The first Dáil’s democratic programme, which got a lot of attention this week, is now being used by parties on the left to claim a great failure of our politics in the past 100 years. Yet it was neither democratic, nor the Dáil’s programme. Sinn Féin didn’t go to the country on the programme in 1918, and it wasn’t approved by the members of the first Dáil. The Labour party was asked to write the document in an attempt to get the international socialist movement behind Irish independence. The Dáil needed all the support it could get. It also made statements about overtaxation designed to appeal to Irish America.
They were no radicals. Sinn Féin set up republican courts in part to control the claims