“Ireland occupies a position among the nations of the earth unique... in the possession of what is known as a physical force party — a party, that is to say, whose members are united upon no one point, and agreed upon no single principle, except the use of physical force as the sole means of settling the dispute between the people of this country and the governing power of Great Britain..."
James Connolly, Workers’ Republic, July 1899.
The Real IRA and the Continuity IRA are groups of ex-Provisional-IRA Republicans who disagree with the Provisionals’ turn in the mid-90s to exclusively parliamentary-political activity. They include some of the key founders of the movement, such as Ruarai O’Braidaigh, who split with the Adams-McGuinness faction in 1986 when the Provisionals decided to take any seats they might win in Dail Eireann, thus breaking with a six-decades-long tradition of boycotting the “Partitionist” parliament in Dublin.
The intention of those who shot dead two British soldiers on 7 March and one Police Service of Northern Ireland cop on 9 March is to destabilise the far from rock-solid power-sharing system in the Six Counties, which took a decade after the signing of the Good Friday Agreement (1998) to “embed” itself. They have already scored a political “hit” by forcing Adams and McGuinness (who is deputy First Minister of Northern Ireland) to declare themselves on the side of the state and the Police Service of Northern Ireland (now a strictly inter-communal, Catholic-Protestant, police force) against their former comrades.
McGuinness declared the die-hards to be “traitors to the entire island of Ireland. They have betrayed the political desires, hopes and aspirations of all of the people who live on this island. They don’t deserve to be supported by anyone”.
All this is an implied condemnation of everything the Provisional IRA did after 1973, when the Sunningdale Agreement was signed, giving everything to the Northern Ireland Catholics that the Good Friday Agreement gives, and in a more flexible form.
That there is widespread antipathy within the Catholic nationalist population to what the Continuity IRA and Real IRA are trying to do to Northern Ireland, and no appetite for a return to war, is widely attested. That could quickly change if the Real IRA trigger Protestant sectarian attacks on Catholics, which is one of the things they are trying to do.
The Real IRA has already been responsible for the single most bloody deed of the Republicans in the whole “Long War” — the Omagh bombs in August 1998.
In fact that bombing unintentionally rendered great service to the "peace process". The horror engendered by Omagh rallied Catholics even more behind those who wanted the war ended for good. The Real IRA engendered an environment very hostile to their attempts to resume the war.
The Real IRA and the Adams-McGuinness Sinn Fein (incorporating the Provisional IRA) are now, so to speak, dancing around each other in patterns set in modern Irish history, patterns that have been repeated over and over again for nine decades: the former physical-force Republicans now in office confront former comrades who refuse to make peace and enter the "corridors of power" with them and who think them traitors and turncoats in a long line of traitors and turncoats.
Bloody repression of the dissenters by, or with the connivance of, those who have abandoned the armed struggle has again and again followed. That is what Adams and McGuinness seem to have committed themselves to now.
There is, however, a very great different between this and the past confrontations between ex-physical-force former Republicans and irreconcilables. They were all conflicts within the 26 Counties. This one is in the Six Counties — where the balancing between the two communities and the interaction of the Real IRA and the Protestant para-militarists makes the situation more unstable than the South has ever been.
The "peace" which has reigned in the Six Counties since the ceasefire of August 1994 — despite a brief IRA resumption of war on Britain in 1995-7, in which a number of large bombs were exploded — has brought great benefits to the peoples of Northern Ireland. It has not changed the basic reality out of which the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA emerge.
“Peace walls” still criss-cross Belfast, a maze of small but high "Berlin walls" designed to give Protestant and Catholic areas protection from each other. There are now about sixty of them, more than during the Provisionals’ war. They symbolise the political system in Belfast, which is an intricately structured edifice of entrenched and bureaucratic Catholic-Protestant sectarianism.
Partition remains what is has been for nine decades, highly artificial. That is one of the key reasons why opposition to Partition makes imperative sense to those who express that opposition in doctrinaire and intransigent traditional Republicanism.
What follows is an attempt to sketch an overview of the political-ideological lineaments and history of Republicanism in 20th and early 21st century Ireland, and to explain how the physical-force-on-principle trend which the Real IRA and the Continuity IRA embody emerged and became a constant element in Irish politics.
1916
Three events shaped the mind of 20th century Irish republicanism, creating an outlook in which belief in political miracles occupies a central place. The first was the Easter Rising in 1916.
Ninety-three years ago, “in the springtime of the year 1916”, Connolly, Pearse, Mellows, Clarke, McDonagh, MacDermott, Markievicz, De Valera and their friends were feverishly working towards what they hoped would be a rising throughout most of Catholic Ireland. As it turned out, there would be a rising only in Dublin, and a few sparks struck in Galway and Cork.
They had planned a simultaneous rising in a number of centres throughout Ireland. The rising was to have been launched under cover of “manoeuvres” by the legal nationalist militia, the Irish Volunteers, which had been established during the Home Rule crisis on the eve of World War One. At the last moment the official head of the Volunteers, Professor Eoin MacNeill, called off the manoeuvres by putting advertisements in the Easter Sunday papers.
Connolly and the others contemplated the collapse and ruin of all their plans. Connolly believed that European peace was imminent between powers that had been locked in blood-drenched stalemate for 20 months. If he and his friends failed to act, Ireland would miss the chance of winning belligerent status and thus (so Connolly believed) representation at the expected peace conference; they faced the prospect of being rounded up, disarmed and imprisoned without having struck a blow.
Their choice was to act dramatically, with little hope of the immediate success they had hoped for, or else to let themselves be joined to the already large company of self-disgracing comic-opera revolutionary buffoons populating Irish history — to people like William Smith O”Brien MP, the man who led a ragged band around the starving countryside in 1848, as the Famine was drawing to an end, and felt obliged to first ask the permission of a landlord before he would order the cutting down of trees to build a barricade!
James Connolly, the no-nonsense working-class revolutionary, had written about such things with great bitterness and scorn in his book Labour in Irish History (published in book form in 1910). There, he told the bitter tale of botched risings and missed chances that had succeeded each other like endless days of mourning and depression in Irish history. Connolly’s bitterness attested to his determination to do better himself if the chance came. Seeing the chance going, Connolly, Pearse, and their friends acted to make the best of a bad situation.
And so they turned out in Dublin on Easter Monday, 1300 or 1400 of them against the might of the British Empire, in the Empire’s second city — most of whose people, even those who wanted Irish Home Rule, supported the Empire and its war with Germany and therefore considered the insurgents traitors. Patrick Pearse read the declaration of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office, which they made their headquarters, to an uncomprehending crowd of casual spectators.
When the week-long battle that followed was over, and the Volunteers and their Citizen Army comrades were being led away under armed guard, some, including Connolly, to be shot after summary courts martial and others to be jailed and interned, crowds of Dubliners spat at them.
Thus Irish Republicanism seized centre-stage in modern Irish history with a great and revolutionary deed, startling alike in its heroic audacity and in its disregard for democracy in form or substance. For the elected leaders of the Irish were the Home Rule and Unionist MPs; the traditional leaders, the priests of the various persuasions. The insurgents had no mandate, not even the shadow of one, for what they did. The Rising was part of the process by way of which they won a democratic mandate, in the election of late 1918.
Connolly could not even have counted on the bulk of the members of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, of which he was acting general secretary. He did not count on it. Of all people, Connolly knew how useful a general strike would be to “paralyse the arm of militarism”. If he did not try to call the workers of Dublin into action on the side of the insurgents, it was because he knew he could not.
The rising was an act entirely in the tradition of mid-19th century European revolutionism — of 1830 and 1848. In one of the articles Connolly wrote on the eve of the rising, on the techniques of insurrection, he analysed the Moscow rising of December 1905 — but that only pointed up the difference. Moscow came out of a mass movement; Easter 1916 presaged and prepared the way for the subsequent mass movement of nationalist revolt, a movement that might never have come, or might have come not so strongly, if the British had not tried to impose conscription on Ireland in 1918.
The declaration of the Republic appealed to the living in the name of the dead: “In the name of God and of the dead generations...” The minority acted in the name of the nation and called on the nation to follow, hoping to spark a national movement. In signing the surrender, Connolly was careful to sign only for Dublin and not to speak for the rest of the country. Plainly even then his hopes had not died. Yet the leaders of the rising cannot have hoped, even in the best case, that their actions would arouse anything but implacable hostility from the Northern Ireland Unionists.
Victory in defeat
The 1916 rising is one of the great examples in history of success coming soon on the heels of what looked like absolute failure. The defeated insurgents were spat at by the people they considered theirs after the rising; but a little over a year later most of them came home from internment camp and prison to a welcome for heroes. Two and a half years after the rising, Sinn Fein won 73 out of 105 seats (for 48 per cent of the votes cast: they won many seats without a contest) in the 1918 general election, standing for a Republic and advocating the immediate setting up of an Irish parliament by the elected Irish MPs.
In January 1919 they did that. Two and a half years of often savage war later, Britain was forced to treat with Sinn Fein, offering most of Catholic Ireland Dominion status — substantial independence, the same as Canada and Australia had — within the British Empire.
If Sinn Fein failed to get all they wanted — an independent republic outside the British Empire, and a united Ireland in which the one million people in north-east Ireland who wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom would accept the majority rule of Catholic and mainly agrarian Ireland — that could be put down to a betrayal of the spirit of “1916”. If there had been more of intransigence, outright refusal to compromise, then... Thus reasoned the minority who rejected the Treaty with Britain.
In its strange and dramatic contradictions, in the sudden reversals of fortune, in the confused and unexpected roles some of its participants played, 1916 inevitably generated confusion and mystification. Its power over the mind and imagination of subsequent generations comes not only from its heroism, or from the attractiveness and fascination of some of its leaders, but from its subsequent success.
The minority acted, outraging most of the nationalist people as well as Irish unionists north and south. They were loathed until the leaders were killed, and then came the magical transformation — the resurrection. Soon there was enough of a victory to vindicate the minority, and retrospectively vindicate the insurgent tradition, the “little risings” of the 19th century. The retrospective weaving of poetic myth around the events and the idea of the blood sacrifice that redeemed Ireland, drawing much of its power from Christian myth, drawing too on the writings of Pearse and McDonagh, and given its shape by “the great myth-maker”, Yeats — all of that, saturating the popular culture of Catholic Ireland, became a great political force. Yeats wrote the most powerful version of the myth of a blood sacrifice:
“O words are lightly spoken,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“Maybe a breath of politic words
Has withered our Rose Tree;
Or maybe but a wind that blows
Across the bitter sea.”
“It needs to be but watered,”
James Connolly replied,
“To make the green come out again
And spread on every side,
And shake the blossom from the bud
To be the garden’s pride.”
“But where can we draw water,”
Said Pearse to Connolly,
“When all the wells are parched away?
O plain as plain can be
There’s nothing but our own red blood
Can make a right Rose Tree.”
The minority acted, and won; the gun bestowed a power, magnified wonderfully, on the minority and their cause: and thus ever after you have a model of minority revolutionary action. In that “miraculous” experience you have the reason behind much of the unreason of modern republicanism. History is a miracle-play! The republicans expect a miracle to overwhelm the unfavourable hard facts in the Six Counties.
Sensible people do not believe in miracles. When something looks like a miracle, we probe to see what really happened and why.
For example, such seemingly miraculous things as the overnight eruption into a general strike of millions of workers who but yesterday were passive and indifferent — France, 1968, is one of the best examples — have for Marxists no mystery: they are rooted in the fact that normally there is a contradiction between the consciousness of working-class people and their real situation and interests. That is what can trigger seemingly miraculous change.
In post-1916 Ireland the cause of the insurgents prospered quickly because of a number of material factors: there was nothing inevitable about it. We know from what he wrote on the eve of the Rising that one of Connolly’s chief spurs to action was his fear of a quick negotiated peace. If that had happened; if, later, the British had not tried to impose conscription on Ireland; if events had not continued to discredit and pulverise the Home Rule party and its entire philosophy of Irish progress by way of agreement with the British state — then “1916” would have been no success.
In Northern Ireland there has been no shortage of republican heroism or of epic events with the power to overwhelm the sympathetic or even hostile imagination — the 1981 hunger strikes, for example, when ten men starved themselves to death. There has been no magical transformation — because the material conditions rule it out.
Civil war
The second event that shaped 20th century Republicanism was the civil war. The Treaty was imposed on Collins and Griffith by the credible British threat of “immediate and terrible war”. The British had contingency plans for internment camps in Ireland in which large parts of the whole population would be imprisoned, as Boer civilians were during the Boer war, to cut off support from the IRA.
After Sinn Fein split over the Treaty, the Republicans lost out in the political electioneering and manoeuvring. The bourgeoisie, the men who in the Dublin Chamber of Commerce had passed a resolution after the 1916 rising denouncing it as “Larkinism run amok”, the big farmers in the east who had recently engaged in a large-scale social war with their labourers — all flocked behind the Collins-Griffith faction of Sinn Fein, the new party of order. So did the Catholic Church, which did much to line up people behind the Free Staters.
Fundamentally, however, what the “Free Staters” had going for them was the lack of any viable “Republican” alternative to compromise with Britain, and the fact that most people could not see the differences between Collins and De Valera as worth fighting about. Many saw that Collins was right that he had, indeed, won “the freedom to win freedom” — to gradually expand the Irish state’s real independence.
Against that, there was the mysticism of Catholic nationalists — honourable, conscientious people like Cathal Brugha, who had sworn an oath to maintain the Republic and could not now swear the required allegiance to the King of England. At the base, among Republicans, there was the inchoate and dimly felt millenarianism of large numbers of people, especially in the West and perhaps especially among youth, for whom “the Republic” represented the drive for a great social transformation — for what Connolly had called the Workers’ Republic. How widespread this was is now almost forgotten.
But in all the labour and small-farmer struggles during the war of independence, the IRA had acted as a force defending the status quo and defending and securing private property on the land and elsewhere. It was a national, and not a ‘sectional” movement. And before and during the civil war, the IRA leadership attempted to act as if they could — like the “men of 1916” — ignore elections, majorities, in short, politics. They acted as a separate military power in the state; they fought a civil war without any coherent alternative to the status quo.
They could not force a better deal than the Treaty out of the still very mighty British Empire. They had no policy for overcoming the division of the country. Implicitly (and some of them, explicitly) they accepted that the North could not be “forced” and that there should be no attempt to force it. The North, amazing as it may seem, had little part in the considerations of Dail Eireann on the Treaty in December 1921 and January 1922. The division of Ireland was a fact, and discussion focused on things like the Oath of Allegiance. On Northern Ireland, the Republicans of that time stood on the opposite pole to the Republicans today (and since the late 1930s).
The IRA drifted into a civil war thinking that the gun and intransigence were enough. Born at that point was what might be called “Carbonari Republicanism”, after an early 19th-century underground revolutionary sect —archaic, sterile, conspiratorial republicanism. In its “revolutionary” period, it had no political programme to match its revolutionary aspirations; when it moved into government, as strands of it repeatedly would, it adopted a straightforward conservative bourgeois political programme, as we have seen Adams and McGuinness do with the Provisional IRA.
An attempt by the imprisoned republican Liam Mellows to restate Connolly in explicitly left-wing-populist nationalist terms — the republicans needed the “men of no property” — had been drowned in blood: Mellows was shot out of hand in December 1922.
The writer’s sympathies are with the republicans, with the young lads and young women who would not accept compromise with imperialist iniquity or accept less than the radical transformation of life “the Republic” represented to them; with those who would not break their oath and their pledge, or break faith with Connolly and Pearse and those who had died in the fight — and with Liam Mellows, who told Dail Eireann in the debate on the Treaty that Collins and Griffith were opting for the “fleshpots of Empire”, turning their backs on the Indians and the other oppressed peoples struggling for freedom against the British Empire. For socialists, those are our people, even when we disagree with them, or would have advocated a different course to theirs.
But the greatest tragedy of the civil war was that the republican side caught up into itself and into its notions of action — not politics, not working-class action, but the gun, in the process of becoming a political fetish — a large part of the revolutionary energy of plebeian Ireland. For decades Carbonari republicanism would act as a lightning conductor, as one of Ireland’s safety valves.
With its social base among small farmers, and rural and small-town labourers, the republican movement was separated from the organised labour movement in Catholic Ireland not so much by ideals as by method. Republicanism took shape as an “outsider” revolutionary movement. It defined itself as revolutionary by its commitment to minority action, to armed struggle on principle and as soon as possible. It saw military action as something sufficient to itself, dependent for success more on military logistics than ripe social conditions. After 1922 Republicanism was cut off from and abjured political action on principle, resolutely boycotting every parliament in the British Isles, Dublin, Belfast, or Westminster..
It was an archaic revolutionary movement, a throwback to mid-19th century movements in Europe, a hybrid, with (in practice if not in theory) many points in common with a militant anarchism. Social questions would be of interest to republicans — some of them — only as a means of gaining support for the nationalist armed struggle. It was an upside-down view of the world, in an archaic, land-that-time-forgot revolutionary movement on the fringes of Europe. Frederick Engels had described one of their 19th century ancestors, the terrorist sect of “Invincibles”, as Bakuninists.
The stagnation in Ireland, the situation created for revolutionary politics by the split in the working class and by Partition, and, as we will see, the collapse of the Communist International, would combine to keep the physical force revolutionaries in business. The IRA would become Ireland’s substitute for a “revolutionary left” of the modern, 20th century, sort — for one based on the working class, using politics and trade unionism normally, treating questions of the state and armed force rationally rather than making a fetish of any particular form of action, organisation or struggle.
Connolly’s socialist republicanism
The third crucial development, allowing Carbonari republicanism to survive and helping to shape and perpetuate it, was the fate of revolutionary working-class socialism in the world and in Ireland — first, the dissipation of Connolly’s political tradition, and then the degeneration of the communist movement into Stalinism.
Connolly had followed the tactics advocated by Marx, and later to be advocated by the Communist International, on the proper relationship of socialists to “revolutionary nationalists” — act together, organise and propagandise separately. But politically Connolly was swallowed up by his bourgeois and petty-bourgeois allies; despite the wide sentiment for “Connolly’s Workers’ Republic” that existed, socialism was not an independent force in the years after 1916.
Connolly coined the ambivalent slogan that would serve populist republicanism: “the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour; the cause of labour is the cause of Ireland”. He did not understand it as either a merging of the working-class interest into a multi-class national entity, or, as populist republicans do, the enlistment of labour and social issues as a means of gaining support for the national struggle. He saw the national question and the social question as flowing together, and national liberation as the victory of the working class.
“In the evolution of civilisation the progress of the fight for national liberty of any subject nation must perforce keep pace with the struggle for liberty of the most subject class in that nation and... the shifting of economic and political forces which accompanies the development of the system of capitalist society leads inevitably to the increasing conservatism of the non-working-class elements and to the revolutionary vigour and power of the working class”. He wrote that in 1910, in Labour in Irish History, and though he came to be caught up in the purely national struggle in 1916 there is no reason to think that Connolly changed his mind on what, for socialists, the national struggle was about.
The flaw in Connolly’s design for 1916, as a working-class activity, was twofold. Any possibility of a national movement and a socialist working-class movement flowing together and “reconstructing the nation under its own leadership”, as Trotsky put it in his theory of “permanent revolution” and as Connolly formulated it above (and elsewhere), was ruled out by the split in the Irish working class, and by the relative weakness of the Catholic working class vis-a-vis the rest of Catholic Ireland, which was, essentially, a peasant country. The “national question”, as defined in most of Ireland, cut off the majority of the working class, who saw themselves as British.
It was this division in the Irish working class, and in the unions, that paralysed the labour movement in the war of independence. It organised general strikes as part of the political-military struggle, but it left politics to the bourgeois factions, unionist and republican: otherwise, it would have split.
The second flaw in Connolly’s plans, which shaped his posthumous fate in Catholic Ireland, was his failure to build an educated, clear and coherent revolutionary socialist organisation, able to pursue consistent goals in changing circumstances. Connolly left a great vacuum. To discuss why would take us too far afield here. The consequence was that after 1916 the labour movement was a captive of nationalist forces.
“Connollyism” was reduced to a vague aspiration, his hard Marxist ideas immediately subjected to working over and political mastication by “left-wing” priests and others to assimilate them to Catholic Nationalist Ireland. Connolly’s “Workers’ Republic” was blurred into and merged with vague notions of a return to an (essentially mythical) ancient Celtic Irish communism. The widespread popularity of such ideas helped the labour movement grow — the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union experienced a phenomenal expansion in the period between 1916 and 1922 — but it had little other effect.
During the war of independence, talk of a Workers’ Republic merged with Catholic mysticism and vague “back to the socialist clan system” millenarianism to provide a plebeian aureole for the republican struggle against Britain. Connolly’s legacy dissolved into a vaguely socialist and populist wing of nationalism.
The Communist Party of Ireland
The forces of revolutionary socialism had to recompose themselves, and this was attempted as the war of independence was ending by the creation of a Communist Party, linked to the Communist International.
Tiny and led by very young people, among them James Connolly’s 20 year old son Roddy, it had little weight, and politically it let itself become a satellite of the physical-force republicans in the civil war.
After 1923, it regained the founder of the mass Irish workers’ movement, Jim Larkin, who came back from jail in the USA, and led the breakaway from the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, the Workers’ Union of Ireland. (Both ITGWU and WUI are now merged into SIPTU).
In the late 1920s, after Jim Larkin drifted away from the Communist International, there was no Communist Party. The movement was recommenced by young militants trained for years at the “Lenin School” — i.e., the Stalin school — in Moscow, Betty Sinclair, Sean Murray, Brian O’Neill, Michael McInerny and one or two others. When the Communist Party of Ireland was refounded in 1933, it was rigidly Stalinist.
The early Communist Party had been the real heir of Connolly. In the natural course of healthy political evolution it would have overcome its weaknesses and subsumed and appropriated the working-class revolutionary element trapped in republicanism, winning republican militants to a clear notion of the workers’ republic — working class power — as the only republic that would not be a gombeen mockery of the struggle of struggles of the Irish people.
Thus it had been in 19th century Europe, when the primitive, politically incoherent, underground revolutionary sects had over time dissolved and merged into modern labour movements — in France, for example, the Blanquists did that. In Ireland, the old revolutionary insurrectionary sectism survived in the IRA, penned up in the social and political blind alleys of post-partition Ireland. It did so because the alternative, rational, revolutionary movement, the communists, collapsed into a variant of populist nationalism, and became only a tributary stream into republicanism.
The Communist International
From 1923-4 the Communist International veered to the right. Its Fifth Congress — reflecting the interests or the perceptions of the ruling bureaucrats in the Soviet Union — began the process of substituting other politics for the working-class, communist politics of the first four congresses of the International.
The Stalinising communists began to advocate the creation of two-class “worker and peasant” parties, and — in practice — the subordinate alliance of the communists with the bourgeois nationalists in colonial or semi-colonial countries. In China this led the working-class communist movement into the bourgeois-nationalist organisation of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Guomindang — and to a terrible massacre of Communist workers in 1927.
Everything which in 1916 and post-1916 Ireland had come about because Connolly was dead and because there was no communist party, that is, from confusion and working-class defeat, now was deliberately fostered as a matter of high Comintern policy, under the direction of the Executive of the Communist International. In Ireland, the tiny, fledgling Communist Party had already tended to become a tail of the physical-force republicans in the civil war, before such politics became official Communist International policy. By the time the original Communist Party of Ireland collapsed, and a replacement was organised around Jim Larkin and his union, official Communist International policy was pushing them towards being a mere left-wing tail of the republican nationalists, around whom was grouped much of the natural constituency of the communists in Catholic Ireland.
The early, Lenin-Trotsky, Communist International had produced a great flowering of revolutionary Marxism, a great clearing away of reformist encrustations, a sharpening of long blunted Marxist perspectives, and an ardent commitment to militancy on the national question, too. The documents embodying this work — Lenin’s draft, amended by the Second World Congress, on the National and Colonial Question, for example — form part of the bedrock of modern Marxism.
Yet no major Communist International document analysed Ireland. The nearest approach was a couple of weighty pieces by young Roddy Connolly in the Communist International’s magazine on the current situation in the light of history. By the tenth anniversary of the rising, Stalinist hacks were writing commentaries in which Irish history was current Communist International policy read backwards — and forwards.
In Ireland/Britain, as in for instance Croatia/ Yugoslavia (the most powerful Balkan state), nationalism was utilised to make difficulties for important states that were enemies of the USSR. Catholic Ireland’s nationalist tradition fitted well with Russian needs and the resultant Stalinist “line”. It fitted, too, the scholasticism that replaced Marxism as living analysis in the Communist International. Marx had written about Ireland. So had Lenin. Neither, naturally, had an analysis of post-partition Ireland to offer. And it was a radically different Ireland. (See “Lenin on Ireland” in Workers’ Liberty nos. 22 and 23).