Popular Resistance

Traditionally, the focus on this period has been overwhelmingly military. Dashing tales of republican ambushes and heroic valor used to dominate the portrayal. Even the “revisionist” school of anti-republican historians did little more than turn the picture inside out, replacing a positive saga of heroism with a negative deprecation of militarism. While more recent historians have dialed down the derring-do, the military aspect is usually well to the fore.

This is understandable to an extent. Armed conflict has an inherent drama to it, especially when poorly armed underdogs take on the might of an empire and fight it to a standstill. The military resistance of these years, and the widespread support that nourished it, has to be central to any understanding of the period.

But there was far more to it than that, a deeper resistance to the way things were. Late in World War I, a one-day general strike was part of a mass campaign that thwarted an attempt to conscript Irishmen into the British Army. Entire swathes of the country became no-go areas for the British military in 1920, not just because the Irish Republican Army (IRA) ambushed them, but also because railworkers refused to allow them on their trains. The British government was forced to release hundreds of republican prisoners in the same year by a general strike where workers’ committees were beginning to take on administrative roles in their localities.

As the editors of this collection point out, “there was an almost universal questioning of the condition of things.” Ireland was anything but immune to the wave of radical optimism across the world in the wake of the Russian Revolution. A Dublin meeting in solidarity with that revolution was packed to overflowing, and discussion of its achievements — along with ambitions to emulate them — were far from confined to the left-wing press.

When people rebelled in Ireland at this time, they tended not to impose limits on what they were rebelling against. When they said they wanted the people of Ireland to run the place rather than the British government, that usually meant an Ireland where those people would have a secure living and a decent roof over their head — freedom in a broad sense. The fight against social injustice wasn’t divorced from the “national question,” but rather seen as a necessary part of it. Trade unionists and republican guerrillas were often the selfsame people.

Soviet Ireland

One of the hallmarks of any revolutionary period is a common insight that, far from being a series of discrete “issues,” injustice should be understood and challenged in its totality. We can often see this at work in the self-described “soviets” that were proclaimed up and down Ireland at the time.

One of the earliest, in Limerick in 1919, began as a protest against military restrictions on the city and ended up printing its own currency. Occupations of workplaces with red flag aloft challenged recalcitrant employers, often of a pro-British bent, and relied on the sympathy of local farmers to keep agricultural concerns going under workers’ control.

The fact that much of this activity took place in rural towns rather than the cities is striking. At the time, the social relations that are characteristic of capitalism were still new in the Irish countryside and open to question, and a deep radical tradition demanding land for the people was still alive. Johnny Burke describes here the delicious irony of smallholders turning the tables on landlords and big farmers, collectively issuing them with notices to give up land.

Many of the essays provide a bottom-up look at the events of the period in a particular district or trade, providing a real insight into the nuts and bolts of how a revolution took place. Brian Hanley examines the international aspect of it through dockworkers’ strikes in New York and Liverpool in solidarity with the Irish cause. Several essays remedy the long-neglected role of women in labor and national activism.

This book evidences the emergence of a school of historians who are working to restore the multifaceted crosscurrents of class and gender to our understanding of Ireland’s revolution. They move with ease across their material, challenging old simplifications with an unapologetic focus on those who have been too long excluded from the narrative. Their work points up a host of new leads for future historians to explore.

Possible Futures

In attempting to synthesize all this, one thing that jumps out is a profound disconnect between grassroots and leadership. On the ground, an instinctive spirit of radicalism was widespread, naturally joining together the cause of political freedom with social and economic freedom. At a national level, however, things were not so well integrated.

The independence movement repeatedly proclaimed its sympathy for the aspirations of working people, but such aspirations didn’t figure in its bottom line. Establishing an Irish state was the overarching objective, with the demands of workers often decried as divisive distractions from the main issue. Moves to tackle social injustice were promised, but postponed until independence was won. While IRA volunteers had frequently taken part in land division and industrial action, they were later sent in to restore land to its former owners or even to break strikes.

As Ireland’s labor movement mushroomed, its leaders concentrated on organizational consolidation, hesitating to take a stand of their own on the great political questions of the day. From 1916 on, almost every movement in Irish society went through upheaval and change, but the same people remained at the top of the workers’ movement throughout. While their language often echoed the revolutionary mood of the time, their actions fell far short of putting it into practice.

Dominic Haugh’s essay on the Munster soviets highlights the role played by individual Marxists in the struggles, but such activists never succeeded in getting together sufficiently to give an alternative lead at a national level. Even if they had done so, balancing the various aspects of the revolution would have been far from an easy task in the face of better-organized alternatives. The objective conditions also conspired against them, with a recession in 1921 curbing labor militancy as the revolutionary wave internationally was going out.

The upshot of it all was an Ireland partitioned into two states, neither of which appeared very inviting: the “carnival of reaction both North and South” of which James Connolly warned. But as Victor Serge remarked, it is not wise to judge a living person by the germs found in his corpse. Other outcomes were always on the table.

“A brief window opened” in the north, as Fearghal Mac Bhloscaidh puts it here, with socialists who supported Irish independence winning significant support in the Belfast working class. The role women played, usually in the teeth of opposition, foreshadowed an Ireland where their rights could have been realized instead of trampled on. The exercise of working-class power, often in the struggle against the British Empire, showed the potential of striving for a republic based on that power.

The past is never a foreign country, least of all in Ireland. The commemoration of our revolutionary years has coincided with the 1921 settlement coming increasingly into question. Brexit has underlined the harsh ongoing reality of the partition imposed then, and the end of the border has become an everyday topic of discussion. The long-established mold of politics in the south has shattered since the Celtic Tiger ignominiously collapsed in 2008. A hundred years ago was “a time to imagine all possible futures,” writes Theresa Moriarty here, and learning more about it can help us imagine some more.