Timeline: 100 years since Ireland joins League of Nations

On a sunny morning in Paris in early 1919, Irish diplomat Sean T O'Kelly stood on the pavement outside the office of French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau.

He was suited and booted.

In his hand he held a document outlining the case for Irish independence. He wanted it put on the agenda of the peace conference that was then deciding the shape of the world after the 1914-18 Great War. If there was to be a new League of Nations, Ireland wanted to be one of those nations.

The 'poilus', the French soldiers guarding the building, looked on impassively.

Sean T. O'Kelly never got that meeting.

America backtracks

A year before, the US President Woodrow Wilson had electrified the world and given hope to independence movements across the globe when, in his 'Fourteen Points' statement, he called for a League of Nations to guarantee the independence and the territorial integrity "of great and small states alike".

By 1919, the same President was backtracking. He never meant his plan to apply to Ireland. Ireland was an internal matter for America's wartime ally, Great Britain.

In Ireland, enthusiasm for the League of Nations curdled into disillusionment.

The suspicion grew that the league would be another vehicle for the big states to get their way, for those with all the power to hang on to it.

But despite their suspicions of the motives of the big powers, the Republican leadership had eyes on Europe, even as the War of Independence raged.

Enter the legionnaire

Michael MacWhite had just been discharged from the French Foreign Legion, a three-times-decorated combat veteran who returned to Dublin after the Great War to offer his services to the Republican cause. His years spent in Europe as a teacher and newspaper correspondent convinced the leadership to send him to Geneva in 1921, to open an office to represent whatever government emerged from the war.

Chasing the prize

The Provisional Government and later the Free State Government saw big prizes in league membership. It would mark out the new state as an independent entity, not in the league under the umbrella of the British Empire, but accepted in its own right.

Membership would offer a way to hold Britain to the terms of the Anglo-Irish Treaty which had brought to an end the War of Independence but then split the Republican movement forever, and triggered the Civil War.

Membership – and registration of the treaty at the League of Nations – would reinforce the Irish position that the treaty was an international agreement reached between two separate entities, not an internal 'arrangement' between two parts of the same entity, as the British understood it.

The conviction was that, if it was handled right, it would strengthen Ireland's hand in the negotiations on the border with Northern Ireland.

Not applying for and receiving admission would send the opposite signal to Britain and the rest of the world: that the Free State accepted and acknowledged its place as a subsidiary in Britain's immediate orbit.

The British government would not stand in the way. Prime Minister Lloyd George's letter to Arthur Griffith as far back as December 1921 had made it clear: in British eyes, Ireland was a dominion of equal standing with Australia Canada and South Africa and should be a member.

Irish-America remained deeply suspicious of the league; it was seen as a British project designed to keep the Big Four powers of the Great War - Great Britain, France, the United States, and Italy - on top, and the small nations 'in their place'. The fear was that the Free State as a member would only add to the block of votes controlled by Britain through its Empire and Dominions.

There was disagreement on the timing of Ireland's application for membership. Michael MacWhite and Minister for External Affairs Gavan Duffy wanted to press on quickly, but the Government knew the country was not ready. The application would have to wait until the new constitution was agreed and adopted, and the Provisional Government had been succeeded by the fully-fledged Free State Government.

'Chrysalis'

The Government's caution was justified by events at home.

In the Civil War, hopes of a quick Republican collapse after the fall of its Munster heartland were misplaced, and the Government saw only a grinding slog of attrition ahead, with even the survival of the new Free State far from certain.

Desmond FitzGerald took over as Minister for External Affairs in August 1922. He believed that, as long as the war was raging, the Free State was not a viable candidate for the league.

He told the Dáil that the terms of membership asked hard questions.

Was the Government recognised by foreign states, and if so, by which ones?

Did the applicant nation enjoy stable government and settled frontiers?

Was it genuinely self-governing?

Did this applicant state agree to the league's requirement that it must maintain armed forces proportionate to its population?

Minister FitzGerald believed that the Free State failed the tests: Ireland was in a 'chrysalis' stage, with its land border yet to be defined, deploying huge armed forces while locked in an existential struggle for survival against internal enemies.

All is changed; ready to join

And yet, in less than twelve months from that day, President WT Cosgrave was in Geneva to formally accept the invitation to join the League of Nations.

What had changed?

Two things.

First, at the end of 1922, the Free State Government was inaugurated, emerging into fully-fledged status with its new constitution voted in by both the Dáil and Westminster.

The promised British support for Irish membership of the league now kicked in.

Then in May, the Civil War ended when the anti-treaty IRA was ordered by its leadership to hide its weapons and disperse. The existential threat to the new state's survival had passed.

Desmond FitzGerald formally applied to the Secretary-General for membership of the League of Nations, promising to abide by all the league's conditions of membership.

The earliest chance of acceptance was at the next General Assembly, in September of that year.

The momentum builds

By July, momentum was building.

Six weeks from admission, Michael MacWhite advised Minister FitzGerald that all legal and diplomatic documents must henceforth be in Irish, English and French, in that order - the Irish versions to be in Gaelic script.

Irish diplomats must travel on Irish passports; under no circumstances should they use British documents.

By late July, diplomatic representatives from other countries were beginning to set up in Dublin, Belgium, Argentina and Italy among the first.

'Ireland has no enemies'

In early September 1923, President of the Executive Council WT Cosgrave led a delegation to the league's headquarters in Geneva. At twelve noon local time on Monday, 10 September, members voted unanimously to admit the Irish Free State to full membership. President Cosgrave took his seat, accompanied by Minister for External Affairs Desmond FitzGerald and Minister for Education Eoin MacNeill.

There was sustained applause from the members, the press gallery and the public gallery.

Cosgrave began his speech in Irish, and then switched to English.

"Ireland has no enemies. She counts on having no enemy, harbouring no enmity in the time to come".

He committed Ireland to using its sovereign status to promote the peace, security and happiness of the human race, to help avert the ancient evils of warfare and oppression, and expressed his hope that the league would help in the economic and educational progress of Ireland.

His return to Ireland a few days later saw scenes that would have been unthinkable a few months earlier. Army honour guards, bands and firing parties competed for space with the crowds lining the entire route that his car was driven from Dún Laoghaire to O'Connell Street in Dublin. He had to stop several times along the way to speak to those gathered.

Cumann na nGaedheal Party Secretary Seamus Hughes addressed him at one stop, citing the long history of forlorn Irish exiles wandering Europe begging for help for Ireland.

"The mission of you and your colleagues has not been to seek for help, but to assert our newly-won freedom before the world, and to claim international recognition for the oldest of the nations."

In Britain, the Manchester Guardian gave its assessment of what had changed.

"Even Mr de Valera can scarcely pretend that an Ireland that has a Treaty with every member of the League of Nations is at England's mercy".

Back to business; time to deliver

Back in Geneva, after all the soft words, the hard work resumed.

One week after acceptance into the league, Michael MacWhite was back on to the Secretary-General, this time looking for advice on how to get the treaty registered with the League of Nations.

The drive was on by the Irish Government to get the treaty registered as an international agreement between two equal entities. The legal advice to the Government was that there were multiple precedents for such treaties to be registered.

The British press picked up on the Irish inquiries about registering the treaty, and the newspapers were full of speculation that if successful, Dublin would then ask the league for help with the Boundary Commission, which was to decide on the exact line of the border on the island of Ireland.

Britain sends a warning; overstepping the mark?

Even during preparations for the Irish State's admission into the league, the British were warning the Free State Government that forcing the border issue could backfire, if Northern Ireland Premier James Craig demanded dominion status in retaliation.

Which would make the border permanent.

The British objected to the registration of the treaty for the very reason the Irish were so determined to get it done. In their eyes, it was not a treaty between two distinct and different states, but an agreement between two parts of the same entity.

The objection to any league involvement in the Boundary Commission stemmed from that position, because to the British the border was an internal, not an international, issue.

To the British, any Irish plans to seek the support of the league on deciding the line of the border between the Free State and Northern Ireland would mean that the Cosgrave government had, either deliberately or by mistake, fundamentally overplayed its hand, considering that it was a dominion of the British Empire, and not a separate sovereign state.

Here was the fault line between the two countries; the Free State was in the League of Nations precisely because it considered itself to be a sovereign state.

It took almost a year for the Cosgrave government to finally get the treaty registered at the League of Nations, over British protests.

The real path to freedom

Joining the league and working its machinery, for all its flaws and shortcomings, was vital for Ireland's international profile, and for its sense of itself. But the development of the Irish nation state would always depend on direct engagement with the British through the mechanics of the British Empire and its relations with the dominions.

In the end, the only guarantee of British good faith was, well, British good faith. Because it suited them, they stuck to the terms of the treaty. When the Irish later pressed for changes to the border through the Boundary Commission, it was a different story. Irish hopes for support from the league for the changes were made meaningless in the face of the refusal by the British to budge. No fine speeches or committee motions in Geneva were ever going to change that.

Britain's relations with those dominions were evolving rapidly. From being considered as mere colonial outposts of Britain in 1912, by 1920 they were being acknowledged as individual countries.

The momentum was pushing the dominions more and more towards real independence, and the Free State not only rode that momentum, it added its weight to the debate.

The December 1931 Statute of Westminster would prove to be one of the most important waystations on the road to securing Ireland's place among the nations of the world. The statute, which the Free State Government had a key role in drafting, confirmed the dominions as sovereign states, no longer subservient to the British parliament or its laws.

WT Cosgrave's government claimed that the statute confirmed the powers that the Free State had enjoyed since its foundation.

Fianna Fáil accused Cosgrave of having copper-fastened dominion status, and of leaving the way open for the British parliament to interfere in Irish affairs.

Cumann na nGaedheal lost the General Election in February 1932. The new President of the Executive Council, the Fianna Fáil leader Éamon de Valera, did not let his party's previous scorn for the Statute of Westminster stop him from using it to the full in his strategy of dismantling the treaty.

In 1935, the UK Privy Council's Judicial Committee rejected a legal challenge to de Valera's proposed constitutional changes on the grounds that he was acting under the authority of the statute. The court summarised:

"The Statute of Westminster gave the Irish Free State a power under which they could abrogate the Treaty, and as a matter of law, they have availed themselves of that power".

But on that day, 10 September, 1923, all that lay in an unknown and unknowable future. At that moment in time, the Free State Government could reflect on this: the first goal it had set itself on the international stage had been achieved.

Would that Arthur Griffith had been alive to witness it.