The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson
republican struggle is put in question. From Peadar O’Donnell in the 1930s to Gerry Adams in the 1980s, the attractions of social republicanism are clear, but so are its dangers for those committed to the legitimacy of ‘armed struggle’. Once republicanism takes up material issues – land annuities and rural depopulation in the 1920s and 30s, or unemployment and poverty in the Catholic ghettos of the 1980s and 90s – it risks marginalisation through state-sponsored reform. Thus another key factor bearing on the ability of the republican movement to maintain popular support is the state’s response. The decline of the IRA in the 1930s is largely explicable by the absorptive capacity of de Valera’s political and social programme; and by the same token no analysis of the state of the IRA and Sinn Féin in the 1980s could avoid the issue of Thatcherism. There has been too much emphasis by historians on the ‘republican tradition’, taking us back through nineteenth-century examples of Fenianism and 1848 to Wolfe Tone and the United Irishmen in the 1790s; such an emphasis on an apparently unchanging tradition can blind us to the need to examine the very specific historical circumstances in which republicans operated, and which they were sometimes able to turn to their advantage. We need a more discontinuous, ‘conjunctural’ analysis that breaks with the fatalism of traditional approaches, which, ironically, unconsciously mimic the self-serving certainties of the republican world view.
The original text criticised those histories of republicanism and the IRA that focused primarily on violence to the exclusion of political and social context. Since then many more such books have been published, but so have a few much more valuable analyses, and the criticisms made of apolitical histories cannot be made of important contributions by Richard English and Brian Hanley and Scott Millar.1 The decision to bring out a new edition of this book is justified by two considerations. The first was to update the 1997 edition to cover the historic accomplishment of Gerry Adams and his comrades in turning the declining capacity of the IRA into the basis for unprecedented political successes. The second consideration is to register the ultimate tragic futility of their prosecution of an armed struggle whose main victims were Irish men, women and children, very largely members of the Irish working class, and not the British ruling class. As Sinn Féin ministers comfortably administer a sub-region of the British state, implement Conservative austerity policies and join their DUP colleagues in wooing foreign capital, some of whose representatives the IRA had kidnapped and murdered in the past, a critical history of the organisation’s past is more necessary than ever.
Notes
1 The Origins of Social Republicanism
At the core of republican ideology since 1921 has been the idea of the incomplete nature of the Irish national revolution of 1918-21. The pervasiveness and strength of this notion derive from its fusion of two crucial aspirations within Irish nationalism – for a ‘sovereign’ 32-county state and also for a state that would be socially, economically and culturally different from Britain. It is to the Irish revolutionary of 1848, James Fintan Lalor, that we can look for the origin of the captivating idea that, since the ‘Conquest’ had been a double process of political and economic expropriation, the ‘Reconquest’ must necessarily be a dual process too. For Lalor, the core of the reconquest lay in the expropriation of the landlords and the re-appropriation of land by the Irish peasantry.2 For James Connolly and later Irish socialists and social republicans like Peadar O’Donnell, reconquest was a national revolution that was simultaneously a social revolution.
Connolly’s influence was immense, given his double significance as a socialist of international stature and an executed leader of the 1916 Rising, when he and his Irish Citizens’ Army, an organisational embodiment of the fierce battles of the 1913 Dublin lock-out, had participated in the revolutionary nationalist insurrection in Dublin. In one of his earliest articles he had written:
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about, the organisation of a Socialist Republic your efforts will be in vain … Nationalism without socialism – without a reorganisation of society – is only national recreancy.3
The dominant force in Irish nationalism from the 1880s to 1916 was the Irish Parliamentary Party. For Connolly, this was a bourgeois leadership which endorsed not only existing economic relations between Ireland and Britain but also the whole system of ‘foreign’, i.e. capitalist, property relations that British colonisation had imposed on Ireland. A merely political independence that allowed capitalist relations of production to remain intact was practically meaningless. Only the Irish working class had an objective interest in Irish independence, and he therefore deduced that the only true national revolution would be a socialist one. Connolly had created a powerful paradigm linking the failure of the dominant political forces in nationalist Ireland to their class nature. The nationalist project of a 32-county state independent of British influence was accepted, only the capacity of the Irish middle class to realise it was questioned.
Thus not only did Connolly seriously under-estimate the capacity of the Protestants of Ulster, including the majority of Belfast’s working class, to frustrate the aspiration for territorial unity, he also failed to anticipate the space which existed in Catholic Ireland for a nationalism that was not as obesely bourgeois as that of the Irish Parliamentary Party and yet in no sense socialist – a space which the revivified Sinn Féin organisation would fill in the aftermath of 1916. Connolly’s lack of foresight is more understandable given the original Sinn Féin (‘Ourselves Alone’). Founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905, Sinn Féin began life as a small if energetic alliance of Irish-language and cultural revivalists, economic nationalists and a smattering of representatives of the underground physical force tradition (the Irish Republican Brotherhood) which had made little political headway before 1916. It had also been characterised, particularly in Griffith’s writings, by a fierce hostility to trade union militancy and socialism. The post-1916 reconstruction of Sinn Féin into a broad nationalist front capable of displacing the Irish Parliamentary Party stemmed, in large part, from a transformation in the attitudes of rural Ireland to separatist nationalism. Connolly’s essentially urban focus was unlikely to anticipate this decisive shift.
Connolly’s own evaluation of the main social forces that would make the Irish revolution was fundamentally flawed by his failure to come to grips with the nature of rural Ireland and the central role within it of a rural middle class. That the work of Ireland’s only socialist of international standing has had so little to say about rural Ireland would have serious debilitating effects on the subsequent history of Irish socialism. As Joe Lee has cogently argued, Connolly lacked a substantial grasp of the land question that so concerned the majority of the Irish population: ‘Connolly’s fatal tactical error was his reluctance to acknowledge the existence of rural Ireland.4 When he did deal with the countryside, it was to depict a peasantry which the British government’s land legislation of the late nineteenth century had assisted into the stage of capitalist agriculture. He believed that this peasantry now faced inevitable impoverishment as Irish farming found itself in competition with the large-scale, mechanised agriculture of North America. Only social ownership of all the resources of Ireland and a protected economy could save the rural population from impoverishment. This catastrophist view of the future of Irish agriculture ignored, as Marx had done earlier,5 the economic and social weight of the Irish rural middle class, which was far from doomed to extinction. It led inevitably to the view that the only substantial middle class, in Catholic Ireland at least, was urban and economically tied to the British market, with a limited form of Home Rule as its ultimate political ambition.
Connolly was therefore able to provide an optimistic prognosis for the coming Irish revolution, which would resolve the major contradictions between nationalism and socialism and town and countryside. If the middle class was so integrated in the existing nexus of economic relations with Britain, any ‘true’ nationalist would see that real independence necessitated a social revolution. Town and countryside would be reconciled in a worker-peasant alliance brought about as impoverishment by international competition forced the peasants to see the limits of individual ownership and the necessity of a system of agricultural and manufacturing co-operatives.6 The pleasing symmetry of these ideas may help to explain their continuing influence long after the