Talk:President of the Executive Council of the Irish Free State

2004 edit
President of the Executive Council can be referred to as prime minister. The Irish Free State operated a standard Westminster model parliamentary system with the President of the Executive Council modelled on the premierships of the United Kingdom and Canada and the PEC possessed all the standard prime ministerial functions and duties. 'President of the Council' is a standard name applied to many European prime ministers in official constitutional documents. FearÉIREANN 21:50, 3 Jan 2004 (UTC)


 * That is not quite correct. President of the Council is not merely a synonym of 'Prime Minister': both were different kinds of heads of government. We don't refer to Trump or Obama as the 'Prime Minister of the United States', or Merkel as the 'Prime Minister of Germany' - all are heads of government, but not all are 'Prime Ministers'.


 * President of the Council (and variants thereof) was a standard term in the 19th and early 20th centuries for continental parliamentary systems based on the nineteenth-century French (and, ultimately, Swiss) form of parliamentarism: generally, most European democracies during that period modelled themselves either on Victorian England or Republican France. The term can still be found in use in countries such as Italy and Spain.


 * The difference with a Westminster-style 'prime minister' was subtle but very real, based on two different kinds of party system and the opportunities or constraints one or the other imposed upon a head of government. Prime Minsiters almost always require a two-party system (and, more abstractly, a society divided along only one major politico-cultural axis rather than three or four), and heavily disciplined, centralised, nationwide parties. In normal circumstances a 'prime minister' was the dominant figure of a party that was the dominant bloc in parlianent, with the result that he was not only head of government but simultaneously the de facto leader of the parliamentary majority. This gave him de facto powers over his majority and his ministers impossible under a multi-party system. In the French-Italian-Spanish system, the President of the Council had to carefully curate a parliamentary majority based on six or eight small-to-medium parties, which reduced his margin of manoeuvre: when choosing his cahinet he could not include just anyone in any role, but had to painstakingly build a coalition like a house of cards, and give each faction a slice of the pie in cabinet.


 * The clearest indicator of the difference was what happened during a ministerial resignation. For a President of the Council, any change in ministerial personnel was automatically a government crisis. If one minister resigned the head of government could not just replace him overnight with another party loyalist, as could a Westminster prime minister; the entire parliamentary arithmetic changed and a brand-new cabinet formation was required, returning to parliament for a new investiture, and thus constantly courting the risk of cabinet collapse - and a new cabinet of the opposition, without an election intervening. A Wesminster Prime Minister did not have this constant risk of overthrow hanging over him, and if he did it would be another party man, not the opposition, who formed his successor cabinet. At the time, such a strong weighting in favour of the legislature was seen by suppprters as a positive, in contrast to the examples of executive-dominated systems under Bonaparte, Bismarck and even Lloyd George. But the econonic and military crises of 1929-1954 convinced most countries of the need of a more authoritative head of government. That is why many countries that used to have a president of the council went to great effort to replace the role with a more powerful official 'prime minister' in the second half of the 20th century, effectively opting for a more 'Westminsterised' head of government (e.g., Luxembourg and France).


 * In short, the terms are not interchangeable. In this respect, as with many others ('MP' replaced by the term 'deputy'; the term 'gárda síochána' being introduced as a direct translation of the French term for civilian police 'gardien de la paix') the Free State reflected a general desire (not always successful) by republicans to replace perceivedly 'English' institutions with equivalents inspired by the other dominant model of the time, republican France.


 * We can certainly debate degrees and dosages. But great care should be used before making sweeping statements such as 'Ireland followed a standard Westminster system' or that a president if the council was merely a synonym for the UK-style prime minister. To conflate the two ends up causing greater confusion than it solves, as it papers over many of the constitutional, institutional and cultural conflicts of the politics of time, both in Ireland and across Europe Moranete (talk) 08:53, 12 November 2019 (UTC)


 * Moranete: Would it be possible for you to source all that and convert into a new article, or section of an existing article? It would make a good contribution to Wikipedia. Qexigator (talk) 20:06, 12 November 2019 (UTC)