Socio-Economic Rights and the Making of the 1937 Irish Constitution

Abstract

The present article draws on a critical theory of law ‘from below’ and a range of archival sources to account for the contested role and significance of economic and social rights in the making of the 1937 Irish Constitution. That socio-economic rights featured so prominently in the constitution-making process owed, as elsewhere, to constitution-makers’ concerns for ‘class-abatement’ during the Great Depression. During various agrarian, labour and women's struggles in 1930s Ireland, republicans, communists, feminists and trade unionists created a diversity of constitutions and programmes. In response to these mobilisations, state constitution-makers articulated a highly selective form of ‘Catholic social’ constitutionalism. The 1937 Irish Constitution thus left the existing laws of the market unchanged but provided for a distinctly ‘national’ family law, an outcome defensive of the country's peripheral agrarian political economy and of the state's outsourcing its comparatively minimal welfare effort to the Catholic Church.

Keywords:

• Economic and Social Rights
• Ireland
• Constitution
• Law and Ideology

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Graham Finlay, John Coakley, John O'Dowd and Bryan Fanning for their valuable comments on an early version of this work. Any errors are my own.

ORCID

THOMAS MURRAY http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5487-8263

Notes

1. ‘Ireland’ and ‘Irish society’ are used here to refer to the 26 counties. Depending on the political context, this territory has also been designated the Irish Free State, Eire, the Republic of Ireland and the Irish Republic.