Introduction: the political context of crisis politics

The following three chapters will examine a major political crisis in the Free State during its first decade. As I will argue, these crises revealed the kinds of political obstacles – and how they changed over time – that the political leaders had to confront and overcome in their efforts to construct a modern, democratic order. Most broadly, these crises were political expressions of the competing cultural currents in Irish society. Especially in the early part of the decade, challenges to political order were understood and typically expressed through these cultural prisms. As I suggested in Chapter 3, these cultural strains became institutionalized through the constitutional drafting process. As I indicated, the result was paradoxical. Rather than solving the problem of contending cultural currents, the Constitution only amalgamated them into a single document. As the decade progressed, as the next chapters will detail, challenges to the political regime were less frequently expressed in broad cultural terms and increasingly in constitutional, even public policy, terms.

But I will argue that the shift in political language over the decade cannot be interpreted as the result of decreasing cultural opposition. Rather, different understandings of the Irish government continued to animate political life, but as the regime became increasingly adept at demonstrating its political control and authority, and as it appropriated greater political resources on its own behalf, political discourse became less general and confrontational.