The failure of socialist republicanism in the Irish revolution and its aftermath - Part 2
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| Leading Socialist Republican Peadar O'Donnell. An Phoblacht, 12 January 2014. |
Continued from previous post.
The first
interpretation
The first
interpretation of socialist republicanism’s lack of success involves the idea
that there was no real appetite for radical socialist measures in Ireland
during the period in question (the first three decades of the twentieth century).
According to this interpretation, the mainstream Labour movement, as
constituted by the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party (from November
1918 renamed the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress), had little
choice but to allow the dominant stream of political ideology in Ireland at
that time – that of separatist nationalism – to have its head. Once the
question of national independence was settled, the rational course for Labour
was to settle into the role of a social democratic movement within the new
Irish Free State. Republican socialism, on this reading, was destined never to be
anything more than a fringe movement. True, it had come to the fore on certain
occasions, such as during the Dublin lockout of 1913 or the Limerick Soviet in
1919, but these were extraordinary circumstances and not indicative of a
general tendency to social radicalism within the population as a whole. Any
radical potential that had existed had been more associated with the
agricultural classes, rather than the working class, and had, by the beginning
of the revolutionary period, been sufficiently ameliorated by reforming
legislation to have ceased to be a significant factor in the events which were
to follow. According to Michael Laffan, for example, the lack of a significant
social element to the revolution was due to the fact that there had already
been a kind of social revolution in Ireland during the latter part of the
nineteenth century and at the beginning of the twentieth. This had taken the
form of the Land Acts which, since the 1870s, had seen many Irish farmers
transformed from tenants into proprietors of their own land.[1]
Another
purported reason for this alleged lack of support for radical socialist
measures amongst the majority of the Irish population is given by Tom Garvin. Writing
in Joost Augusteijn's 2002 anthology, The Irish Revolution, 1913-23, Garvin
points to the far higher level of industrialisation that existed in Belfast,
compared to other Irish cities, and argues that an industrialised working class
– the traditional support base for socialist ideas – did not exist, in any
fully developed sense, outside of that city.[2]
In an article entitled ‘No good Catholic can be a true Socialist’: The Labour
Party and the Catholic Church, 1922-52, Diarmaid Ferriter argues that the Roman Catholic Church had an influence on the
direction taken by the Labour Party during the 1920s. He claims that it was
during this period that the Church began to express its opposition to
socialism, and that this resulted in the Labour Party being obliged to affirm
its "Catholic credentials" by avoiding too close an identification
with some of its founders, particularly Larkin and Connolly who were regarded
by many Catholics as "anti clerical socialist revolutionaries",[3] and with the more radical
socialist and syndicalist aspect of their ideologies.[4]
Another aspect
of this interpretation is the idea that the Labour movement was precluded not
only from being too radically socialist but also from being too militantly
republican. According to this idea, religious divisions and the associated
political differences over the question of Ireland's relationship to the United
Kingdom made it difficult for the Labour movement to maintain its internal
unity while adopting a strongly republican stance.
Liam Cahill, for
example, in The Forgotten Revolution: The
Limerick Soviet, 1919 – A Threat to British Power in Ireland, written in 1990, pointed to division over Ireland’s
relationship to the United Kingdom as being an important factor in Labour's
inablility to achieve its syndicalist vision of workers' control during the
revolutionary period. He pointed out that "Ninety percent of the skilled
trades unionists in Ireland were employed in Belfast's factories and
shipyards." Many of these workers "regarded the Irish Labour Party
and Trades Union Congress as little more than the industrial wing of Sinn
Féin" and refused to participate in the anti-conscription strike of 1918
or to support a proposed national general strike in support of the Limerick
Soviet.[5] The more the Labour movement aligned itself with the
republican movement, the more likely it was to damage what unity there was
between trade unionists on either side of this religious and political divide.
Like Cahill, Michael
Laffan saw the sectarian divide in Ireland as playing a significant role in
Labour's inability to make much headway with its social and economic goals. In
his 1999 book, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923, Laffan attributed
Labour's failure to stand in the 1918 general election to a fear of upsetting
"Protestant workers in the North"[6] and, again like Cahill, he sees this decision as contributing to the
diminution of the role of socialist republicanism in subsequent Irish history.
He points out that, just as many unionists would have been unhappy with an
alliance between Labour and Sinn Féin (an idea that had been posited during the
run up to the 1918 election), many trade union members also belonged to, or
intended to vote for, Sinn Féin and would have been opposed to the idea of
Labour challenging Sinn Féin in the election.[7] (Indeed, Liam Cahill, in The Forgotten
Revolution, had also noted that "many delegates [to the Irish Trades Union Congress] reported a
determination at local level to vote Sinn Fein" in the 1918 general
election.[8]
The second
interpretation
The second
interpretation sees socialist republicanism as carrying within itself an
internal contradiction, such that the social and economic aims of the movement
were always destined to be held back by the association with radical
nationalism. This reading of the events sees the eventual marginalisation of
socialist republicanism as the inevitable result of allying itself with a
movement which was ultimately averse to any notions of inter-class conflict or
of disunity within the Irish national community.
Writing in 1994, Richard English,
in his book Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the
Irish Free State, 1925-1937, argued that there was a fundamental
incompatibility between, on the one hand, the nationalist stance of groups like
the Irish Republican Brotherhood, Sinn Fein or the Irish Volunteers and, on the
other hand, the socialist ideology of those who were involved in the socialist
republican movement. English highlights the importance of the ideas of James
Connolly in the establishment of that movement,[9] and believes that Connolly
went against his own previously stated views when he decided to ally himself
with those plotting a rising in Dublin in 1916. Subsequent to Connolly's
execution at the hands of a British firing squad for his role in that rising,
socialist republicans continued to ally themselves with the advanced
nationalist movement that was emerging under Sinn Féin (which had itself
adopted republicanism as its official position at its October 1917 Ard Fheis,
or National Convention). The decision not to participate in the 1918 general
election, for example, was one aspect of this allegiance on the part of the
Labour movement. English argues that the commitment to a radical nationalist
agenda inevitably led to the marginalisation of socialist republicanism. While
some of the leaders of the 1916 rising, including Padraig Pearse, had been
sympathetic to the cause of Irish Labour, English shows that Pearse was
ultimately in favour of a cross-class sovereignty for the Irish people as a
whole and, therefore, opposed to a dominant role for Labour.[10]
This multi-class aspect of Pearse’s ideology was
prevalent throughout much Irish nationalism. Referred to by historian Donal Ó
Driscoil as the "integrationist nationalist consensus",[11] it was to continue into
the Free State era, with Cumann na nGaedheal positioning themselves as a
"party that incorporated all elements of the nation", over against
what they saw as the sectionalism of the Labour Party and the Farmers' Party.[12] Similarly, when the Third
Sinn Féin party published its Economic Programme in 1924, the Programme's
objective was described as "the well-being and prosperity of all classes
of the Irish community".[13]
There was, according to English, another way in which the
centrality of the ideas of James Connolly led to a contradiction at the heart
of the socialist republican movement. By taking part, and playing a leading
role, in the Easter Rising, Connolly had given his support to a movement – the
Irish Republican Brotherhood – which believed in a methodology of physical
force carried out by a secretive and elite group on behalf of the people,
rather than by the people themselves. Further, as a result of being executed
for his role in the rising, Connolly was elevated, in subsequent republican
mythology, to the ranks of Irish martyrs who had died in the cause of national
liberation. These twin facets of elite militarism and the cult of martyrdom
were prevalent in the thinking and culture of republicanism and of the IRA
throughout the revolutionary era and its aftermath, yet they ran counter to the
beliefs of socialist republicans like Peadar O'Donnell (who life and ideas are
featured strongly in English’s book), for whom political violence was only
truly legitimate when supported by the mass of the people.[14]
Peadar O’Donnell who was a leading republican
socialist of the revolutionary and post-revolutionary period, was the subject
of a biography by Donal Ó Drisceoil in 2001, and Ó
Drisceoil concurs with
English in concluding that “the continuing adherence of socialists like
O’Donnell to the IRA model” (physical force carried out by a secretive elite
group) contributed to the marginalisation of socialist republicanism in the post-revolutionary era.[15]
In 2005, writing in the anthology Politics and the
Irish Working Class, 1830-1945, which he edited along with Donal Ó
Drisceoil, Fintan Lane argued that Irish nationalism had been an essentially
middle class struggle which had, in effect, inhibited the working classes and
the class of agricultural labourers from achieving their own social
aspirations.[16]
This is a similar argument to that of Richard English around the
incompatibility of advanced nationalism and socialism in Ireland during the
period in question. It can be seen not only as an explanation for the failure
of the socialist republican project, with its attempt to unify the ideologies
of militant socialism and nationalism, but also as justification for the Irish
Labour Party and Trade Union Congress's decision to participate in the
constitutional life of the Free State, rather than continue to embroil itself
in a struggle that had – on Lane's reading – never really been that of the
classes it purported to chiefly represent.
CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
[1] M. Laffan, The Resurrection of Ireland: The Sinn Féin Party, 1916-1923
(Cambridge, 1999), pp. 3-4.
[2] T. Garvin, ‘Revolution? Revolutions are what
Happens to Wheels – The Phenomenon of Revolution, Irish Style’, in J.
Augusteijn (ed.), The Irish Revolution,
1913-1923 (Basingstoke, 2002), pp. 224-232.
[3] Arthur Mitchell, Labour in
Irish Politics 1890-1930: The Irish Labour Movement in an age of Revolution
(Dublin, 1974), pp. 25-47 quoted in D.
Ferriter,
‘‘No good Catholic can be a true Socialist’: The Labour Party and the Catholic
Church, 1922-52’ in Paul Daly, Rónán O’Brien and Paul Rouse (eds.), Making the Difference: The Irish Labour
Party, 1912-2012 (Cork, 2012), pp. 95-106, p. 97.
[4] D. Ferriter, ‘‘No good Catholic can be a
true Socialist’: The Labour Party and the Catholic Church, 1922-52’ in Paul
Daly, Rónán O’Brien and Paul Rouse (eds.), Making
the Difference: The Irish Labour Party, 1912-2012 (Cork, 2012), pp. 95-106,
p. 97.
[5] L. Cahill, The
Forgotten Revolution: The Limerick Soviet, 1919 – A Threat to British Power in
Ireland (Dublin, 1990), p. 125.
[9] R. English, Radicals and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish Free
State, 1925-1937 (Oxford, 1994), p. 27.
[12] J. Knirck, Afterimage of the Revolution: Cumann na nGaedheal and
Irish Politics 1922-32 (Madison, 2014), p. 20.
[13] ‘The Economic Programme of Sinn Féin’
(1924) quoted in English, Radicals and
the Republic, p. 65.
[15] Ó Drisceoil, Peadar O’Donnell, p. 38.
[16] F. Lane, ‘Rural Labourers, Social Change
and Politics in Late Nineteenth-Century Ireland’ in Fintan Lane and Donal
O’Drisceoil (eds.), Politics and the
Irish Working Class, 1830-1945 (Basingstoke, 2005), pp. 113-139.
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