League of Nations

League of Nations, established by the treaty of Versailles in 1919 as a vehicle for the regulation of international relations through collective security. The Irish Free State entered the league in September 1923. Its first years of membership were dominated by uncertainty as to how far dominion status permitted an independent national position at the league. The Statute of Westminster cleared the way for a phase of Irish activism. In 1932 the presidency of the League Council passed by rotation to Ireland. This coincided both with a transfer of power from Cumann na nGaedheal to Fianna Fáil, and also with a change in the nature of the international system the League was established to regulate. The relative calm of the post‐First World War decade was giving way to the ideological and territorial instabilities that preceded the Second World War. From the beginning Eamon de Valera, who acted as his own minister for external affairs, laid claim to the moral high ground as spokesman for the ‘small powers’ in the league. In a series of speeches to the Council and Assembly between 1932 and 1936 he presented Ireland as champion of collective security and enemy of unrestrained power politics. This assertion of international rectitude clashed on occasion with the domestic political mood in Ireland. De Valera's enthusiasm for sanctions against Mussolini's Italy after the invasion of Abyssinia in 1935, for example, was ill‐regarded by a considerable section of political and public opinion reluctant to oppose a fellow Catholic country and its incontestably anticommunist leader.

The growing irrelevance of the league in an international system moving inexorably towards breakdown led Ireland to abandon its declared commitment to collective security and to prepare for wartime neutrality. It was, however, an Irishman, Seán Lester, who presided over the final, moribund years of the league. Successively Irish permanent representative and league high commissioner in Danzig, Lester became its last secretary‐general from 1939 to 1946.

Bibliography

Barcroft, S. , ‘Irish Foreign Policy at the League of Nations’, Irish Studies in International Affairs, 1 (1979)
Keatinge, P. , ‘Ireland and the League of Nations’, Studies, 59 (1970)

Norrie MacQueen