territory as the present day Irish state. However, political turmoil and the ongoing War of Independence meant that it never fully functioned as envisaged. Southern Ireland was superseded in law on 6 December 1922 by the establishment of the Irish Free State. The term Southern Ireland does not have any official status today. However, it is sometimes still used colloquially, particularly by older people, in the United Kingdom. Irish Free State (1922–37) During the negotiations on secession leading to the Anglo-Irish Treaty, Irish politicians wanted the state to be a republic, and its name to be the Republic of Ireland or the Irish Republic. However the British government refused to contemplate a republic because this would have entailed the Irish state severing the link with the British crown and ceasing to be a part of the British Empire. Instead, the parties agreed the state would be a self-governing Dominion within the British Commonwealth of Nations. The self-proclaimed Irish Republic had used Saorstát Éireann as its Irish name, and "Irish Free State" was derived by literal translation of Saorstát Éireann back into English. Article One of the treaty stated: The May 1922 draft of the Constitution of the Irish Free State used only Irish forms of many names and titles, but on British insistence these were replaced with English equivalents; one exception was that references to "Saorstát Éireann" were amended to "the Irish Free State (Saorstát Éireann)". After the establishment of the Free State the Irish government often used the name Saorstát Éireann in documents in English as well as Irish; an exception was that postage stamps of the period used Éire. Because the Irish Free State was not a republic, since 1922 the word saorstát has fallen out of use in Irish as a translation of republic. When the official description of the state was declared to be the Republic of Ireland in 1949, its official Irish description became not Saorstát Éireann but Poblacht na hÉireann. It appears that the "Irish Free State" name was not generally popular, The Times reporting on the Irish general election in 1932: Éire (Irish language name since 1937) As mentioned above, Article 4 of the Constitution of Ireland, gives the state its two official names, Éire in Irish and Ireland in English. Each name is a direct translation of the other. From 1937, the name Éire was often used even in the English language.