The failure of socialist republicanism in the Irish revolution and its aftermath - Part 11
CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST.
Conclusion
From the evidence of the above accounts, it seems likely that, in an Ireland where the influence of the Roman Catholic Church and clergy was profound, there was – at the very least – a wariness or suspicion of socialist ideology. The Church’s warnings against the evils of socialism were certainly more serious than any similar misgivings it may have had in regard to nationalism.
Furthermore, if Kevin O’Shiel’s account is to be believed, nationalism was the one creed capable of exerting a stronger pull on the Irish people than that of the Catholic Church. To this extent, it would seem that the first interpretation of the failure of the socialist republican movement is the correct one – the people of Ireland were simply not ready to embrace any movement that espoused radical socialist ideas.
The other aspect of that interpretation is the notion that radical nationalism was not an option for the Labour movement either, since to adopt such a position would risk alienating those Labour supporters who were of a unionist persuasion, thus splitting the movement. However, the divide between unionism and nationalism was not as significant a problem as it might have been for the socialist republican movement within the 26 counties that were to become the Irish Free State because, as the above evidence shows, Labour seemed to be operating on the basis of a cultural partition even before the Government of Ireland Act made it a reality in 1920. In the five years or so leading up to the 1918 general election, the Irish Trade Union Congress and Labour Party publicly took the view that the interests of its members would be best served by the achievement of independence for Ireland. The party was not shy of displaying its nationalist credentials and, because of this, some historians, such as Emmet O’Connor and Adrian Grant, take the view that the decision by the Irish Labour leadership to withdraw from the 1918 election was a result of poor decision making on the part of the leadership.
The evidence we have looked at, however, leads to a different understanding of that decision. When the question of whether to fight the 1918 election arose, it was not fear of splitting the Labour movement over the question of unionism versus nationalism that prompted Labour’s decision to abstain. Rather, it was a simple recognition of the fact that large numbers of trade unionists who were willing to support the Labour Party on questions of industrial or social policy, were fully intent on voting for Sinn Féin in the upcoming election and would not support any action that threatened to slow the momentum that was building up behind the prospect of a landslide victory for that party.
It is evident from the reports examined above that there was always a certain tension between socialism and nationalism. In the years before 1922, much of this was due to the perceived divisiveness inherent in the industrial militancy of the Labour movement. Nationalists regarded it as important that the Irish people stand united in opposition to British rule. Furthermore, their concept of Irishness tended to involve ideas of a unified and coherent society - a people. The fact that nationalism was, up to a point, considered acceptable – and, in some quarters, even desirable – by many of the Roman Catholic clergy, while socialism tended to be frowned upon, was a further hindrance to co-operation between the two movements.
In 1922, when the issue of the Anglo-Irish treaty came to the fore, it was the Labour movement that chose to distance itself from the more radical branch of the nationalist movement – the anti-treaty republicans. While the Labour Party was certainly in a relatively strong position in 1922 – at least as strong, electorally, as the anti-treaty faction of Sinn Féin – it would not have been able to retain that level of support had its leadership decided to take a stance against the treaty and in favour of either continuing the war against the British, or of joining the fight against those who favoured implementation of the provisions of the treaty. Much of Labour’s popularity was, indeed, based on its opposition to the militarism of those who were preparing to go to war over the issue of the treaty. Thus, it was not poor judgement on the part of the leaders of the Labour movement that led them to make use of the institutions of the Irish Free State, but a realistic assessment of what its supporters wanted from it as a political party.
This parting of the ways between the mainstream Labour movement and radical republicanism was the practical outworking of a fundamental difference in priorities between the two movements. The former saw itself as a mass movement representing the material interests of the workers in terms of jobs, pay and working conditions. The latter had begun very much as a minority movement, with its roots in romantic notions of the cultural, linguistic and even spiritual distinctiveness of the Irish people as a historical entity. Those who now chose to oppose the treaty were driven, at least to some extent, by a sense of loyalty to a not yet fully realised republic, one which existed only in a partial and somewhat abstract form.
Where the evidence examined in this paper does give some support to those historians who see poor leadership as the reason for the failure of socialist republicanism, is in the period from 1923 onwards, when those leaders within the Labour movement who continued to adhere to socialist republicanism had been effectively marginalised by the ILPTUC’s acceptance of the Free State constitution. The inability of these leaders to settle their differences and unite the various factions of socialist republicanism into a single organisation certainly did not help their cause politically or in terms of popular support. Nevertheless, by this point the movement was so thoroughly marginalised – a search of the names of the various organisations and their leaders in the archives of Irish newspapers of the 1920s yields few results, with those reports that do exist being chiefly about the infighting between them – that it is difficult to attribute the movement’s overall failure to achieve its goal of an Irish socialist republic to the lack of unity amongst its leaders during this period.
In sum, then, the evidence examined in this article, largely consisting of reports from the local press during the period of the Irish revolution and its aftermath, points to the failure of Irish socialist republicanism as being chiefly due to the lack of support for radical socialist ideology in Ireland, both during and after the revolutionary period. This lack of support was in part due to the strong influence of the Roman Catholic Church, whose clergy and hierarchy had made it clear that it disapproved of socialism. The popularity of nationalism was another factor since, in the end, it proved impossible for nationalism and socialism to fully co-exist in the context of revolutionary Ireland.
The circumstances being thus unfavourable to the possibility of the success of the socialist republican project, the leaders of the Labour movement made the rational and pragmatic decision not to stand in the way of, or significantly interfere with, the advanced nationalist movement – chiefly embodied in Sinn Féin and the IRA – in regard to the general election of 1918 and the prosecution of the war against the British in 1919 to 1921. When that war and the subsequent truce and series of negotiations led to the Anglo-Irish treaty, the Labour leadership again came to a reasoned decision that the practical interests of its supporters would best be served by following a constitutional path within the Free State which that treaty established.
In terms of the three interpretations, discussed earlier in this article, of the failure of socialist republicanism to achieve its goals during the Irish revolution and its aftermath, the evidence would appear to favour the main tenet of the first interpretation – that there was little appetite for radical socialism in Ireland during this period – while rejecting the notion that a fear of upsetting unionists caused Labour to hold back from embracing Irish separatism too strongly. The evidence examined here also lends some support to the second interpretation - the idea that socialism and nationalism were essentially incompatible, though perhaps this is shown to be the case in more of a practical and historically grounded sense than in the ideological sense understood by Richard English. The third interpretation, that of Emmet O’Connor and Adrian Grant, which sees the failure of the republican socialist movement as being essentially the result of poor decision-making on the part of its leadership, is largely unsupported by the evidence examined in this article.
Andrew Suzmeyan (September 2018)
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