Page:The Gaelic State in the Past & Future.djvu/73

 the modern conditions that are now part of the Nation's surface-thinking, corrects the weakness of modern ideas while providing just the kind of centralisation that the old State lacked.

The essential part of the working of the old State was clearly the convocation of its great councils. While these met at regular periods the State continued its central function, and existed as a whole. When they were discontinued, as they sometimes were, the State fell into disarray, and existed only in its parts. Now in modern times, as it so happens, Irishmen meeting in their own concerns and acting at their own initiative created just such another council, The work of the Recess Committee resulted in the formation of the Department of Agriculture, the working of which was intended to lie at the instance and in the power of a Council of Farmers elected through the country to manage their own concerns. Perhaps no better instance could be given of the tragic futility of trying to work the conceptions of one Polity through the conditions of its alien rival. For the President of the Council became Minister of an alien bureaucratic government. He took his orders from that government, even though every farmer in Ireland was outraged by the effect of those orders. He took his salary from that government, and existed at the will of that government, with the result that the Council that was supposed to express and control the interest of farming in Ireland was itself controlled by the interests of farmers in somebody else's country, and so was brought to a