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Synopsis
"William Butler Yeats called Kevin O'Higgins the 'great builder of a nation'. Assistant minister for Local Government in the revolutionary Dail Eireann government, O'Higgins was a leading champion of the 1921 Anglo Irish Treaty and became the Vice President of the Irish Free State and its first Minister for Justice. But assassins cut his life short in 1927. His importance in the story of an independent Ireland is undoubted. Yet he has often been overlooked. This is partly because O'Higgins' firm resistance to the republican opponents of the treaty settlement provoked great animosity." The accomplishments in his short life were formidable: nothing less than the solidification of constitutional and democratic institutions in the newly independent Ireland. Had he survived, he would have helped Ireland avoid the self-imposed parochial isolation that beset its first half-century of independence. This book definitively captures the thoughts, actions, and policies of a critical figure in the building of the Irish state in its opening years.