Cleachtadh 11

Aistrigh go Gaeilge an sliocht seo thíos as an saothar eacnamaíochta The Growth Illusion le Richard Douthwaite. Ta aistriuchan samplach agus nótaí tráchta le fáil i Nótaí ar Chleachtadh 11.

INDEPENDENCE AND AFTER

When representatives of twenty-six of the thirty-two counties undid the Act of Union in December 1921 by signing the Anglo-Irish Treaty, some certainly hoped for a new period of prosperity akin to that of the 1780s and 1790s. One signatory, Arthur Griffith, had published an influential pamphlet, The Resurrection of Hungary: a Parallel for Ireland, in 1904 in which he had described the effects of Hungarian independence in glowing terms. Hungary had turned itself, he said, from a land that was worse off than Ireland into a powerful state which was the granary of Europe and in the first rank intellectually. A self-governing Ireland could do the same.

But for the first ten years of its life the new Irish state made few efforts to re-establish the conditions that had led to the flowering 120 years previously, and disappointed those who had shared Griffith's vision.