Tim Healy at the Áras

It is twenty past ten on the morning of Wednesday the sixth of December 1922, in the State Drawing Room on the south side of the Viceregal Lodge in the Phoenix Park in central Dublin, in pale December light through the tall south casements. He is sixty-seven years old. He is Timothy Michael Healy, born at Bantry in County Cork on the seventeenth of May 1855, son of the Bantry workhouse clerk Maurice Healy and Eliza Sullivan, schooled at the Christian Brothers School in Fermoy, called to the Irish bar in 1884, took silk in 1899, in the twenty-second year of his King's Counsel practice at the Four Courts.

Beside him in the State Drawing Room is Lord FitzAlan of Derwent, sixty-six, the last Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1921–22), in the formal viceregal court-dress with the Garter ribbon. The handover is the formal political-symbolic-handover from the Westminster Crown-administration of Ireland (which had run since the 1542 Crown of Ireland Act of Henry VIII) to the Irish Free State Government. The W. T. Cosgrave Free-State Cabinet (constituted on the ninth of September 1922 as the Provisional Government and on this day formally established as the Executive Council of the Irish Free State) is present at the east end of the Drawing Room.

Healy thinks: the eight-year political-process since the Easter Rising has produced, on the formal political-record, the Irish Free State. The Treaty of December 1921, the Civil War of 1922 (which is, on the political-military balance, going in the Free-State's favour and will, by the spring of 1923, conclude), the Free-State-Constitution of October 1922, the Royal Assent to the Irish Free State Constitution Act on the fifth of December — all of this leads to the swearing-in this morning.

He thinks: I am sixty-seven. I have been on the Irish-Parliamentary-Party political-scene since 1880. I was at Westminster for the Parnell years, the Healy-Parnell split of 1890–91, the Redmond years, the 1916 Rising, the Sinn Féin sweep of 1918, the War of Independence, the Treaty negotiations.

He thinks: the Governor-Generalship is the political-symbolic office of the handover. The Cosgrave Cabinet chose me on the explicit principle that the office should be held by a Irish nationalist whose political-career predates the 1916 generation. The purpose is to demonstrate to the Free-State public that the Treaty is a continuation of the constitutional-nationalist tradition and not a discontinuous British-imposed settlement.

He takes the Oath of Office at twenty-five past ten, in the formal phrasing of the Free-State Constitution Article 12: I, Timothy Michael Healy, do solemnly and sincerely promise and declare that I will faithfully execute the office of Governor-General of the Irish Free State, without fear or favour, affection or ill-will toward any man, and that I will, to the best of my ability, preserve the Constitution as established by law. Lord FitzAlan hands him the formal Letters Patent of the Office of Governor-General in a leather portfolio.

Tim Healy served as Governor-General of the Irish Free State from the sixth of December 1922 to the thirty-first of January 1928, the five-year transition through which the Free State institutions were consolidated and the Civil War was concluded. He died at his Chapelizod home in west Dublin on the twenty-sixth of March 1931, seventy-five years old. He is buried at Glasnevin Cemetery in central Dublin, in the Healy family plot with his wife Erina (née Sullivan, niece of the Daniel-Sullivan family of Bantry, married 1882). The Áras an Uachtaráin (the Viceregal Lodge renamed in 1937 on the Constitution-of-Ireland change) is, in 2025, the official residence of the Presidents of Ireland; the Governor-Generalship was abolished in the 1937 Constitution and replaced by the elected Presidency, the first President being Douglas Hyde (1938–45). Tim Healy's 1922 swearing-in is, on the balance of Irish historical-judgement, the formal political-symbolic moment of the Irish State's self-constitution.