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Éire

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   Éire ( pronounced [ˈeːrʲə]) is the Irish name of the island called
   Ireland in the English language.

   The name Éire is the nominative form in modern Irish of the name for
   the goddess called Ériu in Old Irish, a mythical figure who helped the
   Gaels conquer Ireland as described in the Book of Invasions. Éire is
   still used in the Irish language today to refer to the island of
   Ireland as well as the Republic of Ireland - as well as the goddess.
   The dative form Éirinn is anglicized as Erin, which is occasionally
   used as a poetic name for Ireland in English, and has also become a
   common feminine name in English.

   The name was given in Article 4 of the 1937 Irish constitution to the
   Irish state, created under the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which was known
   between 1922 and 1937 as the Irish Free State. Article 4 stated that:
   "The name of the state is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland."

   The name "Éire" features on all Irish coinage (and Irish euro coins),
   postage stamps, passports and other official state documents issued
   since 1937 — for instance the Official Seal of the President of
   Ireland. Before then, "Saorstát Éireann", the Irish translation of
   Irish Free State, was used except for postage stamps which regularly
   used "Éire" during the Irish Free State era in both definitive and
   special issues.

   Since 1949, the term Republic of Ireland has generally been used in
   preference to Éire, when speaking English. It is sometimes felt that
   use of "Éire" is associated with a condescending attitude to Ireland in
   some right-wing quarters of the British media. Technically, as the
   Republic of Ireland Act enacted in 1948 makes clear, the "Republic of
   Ireland" is actually a description rather than the name of the state,
   even if generally used as such.

Éire in the Irish Constitution

   The Fianna Fáil party government (1932–48) of Éamon de Valera drafted
   an entirely new constitution, called Bunreacht na hÉireann. The
   constitution is not an act of the parliament of the Irish Free State;
   rather it was "enacted by the people", by a plebiscite in 1937. The
   simple terms, Ireland and Éire, were used in the constitution to
   indicate a break with the Irish Free State without implying a return to
   the Irish Republic or a break with the Crown. Among the new features of
   that new constitution were a President of Ireland, renaming the
   President of the Executive Council the Taoiseach, and restoring the
   senate Seanad Éireann. As it was the religion of over 95% of the
   population, there was a reference (repealed by plebiscite in 1972) to
   the "special position of the Roman Catholic church". Unlike the Irish
   Free State constitution which it replaced, Bunreacht na hÉireann had no
   constitutional link with the Crown, except in external relations
   through a combination of Article 29 of the Constitution and the
   External Relations Act, 1936. The repeal of the latter Act by the
   Republic of Ireland Act, 1948 created Ireland as a sovereign Republic
   in 1949, with Republic of Ireland as a new description but without
   changing the name of the state from Éire or Ireland.

From Éire to the Republic of Ireland

   The declaration of the republic proved somewhat controversial. In 1945,
   when asked if he planned to do so, de Valera had replied, "we are a
   republic", having refused to say so before for eight years. He also
   insisted that Ireland had no king, but simply used an external king as
   an organ in international affairs. However, that was not the view of
   constitutional lawyers including de Valera's Attorneys-General, whose
   disagreement with de Valera's interpretation only came to light when
   the state papers from the 1930s and 1940s were released to historians.
   Nor was it the view in the international arena, who believed that
   Ireland did have a king, George VI who had been proclaimed King of
   Ireland in December 1936, and to whom they accredited ambassadors to
   Ireland. King George, in turn, as "King of Ireland" accredited all
   Irish diplomats. All treaties signed by the Irish Taoiseach or Minister
   for External Affairs were signed in the name of King George.

   De Valera did have a history of making statements on constitutional
   matters that were legally questionable. His belief that the
   Governor-General's post had been abolished by a constitutional
   amendment in December 1936 was privately rejected by his own
   Attorney-General, James Geoghegan, Secretary to the Executive Council
   (i.e., the state's main civil servant and his own closest advisor),
   Maurice Moynihan, the Parliamentary Draftsman's Office (which drafted
   legislation) and other leading legal figures in the government. To sort
   out what was privately seen as a legal mess, de Valera had had to
   introduce a second enactment, the Executive Power (Consequential
   Provisions) Act, 1937, which was backdated as if effective from the
   original date of the supposed abolition in December 1936. In 1947, de
   Valera's new Attorney-General, future President of Ireland Cearbhall Ó
   Dálaigh, began drafting a bill to grant to the President the powers in
   international affairs possessed by the King. Part of the debate in
   government revolved around whether a republic should be declared in the
   bill. The very existence of the debate is evidence that de Valera's
   latest attorney-general and part of his cabinet, maybe even de Valera
   himself, did not agree with de Valera's statement in 1945 that Éire was
   already a republic. In the end, the draft bill was never submitted to
   the Oireachtas for approval. Whether that is because it was simply
   abandoned or because de Valera planned to introduce it after the 1948
   general election (which he unexpectedly lost) is unclear.

   A bill to finally and unambiguously declare a republic was introduced,
   in 1948, by the new Taoiseach, John A. Costello of the Fine Gael party.
   What caused the bill to be introduced remains a mystery. Costello made
   the announcement that the bill was to be introduced when he was in
   Ottawa, during an official visit to Canada. It had been suggested that
   it was a spur of the moment reaction to offence caused by the
   Governor-General of Canada, Harold Alexander, 1st Earl Alexander of
   Tunis who was of Northern Irish descent and who allegedly placed
   symbols of Northern Ireland, notably a replica of the famous Roaring
   Meg cannon used in the Siege of Derry, in front of an affronted
   Costello at a state dinner. What is certain is that the prior
   arrangement whereby toasts to the King (symbolising Canada) and the
   President (representing Ireland) were to be proposed, was broken. Only
   a toast to the King was proposed, to the fury of the Irish delegation.
   Shortly afterwards Costello announced the plan to declare the republic.

   However, according to all but one of the ministers in Costello's
   cabinet, the decision to declare a republic had already been made prior
   to Costello's Canadian visit. Costello's revelation of the decision was
   because the Sunday Independent (an Irish newspaper) had discovered the
   fact and was about to "break" the story as an exclusive. Nevertheless
   one minister, the controversial Noel Browne, gave a different account
   in his autobiography, Against the Tide. He claimed Costello's
   announcement was done in a fit of anger of his treatment by the
   Governor-General and that when he returned, Costello, at an assembly of
   ministers in his home, offered to resign because of his manufacture of
   a major government policy initiative on the spot in Canada. Yet
   according to Browne, all the ministers agreed that they would refuse to
   accept the resignation and also agreed to manufacture the story of a
   prior cabinet decision.

   The evidence of what really happened remains ambiguous. There is no
   record of a prior decision to declare a republic before Costello's
   Canadian trip, among cabinet papers for 1948, which supports Browne's
   claim. However, in what is generally regarded as one of its most
   ill-judged decisions, the Costello government refused to allow the
   Secretary to the Government, Maurice Moynihan, to attend cabinet
   meetings and take minutes, because they believed he was too close to
   their enemy, Éamon de Valera. (De Valera had been in office continually
   for sixteen years and directly preceded them. As Moynihan had been the
   state's chief civil servant for much of that time, it was hardly
   surprising that he would have been close to de Valera. Still, no
   evidence suggests that his closeness to de Valera led him into active
   antagonism towards Costello's ministers, and they reversed their
   decision when they returned to government in 1954.) Rather than entrust
   the minute-taking to Moynihan, the cabinet entrusted it to a
   Parliamentary Secretary (junior minister), future Taoiseach Liam
   Cosgrave. Given that Cosgrave had never kept minutes before, it is
   understandable that Cosgrave's minutes, at least early on in the
   government, proved less than a thorough record of government decisions.
   So whether the issue was never raised, was raised but undecided on, was
   subjected to a decision taken informally, or was subjected to a
   decision taken formally, remains obscure on the basis of the 1948
   cabinet documentation.

   In addition, Browne's own book, published in the 1980s, is littered
   with major factual inaccuracies and thus is seen as equally unreliable.
   The last two surviving ministers of that cabinet in the 1980s, former
   Minister for External Affairs Sean MacBride and Browne, publicly and
   trenchantly disagreed with one another as to the events that led to the
   declaration of the republic. What is certain is that one man's account
   is wrong. But it has proved impossible to determine which one is wrong.

   At any rate, the Republic of Ireland Act was enacted in Oireachtas
   Éireann with all parties voting for it. De Valera did suggest that it
   would have been better to reserve the declaration of the republic until
   Irish unity had been achieved, a comment hard to reconcile with his
   1945 claim that Éire was already a republic. Speaking in Seanad Éireann
   Costello told senators that as a matter of law, the King was indeed
   "King of Ireland" and Irish head of state and the President of Ireland
   was in effect no more than first citizen and a local notable, until the
   new law came into force.

   On 18 April 1949, the Republic of Ireland Act, 1948 came into force.
   Ireland ceased to have a king. The President of Ireland was upgraded to
   a full head of state. While the constitutional name of the state, Éire
   was not changed, the descriptive name given to Éire in the new Act, The
   Republic of Ireland, became the effective name of the twenty-six county
   state. All previous ambiguities over name, title, head of state and the
   positions of the King of Ireland and the President of Ireland were
   resolved. The Westminster Parliament passed its own Ireland Act 1949
   acknowledging the changes, preserving certain rights of Irish citizens
   in the United Kingdom, and designating the Republic of Ireland as its
   name for the resulting state. King George VI, sent a message of
   goodwill to the new Irish head of state, President Sean T. O'Kelly.
   O'Kelly's new status as head of state was celebrated by the first ever
   state visit by an Irish president abroad, to the Holy See in 1950. (En
   route, he planned to "do the decent thing and call upon Your Majesty",
   but timetabling problems prevented what was intended to be the first
   ever public meeting between a British king and an Irish president.)

   The declaration of the republic had two controversial after-effects. On
   becoming a republic, a country ceases to be a member of the
   Commonwealth of Nations. Though 1949 saw India as a republic reapply
   for membership and be accepted, the Republic of Ireland decided not to
   do so. More controversially, the British parliament's Ireland Act 1949
   gave a legislative guarantee to Northern Ireland that Northern Ireland
   would continue to remain a part of the United Kingdom unless the
   parliament of Northern Ireland formally expressed a wish to join a
   United Ireland. This " unionist veto" became a source of much
   controversy during the rest of the twentieth century.
   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%89ire"
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   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
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