File 2 - Éire / The Irish Nation

25 items; newspaper

A file containing loose copies of ‘Éire / The Irish Nation’ from 29 January 1923 (Vol. 1, No. 1) to 5 July 1924 (Vol. 2, No. 25).

‘Éire’, the official publishing organ of the Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin group, ran from 20 January 1923 to 25 October 1924, and continued with its successor publication, ‘Sinn Féin’. Republican Sinn Féin was not unaware of the benefits to be derived from the publication of a newspaper reflecting its view. During its lifetime the organization brought out various weeklies. ‘Éire: The Irish Nation’, which started in January 1923, gave the republican version of events in the closing stages of the Civil War. This proved a boon to the reorganizing committee in its efforts to build up the new party in the summer of 1923.

A second party paper, ‘Sinn Féin’, originally appeared as a daily newssheet during the August 1923 general election campaign; but once the election was over it appeared only weekly. The new party had not been established very long before its leaders, eager to counteract the anti-Sinn Féin bias of the three national dailies, began planning the publication of a daily paper of their own with a national circulation. They failed in their efforts to do this, the principal reason being lack of capital. The failure of the party here may have indirectly hastened its decline. Control of a national daily would have forced Sinn Féin to spell out its aims and policies in a more realistic and precise fashion. At the end of 1924, ‘Sinn Féin’ and ‘Éire: The Irish Nation’ merged, probably for circulation reasons, to form a new weekly, also with the title ‘Sinn Féin’. This paper in turn ceased publication and was replaced by a new weekly, ‘An Phoblacht’, in June 1925’. Source: Peter Pynne, ‘The Third Sinn Féin Party / 1923-1926’. p. 39.