Defending National Liberation Movements?

supporting national liberation but not supporting nationalism??

As if they can be separated!

Truly youse are the leadership of ideas!

Again Organise! have never called the WSM nationalist but I at least am having a problem here with comprehending this nonsense - its not 'support for national liberation' just 'defence of national liberation'. Still sounds like apologetics to me.

1916 - 1922: IRELANDS "UNFINISHED" REVOLUTION?

The Easter Rising and the republic it declared were militarily defeated by the British authorities in 1916. This defeat was followed in the 1918 election, by the electoral rise of Sinn Fein, an election which saw the first woman MP (Countess Markievicz) returned to Westminster. General strikes took place against conscription in 1918, to demand the release of hunger strikers in 1920 and in opposition to militarism in 1921. Workers ‘Soviets’ were declared in parts of Ireland, the ‘war of independence’ was fought and the Irish Free State formed in 1922. While these events were largely confined to the south and west of Ireland the north-east also saw the outbreak of sectarian conflict and the creation in 1920-21 of the Northern Ireland state. Undoubtedly a period of flux, of struggle, increased radicalism and competing interests, opinions as to whether or not a revolution occurred, and how this revolution is defined, are largely connected with the political outlook of particular historians and more generally with political ‘traditions’ or ‘communities’ in Ireland.

Peter Hart, in his contribution to ‘The Irish Revolution, 1913-1923’1, points out the problems of definition and dating of the period:

What do we call the events of 1916 – 1923? Or should it be 1912-22 or 1917-21? 2

While others have failed to define revolution or avoided the use of the term in favour of such descriptions as ‘war of independence’, ‘struggle for independence’, or ‘rebellion’3 J. M. Regan begins his study of the Irish counter-revolution with the following definition of revolution:

revolution a forcible overthrow of government or a social order, in favour of a new system.4

This definition includes, as does David Fitzpatrick in ‘The two Irelands 1912-1939’, the creation of the state of Northern Ireland in 1920-21 as a second or dual Irish revolution. The success of Ulster Unionist resistance to Home Rule, against the creation of a unitary Irish state, and the establishment of the north-eastern Home Rule state of Northern Ireland is usually portrayed as a counter-revolution. It is a counter-revolution which is, curiously although not uniquely, placed chronologically prior to the revolution itself (the Spanish revolution and civil war was preceded by the Francoist rebellion of July 1936), beginning as it does in the 1912 Unionist mobilisation against the prospect of Home Rule.

The determined opposition to the third Home Rule Bill by Ulster Unionism involved massive mobilisation, opposition to the British government of the day, the laying of plans for a provisional government to keep Ulster or a portion of it outside of any Dublin administered Home Rule Ireland, and the formation of an armed militia, the Ulster Volunteer Force in January 1913. Fitzpatrick asserts that Ireland “experienced revolution in several senses”5 from, as he dates it, 1912 to 1922. For Fitzpatrick:

The means by which the two revolutionary elites secured local power ranged from violence and the threat of violence to collective protest, propaganda, parliamentary and diplomatic struggle, and negotiation. The Ulster Unionists relied primarily on parliamentary agitation backed by the menace of armed resistance; the republicans shunned parliament but used propaganda even more effectively than armed force. Thus the creation of the two Irish states, though not achieved by purely revolutionary methods, entailed a revolutionary shift in power-holding.6

Revolutionary methods, and in large part their identification of the Irish revolution/revolutions, used by both Regan and Fitzpatrick rely on a definition of revolution in which the use or threat of violence is paramount. Further Fitzpatrick asserts that:

The alterations in Irish political organisation were sufficiently lasting and profound to merit the term ‘revolution’.7

This is based on the transformation of Ireland’s constitutional status, the extension of the political influence of the churches and the securing of power by two local ‘revolutionary elites’.8

Consensus on the process that led to the formation of Northern Ireland as one of revolution is remote, particularly as Unionism, in stressing that it has and continues to act in defence of the Union against republican and Irish national revolution, casts itself in a conservative role. This may not sit comfortably with historic events or the ongoing propensity of Unionists and Loyalists to clash with the government of the United Kingdom and yet if this was not a revolution then the definition used to portray the formation of the Irish Free State as a revolution is itself undermined.

1916 is remembered in the history and commemoration of the dual blood sacrifices of Ulster Unionism and Irish ‘revolutionary’ nationalism. One lays claim to an assertion of Britishness in the sacrifice of the 36th Ulster Division at the Battle of the Somme and the other to the redemption in blood of the Irish nation. In rhetoric indistinguishable from that of Irish nationalist revolutionary Patrick Pearse, James Connolly was to write in ‘The Workers’ Republic’, less than three months before the Rising:

But deep in the heart of Ireland has sunk the sense of the degradation wrought upon its people – our lost brothers and sisters – so deep and humiliating that no agency less potent than the red tide of war on Irish soil will ever be able to enable the Irish race to recover its self-respect, or establish its national dignity in the face of a world horrified and scandalised by what must seem our national apostasy.

Without the slightest trace of irreverence but in all due humility and awe we recognise that of us as of mankind before Calvary it may truly be said:

Without the Shedding of Blood there is no Redemption.9

While labour, or a section of the labour movement, became identified with the cause of Irish nationalism, with Connolly and the Irish Citizen Army’s role in the Rising the relationship between Sinn Fein and the southern Irish labour movement was a one-way process not a partnership. Michael Laffan, while not questioning the occurrence of a revolution, points out that events:

…did not change the relationship between one class of Irishmen and another. Its impact was nationalist and political, not social and economic.10

The central issue for Sinn Fein and the IRA was the maintenance of nationalist unity. While some seemed to believe that all Ireland’s problems would disappear with independence Sinn Fein’s economic policies were based on a nationalist vision of self reliant capitalism. As labour took the decision to stand aside in the 1918 and 1921 general elections to allow Sinn Fein a clear run:

Sinn Fein accepted labour’s support as its due and offered nothing but platitudes in return.11

The ‘Soviets’ declared in parts of Ireland were not attempts at socialist revolution or workers control but pay disputes backed by occupation rather than strike action, all were handed back to their owners on conclusion of the disputes. Likewise the three ‘national’ strikes that occurred were in support of Irish nationalism more than in pursuit of working class demands and as such they could not extend to the north-east:

Despite the waving of red flags and indulgence in wild rhetoric there was little sign of revolutionary views, let alone Bolshevism, in the Irish labour movement.12

Women were to become more politically active and enter the political arena as never before. While images of Countess Markievicz in Citizen Army uniform, revolver in hand, is among the most powerful images of the period, signifying a dramatically changed role for women in political struggle, the role of women in the Rising, during the war of independence and with the outcome of the revolution was contradictory and to prove transient. Despite the growing role of women organisations like Cumann na mBan were to have a supportive role in relation to male political and military activity. Moreover the revolution and civil war was followed by a concerted effort by successive Free State governments to push women out of politics:

Those in the male leadership who had proven unwilling to allow equal participation during the War of Independence were, once in government, vociferous advocates, of measures designed to return women to the private sphere.13

By 1932 and with De Valera in power the position of women was further undermined while his 1937 constitution “defined women’s contribution to the state solely in terms of hearth and home”14. Margaret Ward concludes that:

Despite the valiant efforts of women to claim agency for themselves, the public world and mainstream nationalism were as heavily gendered as they had been prior to the First World War.15

Irish republicans aimed at far reaching change in the development of Irish culture. Building on the Gaelic cultural revival of the nineteenth century, republicans did aim at fundamental change in the lives of Ireland’s inhabitants:

their vision was linguistic and cultural rather than social and economic: citizens of the new Ireland would speak Irish not English.16

Irish nationhood was powerfully reinforced in the use of Irish titles and names in all areas of government and the state, even in those cases where the previous British system or department had been taken over largely unchanged, Irish ownership was stamped on it symbolically. As late as 1938 the mission to create an Irish Ireland was given precedence over ending partition by De Valera, speaking in Cork, following the transfer of the treaty ports from Britain to Ireland, on 11th July of that year he told a ‘victory ceilidhe’ that:

without the restoration of the Irish language, ‘what has happened today at Spike Island and Cobh will be very incomplete indeed, even if it is followed by our getting back in a very short time the whole of this country for the Irish people’.17

The process that led to the formation of the Irish Free State in 1922, from the Easter Rising and the events which followed, can, in terms of the Irish polity attained, be said to have been a revolution. However this view of revolution is not unproblematic even by the standards of revolutionary nationalism itself.

The development of Sinn Fein ideology, based on the notion of inalienable national territory, rose in opposition to the growing likelihood of the Irish Parliamentary Party’s acceptance of a partitionist settlement. In this respect the ‘revolution’ was to do no better than constitutional nationalism.

The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 treaty fell short of the aspirations of a sovereign Irish republic with its national territory intact. For Sinn Fein the use of armed violence provided leverage in support of the electoral mandate gained in 1917 and 1918. Unlike the Irish Parliamentary Party, Sinn Fein could not influence the British government in the halls of Westminster due to its abstentionist policy. In the absence of such political wrangling something else was needed to bring the British government to the negotiating table with Sinn Fein. The use of armed struggle as the leverage which brought the British government to the negotiating table did not secure the republic or even the compromise of external association forwarded by De Valera. The fact that the IRA could not hope to militarily defeat the British government effectively undermined the position of the Dail’s negotiators.

The construction of an Irish nationalist historiography as one long process of opposition to foreign domination culminating in the establishment of the Free State became the point of reference for anti-treaty republicans and later northern nationalists who found themselves contained within the territory of the Northern Irish state. A history of unfinished revolution developed; in Northern Ireland from 1969 onwards republicans were to reassert that any progress first required the ending of British rule in Ireland and completion of the ‘historically justified’ mission of Irish nationalism. Here again the message is, by varying degrees, that labour must wait. Mirroring the sentiment that ‘labour must wait’ Progressive Unionist Party spokespeople such as Billy Hutchinson have also claimed that ‘normal’ left-right politics can only follow resolution of the constitutional question. Of course in this instance the mirror image is the prerequisite securing of Northern Irelands constitutional attachment to the United Kingdom. The attitude of Irish nationalism to the unionist, or self-identifying British population, is to demand coercion from Westminster and involves a rather naïve belief that on ‘British’ withdrawal that they will realise their ‘Irishness’.

The definition of revolution proffered by Regan and applied by Fitzpartrick is devoid of reference to social and economic transformation in Irish society, a serious omission in any definition of the term. If it is enough to claim that the change of those holding power, accompanied by force or the threat of force, defines revolution, then Ireland had a revolution, perhaps even two revolutions, between 1916 and 1922. If however our definition of revolution demands a more radical departure, wide ranging changes in social and economic relations, a transformation in the everyday lives of working class people, then, despite the mythology and tradition of contemporary and modern Irish nationalists, republicans and socialist republicans, and the uniting of more radical elements behind the goal of Irish national sovereignty, Ireland did not have a revolution at all.

REFERENCES

1. P. Hart in J. Augusteijin (ed), pp. 17 – 33.

2. P. Hart in J. Augusteijin (ed), p. 17.

3. C. Townshend in J. Augusteijin (ed), pp. 1 – 16.

4. J. Regan p. xii.

5. D. Fitzpatrick p. 4.

6. D. Fitzpatrick p. 4.

7. D. Fitzpatrick p. 4.

8. D. Fitzpatrick p. 3.

9. J. Connolly in Aindrias O Cathasaigh (ed), p.197.

10. M. Laffan in P. J. Corish (ed), p. 203.

11. M. Laffan in P. J. Corish (ed), p. 212.

12. M. Laffan in P. J. Corish (ed), p. 202.

13. M. Ward in J. Augusteijin (ed), p. 182.

14. M. Ward in J. Augusteijin (ed), p. 183.

15. M. Ward in J. Augusteijin (ed), p. 183.

16. M. Laffan in P. J. Corish (ed), p. 203.

17. R. Fisk p.12.

Bibliography

D. Fitzpatrick, The two Irelands 1912-1939 (Oxford, 1998).

P. Hart, ‘Definition: Defining the Irish revolution’, in J. Augusteijin (ed), The Irish revolution 1913-1923 (Hampshire & New York, 2002)

M. Laffan, ‘Labour must wait’, in P. J. Corish (ed), Radicals, Rebels and establishments (1985), pp. 203-222.

A. O Cathasaigh, James Connolly the lost writings (London, 1997)

J. M. Regan, The Irish counter-revolution 1921-1936 (Dublin, 2001).

C. Townshend, ‘Historiography: Telling the Irish Revolution’, in J. Augusteijin (ed), The Irish revolution 1913-1923 (Hampshire & New York, 2002).

M. Ward, ‘Gender: gendering the Irish revolution’, in J. Augusteijin (ed), The Irish revolution 1913-1923 (Hampshire & New York, 2002).

...If you fail to acknowledge the simple truth then there really isn’t much point pursuing this....

...I really must sort that out and substitute reality for the superior ideas of georgestapleton....

...Yes I’ll accept that yer wrong about this, no problem....