Faced with peasants organised to fight a land war and a Fenian revolutionary underground still powerful, Britain now exerted herself to solve the “Irish problem”.
Liberal leader, WE Gladstone, recognising that Ireland was a powder keg at Britain’s foundation, energetically set out to remove it by placating the Irish peasants — who were still living at starvation level and without legal rights on the land, comparable in some senses to the serfs of the Middle Ages.
Britain’s ruling class sought to remove the powder keg by passing a number of Land Acts after 1870.
The later Acts — decisively the Wyndham Act passed in 1903 — allowed the peasant, with government finance and the prospect of decades of repayment, to buy out some landlords and make himself, still impoverished, into the owner of a patch of land. It was this right of ownership that most of the peasants wanted, so they withdrew into the background of the political struggle, as supporters of a Home Rule movement which after the fall of Parnell (1891) became a docile tail of the Liberal Party in Parliament. James Connolly and the Irish socialists at the turn of the century opposed peasant proprietorship, demanding the nationalisation of the land instead.
The working class
By the 1890s, a working class had begun to develop in the South. But the Irish working class was (and is) a working class divided against itself. The industrial workers of the north-east of Ireland were the descendants of the colonists, still maintaining, in changed times and conditions, petty privileges over the Catholics and large illusions of superiority.
The Orange labour aristocracy looked with contempt on the Catholic workers.
Like northern Italian workers who looked, and look still, it seems, with almost racist contempt on the southern Italian, and Mexican workers who enlisted to quell the revolutionary peasants during the post-1910 Mexican Revolution, they felt they belonged to a different people.
In 1907 Jim Larkin organised the Catholic and Protestant workers together in Belfast for a brief period — to the terror of the capitalists. It was a brief, shallow but prophetic unity, broken by the rising tide of Home Rule politics and opposition to Home Rule — the attempts to complete the normalisation of the Irish situation by granting limited autonomy to the Irish middle class.
The Southern working class was small and weak, it was divided, it was disorganised — it was only in 1894 that an Irish TUC was organised — but it was the only force that in the circumstances could hope to lead the fight for Irish freedom to a successful conclusion. It showed its potential in its great “Labour War” with Dublin’s Irish-nationalist capitalists, in 1913.
The middle class were stooges of one British ruling-class faction and the working class’s enemies; the Southern working class was born with the memory of the centuries of slavery as its only heritage, and a battle for both Irish freedom and for its own class freedom as the only realistic prospect.
James Connolly, the greatest figure of the socialist Irish working class movement, put the situation very clearly when he said: “The Irish working class is the only true inheritor of the fight for Irish freedom.” He meant that nothing less than a socialist Ireland could really free the people of Ireland, that it was not enough to throw out the British.
Marx, Ireland and the bourgeois revolution
In 1868, when the Liberals were proposing that the Anglican Church should cease to be the official state-sponsored Church in Ireland — so that the Catholic people would no longer have to pay for its upkeep — Karl Marx wrote:
The Irish question predominates here just now. It has been exploited by Gladstone and company, of course, only in order to get into office again, and above all, to have an electoral cry at the next elections, which will be based on household suffrage. For the moment this turn of events is bad for the workers’ party; the intriguers among the workers, such as Odger and Potter, who want to get into the next Parliament, have now a new excuse for attaching themselves to the bourgeois Liberals.
However, this is only a penalty which England — and consequently also the English working class — paying for the great crime she has been committing for many centuries against Ireland. And in the long run it will benefit the English working class itself. You see, the English Established Church in Ireland — or what they use to call here the Irish Church — is the religious bulwark of English landlordism in Ireland, and at the same time the outpost of the Established Church in England herself. (I am speaking here of the Established Church as a landowner). The overthrow of the Established Church in Ireland will mean its downfall in England and the two will be followed by the doom of landlordism — first in Ireland and then in England. I have, however been convinced from the first that the social revolution must begin seriously from the bottom, that is, from land ownership.
Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann
April 6, 1868
Because in Ireland the landlords were an alien force, never accepted (as the landlords were in England) by the people except at the point of the gun, Marx believed that Home Rule would immediately be followed by a great Irish “bourgeois” revolution against landlordism, and that this would trigger a similar final phase in settling accounts with remnants of feudalism in Britain. In fact things went the opposite way. Beginning timidly, English governments — Liberal first and then, decisively, Tory — organised an agrarian revolution from above. The decisive point was reached in 1903 with the Tory Wyndham Land Act substituting large scale peasant ownership for old landlordism. The plan had first been agreed by a conference of landlords and representatives of the people, like William O’Brien MP. The state would finance the buying of the land and the new owner would pay the state for decades. The effort almost collapsed financially in 1909, but it continued, and was finished off by the Free State government after 1923.
For fear of revolution from below — and specifically fear of the Fenians — they organised revolution from above. This could not trigger or evoke a similar movement in Britain.
In so far as there was ever a British settling of accounts with the remnants of its own feudalism that was the struggle to establish the supremacy of the elected House of Commons over the hereditary House of Lords, which the Liberals won in 1910. The bitterness engendered by that struggle reacted back on Ireland and made the divisions there over Home Rule deeper and more bitter. It gave the Orange opponents of Home Rule an ally, a Tory party made reckless by the struggle over the Lords. It helped rip Ireland in two. You could say it was the third time that the English bourgeois “revolution” had bad effects in Ireland: only this time the Protestants and not the Catholics were allied with reaction and the “progressive” Liberals, on whom the Catholics relied, were a weak force, despite their recent victory.
1913
After 1907 Jim Larkin came south and built up the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, mostly with unskilled workers. The methods he used were new and bold, particularly the systematic use of sympathetic strike action as the basis of union policy.
The standard of living in Dublin rose by about fifty percent in a few years, and eventually the employers were driven to unite in an attempt to fight Larkin and smash the Union. In 1913, all workers were told not to join Larkin’s union.
They were sacked when they refused to comply, and were locked out.
This led to a large scale battle for trade union rights, costing a number of workers’ lives. Out of this was born the Irish Citizen Army, a workers’ militia to defend the working class against the police.
The lockout of 1913 ended in partial defeat. The Union survived despite the bosses’ intention to smash it. The workers in Dublin were forced to draw back for two main reasons: the refusal of solidarity by the British trade unions; and the intervention of the Irish Catholic Church.
The British labour movement sent ships full of food up the Liffey to help the starving workers. However, a special TUC Conference refused strike action in support of Dublin.
As James Connolly put it bitterly at the time: where the British working class organisation could have delivered a decisive blow at the employers, they held their hand, contenting themselves with giving aid in money and food, where they could not possibly deal a comparable blow at the ruling class.
The Catholic Church intervened, naturally, on the side of the employers. Many English working class families offered help and to look after the children of the Dublin strikers during the eight month strike. The Church denounced it a a plot to undermine the religion of the children! The priests organised gangs to forcibly prevent them leaving the country. So, in the words of a song born out of the strike: “But hungry houses and crying children, They broke our hearts, we could not win”. Yet the union survived and between 1916 and 1920 expanded spectacularly.
After this the struggle subsided for a period, until after the rising of Easter 1916, in which the Citizen Army participated, led by Larkin’s comrade James Connolly. (Larkin was in the USA).