Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I am all for academia and all the rest but these are not people's events. The people of Ireland are not celebrating that they independently chose to set up their justice system or diplomatic system. These commemorations involve all sorts of Departments but there do not seem to be any big public events to highlight these extraordinary developments under a Government that was operating under massive constraints but that embedded democracy. I am focusing on 2020 because as far as I am concerned, we can come back to 2021, 2022 and 2023 again. I am purposely taking a short-term view of it because of the immediacy of 2020 and there could be many differences between now and next year. We will park 2021 and 2022. Another event worth commemorating is the big debate that took place in the Dáil to make the Army subservient to the Dáil. That was an extraordinary debate to take place and an extraordinary decision to make in the middle of a war. The Dáil took responsibility for all military activities as a result of that. These are major events that stood this State in huge stead into the future. The bedrock of it all were the events of 1920 and for some reason we seem to be brushing over these commemorations for 2020. We are trying to be fast with the commemorations for 2020 and trying to see if we can move on, even though it was probably one of the most significant years in the State's history, building on 1919. Having a meeting of the First Dáil was easy. It was making the First Dáil do what it said on the tin, namely become a real and effective Government in Ireland, that was difficult. Local government was taken over in that period as well but that is more relevant to the 2021 commemorations.