CHAPTER TWO: AN ENGLISH COLONY 1847-1910

CHAPTER TWO

AN ENGLISH COLONY

1847-1910 I Physical force and Parliamentary Party The Great Famine is the outstanding watershed in modern Irish social history. This is not just because of the sheer size of its horror, though the lone number of 1,500,000, who died or emigrated during its period must compel attention. More certainly, it is because it provided a definite event whence one can say that the ‘modern Irishman’ holds his national stage. Before it, the Irish peasant tended to marry early, live by cultivating a tiny plot of land, talk Irish, surrender his coin to his landlord and know all foreign lands as foreign. After it, his numbers decreased and decreased; money (and thus credit) has a major influence on his life so that he no longer marries readily or is so willing to divide his holding; he talks some English and is, accordingly, more able to move from the countryside (causing an urban population explosion), or even from the country. Of course these changes (and such corollaries of them as the increase in grazing as against tillage) were appearing before the Famine. But that event did hasten them. In politics the catastrophe retarded the progress of Nationalist social theory. The Union settlement was seen as leading inexorably to the disaster. So in the long run, at the end of the century, the Irish Social ideal was to take the form of an idealized version of the pre-1801 society plus tenant-ownership. In the immediate future it did not go beyond forcible overthrow of the Union with Britain, Neither panacea could replace O’Connell’s legacy with one more democratic. Accordingly, landlord and bourgeois elements were found ready to take over most future national movements, however nihilistic their methods.

This is first seen clearly in the movement founded on March ne

oe. 17th, 1858. Its members called it simply the Organization, but it is generally known as the Fenian, or (from 1873) the Irish Republican, Brotherhood. Its founders were middle class intellectuals.

They had associated with the left-wing Young Irelander, James Fintan Lalor, and had inherited his movement’s secularism; they had learnt from the socialist secret societies of Europe, as well as from the peasant societies of Ireland. Yet their strategy was without any social content. The organization was made up as a purely military body disciplined accordingly, and with the single aim of driving out the British. This gained it the support of many artisans and emigrants, who had lost any reason to use such tactics for agrarian purposes, and who considered the link with Britain as having caused their misery. This working-class rank and file were simultaneously organizing an embryo trade union and labour movement affiliated to the First International in the late 1860s yet (like their British contemporaries) they never developed a connection between political and economic radicalism. Thus a small, but definite, number of new capitalists became Fenians. On the other hand, the vast bulk of the peasantry was alienated by the Brotherhood’s disapproval of immediate agrarian agitation.

The Fenians created and maintained a power house of nationalism. But their secrecy and military organization made for a tendency to futility and fissibility as there appeared a chance of action. Its tradition of ‘pure’ Nationalism with its Famine basis encouraged later beliefs in the economics of Grattan’s Parliament.

Later still, membership of the I.R.B. was to weaken the will to democratic action when a form of independence was at last established. Fenian weakness was shown when, after nine years, the hesitation of its leader, James Stephens, helped cripple a revolt. Many Fenians left a body that had shown productivity only of heroes.

Others left because of the difficulties caused by clerical opposition to secret societies. Yet the imprisonment and executions of Fenians encouraged sympathy for them, In 1869, a leading prisoner, Jeremiah O’Donovan ‘Rossa’ was elected M.P. for county Tipperary.

Both the administration and many landlords and capitalists were dismayed, The former disestablished the Church of Ireland, passed a Land Act that, for the first time, benefited the tenants and released the Fenian prisoners. Some of the latter tried to steal the Fenians’ thunder by forming (with ex-Tenant Right M.P.s and disgruntled members of the British parties) an Irish Home Rule League to demand a measure of legislative freedom (‘Home 24

Rule’). After promising also land reform and full denominational education (the latter in the O’Connell tradition), the League won 59 seats in the general election of 1874.

Most of the new M.P.s were landlords, but there was a minority of capitalists and professional men, many of whom had been Fenians. Some of these radicals, led by the Ulster businessman, Joseph Biggar, broke early with the constitutionalism of the party majority, and began obstructing the parliamentary process. They were joined by a young M.P. of the landlord class, Charles Stewart Parnell, who became their leading figure. But they lacked an organization to gain control of their party, and, even more, to supersede the 1.R.B. They gained an opportunity by two unexpected events.

The first was the increase in peasant misery caused by the world agricultural slump of the 1870s. A rise in rent arrears caused more evictions and, hence more agrarian agitation. This appeared even among Ulster Protestant tenants: their custom was jeopardized by increased rents.

Yet there might have been no political reaction had it not been for an ex-Fenian, Michael Davitt. He had been born of an Irish evictee who had emigrated to Lancashire, and reared his son among the New Model Trade Unionists. From these young Davitt had learnt their pragmatic radicalism, and he now applied it to Ireland. Like most of the Irish Nationalist Left, he had little ideological subtlety. But he possessed the idea, conceived briefly by O’Connell as a tactic, of a non-denominational mass movement of Celtic peasants and British artisans to achieve the rights cheated from them by the British gentry. Such a policy now had some basis in Britain in the trade unions and their M.P.s. In Ireland, there were only tiny local trade councils, the peasants, the Fenians and the Parnellites. Davitt determined to organize these groups with the peasants as the vanguard and to demand the nationalization of the land. Initially, he was successful. In 1879, Parnell accepted leadership of an Irish Land League. This body organized candidatures at the 1880 general election so that the landlord majority of Home Rulers was turned into an urban bourgeois majority which chose Parnell as its leader. Peasants flocked to support this ‘New Departure’. It received money from emigrants in America. The I.R.B.

Supreme Council was isolated in its opposition to the movement.

A new tactic of isolation was tried successfully against a certain Captain Boycott. The parish clergy had to support their parishioners, the Hierarchy was divided. Ulster Protestantism was similarly split. The League survived government coercion.

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Davitt had weakened clerical influence over the National Movement, but he had done so with the aid of the rising bourgeoisie.

This had no real quarrel with the clerical tradition and mistrusted his policy of land nationalization. The urban workers were not yet strong enough to take its place.

Thus, in 1881, Gladstone’s Second Irish Land Act split the Land League. Parnell, his party and their capitalist allies supported it; so did the clergy. The peasants, backed by the Irish-Americans, held out for their full demands. In the succeeding struggle, the Land League was smashed. The urban workers turned from active politics. It was replaced by a National League under Parnell’s direct supervision. After the 1885 Reform Act had established a measure of household suffrage, he was aided by the parish clergy. The Parliamentary Nationalists became dedicated only to ‘Home Rule’, by the methods, to 1886 of playing off Liberals and Conservatives, and after 1886 of alliance with the Liberals alone. The British working classes were ignored (except by Davitt) and the British radicals insulted. The Protestant tenantry lost its fervour for an increasingly clerical and conservative movement. When an abortive Home Rule Bill was introduced in 1886, the Orange Lodges were able to observe their working class followers participate in sectarian riots. The National League’s social vagueness was essential to Parnell’s ascendancy therein. His known policies tended to diverge from those of his leading followers. He disliked Davitt’s support for trade unions, and worried Irish, as well as British, capitalists by advocating Irish tariffs. His support for land reform after 1881 varied according to political considerations. By 1890, his main real claim to leadership was that he was acceptable to the Liberal supporters of Home Rule. This was shown in that year by the withdrawal of allegiance to him in his party, when that support had been alienated by his behaviour with Mrs O’Shea.

But the anti-Parnellites based their case on an appeal to Catholic morality. This was produced by the power structure within the National League and it was successful in winning opposition to Parnell from the Catholic middle classes. An unholy alliance with | Davitt enabled it similarly to win the peasantry.

On the other hand, the Northern Protestants were, if possible, , alienated still further from Nationalism. Moreover, his opponents’ | negative appeals gave Parnell increased strength from the propertiless class in town and country. In Dublin, especially, he received backing that lasted after his death in 1891. This was the first sign 26

of working-class adherence to Parnellite economic policies that would be spread by Sinn Fein in the next decade.

But, as yet, a more generalized republicanism was the prime beneficiary from Parnell’s break with his party. From that event, the I.R.B. showed revived activity. It was encouraged by the defeat in 1893 of a new, mild, Home Rule Bill, by the Unionist front ministry elected to power in 1895 and, above all, by the Parliamentary Nationalists’ continuing division into a large and a small group under (after Parnell) identical leaders. Other expressions of urban nationalist discontent showed themselves. Many patriotic young men set up literary societies in which were discussed politics that went beyond Home Rule. In 1896, James Connolly set up an Irish Socialist Republican Party. In 1898 republican elements started a campaign to commemorate the United Irishmen. At the same time, famine sustained agrarian agitation in the west. : Now the anti-Parnellite leader, William O’Brien, initiated a campaign to revive the Land League alliance of party, peasantry and emigrants on the most progressive terms that the Catholic middle classes could accept. He enlisted the aid of Davitt in setting up a United Ireland League to back a reunited Irish Party.

The League’s social programme included the end of rural leaseholds, the division of the western grazing estates, and more labourers’ smallholdings for the peasantry: for the bourgeoisie, more powers for the new local authorities, Irish industrial development, restoration of the excess Irish taxes revealed by a commission in 1896, and (a sop also to the artisan) as end of urban ground rents and terminable leases: for the clergy, a separate Irish Catholic University and for the new Gaelic League the preservation of the ‘Gaelic’ language. In 1900, the Parliamentary Party was reunited on this policy under the Parnellite, John Redmond. On it, many new and young M.P.s were elected in the general election of the same year. Simultaneously a United Irish League of America was formed to replace the Fenian-orientated Clann na Gael and increase emigrant supplies for Parliamentary Nationalism. But there were still divisions. The extreme clerical anti-Parnellite, T.M. Healy, was soon expelled from the Party for campaigning openly against the League. Then continued a dual struggle: for power, between Party and League: on policy, between O’Brien (the League’s secretary) and the rest, O’Brien found that a progressive element among the landlords would co-operate with him to get good terms for themselves, Through the resulting talks, 27

George Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903 established preconditions : for complete tenant land purchase. Now O’Brien sought to achieve Home Rule by similar methods. This went against the | feeling of the U.I.L. and he had to resign his secretaryship. Party control was then established over the League.

But that body was not simply a revival of the 1880’s organization. Since 1881, the smaller Irish capitalists had grown in influence and had been given power in the local councils set up by the 1898 Local Government Act. These people were overwhelmingly Catholic and were perhaps the most bitterly hostile of all classes to the Unionist ascendancy and opposed to politicians (like O’Brien) that tried to compromise with it. They dominated the United Ireland League. Such people could not be long controlled by the politicians.

One of these, Joseph Devlin, succeeded O’Brien as secretary of the U.I.L. This young Ulster Catholic became, in 1904, first national President of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, a Catholic charitable body, which he used, to revive the League’s old functions as Irish petty capitalism’s representative organization. Between 1905 and 1915, the order’s membership multiplied by more than twenty. Increased class (and religious) exclusiveness in the Home Rule rank and file was unsympathetic both to established Unionists and to other Nationalist groups. The Irish Party’s existence came to depend entirely on achieving its political aims.

This looked more hopeful with the return to power in 1905 of the British Liberal Party. But the new government offered only a form of ‘devolution’ based on a Council of Local Bodies and unacceptable to the Parliamentarians’ lay and clerical supporters.

The Party met renewed rivalry: Sinn Fein from 1905: a more quickly reviving I.R.B. from 1907: a Socialist Party of Ireland from 1909: and O’Brien and Healy’s All for Ireland League, the same year. Then in 1910, a new general election left the Liberals dependent upon the U.I.L. Now it had a last chance to win Irish self-government as it saw it, by its own methods.

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Il The fall and rise of the Irish peasant Naturally, it was the Irish peasant who was most hurt by the Great Famine and who was the immediate victim of its consequences. These were mainly trends that had been developing before 1845 under the twin pressures of over-population and the spread of money in the rural areas. What the Famine (and the capitalist measures taken to relieve it) did was to magnify their speed with catastrophic results. Most obvious was the rural population decline which was at once absolute and relative to the town population’s stability. The expansion of transport and of a money-based economy and, above all, the fact of over-population were all factors stimulating this, and were encouraged or emphasized by the Hunger. Transport facilities enabled many to leave the country. In many areas wealthy peasants let their starving neighbours have goods on credit and used the resulting hold over the latter to become monopoly storekeepers or gombeen (gaimbin, literally ‘interest’) men, who provided an alternative demand on the peasants’ purses, but one that kept money circulating in the country. The fact of congestion was emphasized first by the inadequacy of the potato plot. In 1847 it was magnified by the Irish Poor Law which made relief payable by landlords in proportion to the numbers of their tenants and to those claimants exclusively who held land of less than a quarter of an acre. This led to an increase in the size of holdings: in 1841 one fifth of them had been over 15 acres: in 1851 half of them were. The surviving peasant found that money was essential for adequate survival; he became careful about marrying early and, indeed, about marrying at all. On the other hand he gradually became less resigned to his lot. Some peasants failed either to die or to emigrate: they became itinerants without land or fixed address, who lived on precarious incomes supplied by smithing, soldering and very much later, as plastics harmed these means of life, begging. On top of this, the landlords did not allow the Famine to make them weaken their demands. Various benevolent ones ruined themselves by trying to help their tenants and were enabled by the Entailed Estates Act of 1849, to sell their lands to less amiable people. The Poor Law encouraged rent increases. Above all, no 29

landlord, however well-meaning, could deal adequately with the national problem of congestion. Thus, between 1845 and 1855, the national rent roll increased from £15,000,000 to £18,000,000. Simultaneously, the move away from tillage was stimulated by the wages that scarcity made payable to the farm labourers remaining in Ireland. Finally, in 1860, the Landlord and Tenant Law Amendmen Act (Deasy’s Act) gave the landlord full powers to recover land without notice of compensation for improvement.

By now, the national pattern of land-holding was established for the next century, though the pattern of products per type of farm was to fluctuate. The smallest (under 30 acres) farms which had the most varied product were west of the River Shannon where the land was worst. In the east were the grazing estates supplying store cattle to the British market. These tended to be the largest farms (100 acres and more: often co-equal with the landlords themselves) and the biggest employers of labour, though they did not employ many for their size. In the south were the medium-sized dairy farms, also employers of labour: not large absolutely, but relatively. This is roughly the basis on which one will talk of ‘small’, ‘large’ and ‘medium’ farmers for convenience.

Although Fenianism was not a rural movement, its appearance stimulated the British Government to provide mild alleviation for the farmer’s lot. In 1869, the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland gave its tenants (less than 7,000 out of a national total of 593,000) the ownership of their holdings on easy terms. The first Irish Land Act (1870) gave the tenant compensation for his improvements and for most evictions. But compensation was not offered in cases of eviction for arrears of rent and the Act gave merely an ineffectual warning against exorbitant demands. Thus, after 1877, when a series of bad potato crops were joined to a world agricultural depression, the decline of the tenant’s income was not made up by any reduction of the landlord’s financial claims. Uncompensated evictions increased, (‘neo-Whiteboy’) ‘Ribbon’ agitation revived. But the peasantry had now outgrown Ribbon tactics alone. The practical end of subsistence farming left the tenant readier to maintain a long-term struggle. With the nation-wide Land League, assassination was kept in the background as a threat to back the boycott of the landlord or his (positive or negative) ally. It intended to achieve land nationalization. Its results turned out rather differently. The 1881 Land Act established a form of double ownership between landlord and tenant, the latter having the right to enhanced 30

value and sale of improved lands. In addition, Land Courts fixed rents for fifteen years and the Church Temporalities Commission that had enabled glebe tenants to buy their lands became a land commission for all tenants. Not only was nationalization shelved, but the Act’s forbidding of land subdivision drew a definite line between the farmworkers of small (and very small) property and the farmworkers with none.

As yet, this did not matter. The Act was imposed over the dead body of the Land League. What was more, tenant radicalism remained necessary. As late as 1896, 45% of Ireland’s agricultural produce went as rent or as tax (the British figure was 10%). In addition, the real price of agricultural goods continued to decline throughout the 1880s. During the same decade, the landlords continued to demand arrears of rent (although such demands were mitigated by an Act of 1883) and the unbalanced distribution of Irish rural population remained uncorrected.

But the resultant revivals of the Land League were limited in scope. Davitt associated himself with the labourers and brought them briefly into the labour movement. In their name, he reiterated the demand for land nationalization. But the farmers found other leaders. Their Plan of Campaign against rent arrears was headed by bourgeois figures, O’Brien and John Dillon, neither of whom was enthusiastic for extreme aims. Eventually, when the agitation of 1898 seemed to threaten bourgeois domination of Nationalist politics, the U.I.L. took up Davitt’s own tactical surrender of the principle of nationalization in favour of piecemeal reform. At the same time, the Unionists’ wish to kill Home Rule led them to attempt to create the conditions for a conservative peasantry. In 1891, Balfour’s Land Act set up a Congested Districts Board to relieve the problems of the areas under its authority. In 1899, a special Irish Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction was set up to improve production in the Irish economy. Another policy was the transformation of the tenantry into a class of peasant proprieters. The climax of this policy was Wyndham’s Land Act of 1903. In the six years after it, 270,000 of the 500,000 odd remaining tenants bought their holdings.

The land purchase policy and its associate, the policy of negotiating with the landlords, was most successful in the dairy province of Munster, where William O’Brien broke with his party to support it. That went with a new development that affected this area especially. Here the mechanical cream separator had been introduced in the 31

1880s as a replacement of the old hand method. The expense of this gave the local gombeenman a new opportunity to strengthen his position vis-a-vis the farmer, To offset him, co-operative creamery societies began to appear. They soon found a backer in the Unionist, Horace Plunkett, and, unlike similar plans of his, they prospered. In April, 1894, a national body, the Irish Agricultural Organization Society, was founded. In 1898, it was backed by the Irish Agricultural Wholesale Society which aimed to beat the gombeenmen in the agricultural supplies trade. In 1899, Plunkett became the first secretary of the new Department of Agriculture and initiated a state subsidy for the I.A.O.S. Co-operative Credit Unions were begun. By 1900 there were 477 co-operative societies in existence. In its development, the co-operative movement appears as a natural ally of the Unionist Party of which Plunkett was a member for several years into the twentieth century. To consider it thus would be to ignore the ideals of its mentors. They were, in several ways, divergent from the path of the movement. Plunkett himself tended to take the utilitarian view expressed in his slogan ‘better business: better farming: better living’. However, George Russell (42) who edited the movement’s journal, The Irish Homestead envisaged a new society of rural communes; a vision that would for a time align him personally with the revolutionary socialist, James Connolly. Both Russell and Plunkett considered that the rural labourer should be involved in co-operation. Both mistrusted the Irish petty capitalist (with good reason) and his Parliamentary Party (from which it was only a short step to distrusting all politicians). Both were disposed benevolently to the Gaelic and industrial revivals and to feminine participation in society, and for the latter end helped found the United Irishwomen (now the Irish Countrywomen’s Association) in 1910.

More was needed to defeat the handicaps of the movement. The small capitalists were naturally hostile and they influenced the U.L.L. and the A.O.H. The bureaucracy was, for once, in agreement with these groups having no wish for co-operative rural communes. Further, in 1904, Plunkett offended the Catholic Church by somewhat tactless and superficial references in his book, Jreland in the New Century. With these against it, the I.A.O.S. could only flourish among those who could fight and had a need to do so. Except where there arose an organizer of the calibre of Paddy (‘the Cope’) Gallagher of Co. Donegal, this excluded the small farmer and the rural labourer and left the emphasis on the movement’s dairy farming initiators. These needed co-operation less as 32

their area’s prosperity had encouraged correction among its gombeenmen. Also they were reluctant to ally with the similarly beleaguered urban workers or with their own labourers. Thus, its only allies were the O’Brienite M.P.s and the Southern Unionist Irish Times when, in 1907, its enemies attacked.

First the Liberal Government was prevailed upon after nearly two years to sack Plunkett as a Unionist anomaly. His Liberal successor, T.W. Russell, was persuaded to stop the I.A.0.S. grant. This all but smashed the movement; many of its subsidiary projects, like the co-operative credit banks, went under.

Plunkett had to subsidize it for the next six years, partly out of his own pocket and partly out of American appeals, until the grant was restored in 1913.

It was only in the latter year that George Russell discovered the Urban Labour Movement.

III

The Emergence of Irish Labour Outside the north-east, the modern Irish urban labour force developed from before the Great Famine. It was a child of the clearances that were fostered by the expansion of money and of grazing. It soon outgrew and destroyed the radical artisan class of the 1790s, which O’Connell, the slump and the boat were already debilitating. The new class developed its consciousness in the 1850s at the same time as the British were developing their a-political ‘New Model Unionism’. Thus the Irish artisan was able to express himself politically in the purest Republicanism of the Fenians, while developing economically in timid trade bodies. Fusion of the latter began in 1863 when the Dublin United Trades Association was formed ‘not... to interfere with the legitimate process of trade’ and continued elsewhere, In 1868, the Dublin body joined the new British Trade Union Congress. Despite Belfast’s greater advance as a manufacturing centre, it was not to develop its Trade Union Council until 1881. In common with the British example, branches of the First International were set up in the 1860s in Dublin, Belfast and Cork; they collapsed in 1871, with their matrix body and without leaving much imprint.

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By the end of the 1880s, most Irish towns had their Trade Union Councils. The British T.U.C. found it difficult to give Irish Trade Union problems the time that their participants claimed for them. A movement developed to set up an Irish T.U.C. and, despite suspicious in Belfast, such a body held its first meeting in Dublin in 1894. The new body had four main problems. Three were common to both Ireland and Britain. They were what to do about unorganized unskilled labour (its position was more desperate in Ireland than in Britain): whether to continue to support the main ‘leftwing’ party (in Ireland, the Irish Parliamentary Party) or movement (the Fenians and their front bodies) or to create a specifically working class one: whether to go beyond reformism. The fourth problem concerned the individual trade unions in the I.T.U.C.: whether to continue to allow affiliation to it of trade unions with London headquarters. The first three problems were to be solved, more or less, during the I.T.U.C.s first twenty years: the last was to be shelved but would return, much later, to plague.

The related question of parliamentary action and of ideology had begun when a Liberal-Labour candidate, Alexander Bowman, was defeated in standing for North Belfast in 1885. In 1890, Parnell had sufficient working-class support to base a new specifically Labour movement on it had he wished. His death and the succession to him of the ultra-conservative, Redmond, destroyed any possibility of this; even so, Dublin remained a Parnellite stronghold in 1892. On the other hand, in the same year, Davitt and two other workingmen were elected as Anti-Parnellite M.P.s, though Davitt was subsequently unseated. A few similar Trade Council Nationalists were later elected; they tended to follow the party line rather more than their Lib-Lab equivalents. This caused dissaffection, especially in Belfast, where a group of Municipal Socialists, soon to find a leader in young William Walker, were urging on alliance of the I.T.U.C. with the British Independent Labour Party. At the same time, branches of the I.L.P. and of the Fabian Society were set up in various towns to survive only in Dublin and in the north-east.

In 1896, young James Connolly formed an Irish Socialist Republican Party to achieve a ‘Workers’ Republic’ of Ireland by constitutional means. Compared with Fenianism and Parnellism, the I.S.R.P. represented a tremendous advance in social theory. Its programme included the nationalization of the banks, popular control of the national schools, and free education to the higher university 34

grades. Less radical to us, seventy years after, are its demands for pensions for the aged, infirm, widows and orphans, free maintenance for children, nationalization of the means of transport and the necessities of life, control of agricultural machinery supplies, graduated income tax, universal suffrage and the forty-eight hour week. It also sent delegates to the Second International, which had been ignored by Irish Labour since its foundation.

But all this made it, perhaps, too advanced for its times. The unskilled workers weren’t organized enough for it; after nearly a century of bourgeois colonial stagnation the skilled were not intellectually ready for it. A further handicap was its acceptance of parliamentary tactics which placed it at a disadvantage vis-a-vis the sitting parliamentarians. These facts militated against the L.S.R.P. as the United Ireland League developed after 1898. Quarrels split the Party and, in 1903, its organizer and chief theorist, Connolly, left for the U.S.A.

As yet, Connolly had not developed ideologically to the point he had reached at his later return to Ireland. Nonetheless, his basic position was established. It was a development from that of Davitt. He was a part of the new European Marxist generation of the Second International. Davitt had inherited and combined the pragmatism of the Fenians and of the British ‘New Model Unions’ and Liberal-Labour M.P.s.

Davitt’s idea was the cross-channel alliance of the propertyless to achieve, amongst other things, an independent Ireland with the state as sole landowner, and which was free from sectarian hegemonies and the strife arising therefrom. To this end, he worked both with the British Labour and with the Irish Parliamentary Party, readily compromising his immediate aims until in his last months, in 1906, the latter’s sectarianism alienated him.

Connolly agreed with Davitt on land nationalization and on non-sectarianism; he broadened the scope of the latter’s internationalism. But his outlook enabled him to go further than his precursor. Despite his personal Catholicism, his Socialism justified the class war by the Marxists concepts of dialectical materialism and the Labour Theory of Value. This hardened his attitude against both the Catholic capitalist demand for Home Rule and against the Belfast Socialist proposals for co-operation within the I.L.P. Both were, at best, palliatives diverting attention from the aim of the Irish Socialist Republic for which his party stood.

Yet he was essentially an activist, and a working-man with a large and growing family. Thus he had no time to take his analysis far enough. He never conducted any deep investigation into the 35

power structure of Irish society. His later work, Labour in Irish History, does not fill the gap. This failure caused him to overestimate socialism’s chance of immediate success in Ireland. For him, the Dublin artisans were the heirs (and not, as they were ideologically, the contemporaries) of the United Irishman Jemmy Hope.

For him the agricultural tenants, whom he didn’t know well, would be aided by their folk memories of Celtic Ireland and Ralahine as well as by necessity to co-operate rationally against growing foreign competition. When the anticipated results showed no sign of occurring, Connolly went to America. This was the biggest mistake of his life. | In the first place, America introduced him to Industrial Unionism and to the Syndicalism associated with it there. For him, the One Big Union of the unskilled was the answer to the failure of the I.S.R.P. But he learnt also, less accurately, to consider it as the workers’ chief force in their political struggle and to degrade thereby the role of the Party. At the same time he never formally clarified his recognition of the role of the national struggle as a weapon within organized Labour’s fight for Socialism, though, personally, he was able to use it as such. His execution in 1916 left Irish Labour in the hands of less flexible men, with disastrous results. Another result of Connolly’s departure was that it left the I.S.R.P. less able to oppose adequately a new rival.

While the Parliamentary Party was split, many of the radical element among the younger artisans had joined the I.R.B. or one of the new Nationalist literary societies that often acted, in practice, as its front organizations. In 1900, twenty such societies in Dublin had amalgamated to form a new politico-literary group called Cumann na nGeadhael (‘The Family of the Gaels’ or Irish).

This body’s first president was the elderly I.R.B. leader, John O'Leary. Its moving spirits were two young working-class Fenians, William Rooney (who died, however, in 1901) and Arthur Griffith who became the body’s ideologist.

In 1904, Griffith produced his Resurrection of Hungary which described how the Hungarians had won their separation from Austria in 1867. First, he pointed out that they had established nationally-inspired cultural and economic institutions. Then, in the 1860s, their representatives refused to participate in the Austro- Hungarian joint diet and set up a separate parliament which claimed for itself the allegiance of all Hungarians and recognized the authority of the Emperor of Austria only insofar as he was King of Hungary. The success of these tactics was used by Grif- 36

fith to point out a moral for Ireland. Its M.P.s should withdraw from Westminster on the grounds that the last Irish parliament, being merely a collection of elected representatives, could not by itself end its existence. A separate Irish parliament should therefore be set up and should initiate all executive bodies of an independent state, especially a consular service. All taxes should be paid to this government and all local authorities would owe its allegiance. The King of England should be recognized only insofar as he was King of Ireland.

To back this ‘Hungarian’ policy, a National Council (officially separate from Cumann na nGaedhael) was set up. It aimed to coordinate and encourage Nationalist action in every sphere. Similar movements were developing elsewhere. In Cork city, young Terence MacSwiney and his friends had started a Cork Celtic Literary Society. In Ulster, two other young Fenians, Bulmer Hobson and Sean MacDermott (Mac Diarmada) founded the Dungannon Clubs. All such bodies appealed to the men of no property for political reasons; economics were ignored as in nearly every such movement since the Fenians. Then, in November 1905, Cumann na nGaedhael and the National Council merged with the Dungannon Clubs to form a political party, Sinn Fein. At the inaugural meeting, Griffith proclaimed for the new party an economic programme that was to haunt Irish Republicans for the next fifty years.

This urged the development of the Irish economy by a vast programme of reform, immediately by individuals and localities: even tually by the separatist government. Some kind of reform of transport, a national survey of resources and a national stock exchange were amongst his proposals. What caught the imagination, however, were the bulk of them. They included tariffs, a subsidized mercantile marine, Irish control of the banking system, the mobilization (or recall) of all possible Irish and American capital and, in agriculture, more tillage, re-afforestation and revival of Irish fisheries. The workers were offered a national system of insurance, reform of the Poor Law and, with the tariffs, control of retail prices. There were several proposals here to which a Socialist could take exception. But, by and large, this was the minimum economic programme of the non-Parliamentary Nationalists. It represented their lowest common economic denominator. It appealed to an artisan class whose members could still aspire to petty bourgeois status. It reflected everyone’s idea of independent Ireland; Grattan’s 37

Parliament had imposed tariffs successfully, the Union had ended them and had brought the Hunger, decline of tillage and the financier’s abuse of their powers. Thus Republicanism had an economic theory that could cover most of those subscribing to its political aim.

For a few years Sinn Fein was the open politico-economic expression of the I.R.B. On its left wing was the Socialist and ex-Connollyite, P.T. Daly. The right included Griffith himself who believed that Ireland could become an independent capitalist state such as the teachings of his inspirer, Friedrich List, had helped make Germany. The new party took a leading part in stimulating the economy.

It participated in such bodies as the Dublin Industrial Development Association, tried to start a bank and even endeavoured to print its own postal stamps.

In politics, it gained some seats on Dublin Corporation. More over, although Griffith’s hope for large bourgeois support never materialized, impatience with the new Liberal government’s avoidance of Home Rule made a number of M.P.s sympathize with it.

The M.P. for Kilkenny resigned his seat to join it. The M.P.

for North Leitrim joined it, resigned his seat, fought the resulting bye-election as its candidate and was roundly defeated.

The rise in the prospects of Home Rule after the general election of January 1910 reduced Sinn Fein’s chances of greater capitalist support. What was more, its economic schemes and its attempt to start a daily newspaper had brought it into debt. The I.R.B. was reviving as a body in its own right and grew cool over the royalism implicit in the Hungarian Policy. Finally many who were not Socialists (including such future notabilities as Mac- Diarmada, Eamonn Ceannt and W.T. Cosgrave) disliked Griffith’s increasing hostility to a new trend in working class organization. Until 1907, the unskilled urban worker was not to be reckoned with in Irish politics. He was no more than one of the worse paid sector of the worst paid community in the U.K. Throughout the 1900s, Dublin had the highest death-rate in the British Isles. In 1909, its unemployment figure was estimated at 20%. The wage of the Irish unskilled building worker was up to one third less than that of his British counterpart.

Matters began to change for the better when young James Larkin, of the National Union of Dock Labourers arrived in 1907 to organize the Belfast dockers. The employers backed sectarian thuggery to split his support. Nonetheless he managed to oppose a lock-out successfully by a series of sympathetic strikes. This was 38

Larkinism. The next year he broke with the N.U.D.L. over its settlement of the dispute. In 1909, he proclaimed a new Irish Transport and General Workers Union that would be open to all unskilled workers, especially in the Irish cities. In 1910 this Union was admitted to the I.T.U.C. despite some opposition from the old-guard craft unionists. Already, at Larkin’s request, Connolly was returning to Ireland to become the I.T.G.W.U.’s Belfast organizer. The I.S.R.P. had merged with various other Socialist splinter groups to form a Socialist Party of Ireland which was attracting back Daly and the Sinn Fein left. The cry was revived for a definite republican T.U.C. Party. The demand was now backed by 3,000 organized workers. But there was one weakness in their position. Unlike in most European countries, (as in Germany and, indeed, Russia) the bulk of the organized unskilled had not been industrialized (outside the special conditions of the north-east). Thus they were less prepared for class struggle in the political sphere: more prepared for the metaphysical struggles of Syndicalism-cum-Nationalism. In this way, they were to be doubly exploited by Irish capitalism.

IV The bourgeois revolution In June 1844, just over a year before the potato blight, Robert Kane produced a work entitled The Industrial Resources of Ireland, In it he outlined a scheme for industrial expansion, of which many suggestions were not to be carried out until the establishment of Saorstat Eireann, and a few have yet to appear.

That Kane could write on that would prove to be a long-term basis was less because of his prophetic powers than his over-optimistic hopes, These were based especially upon the post-1831 system of national primary education. They ignored the fact of the structure of the economic hierarchy.

The normal, vague economic division between large and small capitalists was deepened as a result of the Union. It became reflected generally in the political divisions of the country.

At the top of Irish capitalism was a number of firms, headed 39

mainly by Protestants. Outside the north-east, they included brewing and distilling firms and most of the banks all of which had adapted themselves to Union conditions. They feared accordingly any O’Connellite reversion to the economics of ‘Grattan’s Parliament’. In the Unionist cause this group was a junior partner to the landlords from whom, and from England, it took its mores. It did not regard itself as anti-Irish and its members spent an appreciable amount of their money in the country. As capitalists, however, they looked to England or to the centres of British investment for their profitable opportunities.

Below, and opposing these were the mainly Catholic National capitalists. These were found mainly in the service and distributive (especially drink) trades, also in such small industries as lacemaking and in the new National Bank. Their numbers were being augmented by the expansion of the rural monetary economy that was to reach its climax with the Famine. Much of the respectable demand for the repeal of the Union was based on this class and its belief that a return to pre-Union tariff policies would enable them to invest profitably to the scale of the Protestants. Their general social outlook was much the same as that of the latter: they too took their political leadership from landowners or from professional men in the landed tradition.

Sixty years later, the superficial picture of the division among Irish capitalists showed little change. There was now a wide variety of Catholic-run industries amongst others, in leather, textile, paper and printing, fats, milling and glass. There was one largescale Catholic firm (Gallaghers, the tobacco company) which produced for export. A second bank (The Hibernian) and the Phoenix Insurance Company showed an increased Catholic presence within Irish finance capital. Most notable was the rise of large-scale Catholic non-manufacturing entrepreneurs such as W.M. Murphy in Dublin and the Dowdalls in Cork. But Protestant capital still held its pre-eminent position.

But between the two groups of capitalists, the lines of struggle were different. The Entailed Estates Act of 1849 enabled the less prosperous Protestant landlord to sell out. Thus it reduced the barriers to Catholic landlordism to which many who had aspirations were now able to make good. This left the dominant element amongst the bourgeoisie as the shopkeeper-gombeen class. Members of this were often less than a generation removed from the peasantry, and hated the landlords economically both as extortionists and as rivals in that art. They had no rural landowning ambitions; they looked to the towns, especially Dublin, Thus, after 40

1850 in successive, at first unsuccessful, Tenant Leagues they allied with the peasants against the landlords. In 1880, they won in this way, leadership of the Parliamentary Nationalist Movement. From Gladstone’s Second Land Act, the petty capitalists consolidated their political authority. At first, they did this cautiously in alliance with the priests, with their greater popular authority.

Then successive Land Acts weakened the landlords still further.

Their own powers grew, both politically (as anti-landlord leaders) and economically (fewer rents meant better business), On Dublin Corporation, O’Connell had ensured bourgeois Nationalist dominance by winning an Irish Municipal Reform Act. Now the Nationalists ended the mutual agreement that gave the Unionists a Lord Mayor every other year. From 1898, the local power of the bourgeoisie was expressed politically in the countryside, through the rural councils now established. Finally, the spread of the A.O.H. outside Ulster gave them the highest expression of their power and became the vehicle that looked like entrenching the Catholic gombeen men at head of a home ruling Ireland.

The preamble to the Rules of the Ancient Order of Hibernians harks back to the Irish long struggle for (Catholic ‘Faith and fatherland’. It urges ‘the securing of religious equality and the selfgovernment of Ireland’ as against ‘the growing strength of Materialist views and selfish interests’ such as ‘the evil influences of secret, Communistic, Socialistic and of other societies of the age whose tendencies are to social chaos, blasphemous atheism and the overthrow of constituted authority’. Such slogans were ideal to an organization that combined great formal benevolence with being the political expression of Irish Catholic capitalism. Thus it was for ‘Home Rule’ as it had developed in successive Bills and against anything short of it. It opposed the Anglo-Irish Trading firms as being too-powerful competitors. It disliked the Union Civil Service (apart from its natural political bias, it was uneconomic and interventionist). It was doubtful about trade unionism (especially after Larkin’s appearance). Despite its religion, it was less ‘priest-ridden’ than Parnell’s National League; not only did its members prefer to follow Rome ruling only in theology, but many priests carried out entrepreneurial functions in their areas and were ready to collaborate with the Civil Service, as in the Congested Districts Board. Naturally parties outside the U.I.L.

were regarded with hostility. But the body which caused most hatred among Hibernians, after landlords and Unionists, was the 1.A.0.S.; its success imperilled gombeen-power at its base.

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The narrow views of a body that had claims to be the Irish Parliamentary Party’s grey eminence did not encourage support for Home Rule amongst those who didn’t happen to be small Catholic entrepreneurs. For Unionist organizers of the north-east, such a body was a gift. What was more, hostility arose amongst the traditional Home Ruler supporters.

Such a large Catholic entrepreneur as William Martin Murphy found it more profitable to do business with his Protestant equals than to attack them with Hibernian slogans. Many rural co-operators of the south-west were equally doubtful about the Order.

These groups found a leader in the dissident Parliamentarian, William O’Brien. They formed in 1909 a rival Home Rule Party, the All for Ireland League. This was a ramshackle affair. It included, Murphy’s friend, T.M. Healy, the future Labour Party member, D.D. Sheehan, and Morton Frewen, for a short spell the only Irish tariff reformer M.P. Its policy was an appeal to men of good will of all religions to achieve Home Rule on the United Ireland League’s original programme. This was no more than what the U.LL. itself proposed officially. However public opinion was beginning to doubt the Parliamentary Party’s efficiency. In the general election of January 1910, the O’Brienites made a good showing. Griffith, always seeking bourgeois support, seems to have considered joining it, but his party, as much as the Hibernians, disliked the League.

What did for the O’Brienites was the new position of the U.I.L.

with its new hope for prompt Home Rule. In the December 1910 general election the Redmondites reasserted their position despite Murphy and Healy’s clerical associates. The All for Ireland League was limited to County Cork. Its day was to come later.

Bourgeois Nationalism’s split over political tactics was not equalled by any split over economic aims, like that in the Irish bourgeoisie of sixty-five years previously. The Great Hunger had reduced Ireland’s population to the extent that a viable home market seemed to the Irish capitalist no longer to be a credible possibility. Similarly, the steady decrease in Irish population (and in the home market) did not encourage the development of manufacturing capital out of gombeen-capital.

Thus, when the capitalists gained control of the Nationalist Movement its economic demands did not change. In one way, economic nationalism directed by Irish capitalists represented a reduction of the demands of previous movements. As Irish Catholic capitalism increased in power, ‘Home Rule’ weakened from its 42

first Bill’s separation of legislatures (with the possibility of greater Irish self-government by unilateral action) to an institutional subject Irish legislature. More directly economic was the Catholic bourgoisie’s lack of interest in tariffs. Its victory in the 1880s was followed by the first of many ‘Buy Irish’ campaigns. But Parnell was alone in his suggestions for controls on imports. When, in the 1900s, local Industrial Development Associations were formed, they limited themselves to advocating such policies as Irish Trade Marks. Only a few bourgeois were attracted by Sinn Fein or by the brilliant pro-tariff polemics of the journalist, D. P. Moran. The chief spokesman for Irish capitalism was the imperialist, John Redmond, backed by such able young men as the Free Trader, Thomas Kettle, and John J. Horgan, who favoured Irish control of customs for revenue only. For the other League, the worst that Murphy’s Irish Independent could say against the third Home Rule Bill in April 1912 was that it did not enable the proposed Irish government to run itself economically. This was a crack at the Irish Civil Service that could be accepted by Hibernians.

V The bureaucracy The Irish Civil Service’ first duty was to the British government rather than to any Irish interest or class. It followed that it could not back either the Church of Ireland or the landlords when that government had determined to whittle away their powers. It benefited from its loyalty by becoming the strongest Unionist force outside the north-east. But this made it more than ever a chief target for the bourgeois Nationalists.

Hostility was reciprocated. By 1914, the bureaucracy’s tone and policy was still set by some forty-eight heads and deputy-heads of departments and branches. Of them, only twenty were Catholics as opposed to twenty-eight Protestants, ten of whom were British.

The background of twenty-two of them was either landowning or professional. As the professions had tended to draw their mores from the landowners rather than from the urban capitalists, the Civil Service was clearly bound to clash in feeling with the new Catholic bourgeoisie, even without its Unionism.

a3

This would have mattered less had the bureaucracy not been an expanding force in Irish life. Between 1881 and 1914, four new offices were set up to deal with the economic problems of Ireland following on the ‘fall of feudalism’ therein; in 1881 was established the Land Commission: in 1891, the Congested Districts Board: in 1899, the Department of Agriculture and Technical Instruction: in 1911, the Irish Insurance Commission. These provided precedents for bureaucratic intervention in the Irish economy and the first three of these consolidated much of the landlord’s power in the hands of its old allies. Further the reform of Irish local government in 1898 came ten years after its British predecessor, and then, while augmenting the Local Government Board’s Business, made no provision even for limited British-type parish councils, though, in other respects, it reproduced in Ireland the British locality system. Finally there was the fact that in Plunkett’s eight years at the Department of Agriculture, he could only get a subsidy for the I.A.O.S. and was unable to do any more for farmer co-operation, despite his free appointment of underlings.

When he went in 1907, bourgeois and bureaucratic pressure were united for once to end the subsidy.

This expansion of bureaucratic powers was on a large scale.

The post-1881 offices represented a 100% increase in its size. This was on top of the fact that its organization had never been streamlined after the manner of its British counterpart. The new departments raised further barriers against rationalization. They were autonomous and only vaguely connected with the Chief Secretary who was at once the government’s administrative head and, until the development of the Secretary to the Department of Agriculture, its only administrator in the House of Commons. During Sir Horace Plunkett’s period in the Agriculture Department, primary school agricultural courses were abolished by the Department of National Education which made no attempts to replace them with something to similarly help the farmers help themselves. Civil Service reform was deflected according to Home Rule prospects; the Liberals were ready to leave the task to the Home Rule government: the Unionists would not change matters in that sphere being natural allies to what was, unlike Irish landlordism, still a flourishing and expanding body.

Though national bourgeois hostility to the civil services was well-founded, the only real Nationalist expectation of change was that of its division into ministries responsible to a Home Rule parliament. When it came to the point, Irish capitalist methods could only effect minor economics. The work of nearly all departments a

was essential — that of the much hated new ones most of all — and there was no way for the capitalist to de-bureaucratize it. Co-operation was out of the question. Expansion in local authority powers would lose its attraction once the national authority was gained; the Irish rate system was becoming archaic and thus even less popular than the taxes of a Home Rule government. Above all, as Home Rule prospects grew, the brighter sons of the Irish small capitalists saw in the bureaucracy an opportunity to better themselves far more promising than their fathers’ business.

The Irish civil service had proved indispensable to the Union by doing what few Unionists would have had its British counterpart do. In the process, it had become an autonomous interest unbound by any traditional limitations of action, except survival. For the time, this was bound up with the cause of the Union. But there was no reason why this should always be so.

vI The Catholic Church (and education) The Great Famine saw clerical authority reach new heights. The priesthood ordered the starving peasants to continue to pay rent and was obeyed. This authority continued for the next few years.

It broke the Tenants Right League in the 1850s.

Then the Church’s political power began to decline. The Fenians with their secret oath gave it a shock. In the countryside the spread of money gave the peasant the incentive he needed to defy it to take possession of his land.

The clergy could not be excluded from politics entirely. Having been given a high place in Parnell’s National League and helped bring about the fall of the Chief, it never re-established that position; it remained prominent in the U.I.L. Of that body the Bishop of Raphoe, Rory O’Donnell, was treasurer. The parish priest was a naturally more popular influence than the parish businessman who needed him accordingly. But the priest’s moral influence detracted from the capitalist’s power, This was the more so in that the confidence his congregation possessed in him was often used to carry out the function of an entrepreneur. This was most vividly exemplified by the Galway priest, Fr Dooley’s forming the Galway Woollen Company. It is significant that the Listeanism of Moran’s Leader 45

was most appreciated among the clergy.

The priests’ moral authority was enhanced by co-operation in the business of the government that they were helping the capitalists to take over, The decisive step towards this had been the disestablishment of the Church of Ireland. This was now superseded by the Catholic clergy as the bureaucracy’s local advisors and supporters in non-political matters.

The outstanding example of increasing clerical participation in administration was in education. Here, its claims against secularism triumphed formally in 1870, after the defeat of the Church of Ireland that had used the system for its own ends. The victory of denominationalism was applauded by the Nationalists as a defeat for the oppressor’s religion. It was the more welcomed because the Famine had raised the age and thus the religious conservatism of the people. Above all, the teaching orders that had whittled away secularism provided examples of Nationalism comparing favourably with the anglocentric teaching of the National Schools.

The new National Education system was finalized in 1883. Under it the primary schools were divided by religion and placed under managers, who were usually, in the case of Catholic schools, the parish priests: in the case of Protestant ones, the local vicar.

These schools were subsidized (by a fixed proportion of their cost), inspected (except in religious subjects) and supplied with textbooks (subject to denominational guidance) by the state.

The problems of secondary and university education were solved similarly. In 1878, the Beaconsfield government began subsidizing all the existing (denominational) secondary schools by their examination results. The same year, the secular Queen’s University was replaced for the purposes of degree-giving by a nominal Royal University. This had the power to confer recognized degrees also on the Catholic University of Dublin which the clergy had set up in opposition to Queen’s. Thirty years later, a National University of Ireland incorporating the Queen’s Colleges (save Belfast, promoted to full University), the Catholic ‘University’ and the Royal University was set up with the clergy’s participation therein. The exception to the sectarian rule was in the realm of technical education wherein until 1899 there was a gap. The first act of the Department of Agriculture and Technical Education was to prepare plans for a national network of technical schools under its direct control. The spread of this was handicapped by the shortage of technical teachers; nonetheless, by 1925, there were sixty-five such schools, mainly in the towns.

Denominationalism maintained certain grave faults. Since Cath- 46

olic children tended to be both more numerous and of poorer background than Protestant children, they tended to be less well educated; the state subsidy was a fixed two-thirds of schools’ cost, and a poor congregation had to keep-costs low accordingly. This weakness in the system was partly counteracted by the smallness of many Protestant schools. It was also noticed, on occasions, that the Catholic school manager might use his power (superior to that of a Protestant manager) to replace a well-qualified lay teacher with a less-qualified cleric. This became a lesser likelihood as I.N.T.O. grew in power after its foundation in 1866; after thirty years a dismissed teacher could appeal to the manager’s bishop, though there was always the danger of collusion between the two latter arising from their estate. Again, the parents (for whom denominational education is said to be designed) had (and have) less real control over school policy than teachers or managers.

There was also some waste involved in supplying separate schools according to religion. Even good Catholics would accuse Catholic clerical education of having as its chief aim the production of seminarists. Though this is only recently suspected of being a fault, it is connected with the more generally denounced ‘urban’ educational curricula. Finally, although Britain only started board schools in the year of the formal denominationalizing of Irish education, forty years after its beginning, and although primary education was made compulsory for both countries in 1892, dislike of secular interference made it impossible to enforce compulsion in Ireland until 1926, thus allowing Britain to overtake her educationally. It might be put as a further objection to clerical control of education that it militated against the system, advocated by Padraic Pearse, of ‘freedom to the individual school, freedom to the individual teacher, freedom as far as may be to the individual pupil’.

It is only fair to admit that this was not recognized by Pearse himself. In The Murder Machine he came down against giving local management ‘to a district council rather than left as it is at present’. He urged however that under Home Rule a national Minister for Education be appointed and national payment of teachers instituted. His objection to the ‘murder machine’ was on its continuing suppression of the Irish national ideal not its sectarianism, More significant educationally were his views on school organization. These were exemplified in his own boys’ school, St Enda’s, which he started in 1908 and ran first in Rathmines and then in Rathfarnham. There he revived in a modern form the early Irish idea of fosterage, under which a man took the care of 47

growing boys so as to ensure that all their talents be developed fully. At St Enda’s the boys ran most of the organization themselves, Pearse and his colleagues merely training them according to their repective potentials. St Enda’s survived until after 1916, despite financial troubles which killed off its equivalent, St Ita’s (for girls), in 1912. It was a success partly because Pearse was a natural teacher who gathered similar good teachers around him: partly because it remained a small school with never more than 100 pupils who were drawn mainly from the more patriotic middle class (Larkin’s sons attended, however). In the class society of the time, such a scheme of education could only exist for a minority. The Nationalist bourgeois dismissed Pearse as a crank (whatever that is) and accepted without a qualm sectarian education and its corollaries. Nor did he baulk at such orders in matters of faith and morals as the extension of the Bull Ne Temere to Ireland in 1908, which dictated that the child in a mixed marriage be brought up a Catholic. In such matters, he was a loyal son of the Church. But that threatened his position when its priests took posts on the Congested Districts Board. Also, the Local Government Act of 1898 in its refusal to set up parish councils was a further maintenance of clerical control against him, as well as against the people in general. On the otner hand the Catholic clergy were rather embarrassed by the outspoken sectarianism of the A.O.H. The Archbishops of Armagh and of Dublin tended to look more favourably at the All for Ireland League. Had this party done better in 1910, more would have followed them. As it was, with Home Rule so soon to be accomplished, there were few clerics below the Archbishops who cared to rock the Nationalist boat.

Vil The north-east Nineteenth-century developments ensured support for the Union among the Ulster Protestant Nonconformists. Ulster economic expansion, maintained by the American Civil War cotton famine, justified conscious support for it immediately, Irish Catholic Na- 48

tionalism gave the bourgeoisie (and its Presbyterian clerical allies, fearing for their ‘regium domum’) a good cause to divide the workers against each other and to gain the Unionism of the Protestant majority of them. Hence the’ much vaunted Northern Ireland lack of class consciousness and the Ulster Protestant worker’s readiness to attach himself to a movement run by his masters for his masters. Between the Great Famine and the 1881 Land Act, the Protestant peasantry had its Ulster Custom under attack. There was a possibility that it might rejoin its Catholic equals. Guarantee of the Custom and its extension over the rest of Ireland, blocked this. What was more, the Parliamentary Nationalist Parties never perceived adequately the nature of Ulster Protestant bigotry. They saw only its irrational manifestations and not their material basis.

Thus the Nationalists could see no reason to attempt to break with even the image portrayed by Catholic bourgeois Nationalism. Protestant opposition to Home Rule was further encouraged from outside by the unimaginative conservatism of the nineteenth-century papacy. This had its effect most relative to Ireland in 1908 when the Bull Ne Temere was extended thither.

‘Ulster Unionism’ is, understandably, negative. Only its manipulators feel positively in favour of the institutions of the Union.

The manipulated dislike Irish Nationalism even more.

The Home Rule Bill of 1886 drove most of the, mainly Ulsterbased, Irish Liberals into Unionism. Already its threat was reviving the Loyal Orange Order in the province. In 1886, there were sectarian riots against the Bill. From then, until today, the pattern of the history of eastern (and later central) Ulster has been one of stand-put conservatism with intervals of religious riot. The second Home Rule Bill (1893) caused such a disturbance and stimulated plans to channel the feeling behind into an organized military force. After 1910, as the threat of a third Home Rule Bill gained momentum, Ulster’s oligarchs (other than such few Liberals as Lord Pirrie) were experienced enough rabble-rousers to know what was to be done.

49

INTERMISSION

Celtic Twilight or Irish dawn?

The Great Famine put the final touch to the distintegration of Celtic Irish culture. Those who were worst hit by it were the dwellers in the Gaeltacht: the remaining Irish-speaking areas. In one decade, the already declining numbers of Irish speakers were reduced drastically. From being over half the population, they became just over a quarter of the reduced number.

This meant a completely changed audience for the Irish creative artist. Before it, Irish writers in English had been unable to appeal to the mass of their fellow-countrymen. They wrote for a small colonial group around Dublin. If good, they wrote for the English. If very good, they were able to go to London. After the Famine, they wrote in the knowledge that the mass of Irishmen might understand them. For many years to come, few would be ready to do so, but this few would have a more important influence on Irish literature in English, than the many who continued as before. The precursor of this trend was the Young Irelander, Thomas Davis. His propaganda writings included competent and memorable poetry and he assembled around him other literati, including one major poet, James Clarence Mangan. Though Davis died just before the Famine and Mangan just after, their tradition was maintained by the Fenian, Charles Kickham. After him, Standish O’Grady though less directly political found his inspiration in Ireland’s Celtic past. This tradition would have remained an interesting side-show in Irish literature, but for the ulterior influences that were to have their results.

But Davis, as befitted a Mazzinian Nationalist, championed the maintenance of the Irish language against O’Connell. His advocacy was handicapped by his own inability to speak in Irish but the language had more effective supporters. John O’Donovan formed in 1853 an Ossianic Society to investigate the manuscripts of the Celtic Irish. Dr John MacHale, the authoritarian Archbishop of Tuam, was prominent in championing the language. The Englishman, Dr John Newman, established a Chair of Irish in his new Catholic University of Dublin. Some twenty years later, in 1876, when the Society for the Preservation of the Irish Language was formed it was attacked as too moderate and breakaways from it formed a Gaelic Union in 1878.

50

These literary movements drew their strength from the development of post-famine Nationalism. The Irish language one was the usual expression of national consciousness reasserting itself with the rise of bourgeois and peasant. The English literary tradition was the same thing developing in the newer language.

But the first permanent expression of this occurred not in art but in sport. In November 1884, Michael Cusack, Maurice Davin and five others met in Thurles, Co. Tipperary, to found a Gaelic Athletic Association to maintain and encourage the Irish sports that were being threatened by such English imports as association football. The next month, the Archbishop of Cashel, T.W. Croke, gave the new body his support. In 1888 occurred the first all-Ireland hurling match. The G.A.A.’s importance was more than sporting; it provided the major popular unifying force in parish and county such as the elective councils of the latter were never to do. Even today, the focus of County patriotism lies ae in its team’s success. On the other hand, the G.A.A.’s achievement was soceifientts rural, as rural areas had the least broken tradition of Gaelic sports.

In the towns, the English sport clubs had established themselves.

There, much goodwill has been forfeited by the Association’s automatic expulsion of players and attenders at English sports.

Thus, the G.A.A.’s spirit has tended too often to err on the side of parochialism. This is partly because of its rural basis. Perhaps because of its wider organization, the same cannot be said of the organizing body of the Irish language movement.

In the autumn of 1893, three young men, the Protestant, Douglas Hyde, the Priest, Eugene O’Growney, and the Ulster Catholic, John (Eoin) MacNeill, formed a Gaelic League (Connradh na Gaedhilge) to replace the weak Gaelic Union. Hyde became its President and, under the capable secretaryship of MacNeill, the League flourished. O’Growney and MacNeill wrote Irish text books. Many Unionists joined it (but few relative to other groups). Of the Nationalists, only Dillon tended to be aloof. The clergy supported it, though Maynooth was hostile. After 1900, it gained Irish teaching in school hours (1906), Irish qualifications for teachers in the Gaeltacht (1906) and Irish as a matriculation subject in the new National University (1910-3).

But Connradh na Gaedhilge was more than just a movement of linguistic revivalism. It was clearly against the post-famine puritanism of the country (which was possible why Maynooth disliked it). It ran ‘turas’ or open air excursions to places of interest or beauty, summer colleges with a wide curricula and Ceilidhthe.

51

It was also broadly nationalistic in its effect. Hyde himself, though he maintained as rigorously non-political, saw it as reviving the Irish national spirit that was necessary to their prosperity.

More especially, it encouraged its members to read W.E.H.

Lecky’s History of Ireland in the Eighteenth Century and later Mrs Alice Stopford Greene’s The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, both of which stimulated political Nationalism in them. This nationalism varied in spirit according to its possessor; in Padraig Pearse, it was broad: in such theorists of Irish capitalism as D.P.

Moran and occasionally, Arthur Griffith, it could be very narrow. But few could stay long in the League without being won to it. At last, in 1916, it overwhelmed Hyde’s determination to keep the League non-political and forced him thereby from the Presidency. The effect of the linguistic movement is fairly measurable. This is not so of the English language literary movement outside its own area. The beginning of its expansion into the matrix of future Irish writing in English was the founding of literary societies in the towns during the 1880s. These were the outcome of the general political frustration of actual and potential physical force elements as against the triumphant parliamentary Nationalism of the bourgeoisie. The former saw the hope of political revival in the Parnellite split. Parnell’s death and his succession by the conservative, Redmond, left them more frustrated. In the 1890s were founded two major literary societies and the Irish Literary Theatre. ; At the head of the movement were Standish O’Grady, as Ireland’s leading national literary figure, and John O’Leary, the Fenian. The latter attracted back to Ireland the young poet, William Butler Yeats. Yeats found the movement to be an excellent audience, and the Celtic myths to be inspiration for him. Such were also factors stimulating activity from George Russell (42), Lady Gregory and J.M. Synge. Later, they attracted back to Dublin the novelist, George Moore, Of these people, only he possessed any sort of nationalist background, and this was neutralized completely for him by aestheticism.

In 1900 the movement found a semi-political shape in Cumann na nGaedhael. Its supporters began to enter active politics. By 1907 Griffith was denouncing Synge’s Playboy of the Western World on its first appearance.

This development is less surprising when it is realized that literati and Republicans were at cross purposes, The former wanted an audience and raised high claims to their rights to one. The latter 52

wanted propaganda alone. Neither side was prepared to surrender.

Of the two, however, it was the Republicans that were in politics. 53