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.