The failure of socialist republicanism in the Irish revolution and its aftermath - Part 3


'Big Jim' Larkin in 1913. From www.theirishstory.com.

Continued from previous post.


The third interpretation

The third interpretation is that socialist republicanism might have succeeded in its aims had it not been for errors of judgement, or personal failings, on the part of its leadership. Typical of historians who adopt this interpretation is Emmet O’Connor. In a 2005 article entitled The age of the red republic: the Irish left and nationalism, 1909—36,[1] O’Connor argued that poor leadership and bad decision-making were the reasons for the failure of socialist republicanism to capitalise on the strength it had during the period before the Anglo-Irish treaty. This manifested itself in Labour's decision not to stand in the 1918 general election and its decision to participate in the political life of the newly formed Irish Free State, thus tacitly accepting the provisions of the Anglo-Irish treaty. Poor leadership was also behind the failure of the continuing socialist republican fringe groups to unite into a coherent movement. Indeed, in his 2002 biography of James Larkin, O’ Connor had blamed the latter's personality for the failings of socialist republicanism as a movement in the years after 1923. Larkin's split from the ITGWU, and the failure of groups like Larkin's Irish Worker League and Roddy Connolly’s Socialist Party of Ireland (later renamed the Communist Party of Ireland) to come together and form a single socialist republican front, were, in O'Connor's view, largely due to Larkin's “self-destructive egomania”.[2]

Each of the pivotal moments mentioned by O’Connor is an important aspect of the third interpretation of the failure of socialist republicanism. Had the Labour Party participated, for example, in the 1918 general election it could have gained a greater level of influence over subsequent events. Had it thrown its weight behind the anti-treaty faction in 1922, the result might have been the emergence of a more powerful republican socialist counter-force to the conservative government that emerged from the civil war period. Had the leaders of the various socialist republican organisations that existed in the Irish Free State during and after the civil war been able to put aside their differences and present a united front, they could, perhaps, have been more successful in opposing the conservatism of the Free State establishment.

O’Connor’s influence is present in the work of Adrian Grant and, indeed, Grant’s 2012 book Irish Socialist Republicanism, 1909-36 is based on the latter's PhD thesis which was written under O'Connor's supervision. For Grant, it was the poor judgement and, in particular, the conservatism and over-cautiousness of the Labour leadership which prevented socialist republicanism from gaining more influence over the developing conflict situation with the British and over the polity of the Irish Free State that emerged from that conflict.[3] Like O’Connor, Grant regarded Labour's abstention from standing in the 1918 general election as a costly decision in terms of the fortunes of republican socialism. He saw this decision as stemming from Labour's view that the basis of the election had changed as a result of the recent ending (only a month earlier) of the First World War. The issue of conscription, for example, the struggle against which had seen the Labour movement play a leading role, was no longer of any relevance. Grant believed that Labour saw the election as now being chiefly about the issue of independence, and was not willing to jeopardise the unity of its support base by becoming embroiled in that struggle.[4] However, in Grant's view, the consequence of Labour's withdrawal from the election was to make it easier for Sinn Féin and the nationalist movement to take the leading role in subsequent events, and for a purely nationalistic – rather than socialist – form of republicanism to go largely unchallenged as the dominant ideological basis of the independence movement.

Grant, too, sees the decision of the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress to operate, after 1922, through the constitutional structures of the Irish Free State as alienating it from those who opposed the treaty and who saw themselves as the true defenders of the republic that had been declared by the leaders of the 1916 rising and reaffirmed by the first Dáil in 1919. By so doing, it forced the socialist republican movement to operate outside of the mainstream Labour movement, and Grant – again like O’Connor - sees the disunity amongst the various continuing socialist republican groups as being another reason for their lack of political success.

For Donal Ó Drisceoil, it was in this post-revolutionary era, when the possibility existed for political action within an independent Ireland (at least in the 26 counties of the Free State), that the socialist republican movement failed to take the opportunity available to achieve its long-held aim of establishing a 'workers' republic'. In his biography of Peadar O'Donnell, written in 2001, Ó Drisceoil, attributed much of this failure to “the egotism of Jim Larkin” who, having returned to Ireland from the United States in 1923, became involved in bitter rivalries with some of his former ITGWU and Labour Party comrades. Ó Drisceoil also cites the "shifting priorities" of the Comintern (Communist International) as a factor. Comintern had originally backed Larkin's new organisation, the Irish Worker League, as its representative in Ireland but later became disillusioned with the League's lack of political progress.

In their 2017 anthology about the Dublin lockout of 1913, Conor McNamara and Pádraig Yeates argued that the social conservatism of Ireland in the early part of the twentieth century has been exaggerated and that, contra Tom Garvin, there was indeed an appetite for radical socialist ideas, as evidenced by the popularity of, and willingness to follow, radical socialist republican leaders such as James Larkin. They also disagreed with the idea, put forward by historians such as Michael Laffan, that the agricultural reforms of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century had ended the potential for social unrest in the countryside, pointing out that thousands of agricultural labourers joined the ITGWU during the 1920s.[5] In the view of these historians, the opportunity was there for a radical socialist republicanism to succeed in the Ireland of the revolutionary period, and it was only the failure of the Labour leadership to grasp that opportunity that prevented it from doing so.


TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST
[1] E. O’Connor, ‘The age of the red republic: the Irish left and nationalism, 1909—36’, Saothar, 30 (2005), pp. 73-82.
[2] E. O’Connor, James Larkin (Cork, 2002), p. 116.
[3] A. Grant, Irish Socialist Republicanism 1909-36 (Dublin, 2012), pp. 225-226.
[4] Ibid., pp. 87-88.
[5] C. McNamara and Padraig Yeates, The Dublin Lockout, 1913: New Perspectives on Class War & its Legacy (Newbridge, 2017), p. 152.

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