Republic of Ireland - Name

Name

The Constitution of Ireland provides that "he name of the State is Éire, or, in the English language, Ireland". Under Irish statute law, Republic of Ireland (or Poblacht na hÉireann in Irish) is "the description of the State" but is not its official name. This official description was provided for in the Republic of Ireland Act 1948, which transferred the remaining duties of monarch to an elected president. However, the name of the state in English remained Ireland. A change to the name of the state would require a constitutional amendment. In the UK however, the Ireland Act 1949 provided that Republic of Ireland may be used as a name for the Irish state (although it did not make use of that term mandatory).

The name Ireland for the state was formerly a source of contention between the United Kingdom and Ireland. These concerns arose because part of the island of Ireland is in the United Kingdom and so the United Kingdom regarded the name as inappropriate. In a 1989 case, a majority of the Irish Supreme Court expressed the view that Irish authorities should not enforce extradition warrants where they referred to the state by a name other than Ireland (in this case the warrants had used the name Éire). Judge Brian Walsh said that, "if the courts of other countries seeking the assistance of this country are unwilling to give this State its constitutionally correct and internationally recognised name, then in my view, the warrants should be returned to such countries until they have been rectified." These tensions ended when the 1998 Good Friday Agreement was made. That Agreement resolved issues relating to Northern Ireland and following it Ireland dropped its claim to jurisdiction over the entire island of Ireland. Since that Agreement, the United Kingdom has accepted and uses the name Ireland.

Irish republicans, and other opponents of partition, often refer to the state as the Twenty-Six Counties or 26 Counties (with Northern Ireland as the Six Counties or 6 Counties) and sometimes as the Free State (a reference to the pre-1937 state). Speaking in the Dáil on 13 April 2000, Sinn Féin's Caoimhghín Ó Caoláin explained it as follows:

"In the republican political tradition, to which I belong, the State is often referred to as the 26-County State. This is a conscious response to the partitionist view, prevalent for so long and still sadly widespread, that Ireland stops at the Border. The Constitution says that the name of the State is Ireland, and Éire in the Irish language. Quite against the intentions of the framers of the Constitution, this has led to an identification of Ireland with only 26 of our 32 counties in the minds of many people".

Republic of Ireland is often used for the state, especially to distinguish it from the island or when discussing Northern Ireland. Irish Republic is also often used by the international, particularly British, press. This was the name given to the revolutionary republic which declared its independence in the Irish War of Independence.