Perhaps Ireland needs a monarch to keep its politicians in their place

I recently watched an interview Stephen Fry gave in Canada in which he made an unexpectedly powerful argument for constitutional monarchy.
  It was not an argument based on deference, inherited wealth, crowns, carriages, or royal spectacle. Nor was it based on any belief that a monarch is naturally wiser than an elected politician.  It was about humility.
  Fry asked his audience to imagine Donald Trump being required to travel to Capitol Hill every week to meet a person called Uncle Sam. This figure would be the living embodiment of the United States, before whom the president would have to bow.
  The purpose of that bow would not be to acknowledge the personal superiority of Uncle Sam. It would remind the president that he was not America. He was merely its temporary servant.
Fry compared this imaginary arrangement with the British prime minister’s regular audience with the monarch. He described the sovereign as a “living flag”: a human personification of the country, its history, and its constitutional continuity. The argument has stayed with me.

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Before anyone reaches for the smelling salts, I am not proposing that Ireland import the House of Windsor. Neither am I suggesting that we reopen Dublin Castle, purchase several gold coaches, and begin awarding hereditary estates to government supporters.
  Nor should any Irish monarch possess the slightest independent power to govern. The point is almost precisely the opposite. Could the existence of a permanent, hereditary, and politically powerless head of state prevent elected politicians from imagining that they personally embody the nation? Could it remind a Taoiseach that winning an election does not make him or her the owner of Ireland?
  In a constitutional monarchy, the government governs but does not personify the State. The monarch personifies the State but cannot govern it. Each office limits the pretensions of the other.
  A prime minister may command a parliamentary majority, appoint ministers, direct policy, and dominate public life. But that prime minister must still enter the presence of somebody who represents the country beyond the government’s electoral term. There is something healthy in that.
  Political power has become increasingly personal. Parties now build themselves around leaders rather than ideas. Governments communicate through the image, language, personality, and daily activities of one central figure.

A king above politics; a symbol of the nation, a servant of its people, and a living link between Ireland’s ancient inheritance and its modern future.

Everything becomes the Taoiseach’s initiative, the minister’s announcement, or the party leader’s personal mission. Social media has greatly worsened this tendency. Political leaders no longer merely administer the State. They are encouraged to perform the State continuously before cameras and mobile telephones. The distinction between serving the country and personifying it becomes dangerously blurred.
  That problem is not confined to Donald Trump or the United States. It can arise wherever a leader begins to believe that criticism of him amounts to criticism of the nation.
The hard left and hard right share more of this tendency than either side would care to admit.
The hard right frequently treats the flag as its private property. It attempts to define national loyalty according to its own narrow tests of identity, ethnicity, migration, religion, and cultural conformity.
  The hard left often makes the opposite mistake. It regards the very idea of national identity with embarrassment or suspicion, as though attachment to a country must inevitably lead to exclusion, aggression, or racism.
  One side tries to seize the nation. The other sometimes appears ready to surrender it.
Between them stands a substantial majority of Irish people who love their country without hating anybody else, who value sovereignty without embracing isolation, and who understand that national identity need not be either a weapon or an apology. Could a permanent head of state embody that middle ground?
  Ireland presently has a directly elected president. Under Article 12 of the Constitution, the President takes precedence over every other person in the State and is chosen by direct popular vote for a seven-year term.
  We have also been fortunate in many of those who have occupied the office.
Mary Robinson, Mary McAleese, and Michael D Higgins each developed the moral and cultural influence of the presidency in different ways. The office has frequently represented Ireland abroad with dignity and distinction.
  This argument should not be mistaken for a personal criticism of President Catherine Connolly, who began her term in November 2025, or of any individual president. It concerns the structure of the office rather than its present occupant.
  But there remains an uncomfortable question about the political origins of the presidency.
Éamon de Valera was the central political force behind the Constitution of 1937. He established a committee to examine the existing constitutional arrangements and personally drove the creation of the new constitutional order.
  I have long suspected that de Valera designed the presidency in a manner which allowed Fianna Fáil to retain effective possession of both the headship of government and the headship of state for as long as the party remained dominant.
  That is my interpretation. I cannot produce a private note in which de Valera admits to such an intention, and it would be wrong to present speculation as established historical fact.
But consider the outcome.
  Fianna Fáil candidates held the presidency continuously from 1945 until 1974, and again from 1976 until Mary Robinson’s victory in 1990. Mary McAleese was subsequently elected as the Fianna Fáil nominee in 1997 before being returned unopposed in 2004.
  Mary Robinson’s election was the first occasion on which a Fianna Fáil candidate lost a presidential election. That did not happen until 1990, more than half a century after Bunreacht na hÉireann came into force. Was this merely the natural consequence of Fianna Fáil’s electoral strength? Perhaps. But the constitutional architecture and the party’s political dominance fitted together with remarkable convenience.
  De Valera himself moved directly from leading Fianna Fáil and serving as Taoiseach into the presidency. He held the office for 14 years. The founder of the party which dominated government became the personification of the State under the Constitution he had helped to devise. Can anyone seriously argue that this arrangement was completely detached from party politics?
  The Irish presidency is formally above politics. Yet almost every presidential election is fought through political parties, political endorsements, political organisations, and political arguments.
Candidates require nominations from members of the Oireachtas or local authorities unless they are former or retiring presidents. The system therefore gives established political organisations considerable influence over who may even appear on the ballot paper. Every elected president consequently enters Áras an Uachtaráin after winning a political contest.
  However dignified the successful candidate may become, there must first be opponents, campaigns, manifestos, endorsements, accusations, victories, and defeats.
One part of the population wins the presidency. Another part loses it.
  A hereditary monarch has no electoral mandate. That is normally presented as the decisive argument against monarchy. But could it also be one of its constitutional advantages?
Because the monarch has no mandate, the monarch has no authority to impose a political programme. There is no manifesto to implement, constituency to reward, or party organisation to satisfy.
  The hereditary principle removes the head of state from the electoral auction. It deprives the monarch of democratic power but may, in return, allow the office to represent the democratic State without competing against its government. The obvious objection is that inherited public office offends the principle of equality. It simply does, but I propose that it is not all that simple, either. No honest argument for monarchy can pretend there are not glaring contradictions. A child should not ordinarily receive a constitutional office merely because of his or her parents. But the question is not whether hereditary succession is perfectly logical or perfectly egalitarian. Few political institutions satisfy either standard. The proper question is whether its limited unfairness might produce a greater constitutional benefit.
  Would we prefer a head of state chosen once by historical settlement and thereafter denied political power? Or should we continue electing a symbolic national figure through an increasingly ideological political contest?
  Would a permanent Irish crown provide a shared embodiment of the nation which neither the hard left nor the hard right could claim as its own? A monarch could not be the property of Sinn Féin, Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, Labour, the Social Democrats, or any of the more excitable political factions presently shouting at one another online.
  Neither could a monarch belong exclusively to Catholics, Protestants, atheists, republicans, unionists, rural Ireland, or Dublin.
  The institution would succeed only if it represented the full national community. Any monarch who became the representative of one tribe, class, religion, or ideology would destroy the case for monarchy almost immediately.
  Would it solve the housing crisis? Of course not. Would it shorten hospital waiting lists, build roads, control public expenditure, reform immigration policy, or improve local government? Plainly not.
  But constitutions are not judged only by whether they repair roads. They also determine how power is understood, limited, transferred, and symbolised.
  Ireland’s present political divisions are not merely disagreements about taxation or public services. They increasingly concern the meaning of Ireland itself.
  Who belongs here? What do we owe to our history? What does sovereignty mean? Is patriotism respectable? Does Irish identity rest on citizenship, culture, ancestry, language, shared allegiance, or some combination of them all?
  An elected politician cannot conclusively answer those questions on behalf of everybody.
Perhaps no individual can. But a permanent and politically neutral institution might at least prevent competing parties from pretending that they alone possess the answer.
  Then comes the practical question. Where would Ireland find a monarch? The last figure commonly described as the High King of Ireland before the Anglo-Norman intervention was Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair, the King of Connacht, who died in 1198. Even that description requires qualification. Medieval Irish high-kingship was contested, layered, and substantially different from the later centralised monarchies of Europe.
  Tracing one uncontested line of succession across more than 800 years would be an extraordinary undertaking. There would probably be numerous descendants, competing dynastic claims, missing records, disputed marriages, and genealogical dead ends.
  So let us give the historians something useful to do. A properly constituted commission of historians, genealogists, archivists, and constitutional lawyers could examine the principal surviving lines of the old Irish royal dynasties.
  Its purpose should not be to discover some absurd notion of pure Irish blood. No such thing exists, and any attempt to create an ethnic qualification for the office would be both dangerous and profoundly un-Irish.
  The commission could instead identify historically credible dynastic lines and recommend a constitutional method of selection. A national convention might choose the first holder according to character, public service, historical connection, and an absolute commitment to political neutrality. The people would then have the final say in a referendum.
  After that first democratic act of establishment, succession could become hereditary under clearly defined constitutional rules. The crown would possess no executive authority, no political discretion beyond tightly controlled reserve powers, and no right to express partisan opinions. The monarch would reign under the Constitution and entirely at the pleasure of the constitutional order.
  The idea is admittedly improbable. It may even be preposterous. But Fry’s point was that an institution need not be wholly rational to perform a rational function. Flags are pieces of cloth. Anthems are songs. Parliaments are rooms in which adults shout at one another before walking through different doors.
  Human beings nevertheless require symbols. The attraction of an Irish monarchy would not lie in making one family more important than everybody else. It would lie in creating one office before which every politician was required to acknowledge that he or she was less important than Ireland.
  Imagine the weekly scene. The Taoiseach arrives to report on the business of government. He or she may have won an election, defeated his opponents, dominated the Dáil, and spent the week appearing on every available television programme.
  But he or she must still bow before the constitutional embodiment of a nation which existed before his government and will survive long after it. Not before an autocrat. Not before a political opponent. Not even, in the final analysis, before an individual. He or she bows before Ireland.
  Would that humble our politicians? Would it reduce the growing belief that every election is a struggle for possession of the national identity? Would it give the country a permanent centre while the political fringes pull furiously in opposite directions? I do not know; however, I am extremely fascinated by the notion. In my opinion, it is a more serious question than our settled republican assumptions permit us to admit.
  Any historian prepared to begin tracing the descendants of Ruaidrí Ua Conchobair?

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