Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 10

The Catholic bishops received their copies of the Department of Justice memorandum on ‘subversive teachings and activities’ and duly responded in a joint pastoral letter on 18 October 1931. Saor Éire was condemned as a ‘frankly communistic organisation’ trying to ‘impose upon the Catholic people of Ireland the same materialistic regime, with its fanatical hatred of God, as now dominates Russia and threatens to dominate Spain’.¹³³ The government introduced new Public Safety legislation under which twelve organisations including Saor Éire, the IRA and the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups (precursors of the Communist Party of Ireland, whose earlier incarnation had been dissolved) were banned, military tribunals were introduced and hundreds were arrested.

Seán Cronin claims that the church-state offensive took the IRA by surprise: ‘They had moved out of the shelter of “national rights” into the exposed ground of “social rights” and were bombarded by everyone.’¹³⁴ The Catholic Church’s offensive certainly demonstrated the clear ideological constraints on the agrarian radicalism of which people like O’Donnell had such high hopes. The Mayo News, which, as a militant supporter of small farmer agitation, had published one of O’Donnell’s pamphlets,¹³⁵ made its position on Saor Éire very clear. Reprinting the manifesto in full, it then attacked it at length, particularly for its claim to continuity with 1916:

Patrick Pearse and his co-signatories of 1916 placed ‘the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God’. The engineers of the new Workers’ Republic at their first conference sent fraternal greetings to the Russian Soviets whose proclaimed policy is anti-God, who excel in obscene caricatures of the Blessed Virgin. The proclamation on which Saor Éire takes its stand, was drafted not by Patrick Pearse, but by Mr Stalin in Moscow. The whole programme is foreign as well as anti-Christian, it is against every tradition and principle of Irish nationality … [If] the mask of Republicanism under which it is masquerading were torn off this face, it would show itself in all its anti-National and anti-Christian ugliness.¹³⁶

The response of the bulk of republicans was to discard the Saor Éire programme and forcibly assert their fidelity to nation and Catholicism. The remnants of Sinn Féin were produced to vouch for the soundness of those who had unfortunately produced a ‘misguided’ social programme. Mary MacSwiney, while opposing Saor Éire (‘It is a bad national policy to divide the people on a class basis’), claimed that of those who produced the policy, ‘Most … are practising Catholics and not one single one of my acquaintance would stand for an anti-Christian state.’¹³⁷ A stalwart of the IRA and the annuities movement like Eamonn Corbett would publicly proclaim, ‘Many of us are indifferent or hostile to communistic ideas and propaganda but feel very strongly on the national question.¹³⁸

When the periodical Irish Rosary claimed that on a trip to Moscow in 1929 O’Donnell had been trained in ‘anti-religious propaganda’ he sued (unsuccessfully) for libel, denying the charge and adding, ‘On the contrary, I am a Catholic.’¹³⁹ Republicans were long used to withstanding attacks from the Church – after all, they had been excommunicated during the Civil War, but such anathemas had concerned their role as an ‘armed conspiracy’ and had not questioned their Catholicism. The new assault provoked a headlong retreat from a public leftism which had never been securely grounded anyway. The organisation now joined the broad opposition front including Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Labour Party, which denounced the increased repression and the government’s conservative incapacity to deal with the economic crisis, but from a safely Catholic position.

Sinn Féin’s Árd Fheis dissociated the ‘republican movement’ from ‘anti-Christian propaganda’ and proposed a social order based on ‘Christian principles’. For people like MacSwiney and the leading IRA man and later supporter of the left Republican Congress, Michael Price, this meant the principles set out in papal encyclicals. Price quoted Aquinas, Pius V and Leo XIII to back up his ideas for social reform.¹⁴⁰ James Connolly had set the pattern for this dressing up of radicalism in theological garb in his Labour, Nationality and Religion. Understandable in some ways in a country where Catholicism had such deep roots, this approach created problems with which, by definition, it could not cope in dealings with Ireland’s substantial Protestant population. But the pressure to conform was irresistible, as one organisation after another proclaimed its fidelity to social reform according to Catholic Social principles. As a leader of the Labour Party put it: ‘They already had the framework of an equitable social system especially suited to the people in the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and his illustrious successor, the present Holy Father.’¹⁴¹

For de Valera and Fianna Fáil, it would prove relatively easy to ignore the government’s allegations that they were party, to an upsurge of ‘Bolshevist’ agitation and to benefit from the discomfiture of social republicanism. De Valera was in some ways more robust in his response to the government assault than the leadership of the IRA. Quick to point to the paltry number of Communists in the Free State, he went on to establish that any ‘extremism’ was caused by the country’s manifest and major economic and social problems. These demanded a solution, but,

a solution having no reference whatever to any other country, a solution that comes out of our own circumstances, that springs from our own traditional attitude towards life, a solution that is Irish and Catholic.¹⁴²

De Valera’s own tendency to substitute a spiritual republican asceticism for economic policy (he informed the Manchester Guardian that he wanted to free Ireland ‘from the domination of her grosser appetites and induce a mood of spiritual exaltation for a return to Spartan standards’¹⁴³) was quite compatible with electoral promises to provide employment for all who wanted it and to solve the problems of the congested districts and the Gaeltachts.¹⁴⁴

In less than a decade his hopes for an Ireland with a population of 20 million would appear empty, a product, as Ó Tuathaigh put it, of his conventional nationalist belief in the creative powers of political sovereignty.¹⁴⁵ However in 1931 and 1932 such beliefs inspired the hopes of many small farmers and unemployed workers, while the IRA could only vacillate between its desire to re-establish its national credentials and a residual tendency to criticise the new Fianna Fáil government from the left. The Church’s assault notwithstanding, the rising political tensions produced by the government’s drive against ‘anti-state’ organisations and the frequent clashes between republicans and the newly-formed Army Comrades’ Association (a precursor of the fascist Blueshirts) led to a generalised upsurge of republican sentiment and activity. This benefited both Fianna Fáil and the IRA, whose membership increased, passing 8,000 by 1934.¹⁴⁶ In the 1932 and 1933 elections, the IRA told its volunteers to campaign for Fianna Fáil, adding the proviso that such support did not imply acceptance of the limits of de Valera’s objectives.

When it came to specifying the difference between Fianna Fáil and IRA objectives, the political hollowness of militant republicanism became evident. The mainstream evinced an uneasy and ambiguous attitude, lending some credibility to the government’s gradual dismantling of the Treaty, but rejecting de Valera’s requests for the disbanding of the IRA and a ‘fusion of forces’ against the ‘anti-national reactionary forces’.¹⁴⁷ A vestigial radicalism was also maintained: thus an IRA statement of 1933 urging members to vote for Fianna Fáil also registered dismay at the government’s ‘attempt to stabilise and build up an economic system, which for all that it relieves unemployment at the moment, will perpetuate the evils of social injustice’.¹⁴⁸ The IRA Convention in March 1933, however, adopted a new policy statement, ‘The Constitution and Governmental Programme of the Republic of Ireland’, which formalised the retreat from Saor Éire. It promised social reforms, restrictions on wealth and welfare for the poor, but also stressed the individual right to private property and provided for the safeguarding of private enterprise. There was nothing here with which de Valera could not agree, and at least one thing that must have seemed a boon: the Convention also issued an order prohibiting volunteers from writing or speaking on economic, social and political questions.¹⁴⁹

For Moss Twomey, Sean MacBride, son of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride and Maud Gonne who became Chief of Staff in 1936-37, and the majority of the IRA leadership, there would have been little dispute with the claim (from a Fianna Fáil negotiation document) that, ‘They [Fianna Fáil and the IRA] have at bottom the same national and social outlook.’¹⁵⁰ The re-creation of republican unity through fusion was desired by both; at issue were the terms of the fusion. In de Valera’s view, Fianna Fáil, which he insisted on characterising as a broad national movement, ‘the resurrection of the Irish nation’,¹⁵¹ should absorb the IRA. The latter appeared to envisage a much more equal partnership in a united front to re-establish the Republic. Meanwhile, they would maintain their separate existence and right to take military action. De Valera had offered fusion on the basis of the republican ceasefire proposals of 1923, which among other things claimed that, ‘The sovereignty of the Irish Nation and the integrity of its territory is inalienable.’¹⁵² In five meetings with Sean MacBride in the first eighteen months of Fianna Fáil rule, de Valera maintained that, apart from the ‘outstanding difficulty’ of partition, the spirit of these proposals could be implemented by his government.¹⁵³

As the government withheld the annuities, entered the Economic War with England and was assailed by a strident big-farmer onslaught in the form of the Blueshirts, its republican credentials were validated not only by the republican electorate but also by increasing numbers of IRA volunteers who were absorbed into the army and a new volunteer force. O’Donnell later commented on this period:

I realised when Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932 that the IRA had no meaning as an armed force. They could offer so many concessions to the Republican viewpoint that it was bound to blur the issues that still divided us. But it would reinforce more than ever my early belief that a government was permitted in Dublin only so long as it remained a bailiff for the conquest.¹⁵⁴

The development of the Blueshirts in 1933 was to provide O’Donnell and his supporters in the IRA with another issue which they hoped would allow a clear political demarcation to be drawn between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ republicanism: the struggle against Irish fascism would displace the anti-annuities movement as the main mobilising issue for social republicanism. The Blueshirt movement originated in the anti-republican Army Comrades’ Association founded in 1931 by veterans of the Free State army. After the Fianna Fáil victory in 1932, the ACA opened its membership to the general public. In March 1933 de Valera called a snap election which increased his parliamentary majority, and in the same month he sacked General Eoin O’Duffy, Cumann na nGaedheal’s appointee as Chief of Police. O’Duffy made himself the focus of the ACA, which he renamed the National Guard, and gave it a distinctive style when he instituted the fascist salute and the wearing of a blue shirt as a uniform. At its height, it claimed a membership of 100,000, and for a year from the autumn of 1933 it seemed a formidable force. However the challenge would be easily defused; the movement’s collapse reflected the leadership’s failure to create a broad-based coalition of opposition. The Blueshirts were too dependent on one social group, the big farmers and their sons, particularly the large cattle farmers in Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Kilkenny, who were suffering from the disruption of the cattle trade by the Economic War.

For O’Donnell and his supporters, however, Irish fascism represented the issue that would allow the IRA to take the initiative against de Valera’s increasingly successful incorporation of its constituency. Throughout 1934 there were continuous clashes between republicans and Blueshirts and the police and army. The Blueshirts had adopted the tactics of the anti-annuity movement, organising non-payment of rates and land annuities, and resisting attempts to seize animals. Republican attacks on Blueshirt meetings allowed the government to adopt a statesmanlike stance, more or less even-handedly dispensing ‘justice’. In 1934 the military tribunal established to deal with such disturbances convicted 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA men. Naturally enough, the IRA bitterly denounced any action directed against it as a betrayal, but there is no sign that it decreased the government’s popular appeal. For the left in the IRA, de Valera could never defeat the Blueshirts because he left the economic and social basis of the movement – the large-farmer class – untouched.¹⁵⁵

An apocalyptic vision of the fascist threat merged with traditional obsessions:

The British preparations for war are being reflected here in the hectic drive of the Imperialists for power. Britain at war can only be safe when Ireland is gripped in the steel jacket of the Imperialist Fascist dictatorship.¹⁵⁶

Precisely because there was so little evidence of the Blueshirts’ capacity to mount a real challenge to the state (after all, ‘constitutional’ republicanism of the Fianna Fáil variety could easily label Irish fascism as an essentially anti-national minority, given its Free State origins), social republicans were driven to portray it mythically, as part of a British assault on the Irish nation. Fianna Fáil would now be portrayed as a government unable to satisfy the demands of its small-farmer and worker supporters and, more critically, unable to prevent a political counter-revolution from the ‘imperialist’ elements in the country. Social republicanism would be proved correct in its estimate of Fianna Fáil’s reformism, but such prescience as it could claim was small compensation for the continuing subordination of its social radicalism to a nationalist political project. So much became apparent in the short-lived Republican Congress.

At the 1934 IRA Army Convention, Michael Price, who had moved considerably from his position of opposition to Saor Éire, proposed that the IRA should adopt as its objective a Republic as envisaged by Connolly. The leadership, no doubt mindful of the recent intense assault from the Church on Saor Éire, opposed the Workers’ Republic as a goal and, when his resolution was defeated, Price withdrew. O’Donnell and George Gilmore then proposed a resolution that the IRA should mobilise a ‘united front’ campaign for a Republican Congress, a rallying of republican opinion which ‘would wrest the leadership of the National Struggle from Irish Capitalism’.¹⁵⁷ A majority of the delegates supported the resolution, but the vote of the leadership ensured its defeat and O’Donnell and his supporters left the IRA.

The Congress supporters established a newspaper and local groups in preparation for a national conference to launch the united front. The almost immediate collapse of the project when the conference met in Rathmines in September 1934 demonstrated the strict limitations of even the most radical forms of social republicanism. The immediate cause of the split was a division between those who wanted a commitment to the slogan of a Workers’ Republic and those, led by O’Donnell and Gilmore, who wished the Congress to mobilise around the struggle for the Republic, which Fianna Fáil was incapable of leading to a successful conclusion.¹⁵⁸ The O’Donnell position, which had a pyrrhic victory, was consistent with the dominant tendency of social republicanism since the annuities campaign. It aimed at a united front of IRA members, rank-and-file Fianna Fáilers, Labour Party members and workers and small farmers, who would be appealed to with a combination of national and social issues. Within this combination, the nationalist inflection was quite systematic.

The first issue of the Congress’s paper had defined the main task as the struggle against the Blueshirts: ‘Above all else, an organ of mass struggle against fascism that must be the slogan of every committee working towards the Republican Congress’.¹⁵⁹ But fascism was portrayed as a stalking horse for the traditional enemy:

Once in power, British backing beyond anything given those that played England’s game in 1922 would be given. For, Britain seeks to have Ireland in chains before adventuring into the war for which she is feverishly preparing.¹⁶⁰

Like the annuities campaign, anti-fascism was to provide material for a popular upsurge to ‘complete’ the national revolution. Fianna Fáil’s alleged inability to deal with the Blueshirts was traced to its unwillingness to challenge the ‘conquest’ in rural Ireland by expropriating the ranchers without compensation and redistributing their land to the small farmers and the landless. In a pamphlet written at the beginning of the Economic War, O’Donnell had argued that the anti-rancher policy was the central task in completing the national revolution:

The thinning down of the rural life and the organised dependence on Britain was the economic organising of our national enslavement. It is the national issue that is in the forefront in breaking down that dependence and increasing rural employment. This rancher-based cattle trade versus tillage fight is now primarily a fight on the national issue.¹⁶¹

Large-farmer and rancher support for fascism appeared greatly to strengthen the social republican case against Fianna Fail policies. In fact, there was not a lot of evidence that small farmers were as yet dissatisfied with the pace of the government’s agrarian reforms, and, more significantly, even the Congress’s paper had to record serious rural unease with the radical tone of social republicanism. A supporter from Tipperary reported, ‘Very few people in the country districts know anything about James Connolly. There is a prejudice against his policy.’¹⁶² More specifically, another supporter complained that the slogan ‘Seize the ranches’ was not well received and served to generate much confusion:

The words ‘confiscation’ and ‘communism’ and all sorts of other -isms are thrown at those who use it and unfortunately some small farmers believe that the adoption of such a policy will lead to the seizure of their little farm.¹⁶³

If the fascist threat to the government and its agrarian reforms had been as substantial as the Congress supporters claimed, there would perhaps have been some hope for its strategy of arousing the countryside.

The Congress analysis of Fianna Fáil’s supposed weakness in the face of the Blueshirts directly followed Marx’s diatribe against the failure of European bourgeoisies to carry through the revolutions of 1848:

Fianna Fáil cannot fight Fascism. Irish Capitalism is caught between two threats – the threat of Imperialist dictatorship on the one hand and the fear of the roused working class and small farmer population on the other. This is the secret of Fianna Fáil’s hesitation.¹⁶⁴

In fact, the 1934 local government elections in Mayo, in which O’Duffy had been predicting a major victory, represented a substantial defeat for his movement – as the Mayo News commented: ‘The county council and municipal elections in the Irish Free State have pricked and deflated the ‘Blueshirt balloon’.¹⁶⁵ The mainstream IRA, which had consistently refused to accept the Congress analysis of the fascist threat, noted that the election ‘proved conclusively that the Imperialist-Fascist organisation commands the support of only a minority of the people’.¹⁶⁶ No doubt the IRA leadership was pleased to see the main mobilising efforts of the Congress so quickly deflected. The Rathmines split would reveal the other strategic weaknesses of social republicanism.

The initial statement of the Congress group had declared that the way to make ‘the Republic a main issue dominating the whole political field’ was to identify it with the workers and small farmers: ‘A Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots Capitalism on its way.’¹⁶⁷ But there was no evidence that the discontents of parts of rural Ireland had any affinities with the struggles of urban workers, and even less on which to base the Congress’s hopes in urban Ireland. Here the social republicans were fatally handicapped by a broader republican incapacity to relate seriously either to the existing labour movement or to the Protestant workers of Ulster.

Michael Price, addressing the Woodworkers Union for the Congress organising committee, explained that the Irish Labour Party was not being invited to participate. One of the reasons for attacking the Labour Party was that ‘they are certainly not leading any struggle for the overthrow of capitalism’ – which was certainly true, if unsurprising – but the core of his complaint was that it had ‘betrayed the Connolly teaching and tradition in 1922 … The Irish Labour Party is shifty on the Republican issue.’¹⁶⁸ Price and the other social republicans were true to Mellows here in choosing Labour’s relation to republican objectives as the fundamental test of its progressive claims. In a communication to Frank Gallagher (later a key member of Fianna Fáil), Mellows defined the left-republican position on the leadership of the Labour Party:

By their acceptance of the Treaty and all that it connotes … they have betrayed not only the Irish Republic but the Labour movement in Ireland and the cause of the workers and peasants throughout the world.¹⁶⁹

Throughout the period of social-republican dominance, An Phoblacht was characterised by a lack of serious coverage of the labour movement, especially as compared with its intense concern with the annuities campaign. What it did have to say tended towards denunciations of the ‘anti-national’ role of the leadership. Particular venom was reserved for the man who had led the Labour group in the Dáil, Thomas Johnston. An Englishman, Johnston brought out the more xenophobic impulses in his republican critics. O’Donnell seems to have been typical of those whose judgement of the labour movement was permanently distorted by the passions of the Civil War. (A biographer relates an incident which reveals the depth of republican resentment at Labour’s ‘betrayal’: when O’Donnell was in jail during the Civil War, his wife went to Johnston’s office and ‘warned him to his face that if anything happened to Peadar, he himself would not be alive that night’.¹⁷⁰)

As the annuities campaign developed, the lack of interest which it generated in urban Ireland, and particularly in the labour movement, seems to have alienated O’Donnell even more. The labour movement was charged with forsaking the legacy of Connolly, and although this was sometimes argued in the ultra-left language of the Comintern during its highly sectarian ‘Third Period’, the core charge against Labour was a nationalist one. In a typical blast in an article on Connolly, O’Donnell appeared to dismiss not only the leadership but the rank and file of the Labour Party as well:

I have not the slightest doubt but that outside the Republican movement … there are no right elements. That section of the working class element that follow Johnston will supply the thugs and police to be hired by the Imperialists in the event of any treasonable goings on such as 1916.¹⁷¹

At the heart of social-republican alienation from the Labour Party and those workers who supported it was the belief, encouraged by O’Donnell in particular, that the small farmers were the ‘oppressed’ group most receptive to a nationalist inflection of their grievances. O’Donnell put this clearly in his introduction to Brian O’Neill’s ‘Marxist’ The War for the Land in Ireland:

In my opinion the relationship between the social rights of the toilers and the fight for national independence has been more persistently maintained by the small farmer population, even than by the industrial workers in the south.¹⁷²

The only concrete proposals that social republicanism offered the working class were a mixture of Third Period leftism – to forsake the existing ‘reformist’ trade unions and set up rival rank-and-file committees – and the nationalistic demand that all unions in the Free State should have their headquarters there.¹⁷³ This attack on the role of the British-based ‘amalgamated unions’ (‘English Unions for English interests’) was a traditional nationalist one: Arthur Griffith had bitterly attacked James Larkin as an emissary of ‘English trade unionism’ before the First World War. It would be taken up and encouraged by Fianna Fáil and, together with Catholic anti-communism, was to provoke a long and debilitating split in the trade union movement in 1944.¹⁷⁴

If social republicanism’s lack of rapport with the working class in the Free State was ultimately a product of its subordination of class to nationalism, the intense interest the Congress displayed in developments in the Protestant working class in the North might appear surprising. The republican position on the Ulster Protestants varied between a hostile view of them as the bigoted descendants of alien Planters and a more sympathetic, if ultimately patronising, view of them as a section of the Irish people who, for a variety of reasons, had been separated from their place in the nation by British machinations. An Phoblacht expressed both views. A hostile editorial in 1928 outlined a flippant, but common, nationalist ‘solution’ for the Ulster Protestants:

There are in our North-Eastern counties a large number of people who pride themselves on both their Scottish ancestry and their loyalty to the English crown. Why not swap these worthies for our exiles in Scotland, who will give an undivided allegiance to Ireland?¹⁷⁵

Here there was much common ground with Fianna Fáil. When de Valera was arrested in Northern Ireland, An Phoblacht gave prominent coverage of a large protest meeting in Dublin addressed by Fianna Fáil TDs. The sentiments expressed towards the Ulster Unionists were uniformly hostile and bellicose: ‘Buy no Belfast goods … until they were willing to become part of the Irish nation.’ They were referred to as ‘the Orangemen and Freemasons of Belfast’, and Sean McEntee, soon to be a Cabinet minister, declared that he and his comrades ‘would not rest until the Republican flag was floating not alone on Cave Hill but on Stormont’.¹⁷⁶ For the social republicans, the very notion of the ‘reconquest’, while it could at times be expressed in suitably ‘left’ anti-capitalist terms, was hard put to incorporate Protestant workers. It was usually presented as an ‘uprising’ of Gaelic Ireland and of the urban and rural poor to seize back their rightful inheritance, and many who used the notion clearly had difficulty in applying it to Ulster, where the ‘planter’ element included a working-class majority. Some simply erased the Protestant working class from their view of Ulster. Thus Eithne Coyle, president of the republican women’s organisation Cumann na mBan and a signatory to the original Republican Congress manifesto, obviously saw the ‘reconquest’ in atavistic terms: ‘We must show these tyrants in the North that the land of Ulster belongs to the real people of Ireland and not to the planter stock of Henry VIII.’¹⁷⁷

The dominant strain in social republicanism and in the Congress was what Clare O’Halloran has dubbed the stereotype of the hard-headed and practical Unionist who respected plain speaking and would respect republicans who stuck to their principles.¹⁷⁸ While certainly less obnoxious than the planter/bigot stereotype, it was nevertheless based on a failure to engage with the substance of the Unionist movement and state. If the mass of Protestant workers were hostile to the legacy of Wolfe Tone, this was to be explained by their failure to distinguish the secular and non-sectarian nature of republicanism from the sectarianism which had corrupted nationalist politics in Northern Ireland. Thus An Phoblacht speculated that, ‘If you could succeed in discrediting organised political sectarianism on the Catholic side, the Orange Order would not long survive.’ It attacked Joe Devlin, the leading northern nationalist and MP for West Belfast, for his role in the Catholic organisation the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and the main Catholic daily, the Irish News, claiming that, ‘For nationalism that paper substitutes Catholicism, for Imperialism it substitutes Protestantism, fanning the flames of sectarianism and keeping the Catholic and Protestant exploited in disunity.’¹⁷⁹ Such recognition of the role of sectarianism in nationalist politics represented one of the more honest and attractive features of social republicanism, but it still functioned to sustain a political strategy which ultimately failed to come to terms with the fact that, for many republicans, nationality and Catholicism were integrally linked and that ‘secular’ republicanism was very much a minority creed.

The onset of the Great Depression and the sharp increases in unemployment in the heartlands of the Protestant working class formed the basis for a new optimism about the possibilities of winning Protestant workers to ‘anti-imperialist politics’. In an address to ‘the men and women of the Orange Order’ on 12 July 1932, the Army Council of the IRA informed the Protestant workers that, because of the world depression, Britain was no longer able to support the economy of Northern Ireland and that their future was therefore bound up with the rest of the Irish people: ‘The industrial capacity, and training of you, industrial workers of North-East Ulster, ensure for you a leading influence and place in the economy and life of a Free Irish Nation.’¹⁸⁰ How the export-oriented shipbuilding, engineering and textile industries of Belfast would be integrated into an autarkic social republic was not explained. The superficialities of the address would be sustained by the outbreak of serious working-class discontent during the Belfast outdoor relief strike and accompanying riots in October. As Protestant and Catholic workers campaigned and rioted together, social republicans proclaimed the beginning of an historic shift in Protestant allegiances. George Gilmore, a republican from a northern Protestant background, described the outdoor relief strike as ‘the most important event in that city for centuries’. Here there is a clear repetition of Connolly’s tendency to see in every serious strike involving Protestants the beginning of a break with Unionist ideology. For republicans of the left and right, Unionism was a reactionary ideology whose mass base had to be explained by assuming a Protestant working class blinded to its own interests. Conversely, any sign of even a limited economic and social awareness was read as the beginning of the end of Unionism.¹⁸¹

The Republican Congress would make much of the need to involve the newly awakened Protestant working class in ‘anti-imperialist activities’. Its paper claimed that, ‘The advance of the vanguard of the Protestant workers into active struggle for the Workers’ Republic is no longer a matter for day-dreaming. It has taken place.’¹⁸² Congress supporters made much of their ability to bring a contingent of Protestant workers from the Shankill Road to the 1934 Wolfe Tone commemoration march at Bodenstown and of their success in establishing local sections of the Congress in Belfast. It was certainly an achievement to get even ‘two lorry loads’¹⁸³ of Protestant workers to a traditional Republican occasion, but then, as before and since, the actions of small groups and individuals were assigned a wholly spurious representative significance. These few Protestants were then used to shore up an approach to the mass of Protestant workers which, if they were aware of it, evoked only hostility.

O’Donnell could claim in Dublin that a ‘great awakening’ was taking place amongst Protestant workers. But economic discontent and even dissatisfaction with the Unionist regime hardly justified his claim that, ‘Workers of non-nationalist stock are realising that their place is in a united front with their comrades in the south.’¹⁸⁴ The dominant strain in the coverage of the north in the Republican Congress was to emphasise that economic class consciousness was not enough, that Protestant workers had to move beyond the politics of the Northern Ireland Labour Party. ‘The main weakness of anti-imperialist activities in Belfast working-class organisations has been a shying away from the national struggle for freedom.¹⁸⁵ In an address to trade unionists in the Independent Labour Party hall in Belfast, O’Donnell attacked the NILP for

dodging the Republican issue … the working-class movement in the North-East has weakened the whole national struggle by its failure to see that its own freedom is inseparably bound up with the unity and freedom of an Irish Workers’ Republic.¹⁸⁶

In the face of developments like the sectarian riots in 1935, this incapacity to gauge the depth of Protestant working-class antagonism to ‘the national struggle’ could only sustain its optimism by more frantic attacks on the ‘pro-imperialist’ leaders of the northern labour movement and the reactionary and sectarian role of the IRA leadership in Belfast.

Prior to the outdoor relief riots, An Phoblacht had criticised northern republicans for being little more than a Catholic defence force and making no attempt to establish contacts with Protestants. Belfast republicans were said to be ‘on the whole possessed of a bigotry that is dangerous to the cause they have at heart’.¹⁸⁷ The failure of the Belfast IRA to get involved in the outdoor relief strike as an organisation was also attacked by O’Donnell, who claimed that they had been encouraged to make contacts with the Protestant working class:

But always the reply was a thousand and one good reasons why it could not be done. Even on the eve of the ODR workers’ uprising the local OC pooh-poohed the idea that such a development was likely.¹⁸⁸

It was true that, except for a small number of socialist-inclined volunteers and a small number of Protestant IRA men, the Belfast organisation was not fertile ground for social republicanism. Its concerns were predominantly military and geared towards its role of communal defence. As O’Donnell bluntly put it: ‘We haven’t a battalion of IRA men in Belfast; we just have a battalion of armed Catholics.’¹⁸⁹ To claim, as the Congress did, that, ‘The erection of the border was made possible by the separation of the Republican movement from the working class movement,’¹⁹⁰ was, however, greatly to exaggerate the role of these negative features of Belfast republicanism.

The failure to achieve the Republic was explained away on the republican left by various failures of leadership – the 1919 failure to support the demands of the small farmers and landless men, or the Belfast IRA’s lack of proselytising activity amongst the Protestant workers. That the problem lay in the objective was never raised as a possibility. Social republicanism emerged as a strategy evolved to overthrow the Treaty settlement. Its use of the language of class and its attempt to link republican objectives to social and economic issues did have some real effects. Most crucially, it ensured that Fianna Fáil sounded the note of agrarian radicalism in 1932, but although it could play a role in pushing Fianna Fáil to the ‘left’, it could achieve little more. Attacks on de Valera in power only alienated its rural constituency, which feared ‘socialism’. Left republicans had the weakest of roots in the southern working class and only illusions about Protestant workers. The Congress would split and disappear, divided between a majority led by O’Donnell, who still held to the strategy of mobilising the masses by demonstrating that only an economically and socially radical strategy could achieve traditional republican objectives, and a minority led by Michael Price and two of Connolly’s children, who argued that only a specifically socialist objective could ensure the support of the Protestant workers of Ulster.

The majority position completely failed to take account of the fundamental change that Fianna Fáil’s victory had brought about. Before that, it was possible to argue for a radical republican movement to force Fianna Fáil to the left or even to displace the party altogether. With the resources of state power, de Valera had proved able to siphon off large elements of the republicans’ constituency. It was much more difficult to mobilise an ‘anti-imperialist’ united front when the government could not be so easily portrayed as a reactionary pro-British rump. The minority position failed to attract because of the manifest difficulties facing any exponent of a ‘Workers’ Republic’ in a state where the headquarters of the tiny Communist Party had recently been burned down by a clerically-inspired mob. Nevertheless, its supporters made some highly pertinent criticisms of the arguments of O’Donnell and Gilmore. These had emphasised that the only principled approach to adopt in Northern Ireland was to put the republican position straight to Protestant workers:

It is harder to go among Protestant workers and insist that they must team up with the Republican masses against British Imperialism than to go under the banner of a Workers’ Republic.¹⁹¹

In response, it was argued not simply that such propaganda would get nowhere in Belfast, but, even more significantly, that the continued affiliation to republican objectives would tie the movement to some of the most reactionary Catholic integrative political currents in the south. In an astonishingly prescient attack on the proponents of a republican united front strategy, Michael Price recalled a recent bellicose statement by Seán T. O’Kelly, a Fianna Fáil Cabinet minister, threatening to impose the Republic on the north by force of arms and an offer by O’Duffy, the Blueshirt leader, to sink his differences with de Valera in a common campaign against Ulster. ‘The united front movement might lead them to become involved in an attempt to make positive the jurisdiction of an all-Ireland Republic.’¹⁹² It would in fact be the IRA, not the Congress, that would soon be involved in such a campaign. The social republicans had greatly exaggerated the radical potentialities of the rural and urban masses and were unable to combat the absorptive capacity of Fianna Fáil’s populist nationalism to which they had contributed. On the issue of Protestant Ulster, social republicanism had failed utterly to escape the iron cage of nationalist assumptions and, while they might look with dismay at the subsequent IRA attempt forcibly to ‘complete the national revolution’, O’Donnell and his supporters would continue to judge all issues by their relationship to an objective they happily shared with the most conservative and militaristic elements of the IRA.