amendments be enacted in the same manner as ordinary laws, i.e. as Acts of the Oireachtas. However, the 1937 Constitution was not an Act of the Oireachtas. Instead, it was "approved" by the Dáil and then submitted to the people in a plebscite and only deemed to have become law once voters had endorsed it. The second and related argument was that the 1937 Constitution purported to repeal the 1922 Constitution even though the 1922 Constitution did not explicitly grant the Oireachtas the power to do so. However the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had previously ruled in Moore v. Attorney General of Ireland (1935) that following the Statute of Westminster (1931) the Irish Free State legislature had gained the unfettered power to pass legislation and thus amend the constitution in a manner repugnant to imperial acts, and it had successfully removed any right to petition the Privy Council. The Department of External Affairs notified foreign governments only of the change of name; it did not re-accredit diplomats as would be expected were the post-1937 Ireland a successor state of the previous Irish Free State. Coming into force The date of the coming into operation of the Constitution was contained in Article 62, a transitory provision of the Constitution which is omitted from the official published text. Article 48 provides that the Constitution of the Irish Free State is repealed as of that date. No resolution of the Dáil was passed by the 9th Dáil, which was elected the same day as the plebiscite on the Constitution, and the Constitution came into force on 29 December 1937, 180 days after the plebiscite. Consequential acts were passed between July and December to provide for the establishment of, and holding elections for, the new Seanad and the Presidency, as well as for other adaptations. The Presidential Establishment Act 1938 was passed after the Constitution had come into effect but before the first President, Douglas Hyde, took office. New official stamps, seals, and papers marked "Éire" replaced those with "Saorstát Éireann"; in some cases immediately, in other cases after existing stocks had run out. International response When the new constitution was enacted, the British government, according to The New York Times "contented itself with a legalistic protest". Its protest took the form of a communiqué on 30 December 1937 in which the British stated: The Eire (Confirmation of Agreements) Act 1938 provided