric of the 1916 proclamation.) After Independence, the Programme’s delineation of the defining characteristics of the Republic was a hideous embarrassment. In the real Ireland, private property almost always trumped the common good. Neither liberty, equality or justice for all was obvious in a society that imposed severe restrictions on private and intimate behaviour, that tolerated vicious poverty and that excluded and exported a huge proportion of its population. The Programme’s belief that the welfare of children would be the first concern of Irish governments was grotesquely mocked in the hellish industrial school system in which 170,000 children (more than one child in every hundred) were incarcerated.2 Even the ‘odious, degrading and foreign’ workhouses were left in place, albeit with the friendlier, more Irish name of ‘county homes’. If what the framers of the Democratic Programme outlined is called a Republic, some other word entirely has to be invented for the state that actually emerged from their struggles.

Perhaps, in hindsight, it was never likely that a real republic would be born in the circumstance of early twentieth-century Ireland. Mainstream Irish nationalism paid little attention to Ulster Protestant identity (which it simply dismissed, in the words of the 1916 Proclamation, as ‘differences fostered by an alien government’ to which the Republic would be ‘oblivious’). That, in turn, made partition virtually inevitable. James Connolly’s prediction that partition would result in a ‘carnival of reaction, north and south’ proved to be all too accurate, with each of the post-partition entities defining itself through its majority religious and ethnic identity.

Equally, though, the South itself may have lacked the kind of civic culture from which a republic could grow. George Russell (AE), one of the guiding spirits behind the Co-Operative Movement, argued rather presciently in 1912 that a successful democratic state could be built only on the basis of a thriving culture of citizenship: ‘I understand and sympathise with the fixed passion of the politician for his theory of an Irish State, but I do not believe he will gain the results he hopes for unless his State is composed of people who may truly be called citizens.’ Russell suggested that ‘If we have in the country parishes of Ireland a host of unorganised peasant proprietors, each pushing a trivial agricultural business, each acting alone and never in union with his neighbours, the energy of self-interest in its lower forms will become the predominant energy, and this will overflow into rural and county councils, and we shall have frequent jobbery; and in the region of national politics we shall have the conflict of personalities, rather than the pursuit of public interests.’3 In spite of the valiant efforts of organisations like the Co-Operative Movement itself, Russell’s fears proved to be all too well-grounded. A society of peasant proprietors did not prove to be fertile ground for the growth of a republic.

Nevertheless, for well over half a century now, it has been normal for most people living in the twenty-six counties to say that they come from ‘the Republic’. It is telling, though, that even the use of this word to describe the state is mired in confusion and ambivalence. The constitution declares the name of the state to be Ireland or Eire. There is no mention of a republic. The Republic of Ireland Act of 1948 declares that ‘the description of the state shall be the Republic of Ireland’, but the constitution has never been amended along these lines. In bringing forward the Republic of Ireland Bill in 1948, the then Taoiseach John A. Costello explained that there would be a difference between what the state was called and what it was: ‘There is the name of the State and there is the description of the State. The name of the State is Ireland and the description of the State is the Republic of Ireland.’4

But even as a description, the Republic barely exists. The official government website nowhere refers to the Republic of Ireland or even states that Ireland is a republic. In the diplomatic sphere, while the Irish state has accepted credentials from ambassadors addressed to ‘Ireland’, the ‘Republic of Ireland’, or the name of the president, it will not accept credentials addressed to the ‘Irish Republic’ because this last term was the name used in the declaration of independence in 1919 and encompassed all thirty-two counties.

All of this has little effect on the view most of the state’s citizens take of their country, but the confusion is, in its own way, rather apt. If we’re not sure whether to call our state a republic or not, it’s partly because it is and it isn’t. In the sense in which most people use the word – a liberal democracy without a monarch – Ireland obviously is a republic. But a broader notion of republicanism raises basic questions about the reality of Ireland’s democracy. Using the definition articulated so powerfully in the work of Philip Pettit,5 we can ask whether Ireland is ‘a state that can operate effectively against private domination, helping to reduce the degree of domination people suffer at the hands of other individuals and groups … a state that is organised in such a way that it will not itself represent a source of domination in people’s lives… a state that is conducted for the public interest, that pursues its policies in the public eye, and that acts under public control – a state that is truly a res publica, a matter of public business’.

The short answer to those questions is ‘not really’. Far from operating against ‘private domination’, the Irish state...