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The Impact of Eamon De Valera: Domestic Causes of the Anglo-Irish Economic War

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 July 2014

Paul M. Canning
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Extract

When analyzing the origins of the Anglo-Irish “economic war” of 1932-1938, historians have focused primarily on two precipitant causes: the destablizing effect on Anglo-Irish relations of Eamon de Valera's return to power in Ireland in 1932, and the reaction to the resulting situation by the British Government. Underlying both were unresolved constitutional and financial questions. Chief of these were the oath of allegiance to the king, which de Valera had pledged, if elected, to remove from the Free State Constitution, and the land annuities, which were annual instalments paid by Irish tenant farmers purchasing their land through loans advanced by the British Government under the Land Purchase Acts of 1870-1909. These payments de Valera had promised to withhold from the British Government.

Although the dispute between de Valera and the British Government has been studied extensively, the political context in which it was carried on has not. This is especially true on the British side. The British Government and its Dominions Secretary, J.H. Thomas, are often criticized for their handling of the affair. F.S.L. Lyons, for example, writes that Thomas “sniffed the approach of treason in every tainted breeze and saw in the return to power in 1932 of the intransigent republican of 1922 a direct threat to the whole basis of the settlement so painfully reached in the Treaty.” A.J.P. Taylor, though no less critical of Thomas, sees the whole affair more broadly as “a last kick of the old rule that English statesmen took leave of their senses when dealing with Ireland.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Albion , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , Fall 1983 , pp. 179 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © North American Conference on British Studies 1983

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