Dáil’s 90th anniversary - First Dáil faced real challenges

IT would overestimate the challenges faced by the members of the first Dáil, who held their inaugural meeting 90 years ago yesterday, to suggest that they were greater than those faced by President Barack Obama on this, his first morning in the Oval Office.

However, it is much easier to argue that they were far, far greater than anything faced by Leinster House’s incumbents. The members of that 1919 Dáil assembled as most of Europe was still in the grip of the terrible consequences of World War I. All across the continent war-weary peoples struggled to rebuild their lives unaware that just two decades later even greater carnage and destruction would follow.

The members of that first Dáil assembled while a foreign power still occupied this country. They had neither the means to enforce laws they adopted nor the means to raise revenue much less a currency of their own. Many of them were held in British jails when they were elected to the Mansion House assembly.

They had yet to win the support let alone recognition as an independent nation. They certainly did not have the support of a confederation of neighbours as powerful, as rich and as comforting as the European Union.

Neither did they have email, the internet or even mobile phones to spread their message. How theycarried out basic functions of government or communicated can only be a mystery in to the children of the 21st century.

Yet they persisted despite everything, because like President Obama, they believed that right was on their side and that they could best serve the future by shaping it. Their idealism, and to an extent their naivety, was represented through their Democratic Programme in which they stated their objectives and principles.

“We declare that we desire our country to be ruled in accordance with the principles of liberty, equality, and justice for all, which alone can secure permanence of government in the willing adhesion of the people,” it proclaimed.

Almost a century later these objectives have been partially realised but they did not imagine an Ireland, as described in a commemorative speech given by Taoiseach Brian Cowen yesterday, as a place where “economic turmoil will touch the lives of almost all Irish people in the difficult years ahead”.

Yet, there is a common thread which reaches to President Obama’s America too. As our grandparents and great grandparents we were urged in 1919, as Americans were encouraged yesterday, Mr Cowen urged us all to “work for the common good” by accepting uncomfortable measures to confront the challenges facing us all. Addressing the social partners Mr Cowen said workers in the public and private sector will have to “share the burden of adjustment ... the scale of the adjustments now required represent a major political, economic and social challenge for every single person in this country”.

So there we have it, struggle then and struggle now, though on a completely different scale and of completely different consequence. Let’s hope we have the good sense to heed this simple call because it is certain that it pales into insignificance in comparison to the challenge accepted by the 105 members of the first Dáil.

There is another certainty here too. Our senior bankers and their dependants should give thanks that our current Minister of Finance is unlikely to resort to the methods that made our first Minister for Finance — Michael Collins — the force he was in the shaping of this country.