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Ireland applied for membership of the League of Nations in April 1923 and was admitted, with considerable public interest and enthusiasm, at the League’s Fourth Assembly in Geneva on 10 September 1923. A high-level delegation led by President of the Executive Council William T Cosgrave and Minister for External Affairs Desmond FitzGerald went to Geneva to take Ireland’s seats in the League’s Assembly. The delegation is pictured here in Geneva.

Seated (l-r): Hugh Kennedy (Attorney General), William T Cosgrave (President of the Executive Council) and Eoin MacNeill (Minister for Education).

Standing (l-r): Michael MacWhite (Permanent Representative of Ireland to the League of Nations); Desmond FitzGerald (Minister for External Affairs); The Marquis MacSwiney of Mashonaglas (Substitute Delegate); Kevin O’Sheil (Assistant Legal Adviser); Ormond Grattan Esmond TD (Delegate); Diarmaid O’Hegarty (Cabinet Secretary) and Gearóid McGann (Secretary to the President of the Executive Council).

To view the photograph see NAI, DFA/Early/League of Nations/258

Written by Minister for Finance Michael Collins just under a month before his death, Collins here queries with Minister for Foreign Affairs George Gavan Duffy whether, in the early stages of the civil war, Ireland should press its application for membership of the League of Nations. Ultimately Ireland had to wait until the formal establishment of the Irish Free State as an international entity in December 1922 before it could apply for League membership, which it did in April 1923.

Headed ‘Rialtas Sealadach na hÉireann’ (Provisional Government of Ireland), this minute sheet records the process of Ireland’s application for membership of the League of Nations. The Provisional Government had no power to undertake foreign policy and, as a dominion in the British Commonwealth, Ireland had to get sanction from London to apply for League membership. In the coming years, the Cosgrave government would use League of Nations membership to show that Ireland was an independent member of the international community with its own foreign relations and own international interests separate from Britain and the Commonwealth.

14 March 1923 memorandum to each member of the Executive Council by Assistant Legal Adviser to the Executive Council Kevin O’Sheil marked ‘Secret’ which illustrates a range of international and national reasons why the Irish Free State should seek membership of the League of Nations. O’Sheil, then working on drafting Dublin’s case for the recasting of the North-South border via the Boundary Commission, saw League membership very much in terms of the assistance the League could potentially give Ireland over redrawing the border.

A letter from Ireland’s Representative to the League of Nations Michael MacWhite to Minister for External Affairs Desmond FitzGerald. Written directly after MacWhite had submitted Ireland’s application for League membership in April 1923, MacWhite tells FitzGerald of the ‘immediate excitement’ created by the ‘most important application that has been made since the formation of the League’, an application he judged to be even more important than one by either Germany or Russia.