CHAPTER THREE: THE REVOLUTION SUBVERTED 1910-1923

CHAPTER THREE

THE REVOLUTION SUBVERTED 1910-1923

‘Is there any other point to which you would wish to draw my attention?’ ‘To the curious incident of the dog in the night-time.’

‘The dog did nothing in the night-time, ‘That was the curious incident.’

A. Conan Doyle, ‘Silver Blaze’ The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes.

From 1905, a Liberal government was again in power in the United Kingdom. In its Irish policy, it appeared as little better than a pale shadow of the Unionists.

But, in 1906, a Home Rule constitution had been granted the Transvaal which had recently been up in arms against the British.

In 1907, two M.P.s of the Irish Parliamentary Party had resigned their seats, one of them fighting the subsequent bye-election for the new Sinn Fein Party.

In that year, also, James Larkin had begun to organize the unskilled workers in Belfast.

From 1908, there was a gradual takeover of the ILR.B. by a group of impatient men, led by a former Fenian prisoner, Thomas J. Clarke. This included the Sinn Feiners, Bulmer Hobson and Sean MacDiarmada (now appointed National Organiser), P.S.

O’Hegarty and the Ulstermen, Denis McCullough and Dr Patrick McCartan. These people were beginning to honeycomb social strongpoints with their own men in preparation for armed rising.

In 1911, they would take over the I.R.B. from the old guard.

In 1909, O’Brien and Healy had formed their anti-Hibernian All for Ireland League. In the same year, various groups of Socialist Nationalists formed a Socialist Party of Ireland.

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Also in that year, the Countess Constance Markievicz and Bulmer Hobson founded a republican body of boy scouts (Fianna Eireann). All this meant at the beginning of the second decade of the twentieth century was that the Irish Parliamentary Party had to establish Irish Home Rule as an immediate possibility. If it did not, it was liable to be supplanted in its position at the head of Irish Nationalism by an organization more radical in aims and strategy or tactics or all three.

The general election of January 1910 placed Redmond where he could force the Liberal government to grant a new Home Rule Bill. The general election of December restated this position and showed that the United Ireland League enjoyed more support than at any time since 1903.

The third Home Rule Bill appeared in April 1912. It was very much like the 1893 Bill; it included the subordination of the Irish legislature to that of the United Kingdom and no control by the Irish over customs. It could not satisfy the Republicans. However, they were prepared to accept it, with varying degrees of reluctance, as a provisional measure that might lead to something better.

This moderation was not shared by the Unionists of the northeast; they feared an Ireland controlled by priests and Hibernians.

They had allies. Unionists in the other three provinces agreed with their fears, though, being an upper class garrison population, their path proved divergent from that of their Ulster allies. More important was the British Conservative Party, now led by a colonial bigot, Andrew Bonar Law, and ready to ally with Satan against the Liberals. British Conservatism and Irish Unionism gave Ulster Unionism a leader in Britain’s ex-Solicitor-General, the Irish Protestant, Sir Edward Carson. But Ulster Protestantism’s real organizing genius was a stolid stockbroker from Co. Down, James Craig. Even before the Home Rule Bill was introduced, Ulster oligarchs had been preparing opposition. The armed. blacklegs that had been used against Larkinism in 1907 were reorganized. In July, 1912, a Hibernian riot was used as an excuse for Protestant sectarian disturbances which had the extra use of breaking up the LT.G.W.U.’s Belfast organization. From September 1912 a Covenant against Home Rule was signed by some 218,206 Ulstermen.

A para-military body, the Ulster Volunteers, was supplied with German guns and encouragement. The British army was infiltrated with Unionist supporters. All this was aimed to cause Ulster be

(or as much of it as possible) to secede from home-ruling Ireland and to act as a separate state under a provisional government, until Britain would let it be reunited within its parliament.

Government and Parliamentary Party did nothing. The former was conscious of its minority position and feared to compromise itself within British capitalism. The latter was sure, once the Bill was passed, Ulster would accept the fait accompli. It feared also that too precipitate action against the Unionists would embitter them and make difficult the uniting of a home ruling Ireland.

Thus Ulster militarism was allowed to grow until it could not be crushed save by civil war.

But its appeasement by government and U.I.L. caused a revival of Nationalist discontent. The I.R.B. spread its organization. More open was the final establishment of a parliamentary Labour Party at the I.T.U.C.’s Clonmel Congress in 1912. Within the new party, Connolly’s group [now the Independent Labour Party (Ireland)] preached non-sectarian and clearly Socialist Republicanism, Outside Belfast, the I1.T.G.W.U. expanded.

But, for some time, the larger Irish capitalists (Protestant and Catholic) had been preparing to do battle with Larkinism. In 1909 a Cork Employers’ Federation had been formed. In 1911 a similar body had been set up in Dublin.

Now the latter moved to the attack over Larkin’s organization of the workers in W.M. Murphy’s Dublin United Tramway Company. The employers of the Federation locked out all I.T.G.W.U.

members from August 1913 to January 1914.

The Lock-Out split nationalist Ireland. The United Ireland League remained formally neutral; it was the bigger Dublin employers who were opposing Larkin, and they were led by the All for Irelander, Murphy. The Church hedged similarly, fearing for its popularity. Most Fenians and Sinn Feiners sympathized with Larkin, though Griffith and Hobson opposed him. The national literati tended to support him. Through George Russell, the farmer co-operative movement appeared to be beginning to reach an understanding with the urban Socialists.

On the other hand, the Unionists were united against Larkin.

But what was decisive was the refusal of the British trade unionists to help their Irish comrades positively by blacking Dublin goods. In the end the employers won a pyrrhic victory; even where the workers concerned signed a document renouncing I.T.G.W.U.

membership, they remained members thereof in practice. But there were other results. There was an understanding between Connolly 56

and Russell, the theorist of rural co-operation. More important was the revelation of two facts; first that the time of the general strike was not yet, except for very limited purposes; second that the Irish worker could not rely on outside help. Accordingly, Connolly maintained in being an Irish Citizen Army that he had started in October 1913 to protect trade unionists from the employers’ thugs. This was now organized labour’s military arm, and would be used to help it achieve its aims. By the middle of 1914 the I.C.A. claimed 1,000 members.

Born more directly from the frustrations surrounding the Home Rule Bill was the Irish Volunteers. It had been demanded as an offset to the Ulster body by many journals for some time. Now in November 1913 it was founded on the initiative of Eoin Mac- Neill, the Secretary of Connradh na Gaedhilge, who became President of the force. MacNeill was himself a mild supporter of the U.I.L. Most other Volunteer officials were similarly inclined. Padraig Pearse became Director of Organization, his friend, Thomas MacDonagh, Director of Training and the ex-British Consul, Sir Roger Casement, Treasurer. The force included, however, many members of the I.R.B. and of Sinn Fein; one of these, Bulmer Hobson, became Secretary. At the same time as the Irish Volunteers, there was formed a women’s group, Cumann na mBan, to act as a nursing body to them. In March 1914, Redmond, who feared an Irish civil war, moved to take over the Irish Volunteers. In June he succeeded in placing a majority of his nominees on the Volunteer Council. He was backed by MacNeill and Casement, but also by Hobson, who thereby had to leave the I.R.B.

With the Volunteers secure, Redmond proposed compromise to the Ulster Protestants. This offered those counties that wished a six year exclusion from the jurisdiction of the proposed Home Rule regime. This plan collapsed because the Unionists demanded the similar exclusion of Tyrone and Fermanagh—two counties with Nationalist majorities.

At the outbreak of the First World War, Redmond joined Carson to promise support for Britain against Germany. In return, the Home Rule Bill was enacted, although suspended for the War’s duration. Redmond’s support for Britain was backed by most nationalists.

They were told, and believed, that they had Home Rule. They had, also, war-booms in agriculture and industry; between 1914 57

and 1918 Ireland had a favourable trade balance for the first time since 1904; Irish joint stock bank deposits rose 1910-1920 from £ 62,500,000 to £200,000,000. Appetites were further whetted by promises of war supplies contracts and of former German trade.

The army’s separation allowance gave a regular income to many homes that had never known one.

But there were dissidents. In September 1914 the original (1913) Volunteer Command ejected the Redmondites and denounced the British alliance, demanding as its price effective Home Rule immediately. Only 12,000 of the 180,000 Volunteers in training followed them. But they included not only the I.R.B.

and Sinn Fein elements but former Home Rule supporters like Pearse (now an I.R.B. member) and MacNeill. The Redmondite Volunteers were reformed as the Irish National Volunteers.

MacNeill’s group kept their name but were more generally referred to by the Redmondite Freeman’s Journal as the ‘Sinn Fein Volunteers’. That nickname gave in practice much free publicity to Sinn Fein. But as far as general political views were concerned, it was fair enough. Most Volunteers shared a vague form of Sinn Fein theory. The division came at that point. The right-wing included MacNeill, Hobson and Griffith, all of whom (especially the last) were unsympathetic to Labour aspirations. The left-wing included Pearse, MacDonagh and Ceannt, supported by Thomas Clarke; they were less narrowly bourgeois; of them Pearse was developing towards the end of his life a theory that challenged the concept of private property. All the Irish Volunteers tended to have greater respect for the Church than did the members of the I.C.A. However, to the former, intellectual politics was placed second to moral training. Pearse, remembering that the national movement had been betrayed many times before, dedicated himself to seeing that it did not fail again. MacSwiney of Cork trained himself similarly. Behind this determination was the recognition that this was Ireland’s last chance; that the Gaelic League might never again fire Irish nationalism, as its cultural basis was already weak enough.

The left wing of the Volunteers began to make contact with the Irish Citizen Army. This body had lost much of its strength: many had joined the Irish Volunteers: many others (such as Sean O’Casey) grew impatient with what they deemed its undue nationalism and left it. After the outbreak of the war, Larkin went to America to help the Labour struggle there and to contact the I.R.B.’s allies in Clan na Gael. Connolly was now in charge of the 1.T.G.W.U. and of the I.C.A. His Republicanism was now rein- 58

forced by the same pressures affecting the Irish Volunteers. In addition, the collapse of the Second International before the pressures stimulated by war, left Irish labour as the only force ready to attack that war and thus perhaps establish a Socialist Europe.

The combination of Volunteer and Socialist produced the Easter Rising of April, 1916. But the Volunteers were divided over the necessity or otherwise of German support. The right-wing favoured this; the left-wing, with Connolly, prepared to fight without it, and isolate the right in a revolutionary situation. Unfortunately, Casement was captured by the British with the supply of German arms that would reassure the right. At the last moment MacNeill cancelled the parades that were to result in nation-wide insurrection.

This ensured that 220 only of the Citizen Army, 1,000 of the Dublin Brigade of the Volunteers and a Volunteer detachment from Maynooth, Co. Kildare, with aid from Fianna Eireann and Cumann na mBan, took part in a revolt by themselves in the city of Dublin, while unco-ordinated risings occurred in Cos. Galway and Wexford and a single skirmish in Co. Cork. Even so, and despite appalling luck, the Rising lasted nearly a week.

The manner of the executions of the revolt’s leaders (especially that of the wounded Connolly) and revelations of British atrocities in its suppression (including the attempt at complicity in the actions of a homicidal lunatic) justified the hastening of the Irish’s changed heart against England.

In August 1915 the United Ireland League had been sufficiently doubtful about its own popularity to initiate a series of County conventions to revive support.

And it had grounds for doubt. Many National Volunteers had died in France without formal recognition of their corporate identity, while the Ulster Volunteers were given a special division.

What was more, there was a permanent threat of Irish conscription imposed by the British Parliament and to be resented as such.

This threat was increased from May 1915 after the British Government had opened its ranks to such Unionists as Carson and F.E. Smith, It had not been weakened when in December 1915 a Conscription Bill was introduced for Britain only. In economics, wages had risen at a slower rate than prices (£1 in March 1914 = 13/- in March 1916) and much of the separation allowance’s value was correspondingly reduced.

Among the after-effects of the Rising was the (untrue) smear that the Parliamentary Party had cheered the executions. The impression of treachery was joined with one of futility by a government proposal for immediate Home Rule of which Unionist 59

objections forced withdrawal.

But as yet, the surviving leaders of the Rising were in British prisons. Even so, they were preparing to revive the struggle. They had a leader in each jail. Such men included Eamon de Valera, by chance the only surviving commandant of the Rising, and a young civil servant and Fenian, Michael Collins.

In this period was being determined the social nature of the independence struggle. The I.T.U.C. (and Labour Party) had as a whole always failed to understand Connolly’s Republicanism.

At its Sligo Congress in August 1916 with the Belfast co-operatives organizer, Thomas Johnson, in the Chair, it stood in memory both of Republicans killed in Dublin and of Volunteers killed in France. More significant was the I.T.G.W.U.’s withdrawal from the national struggle and the simultaneous weakening of the I.C.A.

This severed organized Labour’s only formal link with the Republicans. It also severed the Republicans from much existing Irish Socialist thought. The I1.T.G.W.U. withdrew from Republicanism for what seemed sound ideological reasons. Connolly’s successor as Acting Secretary, William O’Brien, was a disciple of his teachings. For O’Brien, syndicalism meant building up working class organization till it could replace the bourgeois state; Republicanism meant letting the national issue be clarified so that it would not interfere with the establishment of Socialism. This did not preclude a revolutionary, internationalist stance on such issues as the Soviet Revolution in Russia. It did mean, in the hands of an organization man such as O’Brien, leaving the national struggle to the bourgeois Nationalists, as being something in which an international Socialist had no interest. The imaginative activism with which Connolly transcended hs ideology was forgotten.

O’Brien was supported by Thomas Johnson, a good Socialist but one with many English prejudices. These two were in 1919 to take office respectively as Secretary and Treasurer of the I.T.U.C.

(they exchanged positions the next year). Their practical policies were based on the assumptions that an inevitable republic would include the whole island: that then the national movement would divide socially and unite on these lines with equivalent potential divisions in the quondam Unionist movement: that therefore the Labour movement’s first duty was to grow in strength and spread Socialism (especially in the north-east).

In December 1916, David Lloyd George became Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He initiated his government’s Irish policy 60

by repatriating the Republican internees (not convicts serving sentences, like de Valera, until June 1917). They returned to Ireland and revived their institutions. The I.R.B. Supreme Council was reconstituted to include Collins who became also Director of Organization for the Volunteers. Griffith revived his journal, the demand for which had increased due to his prestige as the ‘ideologist of Easter Week’. For the Parliamentary Party the situation had deteriorated since Easter Week. In January 1917 its paper, the Freeman’s Journal, estimated that a pound would buy only what ten shillings and eightpence halfpenny would have bought in July 1914. The farmers were particularly hurt. Imports of colonial butter wounded the dairy farmer. A potato-blight injured the pig-rearing small farmer.

Most farmers were angered by the bad harvest of 1916 and the following compulsory tillage order of January 1917. Over all, rumours of impending conscription continued. The country was increasingly cynical about parliamentary tactics, not only of the U.LL. but of the All-for-Ireland League; in fact in November 1916 the former won a seat from the latter.

The I.R.B. combined with Sinn Fein to cover Ireland in a front ‘National Aid Association’ for participants in the Rising and relatives thereof. In February 1917, it put up an ‘Independent’ candidate at a bye-election in North Roscommon. He was the Papal Count, George N. Plunkett, father of Joseph Plunkett, leader and martyr of the Rising. He won the seat with an over-all majority over two Home Rule candidates. He announced that he would follow the Hungarian Policy and not sit at Westminster.

Events continued to favour the Republicans. There was another bad harvest in 1917. The Government had appointed a Food Controller for the whole British Isles; his politics were inevitably anglo-centric. Food price controls tended to hurt the Irish farmer without helping the Irish townsman.

But government policy was even more confused on the Irish national issue. This was natural; it depended for support on the Unionists, yet, for reasons of foreign and military policy, it could not afford to alienate Nationalist Ireland too much. Thus, after new proposals for partitionist Home Rule had been rejected, the Government shelved the issues to an Irish Convention. The Republicans abstained from this. It resulted merely in dividing the ranks of Parliamentary Nationalism between Redmond and the old guard (who were still prepared to accept Home Rule) and Devlin, allied to the Bishops and the All-for-Ireland League, who wanted Dominion status. In any case, the report of the Convention was 61

overshadowed. A week before it appeared, in April 1918, the Government initiated a serious attempt to conscript Ireland, which could be stopped only by a unified campaign of all Nationalist groups. The next month it arrested the leaders of Sinn Fein on pretext of a ‘German plot’, It is not surprising that, in all the bye-elections of 1917 and 1918, the Irish Parliamentary Party held only the Hibernian strongholds of South Armagh and East Tyrone and Waterford City, where on Redmond’s death his son held the seat. The general election of December 1918 was the first operating under manhood suffrage. It was fought, outside Ulster, Dublin University and a few other constituencies with Unionist candidates, between Parliamentarians and Republicans.

The Parliamentary Party, led by Dillon, took its stand on Dominion status to be achieved by Parliamentary means.

Against such a line were the Republicans. Their official political expression was Sinn Fein. It had been led by de Valera since October 1917. Then its aims had been changed from dual monarchy to ‘securing the international recognition of Ireland as an Independent Irish Republic’ which time ‘the Irish people may by referendum freely choose their own form of government’, However, the means of achieving this remained the Hungarian policy. The social programme was much as before, though including now the guarantee of the living wage and later a demand for more houses.

The All-for-Ireland League renounced its seats in favour of Sinn Fein. Healy’s nephew, young Kevin Higgins, was a candidate thereof. Behind the Party was the I.R.B. Supreme Council. The intrigues of this body had replaced the dual monarchist, Griffith, with the Republican commandant, de Valera. It was dedicated to maintaining the Irish Republic that it held to have existed since 1858.

But this was all: consistency in political aims appeared as conservatism in social views. The discipline of secret societies tends to breed Bonapartes rather than democrats and many I.R.B. members had tendencies towards the former style. More specifically, the Supreme Council was composed of men who were, at best (like Liam Mellows and, perhaps, Harry Boland) prepared to use social programmes to reinforce the political aims and at least (like Collins and the majority) eager to avoid such programmes for fear of jeopardizing those aims. This division was based on an unconscious disagreement as to the nature of the Irish Republic: a question that only Connolly had considered deeply. Occasional demands for a ‘Co-operative Commonwealth’ or even a ‘Workers’ 62

Republic’ were not backed by clear analysis. As yet the significance of this lay in the future.

More obvious militants were those in the Republican movements’ military arm: the Irish Volunteers. Forces of this body were already making attacks on the police (R.I.C.) to obtain arms to protect the Republic. Volunteers were most generally farmers’ younger sons, farm labourers, unemployed men and others of the propertyless. Their Army Council was run democratically. Above all, they could not be separated from local problems or social aspirations. But, for the moment, all such aims were centred in the single word: Republic. That it was so was accepted by organized Labour. As leader of Sinn Fein, de Valera had bidden Labour wait. Its leaders were happy to do this. Between 1916 and 1920; the I.T.G.W.U. was increasing its membership figures from 5,000 to 130,000. Much of this increase came from among the building workers and from the rural areas that Larkin had only begun to enter. Wartime prosperity encouraged a tolerant attitude on the part of employers. The farm labourers had gained a 70% wage increase in October 1917.

In Belfast, too, class consciousness was gaining ground. But here, in July 1920, Carson would be able to stimulate bigotry and revulsion from the Irish War of Independence into producing vast sectarian and anti-trade unionist riots. And trade union expansion involved increased trade union bureaucracy and conservatism.

Many of the new provincial organizers were politically naive or even Hibernian. But Labour’s petty bourgeois consciousness encouraged separation of political and economic action enough already.

Its leaders’ neutrality in the national struggle loosened the ties of many in or sympathetic to the movement. Of these, some, such as Richard Corish and Cathal O’Shannon, would return to Labour politics under independence; others, including Joseph MacGrath, Sean MacEntee and Peadar O’Donnell, would be attracted elsewhere. The I.C.A. became a left wing adjunct of the Volunteers rather than their pace-maker. The machinery, such as it was, was allowed to fall into disarray. When Harry Boland offered O’Brien the Republican candidacies of four seats in Dublin City, the latter could not accept them. This stimulated internal dissension. From America, Larkin denounced such political quietism.

From 1919, his professed supporters would run a breakaway Dublin Trades Council, with P.T. Daly (who had grudges to settle with O’Brien) as secretary. More ideologically significant would be the conversion in 1921 of a revived S.P.Y. (1) into the Communist 63

Party of Ireland, led by Connolly’s young son Roderic, and excluding O’Brien, O’Shannon and others.

Sinn Fein won the general election of 1918, as far as Ireland was concerned. It returned 73 out of 105 candidates, despite the imprisonment of most of them. Those who were free proclaimed themselves on January 21st, 1919 an independent Irish Parliament (‘Dail Eireann’) as envisaged by the Hungarian Policy.

The Deputies of Dail Eireann (‘Teachta Dalai’) had been chosen as candidates by the Secretaries of Sinn Fein, Collins and Boland, because they were unlikely to be squeamish about the means to be used to maintain the Republic. But there does not seem to have been any social criteria for their appointment beyond the general acceptance of the Sinn Fein programme.

In fact, the first Dail had nearly two-thirds of it made up by men from the urban professional and white-collar classes, another quarter by capitalists and the remaining 10% by farmers. Many had joined Sinn Fein after 1916, A bitter veteran of that Party, P.S. O’Hegarty, was later to remark that the ‘politicians’ had taken it over. More accurately what had seemed likely in 1910 was now achieved; the bourgeoisie was disillusioned with orthodox parliamentary tactics.

There was a natural division of interests between propertyless Volunteers and bourgeois T.D.s This was not as obvious as it later became. The Sinn Fein programme was immediately acceptable to all. The Dail augmented it at its first meeting by a vague idealistic and often self-contradictory Democratic Programme, despite Collins’s fears that this would ‘split the nation’. Above all, as with the pre-1916 Volunteers and indeed, with most ‘pure’ national movements, the morale was everything: policy nothing. The role accepted by Eamon de Valera, as president of Dail Eireann, was that of the man who kept things that way.

Until Irish independence was finally recognized the policy of the Dail, and of its cabinet under de Valera, was to maintain itself as the official representative body of the Irish Republic. Opinions differed as to how this would best be done. On the one hand, Griffith favoured his long-standing policy of passive resistance to the British. On the other hand, Collins advocated a physical force strategy to be carried out by the Volunteers, responsible only to the I.R.B. The disagreement was resolved on the same day as the Dail first assembled; a fight between Volunteers and R.I.C. resulted in the death of two of the latter, The Dail accepted responsibility for this tacitly, and continued to do so as the ensuing War of Independence developed. In August Cathal 64

Brugha (Charles Burgess), the Dail’s Minister for Defense, placed the Volunteers under the Dail’s official authority by imposing on them an oath of loyalty to that assembly as the Government of the Irish Republic. This was done against the I.R.B. From then on the Volunteers were the army of the Irish Republic or Irish Republican Army. Finally, in 1921, the Dail accepted explicitly responsibility for all actions of the I.R.A.

The I.R.A.’s allegiance to Dail Eireann not only justified its military actions but made it the latter’s police force. The Dail Cabinet established all parts of the basic government machine, including a functioning judiciary, a consular service and a Department of Finance capable of floating a national loan. In this, it was aided by the magnificent discipline of the local councils which Sinn Fein captured in the elections of January and June 1920.

However, the more positive social proposals of Sinn Fein had to be postponed until a fuller organization developed. Though the colonial administration had been superseded in the fundamentals of government, it remained capable of thwarting the Dail in wider policy. But in one field, the Republic made its presence felt and revealed its class limitations thereby. In Connacht and in Co. Kerry, smallholders and landless men seized for division large estates in their areas, The Dail had already prepared a land settlement scheme and proposals for a land bank to finance purchases. In May 1920, it set up the first special Land Arbitration Court in Co. Galway to decide each land claim on its merits. Such courts boasted of tributes to their impartiality from Unionist gentry. The verdicts of such courts were executed by the I.R.A. Not surprisingly where it had to carry out such duties, the area was the least active in the national struggle.

The land policy was merely the outward sign that the Republic was prepared consciously to collaborate with the privileged classes far beyond the call of necessity. Through Griffith’s friend, Oliver St. John Gogarty, the Dail leaders met many of the Union establishments; Unionist and Parliamentary Nationalist.

Such a policy could be faulted on two counts. International working-class support for the Irish Republic was far less than for its contemporary in Russia. But the most obvious example of that was the half-heartedness of British Labour. And it can be attributed to the metropolitan worker’s normal coolness towards a colonial war. More certainly, Sinn Fein in action offered as little to the Protestant worker of the north-east, as to his anglo-centric boss.

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Alienation was deepened by an unofficial boycott of Belfast’s goods begun in Connacht in January 1920. The Belfast riots in the following July were merely the worst of that year. In turn, they caused the Dail to formalize the boycott. Against this background, Lloyd George passed his Better Government of Ireland Act.

The partition of Ireland was formalized by giving the north-eastern oligarchs six Ulster counties, including Fermanagh and Tyrone.

This was the maximum area that Craig and his allies could control. Since 1920 ‘Northern Ireland’ affects the politics of the other twenty-six counties only negatively, through its very separation.

Irish Labour was still gathering the fruits of political inactivity.

From May to December 1920, it organized a strike against the public carriage of British arms, though with little effect. The next year the Party abstained again from opposing Sinn Fein at a new general election for fear of jeopardizing the national struggle. But then it demanded the conscription of non-Republican capital.

Nothing happened. The trade unions had a further problem. During the World War, an Irish Farmers’ Union had developed from County Farmers’ Associations. Failing to gain support among the smallholders, it remained accordingly the preserve of the larger farmers.

For these, the big problem was trade union organization of their labourers. In practice, by May 1920, the I.F.U. was as much a union-breaking body as the Dublin Employers’ Federation had been in 1913. From July 1920 to July 1921, the British Government tried to crush the Irish Republic while keeping the pretence of using purely police action. This entailed using special military police forces: ‘the Auxiliaries’ and ‘the Black and Tans’. All this did was reduce the island to chaos, outside Northern Ireland and Munster, the province in which the I.R.A. had always been most active. But both sides wanted a truce. From July 10th, 1921 negotiations continued for an Anglo-Irish treaty. Post-war expenses of British government made the forcible maintenance even of the 1920 Act an uneconomic proposition. The Republic were ready to talk.

The period of the truce saw a sudden blossoming of working-class radicalism. Already, as a contrast to the quietism of Labour’s leaders, there had been signs of unrest. Many strikes had occurred under a red flag. In May 1920, Knocklong Creamery, Co. Limerick, had been taken over by the workers, and in May 1921, the Arigna coal mines in Co. Leitrim were similarly seized.

But in each case revolutionary action had been the means merely to higher wages. Nor did Labour or Communist leadership try to 66

make them into anything bigger. Labour waited with a vengeance.

Now the rank and file took more decisive moves. In August 1921 the workers at Cleeves’ mill and bakery at Bruree, Co. Limerick, seized control of it and ran it under the red flag. In September a soviet proclaimed its control over the port of Cork. Most significant was the activity of the herdsmen in the lands around Toorahara and Kilfenora in Co. Clare. Instead of demanding the division of the lands that they had seized from the owners they ran them as a soviet. Such activities took place without interference from the I.R.A. in its strongest areas. And the I.R.A. was restoring its membership. On December 6th, 1921 were signed the Articles of Agreement for a Treaty between Great Britain and Ireland. As a result, the twenty-six counties held Dominion status as the Irish Free State (Saorstat Eireann). This included a definite and direct oath of loyalty to the King of England, but left the state free to fix her own customs. Partition had to be recognized, but Northern Ireland’s boundaries were to be delineated by a commission. This might possibly reduce its area to an uneconomic farm around Belfast such as would have to be reunited with the Saorstat. The British were allowed to retain their Irish naval bases.

These Articles were opposed by de Valera —less because of the maintainance of partition or the British naval presence than because the formula containing these did not allow for the more intransigent Republicans. When the Dail accepted them de Valera resigned and formed a specifically Republican Party (Cumann na Poblachta). Griffith, who had led the Treaty delegation, became President. Collins, who had been with him, led the majority of the I.R.B. to support the Treaty. He headed a Provisional Government to transfer the colonial power from the British.

The new dual administration had to face the problems following the War of Independence. Many rural industries, most notably the co-operative creameries, had been burnt by the British.

Prices of agricultural goods were beginning their post-war decline.

Unemployment was estimated by the Labour leader, Johnson, as reaching the figure 112,000. With the end of the truce a crime wave had begun. And, even more unsettling to a bourgeois regime, was the fact that social unrest was continuing; in May it culminated in Munster in the seizure and subsequent managing of factories and private creameries by the workers therein.

More immediately dangerous was the attitude of a majority of the I.R.A. This comprised eight out of its fourteen divisions and three of its five independent brigades. The soldiers had sacrificed 67

much for the Republic. In its name they had put off demanding greater material benefits and had told civilians of their class to desist from such demands. For many the Republic had taken the place of social thought. Now they. were told it never existed: many of them felt betrayed.

But Republican army leaders were divided. Some wanted immediate military action. Others feared to alienate the popular basis necessary to preserve the Republic and hoped that the Saorstat Constitution would manage to preserve it within the Treaty.

The latter body had affinities to the position of de Valera and the politicians who considered that the Treaty was needlessly dividing the country: that the British would have accepted more.

The Treatyites were similarly divided. Collins and the soldiers (now the Saorstat Army) feared the spread of communism among the forces: feared also that civil war would exacerbate matters; hoped for a Republican Constitution. Griffith and the civilians underestimated the opposition to the Treaty and believed that it could be crushed swiftly and business restored as usual.

The post-Treaty debate continued, as it had begun, in a completely formalistic manner. Meanwhile the Labour Party went to the other extreme and tried to ignore the Treaty in the name of a ‘Workers’ Republic’ while denouncing ‘militarism’ and accepting practically, the authority of the Treaty-ite regime. The C.P.I. and the I.C.A. gave unconditional support to the Republicans, reviving in this cause Labour’s 1919 slogan of ‘First the Republic, then the Workers’ Republic. [Only Larkin from an American prison called for a war for a Workers’ Republic: he was ignored.] Clashes between pro- and anti-Treatyites had resulted in April in the establishment of an Anti-Treaty H.Q. in the Four Courts in Dublin. The next month Collins and de Valera, on behalf of the moderates on both sides, signed a pact. By this the Treaty would be ignored and, after a formal general election, the two sides would unite in a government to get from Britain the best settlement possible, without actually breaking any agreement. At the same time Collins endeavoured to unite all old Republicans in attacks on Northern Ireland, where the regime was keeping order only through a blatantly sectarian police force. These long shots might have succeeded but for two things. British pressure made the Saorstat Constitution far less Republican than had been hoped. Then, in June, the electors voted for candidates of the Labour and Farmers (I.F.U.-sponsored) Parties, both of which accepted the Treaty, as against the Republicans. The Workers’ Republic only won 2,600 votes less than ‘The Republic’, all but one of its eigh- 68

teen candidates being returned. The civilian Treatyites, who had always disliked the Pact, persuaded Collins to repudiate it. The new government was composed only of Treatyite ministers, At the end of the month it ordered the bombardment of the Anti-Treatyite garrison in the Four Courts, two days before the third Dail was to meet. De Valera allied himself with the besieged garrison.

Civil war had begun. Against the Republicans was the majority of the people. They were tired of war and ready to swallow the absence of a Republic, especially if the existence of this meant a revived Anglo-Irish struggle, as the Treatyites claimed.

The charge of Republican militarism was sustained by the fact that until October the Army Council of the I.R.A. was the Republicans’ only executive. De Valera, Brugha, Austin Stack and the other ex-Ministers took subordinate roles in the struggle. When a political body was set up it was composed of Anti-Treaty deputies of the Second (Republican) Dail. It took that body’s name on the erounds that it had never been properly dissolved, and that the Third Dail was a body usurping Republican functions on behalf of the Saorstat. Such an argument was rather too sophisticated for most people who remembered that elections had taken place for the Third Dail and that the Anti-Treatyites had readily participated in them. What was more, such propaganda (and other esoteric claims concerning the Oath to the King, the credentials of the Treaty Delegation and the betrayal of the Collins-de Valera Pact) was not counter-balanced by economic proposals. Most leading Republicans had accepted quite happily the policies of the Republican Dails. Such a negative outlook maintained the alienation between Republicans and the Labour Party, which acted (true at least, to its avoidance of understanding the state) as the Saorstat’s loyal opposition. In Connacht, where much of the Republic’s military strength lay, its advantages were cancelled out by the fact of the I.R.A.’s previous anti-peasant role. In Munster, positive social feeling was allied to a strong I.R.A., to create the ideal circumstances for prolonged warfare on the basis of the ‘Munster Republic’. But the Republican Army made little attempt to encourage the socialist elements in this area, and discouraged them actively on occasions. The Republican leaders included a few who tended to question this attitude. Boland, perhaps their best mind, was killed in August 1922. Mellows and Peadar O’Donnell were imprisoned from July. Mellows was shot (a classic ‘necessary murder’) in Decem- 69

ber. In his last months, however, he produced a series of policy proposals that show well the strength and weaknesses of left-wing Republicanism. Notes from Mountjoy Jail develops the tradition of Pearse rather than of Connolly. It proposes a measure of state ownership (specifically in banking and in transport) and a crash programme of land division. It is clearly anti-capitalistic and in favour of the Republic of the propertiless. At the same time, it justifies itself in terms of an idealized Celtic Irish past, and justifies the Republic of the poor by reference to the Republic of 1919, which was rather a different matter. Of all Mellows’ proposals, the only immediate action taken by the Republicans was in re-establishing the ‘Second Dail’. As a result, the forces of Labour and of left-wing Republicanism remained separated. | The loss on the Treatyite side was in its leading personalities.

In August, Griffith died and Collins fell in battle. The loss of Griffith was the loss of an orthodox, narrow, bourgeois democrat.

Collins is less easy to analyse. His posthumous book, The Path to Freedom, shows a harking back to Celtic Ireland, similar to Mel: lows’. However, its arguments reveal an essential vagueness as to the nature of democracy and a belief in ‘co-operation’ as between Capital and Labour. Added to many details of the latter part of his career, the book would seem to presage a possible negotiated end to the Civil War and a succeeding Bonapartist dictatorship (‘to prevent Communism’), such as only he would have had the prestige to impose. His successors could act only as trustees for counter-revolution.

Against the divided left, the elite groups were united as never before. The Saorstat gave the bourgeoisie that control of the colonial bureaucracy that it wanted. Unduly anglophil members of the latter went to England, and were replaced by officials of the first Republic. Bourgeois and bureaucrat united, with the blessing of the hierarchy, to attack Republicans and anti-capitalist agitators.

All over Ireland wage reductions were imposed with government blessing. The Limerick and Tipperary soviets were reduced by I.F.U. boycott; the Clare soviets by farmers’ units under military direction, anticipating events in the 1930s. The farm labourers’ organizations were crushed with the aid of blackleg labour. By April 1923 Irish radicalism was on the defensive.

In this month, James Larkin returned from the U.S.A., where he had been imprisoned for nearly three years as a victim of Mitchell Palmer’s red scare. He was known to dislike the Treaty 70

ht — and had refused, because of this, to be nominated in absentia as Labour candidate for North Dublin during the Pact election. His arrival in Dublin showed a possibility that the Irish Labour Party and T.U.C. might take the lead in a new struggle for a socialist republic. Larkin’s tactical skill failed him. Already Labour’s leaders had found excuses not to press for his release. This presaged his new, deeper disagreement with O’Brien and Johnson. He initiated a fight to expel the sitting executive of the I.T.G.W.U. But Larkin had thus to appeal to capitalist legalism; O’Brien had a better case there. In March 1924, with the court’s blessing, the latter expelled him from the trade union that he had founded. This and other legal actions left Larkin bankrupt and ineligible for the Dail. The I.T.G.W.U. suppressed all mention of his name in its publications and used its power to keep isolated his newly-founded Workers’ Union of Ireland. The latter revenged itself by winning over most of the unskilled workers in Dublin.

Congress and Party were allied closely enough for the breach in the Labour movement to be colossal. A small but distinct group developed around the W.U.I. Some of its members backed the Republicans. Others backed Larkin’s own ‘Irish Worker’ League which absorbed the C.P.I.

But, by May 1923, the Civil War had ended and with it for a time the Irish Republic. In the process, the right had been united.

The Left was, however, now divided into three portions: Republican, Labour and Larkinite.

For most people, Irish history is replaced, at this point, by mythology. 71