Shields, Evelyn. “The Rhetoric of Emerging Nationalism: A Case Study in Irish Rhetorical Failure.”
Shields, Evelyn. “The Rhetoric of Emerging Nationalism: A Case Study in Irish Rhetorical Failure.” Central States Speech Journal 25 (1974): 225-232.
In this essay, Shields examines the over 450 speeches created in the Dail Eireann post the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 that brought a cease-fire and evacuation of British troops but some major concessions that the Republican Nationalists couldn’t live with. The 458 speeches reveal a pattern of a shared vision–self-determination for Ireland–with two separate definitions for what that means. On the one hand, the Republicans hewed to a principled purity of total freedom or bust (led by de Valera, they based this in “historical and de facto validity” (228) by virtue of the Republic established in 1919 on the heels of the 1916 Easter Rising; on the other hand were the pro-treaty gradualists led by Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith who posited themselves as realists who saw this as a stepping stone to complete freedom.
While the Dail ratified the treaty, and thus the concessions, Ireland soon plunged into Civil War over the intractable differences between the pro-treaty faction and the Republicans. Shields sees the immediate violent history of Ireland, coupled with the lack of a tradition of democratic self-determination, for the failure of discourse to stem the turn toward internal armed conflict.
Shields’ framing of the Dail’s two-sided arguments over Eire’s self-determination as a public culmination of the long rhetorical battle lines for Irish self-determination being waged for centuries. The Fenians of the 1860s were likely invoked as historical arguments on both sides. They were claimed by the idealists and the gradualists. The rhetoricity of history.
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