HISTORY & LITERATUE 13 MARCH 2016

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1922. The drafting of the Constitution of the Irish Free State - the archive of Ronald Mortished, Secretary

of the Constitution Committee.

An extremely important archive , commencing with Mortished’s handwritten notes of the first 26 meetings

from 26 January to 6 March 1922. The first meeting of the Committee was chaired by Michael Collins, but

Darrel Figgis chaired all of the subsequent meetings as Collins was busy with military matters. The rest of the

archive comprises 13 files containing 100s of mainly typescript drafts of sections of the proposed constitu-

tion with manuscript notations, various papers regarding many aspects including the British Honours List,

integration of the Civil Service, Cheaper Elections”, and various contributions such as a supportive speech

by General Smuts of South Africa, as well as a library of other countries’ constitutions, some annotated. The

latter include Poland, Estonia, Russia, Malta, South Africa, Switzerland, etc., as well as The Resurrection of

Hungary 1904 by Arthur Griffith - many references to these are made in the various drafts, and there are

extensive notes on them in both manuscript and typescript .

One of the more important documents is “Draft A” which was approved and is signed in ink by Darrel Figgis,

James McNeil and John O’Byrne, accompanied by detailed notes on Drafts A, B and C, in Mortished’s hand,

and typescript unsigned drafts A and B and a letter by Hugh Kennedy, addressed to Michael Collins as Chair-

man of The Provisional Government, typescript copy of lengthy and invited criticisms by George O’Brien,

and Darrel Figgis’s answer to same addressed to Michael Collins.

Also included are letters of thanks to the staff under Mortished from Figgis, O’Rahilly and C. J. France. The

latter was an American, and member of The American Committee for Relief in Ireland.

This archive is a great primary source of immense interest to those students of the founding of the Irish Free

State and the thinking of the men commissioned to produce the Constitution in a matter of only 6 weeks.

Provenance: Ronald J. P. Mortished;

Thence by descent to the present owner

Ronald James Patrick Mortished was born in London to Irish parents on 19 June 1891. He joined the Civ-

il Service in London and was posted to Dublin in 1909. He married Marie Shields, sister of actors Arthur

Shields and Will Shields (Barry Fitzgerald). He joined the British Independent Labour Party in 1907 and

the Socialist Party of Ireland in 1909. He wrote for Jim Larkin’s Irish Worker and other Labour periodicals,

usually under the pseudonym of “Patrick Thompson”. He was working in the Valuation Office when he was

appointed Secretary of the Constitutional Committee in 1922. He later stood unsuccessfully for Labour in the

1927 general election., and then went to work for the International Labour Office in Geneva. He returned to

Dublin in 1946 to become the first Chairman of the newly founded Labour Court. He died in 1957.

Estimate €5000-€7000 £3900-£5460