Message to the Free Nations of the World

Its text was:

'To to Nations of the World! Greeting.

The Nation of Ireland having proclaimed her national independence, calls through her elected representatives in Parliament, assembed 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.[1]

Nationally, 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 through the long era of English usurpation she has in every generation defiantly proclaimed her inalienable right of nationhood down to her last glorious report to arms in 1916.

Internationally, Ireland is the gateway of the Atlantic. Ireland is the last outpost of Europe towards the West: ireland is the point upon which great sea routes between East and West converge: her independence is demanded by the Freedom of the Seas: her great 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 English policy of world domination.

Ireland today reasserts her historic nationhood the more confidently before the new world emerging from the War.[2] Because she believes in freedom and justice as the fundamental principles of international law, because she believes in a frank co-operation between the people for equal rights against the vested privileges of ancient tyrannies, because the permanent peace of Europe can never be secured by perpetuating military domination 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 as an Irish Republic against the arrogant pretentions 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, in order 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.'

The 'Message to the Free Nations of the World' was passed by Dáil Éireann on January 21, 1919.

Notes

• [1]The conference in question was the Versailles Peace Conference being held in the Palace of Versailles in France.
• [2] World War One

External Links

For details of Irish parliamentary debates, see Irish Parliamentary Website (http://www.oireachtas-debates.gov.ie)