The Gaelic State in the past & future — A Reader’s Guide

The Inverted Order of Resurrection

One of the most arresting patterns in Figgis's argument is his claim that the nineteenth-century Irish revival moved in reverse chronological order. He writes that the nation had lost, first, its state; then its language and culture; then its land; and finally its liberty of faith. In the resurrection, it won back these losses in the inverse order: first religious liberty, then land, then culture, and now it seeks its state. This is not a casual observation but a structural key to the book. Figgis presents the land war, for instance, not as a modern economic struggle but as the re-assertion of a very old memory—a freeman's right, not a tenant's. He quotes the Devon Commission Digest noting that tenants claimed a tenant-right irrespective of legal claim, and calls this a curious thing to observers with a foreign state-idea. The pattern gives the whole narrative a sense of historical inevitability, as if the nation were a sleeper slowly waking limb by limb.

The Unworkable Liberty of the English State

Figgis is sharply critical of the eighteenth-century Irish Parliament, which he calls the liberty of the English state in Ireland, won by the jailers of the old nation. He describes the Grattan Parliament as an utterly unworkable constitution, because its members remembered the source from which they sprang and would not carry victory to its logical conclusion. The key detail is FitzGibbon's point that the Seal was in the care of the English Chancellor, giving England the final word. Figgis sees this as an independence that needed force at every moment to be of any avail. The Act of Union, in his reading, was England striking down her own jailers and abolishing their little hour of liberty. The parenthesis was concluded, and history could take its course again. This passage reveals Figgis's method: he treats the colonial parliament as a historical dead end, a false dawn that actually delayed the real work of national reconstruction.

The Haunted Hall of Memory

Figgis's prose is at its most vivid when he describes the nineteenth century as a haunted hall where ghostly memories become flesh and blood. The image is not decorative; it expresses his core belief that the Irish nation carried within it a living memory of its pre-1603 state, a memory that surfaced in movements like the land war. He notes that the landlordry was now mainly absentee, which made the re-assertion of a freeman's right a solid national act. The language of haunting recurs: the nation arose feebly at first, and marched into the nineteenth century to claim satisfaction for desires and instincts that had never died. This is not a dry constitutional history but a work that blends political analysis with a kind of historical mysticism. Readers should expect a text that is as much about the psychology of national memory as about legal structures.

Figgis's book is best read as a primary document of the Irish revival, not as a neutral history. Its value lies in the way it fuses historical argument with political prophecy. The excerpts suggest a writer who is impatient with compromise and convinced that the Gaelic state offers a template for a just and organic future. Readers interested in the intellectual roots of twentieth-century Irish nationalism will find here a clear, passionate, and structurally inventive case.

Reading Figgis’s account of the Gaelic polity, I keep thinking about how much was lost before anyone thought to write it down. His sense of inverted history lingers. It makes me want to sit quietly with older Irish voices, like the ones in The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, D.D. - Volume 07 Historical and Political Tracts-Irish — Key Ideas to Explore, where the grievances feel closer to the ground, less abstract, more like weather.