We took a break for a year or so to have a row amongst ourselves; then we fought a civil war over the failure to put the republic into the treaty we'd signed with the British.
At which point, the Fianna Fail opposition leader claimed that we'd actually been a republic from when he was Taoiseach, in the mid-1930s.
While the word "republic" was freely used, there's no evidence of any great political debate on what the shape and content of the republic might look like.
The empire's lord lieutenant in this country, the Earl of Clarendon, said that Ireland "was sacrificed to the London corn dealers". The government's chief adviser on statistics, Sir Robert Giffen, noted that Ireland paid the empire £7m a year in taxes, when it, by right, ought to pay only half that.
Quite reasonably, the nationalists wanted the Brits out. The desire for a "republic" was understood mostly as merely a rejection of the empire – and "republic" was just another word for separatism.
And, although the word was flung about loosely, the desire to break with the empire – full stop – remained stronger than the desire to create a particular form of society.
On the first day of the 1916 Rising, in the GPO, Patrick Pearse, Joe Plunkett and Desmond FitzGerald discussed possible outcomes to the rebellion. Pearse and Plunkett were executed – but FitzGerald later wrote about the discussion.
It's a fairly broad definition of a republic that includes the coronation of a 26-year-old layabout prince.
The Proclamation was ahead of its time, in its notions of fairness and equality, of "religious and civil liberty, equal rights and equal opportunities to all its citizens".
Its very deliberate use of "Irishmen and Irishwomen" signalled solidarity with the ideals of the suffragettes.
The Democratic Programme of the first Dail was likewise idealistic: "It shall be the first duty of the Government of the Republic to make provision for the physical, mental and spiritual well-being of the children, to secure that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food, clothing or shelter".
The civil war was fought over the technical language of the treaty. There was no battle of differing visions – what the argument came down to was: fight on, or take this compromise.
From the savagery of the civil war came the two entities that became Fianna Fail and Fine Gael, the two wings of the same party that have come back together in today's cartel arrangement, designed to maintain their virtual monopoly of the political field.
This form of party-Church governance was never in anyone's manifesto, but it was the reality of power. If you dared antagonise the bishops they'd denounce you, with devastating consequences at the ballot box.
The bishops deemed the children of unmarried women to be "illegitimate" and that was the word put into legislation. Since the births weren't legitimate, such mothers were not true mothers. The children were stolen, imprisoned in "homes", mistreated – and eventually some were sold off to rich Americans.
The grand phrases of the Proclamation, which lauded equality and fairness, gave way to a pinched, aggressive paternalism. The aim was to shepherd us from birth to death with the minimum amount of sin – and the bishops had a very wide interpretation of sin.
The fact that we weren't formally a republic gave the dissident IRA of the day a reason to exist. And it irritated the politicians. We weren't one thing or the other, and that reminded them of their failure.
When Fine Gael eventually declared the republic, in 1949, it didn't change anything. The coalition continued between the unelected bishops and one or other of the dominant parties. The first crack in that undeclared but very real system of government came shortly afterwards, when the bishops stopped the Mother and Child scheme.
It was the beginning of the end. Eventually, the bishops' own behaviour undermined their dominance, and that unspoken coalition between the Catholic Church and political parties was broken.
The declaration in 1949 was ill-planned, provoked by a snub to the Taoiseach of the day – it meant nothing to the lives of the citizens, but none of that mattered. We got to declare yet again that we were a republic.