Issued in Irish, English, and French by Dáil Éireann at its first meeting, January 21st, 1919.
Dáil Éireann
Whole text
Message to the Free Nations of the World
To the Nations of the World—Greeting.
The Nation of Ireland having proclaimed her national independence, calls, through her elected representatives in Parliament assembled in the Irish Capital on January 21st, 1919, upon every free nation to support the Irish Republic by recognising Ireland's national status and her right to its vindication at the Peace Congress.
Naturally, the race, the language, the customs and traditions of Ireland are radically distinct from the English. Ireland is one of the most ancient nations in Europe, and she has preserved her national integrity, vigorous and intact, through seven centuries of foreign oppression; she has never relinquished her national rights, and throughout the long era of English usurpation she has in every generation defiantly proclaimed her inalienable right of nationhood down to her last glorious resort to arms in 1916.
Internationally, Ireland is the gateway to the Atlantic; Ireland is the last outpost of Europe towards the West; Ireland is the point upon which great trade routes between East and West converge; her independence is demanded by the Freedom of the Seas; her great harbours must be open to all nations, instead of being the monopoly of England. To-day these harbours are empty and idle solely because English policy is determined to retain Ireland as a barren bulwark for English aggrandisement, and the unique geographical position of this island, far from being a benefit and safeguard to Europe and America, is subjected to the purposes of England's policy of world domination.
Ireland to-day reasserts her historic nationhood the more confidently before the new world emerging from the war, because she believes in freedom and justice as the fundamental principles of international law; because she believes in a frank co-operation between the peoples for equal rights against the vested privileges of ancient tyrannies; because the permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military dominion for the profit of empire but only by establishing the control of government in every land upon the basis of the free will of a free people, and the existing state of war, between Ireland and England, can never be ended until Ireland is definitely evacuated by the armed forces of England.
For these among other reasons, Ireland—resolutely and irrevocably determined at the dawn of the promised era of self-determination and liberty that she will suffer foreign dominion no longer—calls upon every free nation to uphold her national claim to complete independence p.926 as an Irish Republic against the arrogant pretensions of England founded in fraud and sustained only by an overwhelming military occupation, and demands to be confronted publicly with England at the Congress of the Nations, that the civilised world having judged between English wrong and Irish right may guarantee to Ireland its permanent support for the maintenance of her national independence.
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Title statement
Title (uniform): Message to the Free Nations of the World
Author: Dáil Éireann
Responsibility statement
Electronic edition compiled by: Audrey Murphy and Donnchadh Ó Corráin
Funded by: University College, Cork and Professor Marianne McDonald via the CELT Project
Edition statement
2. Second draft.
Extent: 1037 words
Publication statement
Publisher: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts: a project of University College Cork
Address: College Road, Cork, Ireland—http://www.ucc.ie/celt
Date: 2005
Distributor: CELT online at University College, Cork, Ireland.
CELT document ID: E900013
Availability: Available with prior consent of the CELT programme for purposes of academic research and teaching only.
Source description
Macardle, Dorothy (1937). ‘Message to the Free Nations of the World’. In: The Irish Republic: a documented chronicle of the Anglo-Irish conflict and the partitioning of Ireland, with a detailed account of the period 1916–1923. Ed. by Dorothy Macardle. London: Victor Gollancz Ltd, pp. 925–26.
You can add this reference to your bibliographic database by copying or downloading the following:
@incollection{E900013,
editor = {Dorothy Macardle},
title = {Message to the Free Nations of the World},
author = {Dorothy Macardle},
booktitle = {The Irish Republic: a documented chronicle of the Anglo-Irish conflict and the partitioning of Ireland, with a detailed account of the period 1916–1923},
publisher = {Victor Gollancz Ltd},
address = {London},
date = {1937},
pages = {925-26}
}
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Project description: CELT: Corpus of Electronic Texts
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the whole text.
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Profile description
Creation: by Dáil Éireann.
Date: 21 january 1919
Language usage
- The whole text is in English. (en)
- There is one term in Irish. (ga)
Keywords: political; prose; 20c
Revision description
(Most recent first)
- 2011-01-23: Conversion script run, new wordcount made. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2008-07-19: Value of div0 "type" attribute modified, minor modifications made to header; keywords added. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 2005-08-25: Normalised language codes and edited langUsage for XML conversion (ed. Julianne Nyhan)
- 2005-08-04T14:41:49+0100: Converted to XML (ed. Peter Flynn)
- 2005-02-11: Header updated, file reparsed; HTML file created. (ed. Beatrix Färber)
- 1997-02-25: HTML file generated using OmniMark. (ed. Peter Flynn)
- 1997-02-25: File parsed using SGMLS. (ed. Mavis Cournane)
- 1996-11-17: Header constructed, structural mark-up added, checked and verified. (ed. Donnchadh Ó Corráin)
- 1996: Text proofed. (ed. Audrey Murphy)
- 1996: Text captured by scanning. (data capture Audrey Murphy)