Despite the savagery of the civil war, the Irish Free State emerged from its fratricidal struggle in 1923 as a functioning bourgeois democracy on the Westminster model. The old Unionist ruling class and all the “stake in the country” people rallied around the ruling party Cumann na nGaedheal.
The losers in the civil war still commanded — as Sinn Fein — a powerful block of seats in Parliament, but they proclaimed it a matter of principle not to take their seats in one of the “partition Parliaments”. In 1926 Sinn Fein split, the bulk of its people going with Eamonn De Valera to found Fianna Fail, “The Republican Party”; in 1927 De Valera entered the Free State Dail.
A heavily agrarian area, the Free State was now also overwhelmingly, unchallengeably Catholic. Ironically, the lopping off of the Protestant population of north-east Ulster helped ensure that Home Rule in the 26 counties did become Rome Rule. Laws which permitted divorce, inherited from Britain, were changed in 1925. The nationalist poet WB Yeats spoke against it in the Free State senate on behalf of — generally middle and upper class — 26 county Protestants. Poignantly he repeated on their behalf the words of an English monarch 340 years earlier, when England faced invasion by a much stronger Catholic power: “We are no petty people”. But they were a helpless minority people. All the way through the to De Valera constitution of 1937 , the legal and moral basis of the state came to be based more and more overtly on the teachings of the Catholic Church. According to the testimony of former minister, Noel Browne, bishops and cardinals behaved behind the facade of secular politics like the rulers of the country, which they often were. But still the Irish bourgeoisie proclaimed a fervent desire for unity with the Protestant north, and the same constitution — 1937 — that proclaimed the “special position of the Catholic church in the state” (this formula was dropped in the ’80s) also defined “the national territory” as the whole of the island. It was as if they forgot that there were people on the island, substituting geography for politics.
The labour movement, cut off from labour’s big industrial battalions in the north, was weak and increasingly hegemonised by right wing Catholic ideas. Under the direct pressure of the church, exercised through the teachers’ union in the late ’30s, the Labour Party dropped its nominal commitment to winning a workers’ Republic.
In the ’20s, and from the ’40s onwards, emigration bled the working class. By the ’50s, 1,000 people a week left the 26 counties (population then: 3 million). After virtually ceasing in the ’70s, emigration again rose to a flood tide in the ’80s.
In 1932 the losers in the civil war won the election and formed a government — at first backed by the Labour Party — which soon introduced Ireland’s equivalent of FD Roosevelt’s New Deal. Rudimentary social security was brought in; the state assumed a role in stimulating and organising industry, to create jobs. When Britain, in response to De Valera’s ending of repayment of money owed the British exchequer by farmers who had bought out the old landlords, blocked Irish exports of beef, De Valera distributed cheap food to the unemployed. In this way, Fianna Fail became an immensely powerful party — though increasingly a careerist and self-serving one — to which most southern Irish trade unionists gave their allegiance, and, after a while, much of the Irish bourgeoisie too. The Labour Party was marginalised.
From 1932 to 1958, the 26 counties tried to build up industry behind high tariff walls. Lists of imports were compiled and published with a government offer to put on a sufficiently high import tax to make manufacture and sale in Ireland profitable. The tariff barriers were applied against Northern Ireland too. It was part of the world retreat by trade behind national barriers in this period. Small industries were built in this way, and jobs created, in the ’30s and during World War II. But such goods were not generally exportable. The country stagnated and stifled, bleeding 1,000 migrants each week. In 1958 the Fianna Fail regime that had initiated protectionism in ’32 — and even the same man, Sean Lemass, Taoiseach (prime minister) from ’59 — broke out of the strait jacket and began to open Ireland up to freer international trade and investment. In 1965 a free trade agreement was signed with Britain, accepting and accelerating the reality of British-Irish economic integration.
This drawing together of Britain and the south was one of the detonators which blew up the stability of the north at the end of the 1960s. (See next section).
The labour movement grew as the working class grew. Politically, however, it scarcely advanced. The Labour Party, pushed to the right by Catholic Church pressure in the ’30s, had long accepted that its best hope politically was to get into a coalition of all the other parties against Fianna Fail. It did this in the late ’40s, the mid-’50s and then in the ’70s and ’80s. Today it is in government with the shrinking Fianna Fail, come full circle to its first days in government, when Fianna Fail ruled with tacit Labour support.
Reaping the benefits of the liberalisation of trade after 1958, the south began to become more industrial; after 1972 there was a lush flow of EC subsidies, especially to farming.
In the ’60s and ’70s the south was forced to face up to the question of the north. In 1969 when Catholic-Protestant fighting broke out in the north, Dublin politicians blustered and blustered, but did very little. The Anglo-Irish Agreement of 1985 gave Dublin a political voice in the running of Northern Ireland, which however remains completely in Britain’s hands.
In 1933 and ’34 Ireland suddenly acquired a mass fascist movement. The Collins-O’Higgins-Cosgrave party won the civil war in 1922-23 and ruled until 1932. Then the losers in the civil war, led by De Valera, won the election and formed a government. There was an upsurge of Republicanism to the left of the De Valera movement and a sudden eruption of labour militancy too. Great things were expected. The new government cancelled money being paid to England and in response England slapped heavy tariffs on Irish agriculture. Alarmed, and harried by the now triumphant Republicans of all factions, the Cosgrave Party turned itself into a blue-shirted continental style fascist movement. Led by the former Chief of Police, Eoin O’Duffy, whom the new government had dismissed, the Blueshirts were backed by the rich, by the professional classes, and by many Blueshirt bishops, like Dr Fogarty of Killaloe. De Valera used the state against them, banning their uniforms, forbidding a projected “March on Dublin”. There were mass labour and Republican mobilisations against them. The Blueshirts split in 1934. Thereafter the fascists were a small and declining force, and the majority became today’s Fine Gael Party.
The raw materials that made the Communist Parties of Europe after 1919 were present in Ireland in considerable abundance. The new labour movement was militant and revolutionary. There was a widespread sympathy with socialist ideas in the years of the Revolution (1916-23). The tragic weakness of this movement was that in the south it was never clearly separated out from nationalism and Catholicism, and in the north the workers — the main section of the Irish proletariat — were aloof or hostile. When a Communist Party was set up in 1920 it was weak and immature. Jim Larkin led an organisation affiliated to the Communist International in the ’20s, but it was a mere appendage to his trade union. It collapsed in the late ’20s, when the Comintern turned ultra-left. The Communist Party began again — first as the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups — in the early ’30s, led by Sean Murray, Jim Larkin junior, and others. It was a thoroughly Stalinist organisation. Its concern with socialism was lipservice only: its central politics identified it with the Republican movement because its goal was “to complete the bourgeois revolution”. Over time it came to define this in practice as ending partition. The Stalinists blended into the stream of left wing populist Republicanism, often as its right wing. When in 1934 the leftist Republican Congress split off from the IRA, the “Communists” — along with Republican leader O’Donnell, George Gilmore and Frank Ryan — formed its right wing, rejecting a Trotskyist influenced proposal that it should set as its goal “the Workers’ Republic”. Witch-hunted and persecuted — Catholic mobs burned its buildings in Dublin in the early ’30s — the CPI remained weak. In 1941 it split itself into a Six County and 26 County organisation the better to support Britain in the war. It grew to a sizeable, quite right wing, force in Northern Ireland during the war.
The picture above shows part of a contingent of Protestant workers from the Shankill Road Belfast coming to honour Wolfe Tone at a Republican ceremony in Kildare in June 1934. Organised by the CP, and linked to the Republican Congress, these Protestant Republican workers were set upon by right wing Republicans (followers of Sean MacBride and Maurice Twomey) in Bodenstown church yard!
The decadence of the republican movement
The Republican movement came out of the civil war as the embodiment of Irish revolutionary politics.
The small Communist movement was politically its satellite. Yet it was a sterile movement. Its semi-religious and semi-anarchist rejection of parliament and glorification of “armed struggle” made it doubly impotent in defeat. The consequence is that in 70 years there have been a long succession of groups that have hived off from “Republicanism” to “work the system”: in 1926 Fianna Fail; in the ’40s, Clann na Poblachta; in the ’60s and ’70s, the Workers Party/Democratic Left; in the ’90s perhaps the Adams wing of Sinn Fein. The pure Republicans — reinforced in their beliefs by the fate of those who defected to corrupt bourgeois politics — remained intransigent, but no less sterile.
The Republican movement, focussed on “the National Question” and at best only concerned with social questions and “the Workers’ Republic” as a means to gather support for the national question and “armed struggle”, has acted as a force against the emergence of real revolutionary — working-class — politics in Ireland for over seventy years. Gerry Adams has more in common with Richard Talbot, Duke of Tyrconnell, than he has with Wolfe Tone.
Its ‘armed struggle’ position isolates it in the south. Its armed struggle in the north is now reaching its inevitable denouement: utter failure and — so it seems at the time of writing, but nothing is certain — the imminent departure of Gerry Adams and his friends into mainstream politics in the track of De Valera, Sean MacBride and Tomas MacGiolla.
Worse than this: the decision in 1970-71 to fight a military campaign in the north and the subordination of everything else to that campaign inevitably turned the IRA in the north into a Catholic sectarian force, despite its “Republican” nominal ideas. Pretending that Northern Ireland is only “British occupied Ireland” and wilfully ignoring the fact that the real opposition to a united Ireland is one million Irish Protestants, they have in fact made war on Northern Irish Protestants. Isolated from support in the south — outside episodes after “Bloody Sunday” and during the 1981 hunger strikes — they have become simply the representatives of the narrow and sectional interests and outlook of the Six County Catholics.
Historical revisionism
In the 26 counties, for the four or five decades after independence, Irish history was taught in schools as the history of a people righteously struggling against oppression. The names and dates of the “risings” were learned as a litany of glorious deeds. Thus the Irish bourgeoisie in power purveyed the myths of its own origins in the language of a struggle it no longer had much in common with and often in the voices of dead men and women with whom the bourgeoisie in power had about as much in common as the rich priests, cardinals and bishops of the Christian churches have with the carpenter of Nazareth.
All that began to change in the ’60s. The acid of historical revisionism began to be systematically sprayed over the nationalist icons.
On one level this was good. Real history is not a record of glorious deeds; the history of a people is not the history of heroes and martyrs. All advances in historical knowledge — how things really were and the reasons, or probably reasons, why — objectively increases our chances of controlling the reality produced by that history, our own.
But this revisionism, which was stimulated in the 1970s by events in Northern Ireland, has another goal. It conveys the message: have done with all that old “idealism”, “utopianism”, “millenarianism”, all that “delirium of the brave”. Accept that the best option is a quiet bourgeois Ireland, where farmers get fat and workers are exploited and exported. The grossly misconceived militarism of the Provisional IRA, the mutant pseudo-Republicanism of the trapped Six Counties Catholic minority, isolated from Southern Catholics as from the Northern Protestants — that is where “idealism” lands you. Have no more to do with it! That Irish mood is paralleled and interlaced with by the international recoil from Stalinism and its thin, albeit hard-won wisdom: have done with socialist dreams.
These moods will pass. They will pass quicker if they are understood and fought against.
The goals of the mass Irish revolutionary movements of the last 200 years — ill-defined yearnings and millenarian hopes as they so often were — were rooted in the experience of a people confronting the brutalities of capitalism in naked and savage forms. They were the responses and goals — or, if you like, mere yearnings — of a people which had not quite forgotten its tribal past and which was not inured to capitalism. They pointed the way to a future better than the gombeen Ireland we have, which is a mockery of all that has gone before. (The ‘gombeens’ were the Catholic middle-men for the landlords in the 19th century). They point now to the need to learn from history, and from the revisionists too when they are honest historians and not the ideologists of the incumbent Irish bourgeoisie — and go on fighting for the old goals. Socialism, the workers’ — and not the gombeen — republic!
There is a parallel in Russian history. The Narodnik populists fought Tsarism with gun and bomb; they tried to organise “the people” so as to avoid the horrors of capitalist development. They aimed at a vague and ill-defined socialism. They were, inevitably, a failure. The good sense in what they said and wanted was wrapped up in nonsense. Capitalism developed and changed Russia despite their efforts. Layers of the intelligentsia who had been populists began to break with their past and make peace with “the reality” of Russia’s capitalist development.
They used, some of them, a mechanistic, “economic” Marxism to justify themselves: capitalism was inevitable. The old ideals were redundant, romantic and more than a little foolish. They led, in extremis, to the sort of monstrous conspiratorial absurdities Dostoevsky depicted in The Devils.
The Russian Marxists too saw capitalist development as inevitable and progressive. They had insisted on this against the Narodniks. But they did not abandon the goals of the Narodniks, or their ideals. They redefined, purified and concretised them and pursued them in the new conditions. Irish Marxists inherit the goals — ill-defined as they often were — for which generations of the Irish common people struggled. Fighting for the workers’ republic, we continue the age-old fight of the despoiled, dispossessed, and exploited common people of Ireland.