foreign policy

foreign policy in independent Ireland took shape under considerable constraints. The former imperial power was both the Free State's closest neighbour and the arbiter of its economic fate, while the ‘unfinished business’ of the north demanded the most careful diplomatic management. As a consequence, the first two decades of Irish foreign policy were primarily concerned with defining the constitutional relationship with Britain and establishing the nature of Ireland's sovereignty. Despite the Statute of Westminster in 1931 and an interlude of activism at the League of Nations, the continuing issue of partition virtually predetermined Ireland's neutrality during the Second World War.

The diplomatic isolation imposed by neutrality continued virtually undisturbed after 1945. The post‐war years were ones in which an introverted, brooding sense of grievance over partition seemed to determine such foreign policy as the state pursued. Access to the United Nations was, admittedly, denied by a Soviet veto, but with‐drawal from the Commonwealth in 1949, and the refusal in the same year to participate in NATO, sharply restricted Ireland's diplomatic opportunities.

There was little to distinguish the foreign policies of the various parties in power during the 1940s and most of the 1950s. However, this lacklustre bipartisanship broke down when Fine Gael openly opposed the efforts of Frank Aiken, tacitly supported by de Valera and then Lemass, to use the opportunities of UN membership to construct a new international identity for Ireland.

By the late 1960s the prospect of admission to the European Economic Community (see european union) had redirected Irish foreign policy towards western Europe. The distinctive party approaches to international relations which had emerged a decade previously gradually lost their definition. Membership of the Community in 1973 merely confirmed this trend. Since then the dominant role of Europe in Ireland's foreign policy has been acknowledged by all parties in government.

Bibliography

Keatinge, P. , A Place among the Nations: Issues of Irish Foreign Policy (1978)
Keogh, D. , Ireland and Europe, 1919–1948 (1988)

Norrie MacQueen