Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 5

The rural order from which nationalists drew their support was divided between a large peasant class involved in small- and medium-scale farming and a growing stratum of rich cattle graziers, with holdings of at least 200 acres, and more usually between 400 and 600 acres. These ‘ranchers’, as they were popularly termed, were particularly concentrated in three regions – the lowlands of north Leinster, the plains of east Connaught and north Munster and the mountain pastures and boglands of west Connaught.⁷ The co-existence in the west of ranches alongside peasants on small overcrowded holdings was a source of often bitter tension and would create problems for Sinn Féin during the War of Independence. It would also cast a long shadow over republican radicalism in the subsequent period.

In 1911 there were 328,743 Irish farmers, of whom over 100,000 worked fewer than ten acres.⁸ There were, in addition, 450,000 workers in agriculture – farm labourers and the much more substantial group of ‘relatives assisting’. At the top of the rural hierarchy were the 32,000 farmers with more than 100 acres. There were thus two possible lines of fissure in the Irish countryside: between rich farmers and labourers or, particularly in the west, between the land-hungry smallholders and the ranchers in their midst. Such tensions were all the more likely to erupt once the British land legislation culminating in the Wyndham Act of 1903 removed the landlord class as a unifying focus of resentment. An estimated two-thirds to three-quarters of Irish farmers had become owners of their land by the outbreak of the First World War. Nevertheless, significant agrarian grievances remained, particularly among small farmers. The war slowed the process of land purchase and also shut off the safety valve of emigration. One historian has suggested of the 1916-21 period that,

It may indeed be that the real dynamism which underlay the national movement remained the pressure of population on the land. Land hunger, exacerbated by the cessation of emigration, seems to have remained the only force which generated large-scale popular action.⁹

The War of Independence had coincided with a major upsurge of rural social conflicts and trade union militancy. In the west of Ireland, which had a large concentration of the poorest land and the smallest farms and where the Land Acts had done least to satisfy peasant land hunger, there was an upsurge of peasant activity aimed at forcing a radical redistribution of land. Such activity was described by the Unionist Irish Times as ‘Agrarian Bolshevism’, and was often regarded with little less hostility by Sinn Féin, which established arbitration courts to bring the land war under control. Dan Breen, one of the key guerrilla leaders in the War of Independence and later a militant opponent of the Treaty, subsequently told Peadar O’Donnell that if anyone had talked of dividing up estates in his area he would have had him shot.¹⁰ As Paul Bew has pointed out:

When, after 1916, Sinn Féin emerged as a new force in nationalist politics – sanctified by the ‘blood sacrifice’ of the Easter Rising – it was able to outflank the Irish Party both on the left and on the right in agrarian matters according to convenience. In short, by 1918 Irish agrarian radicalism was, from the nationalist point of view, a profoundly ambiguous force.¹¹

Sinn Féin’s first association with agrarian protest, in 1917 and early 1918, was short-lived and typically instrumental. In the words of one IRA man,

I hadn’t the slightest interest in the land agitation, but I had every interest in using it as a means to an end … to get these fellows into the Volunteers … Up to that they were just an unorganised mob.¹²

Soon, however, Sinn Féin and the IRA were concerned that social agitation was disrupting ‘national’ unity and scaring off potential supporters, and in February 1918 the standing committee of Sinn Féin expressed its opposition to unauthorised land-seizures and cattle drives.¹³ In his path-breaking provincial study of the Irish revolution, David Fitzpatrick shows how Sinn Féin organisers encouraged members who were small farmers and labourers to take part in agitation for the breaking up of the large grazing ranches of the west in the early part of 1918, and again in early 1920, when the struggle was far more violent and widespread. Although participation may have consolidated Sinn Féin support amongst the poorest sections of the Irish peasantry, it also fomented hostility among the larger farmers and the more comfortable members of the rural community, whose support was a real political and material necessity for Sinn Féin:

Republicanism itself had been tamed by the men of substance almost from the start. Like the Home Rule movement, which it so closely resembled, Sinn Féin was heavily dependent upon shopkeepers, employers and large farmers for income, and the Republican county councils for their rates … systematic intimidation might have alienated a substantial and articulate group of Irishmen from the Republican cause, thus breaching the underlying principle of consensus nationalism.¹⁴

Sinn Féin’s electoral triumph in 1918 – with 73 Sinn Féiners, 26 Unionists and six members of the old Irish Parliamentary Party elected – exaggerated both the size and the nature of its political victory. Irish Labour abstained from the elections and the Irish Parliamentary Party contested few seats. Also significant in the present context was the economic and social void at the centre of the Sinn Féin programme. Seán O’Faoláin drily summed it up: ‘The policy of Sinn Féin has always been, since its foundation, that simple formula: Freedom first; other things after.’ The author of the first scholarly account of the Civil War expands on this judgement: ‘At whatever cost to ideological coherence, unity had to be preserved and divisive issues avoided.’¹⁵

The electoral demise of the Irish Parliamentary Party owed more to its failure to deliver Home Rule due to Ulster Unionist resistance, and to Lloyd George’s botched attempt to impose conscription on Ireland in 1918, than to positive popular support for the establishing of a republic. The Easter Rising and the execution by the British of its leaders had unleashed a tide of emotional nationalism which viewed the failures of the Parliamentary Party as terminal. The very success of the land legislation in making owners of a majority of Irish farmers removed any material interest they had in the continuation of the Union. It was precisely because the Irish programme on the land question had been largely met by the British parliament that an Irish constitutional party at Westminster became irrelevant. As a sympathiser of the defunct party noted in 1919: ‘Until Irish land purchase was peacefully completed, the man who would suggest the withdrawal of the Irish party from London would make himself the laughing stock of Irish politics.’¹⁶ Those who were most likely not to have been satisfied by the land legislation, who would have liked a much clearer commitment from Sinn Féin to the interests of small farmers and farm labourers, were disappointed as it made clear its overriding commitment to an appeal to all social classes.

The result was a distinct lack of enthusiasm for the ‘national struggle’ in the province where smallholders had seen their agrarian struggles denounced by Sinn Féin and sometimes repressed by the IRA. Connaught, the most aggressively nationalist province in previous periods of agrarian agitation, was relatively restrained in the War of Independence, the central role passing to the province of Munster, with its much more substantial class of medium-sized farmers. In his pioneering analysis of the period, Rumpf relates the land question to participation in the War of Independence:

The districts where the most violent agrarian unrest occurred during the period were not the centres of the national struggle. The social aspirations of the landless men were not primarily expressed in terms of hostility to the British administration. To a certain extent such aspirations were directly excluded from the national struggle, for the spirit which dominated the IRA leadership at all levels inculcated a deep suspicion of any attempt to mix social aims with the pure cause of the national struggle. The social condition of many areas of the west was not favourable to an active national fight. The main national resistance was concentrated in more prosperous districts, such as de Tocqueville noticed was the case in the French Revolution, and was also true of the German Peasants’ Wars.¹⁷

A nationalism linked positively to the demands of the poorest and most marginal elements in the peasantry would have risked losing the support of the most powerful class in the Irish countryside and would have represented a substantially weaker challenge to the British state. Even if it had prosecuted the struggles of the smallholders against the ‘ranchers’, it would not have been creating the basis for a worker-peasant alliance: the aim of the land-hungry peasants was a comfortable holding, not the inauguration of some ‘co-operative commonwealth’. It was symptomatic of Connolly’s weakness in this area that he was forced onto the terrain of Gaelic revivalism in explaining supposed peasant openness to co-operation and alliance with workers by the invocation of a racial memory of ‘the traditions … of the common ownership and common control of the land by their ancestors’.¹⁸

Sinn Féin’s essential coolness or hostility to agrarian militancy was mirrored in its relation to the upsurge of trade union activity between 1917 and 1920. Wartime inflation that ate into working-class living standards, an increased demand for labour which, by 1917, had combined with the introduction of compulsory tillage to cause a labour shortage in agriculture, and resentment at the unequal impact of wartime hardships: these were the key factors in a major growth in union membership. Between 1916 and 1920 the numbers represented by the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC) rose from 100,000 to 225,000 – a quarter of Irish wage-earners.¹⁹ The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, established as a proto-syndicalist organisation by James Larkin in 1909, grew massively from 5,000 in 1917 to 130,000 at the end of 1920.²⁰

Unionisation spread into new areas and hitherto unorganised sectors of the working class. Most explosive was the organisation of the most neglected stratum in the Irish countryside – the farm labourers. Although they constituted only 18 per cent of the agricultural labour force in the 26-country area in the early 1920s, they were a regionally concentrated group, only 6 per cent in Connaught but almost 33 per cent in Leinster. In twelve Leinster and east Munster counties labourers represented about a third of the agricultural labour force.²¹ They would contribute significantly to the growing number of strikes Ireland saw between 1917 and the slump that set in at the end of 1920. Such strikes, especially when accompanied, as they often were, by well organised picketing, sympathetic action and even active sabotage, and adopting the iconography of 1917, with red flags and even detachments of ‘Red Guards’, helped, in Fitzpatrick’s words, to ‘strike fear into the heart of republicans’.²² In June 1920 the illegal Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, issued a proclamation clearly depicting such activities as sectional diversions: ‘The present time when the Irish people are locked in a life and death struggle with their traditional enemy, is ill chosen for the stirring up of strife among our fellow countrymen.’²³

In 1919 the Dáil had created arbitration courts and a Central Conciliation Board. Like the Sinn Féin courts of justice and the land courts, these institutions had the dual function of dislodging the British administration and defusing unrest. Emmet O’Connor provides an astringent summary of the role of such institutions and of the Dáil’s Department of Labour, headed as it was by Constance Markievicz, the one Sinn Féin leader to proclaim herself a socialist:

These efforts had the practical effect of asserting Dáil Éireann’s legitimacy to employers and employees, reducing strife and settling grievances, usually on the basis of precedents set out by [British] government machinery … The Department also played a propagandist function being advertised by Sinn Féin as an illustration of its concern for trade unionists. However, nowhere is there any indication of structural reform appearing on the departmental agenda.²⁴

When the post-war slump began to push up unemployment in early 1921, the republican government examined ways of dealing with it and put forward recommendations for increased tillage, extension of public works and the promotion of profit-sharing industries. It did not, however, contemplate legislation in any of these areas, contenting itself with appeals to patriotism. It ignored a shrill memorandum from Markievicz, forecasting a violent revolution unless the Dáil moved to deal with ‘disaffected workers’. Her proposals were hardly revolutionary: the establishment of food co-operatives, more road works and the gimmicky idea of seizing and re-opening a meat factory ‘to show the workers we had their interests at heart’.²⁵

The largely integrative approach of Sinn Féin and the Dáil to labour issues, their refusal to take sides with labour against capital, was viewed by many in the labour movement as a poor response to the positive role of the ILPTUC and individual unions in the War of Independence. In 1918 the labour movement, outside the predominantly Unionist parts of Ulster, had joined in the campaign against conscription and on 23 April had organised a 24-hour general strike against it. In December the ILPTUC abstained from the general election to allow Sinn Féin a straight fight against the Parliamentary Party. In April 1920 the ILPTUC staged a two-day general strike for the release of republican prisoners on hunger strike. Other important examples of labour contributions to the nationalist campaign were the nine-day total stoppage organised by the Limerick Trades Council against British militarism in April 1919, and the seven-month dockers’ and railway workers’ action against the handling and movement of munitions. For Sinn Féin, this was little more than what would have been expected from any patriotic group of Irishmen. At the most it called for some show of listening to the voice of labour. Thus the Labour leader Thomas Johnston was allowed to draw up a statement of social aims which the first Dáil would adopt as its ‘Democratic Programme’. Considered too radical in its original form, the statement was amended by Seán T. O’Kelly and reduced to what O’Faoláin described as terms of ‘a purely pious and general nature that committed nobody to anything in particular’.²⁶ It typified the largely verbal and emollient concessions that mainstream republicanism was prepared to make to keep labour within the ambit of a political and military strategy firmly under republican control. Only after the Treaty split and the onset of civil war did some republicans begin to fashion a version of the War of Independence that depicted the source of the ultimate ‘betrayal’ as the IRA’s predominating hostility to popular economic struggles.