Faoi ghlas ag Gallaibh…’… ‘Faoi ghlas ag Gallaibh…’. ‘Imprisoned by foreigners…’ The repetition of that phrase in Irish by the Clerk was like a litany. One hundred and five members – few of them women – were entitled to be present. Thirty five times the Clerk intoned the phrase ‘Faoi ghlas ag Gallaibh’. Four other times, his response was ‘Ar díbirt ag Gallaibh’ – ‘On the run from foreigners’.

The first public meeting of the First Dáil Éireann. You’d have said it was not an auspicious beginning if you were present that first day in the Mansion House, Dublin on 21st January 1919.

The Dáil membership was drawn from the 105 Members of Parliament elected in the Imperial General Election of December 1918, to represent Ireland in the British Parliament at Westminster. The Sinn Féin MPs elected decided not to go to Westminster, but to set up their own independent parliament in Ireland. Among them were prominent GAA members like Harry Boland and Michael Collins.

That first day, only twenty eight Deputies were present. Almost forty more were in jail or ‘on the run’. The balance, mostly Northern unionists and a handful of Southern unionists, refused the invitation to attend. They wished to retain representation at Westminster.

This was the first time since Easter Monday 1916, on the steps of the GPO in Dublin, that Irish Republicans had proclaimed independence before the world. By this time, the Great War was over and the Peace Conference was in full swing in the palace of Versailles, near Paris. A War that had been fought, it was said, for the freedom of small nations. Was Ireland, too, not a small nation entitled to its freedom?

The Sinn Féin leadership hoped that the American President, Woodrow Wilson, would press for Irish sovereignty at Versailles if a democratically elected national assembly was in place and a declaration of independence had been made.

Therefore, at their first meeting, the TDs present unanimously passed four formal documents, intended to secure Ireland’s place in international negotiations and politics. These were, a short Constitution, a Declaration of Independence, a Message to the Free Nations of the World and a Democratic Programme of social and economic ideals.

The principal author of the Democratic Programme was Tom Johnson, the leader of the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC). The ILPTUC had lobbied successfully to have Ireland seated separately from Britain at the post-War International Labour Conference, in Berne, in Switzerland. Sinn Féin recognised the importance of the ‘labour’ dimension in gaining international recognition. Furthermore, at some considerable cost to itself electorally, the ILPTUC had withdrawn its candidates to allow Sinn Féin to contest the Election unopposed, effectively turning it into a plebiscite on Irish independence.

Johnson received some assistance in drafting from Seán T O’Kelly, on behalf of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, always the more radical wing of the separatist movement. However, though the words on papers were progressive, they were ignored in practice and politics by this and subsequent Dáileanna. Labour never became strong enough to insist on action.

That same day, in Solheadbeg, county Tipperary, the first shots were fired in the Anglo-Irish War of Independence. Dan Breen, Seán Treacy, Seán Hogan and others ambushed and killed two members of the Royal Irish Constabulary. Thus, started again, for almost eighty more years, the old conflict between the gun and the ballot box in Ireland.

Let us take pride and celebrate today that, in the end, the ballot box has won out over the gun; that not only was the convening of the First Dáil an important step on the road to Irish freedom, but that it pointed the way forward too for colonies like India, Egypt, Australia and Canada that were still crushed under John Bull’s thumb.