Irish Revolutionary History

Bruree Workers Soviet Mills, 1921 by  Caoimhghin Ó Croidheáin . Continued from  previous post . In April 1919, the British Army declared the city of Limerick a Special Military Area under the Defence of the Realm Act, imposing a requirement for civilians to carry permits issued by the Royal Irish Constabulary in order to enter or leave the city. This action triggered a defiant response from the people of that city involving a twelve-day long strike, with the city effectively being run by a strike committee calling itself the Limerick Soviet. The strike was eventually called off on Sunday 27 April, with most workers agreeing to the use of the permits and to a return to work. On the day that the strike ended, Reverend W. Dwane, in an address to the congregation of St Michael's Church in Limerick, used language indicating that the clerical attitude to socialism and to militant industrial action in general had remained remarkably consistent since the Dublin Lockou...

Scab labour being escorted to work by RIC officers during the 1911 Wexford lockout. Picture from  Independent.ie . Continued from previous post . The Evidence The Church and socialism The Dublin Lockout of 1913 is rightly remembered as a crucial struggle between various Dublin employers and their workers, essentially over the question of whether or not workers had the right to join the trade union of their choice (it was the unionisation of unskilled workers - alongside the skilled and semi-skilled - by the ITGWU to which employers like William Martin Murphy of the Dublin United Tram Company objected). But lockouts in general had become a not infrequent occurrence during the second decade of the twentieth century. One important example was a lockout which took place in Wexford in 1911 when various foundry and engineering companies decided to lock out all employees who had become members of the ITGWU. The union had only recently begun to recruit in the area, and it...

Front page of the Evening Herald (Dublin) during the lockout of 1913. From  National Library of Ireland - 1916 Exhibition . Continued from  previous post . Some questions Each of the above three interpretations undoubtedly contains some element of the truth about why the socialist republican movement did not achieve its desired outcome of establishing a 'workers' republic' in Ireland. However, there are a number of key questions which arise from them, an analysis of which will be helpful towards gaining a better understanding of why events turned out as they did. The first of these is the question of whether or not the general public in Ireland at the time of the Irish revolution was sufficiently receptive to socialist ideas to make the idea of an Irish socialist republic a viable one. If it was not, then the first interpretation – or at least that part of it which sees it as inevitable that radical socialism could not have successfully competed for popularity...

'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 con...

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 b...