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Must
republicans be socialists? In 1934, about 10,000 agreed
when they left the IRA under the direction of Peadar
O’Donnell, Frank Ryan, George Gilmore, and Michael
Price, to name a few prominent leaders. They formed
the Republican Congress, an alliance of those who
linked political separatism to radical socialism.
Attempting to overcome the IRA’s predilection
for military fighting rather than policy making, the
RC sought to unite rural smallholders, urban industrial
workers, and republican activists.
The
IRA, which had subsumed Sinn Féin and resisted
a leftist split (under O’Donnell’s co-direction)
in Saor Eire around the turn of the decade, still
controlled the majority of (as many as) 30,000 , but
the radical and military movements of the 30s continued
to decline as DeValera’s Fianna Fáil increased,
taking control of the 26 Counties in 1932. Most Irish
remained skeptical that republicanism could be better
achieved either by the IRA’s physical-force or
the RC’s popular front. Examining the reasons
why the RC believed it could sway the Irish people
better than the IRA or Fianna Fáil remains
crucial to our understanding of the possibilities
and the limits of such an approach, seven decades
later. The difficulties the RC faced and the optimism
it preached bear scrutiny.
The
problem with the Saor Eire experiment—a leftist
vanguard—lay in its militancy; if IRA policy
needed a leftward challenge, why try to rewrite 1919’s
Democratic Programme? If republicans sought radicalism,
it lay in their own legacy. Not with the IRA. George
Gilmore captures this in The Irish Republican Congress
(Cork Workers’ Club, rev. ed. 1978). The gun
lurked “without the revolutionary tradition that
preceded it.” The military lacked direction:
“a spear-point waiting for its shaft and for
an arm to guide it.” (23) The IRA leaders could
not provide this guidance. Their politics remained
vague, their volunteers suffered under a gag order
preventing them from voicing dissent.
So,
in 1934, the RC withdrew from the IRA, with Price
envisaging “an expression of mass Republican
feeling” dissatisfied with a too cautious FF
and a too conservative IRA. (35) The confidence the
RC radiated at first seemed contagious. The Congress
demanded a return of land to smallholders; better
housing; wage increases; improved conditions for rural
and urban workers; clerical separation from state
policy. Familiar goals. A movement was envisioned
that would transcend sectarianism and achieve class
unity.
Nearly
hagiographical in the retellings have been two arguably
isolated incidents. The 1932 Belfast Outdoor Relief
riots in which Catholics and Protestants temporarily
resisted rent increases had tempted IRA grassroots
participation, although their Dublin superiors and
trade unionists both may have wished to thwart the
demonstrators’ common formation. (Raymond J.
Quinn, A Rebel Voice: A History of Belfast Republicanism,
1925-1972, Belfast: The Belfast Cultural and Local
History Group, 1999, pg. 16) Also, featured as the
cover picture of Gilmore’s account, a Shankill
road contingent attended Bodenstown to march alongside
its typical demographic. To what degree did these
“cross-community initiatives” (to employ
a later term) rouse the practical advance of the RC?
Unfortunately, none at all. The RC, its diminished
size retarding its struggle to induct the majority
of their fellow republicans, let alone those enticed
by Fianna Fáil as it lay stepping-stones across
calmer ideological waters towards a pacified Republic,
failed to build momentum for a more dynamic leap across
the ford.
A
familiar tendency to bicker over ideology halted any
actual gains the RC could have delivered to a largely
war-weary, clerically-cowed, and politically complacent
Irish constituency. The trade unions weren’t
eager for a more threatening mobilisation. The Labour
Party likewise demurred. Anti-fascism, however admirable,
failed to galvanize coalitions. Many leftist proponents
of the RC and like-minded campaigns blame their failure
upon a public too lazy, too ignorant, or too distracted
to have its consciousness sufficiently heightened,
purified, and verified as true rather than false.
While this response may assuage those who deify such
attempts, it keeps failing to move its masses or sway
its skeptics. Republicanism constantly faces this
challenge as it persists into its third century. How
can its goals be defined, let alone attained? Too
often, the difficulty of defining the goals results
in the stalling of the movement right after it begins
to warm up.
For
the RC, this failure to reach ignition happened on
the starting pad. A political party or a united front?
Price argued that a definition preceded action. Richard
English distinguishes at the 1933 IRA Convention faction
“communalist rhetoricians” from their opponents,
“class-struggling activists.” (Radicals
and the Republic: Socialist Republicanism in the Irish
Free State, 1925-1937. Oxford UP, 1994) This dichotomy
endured; activists O’Donnell and Gilmore were
continuing the same argument they had made to the
IRA unsuccessfully the previous year. Now, among those
who had left the IRA to back the RC at its Rathmines
convention, its own 1934 Congress faced—as all
republicans seem to, noted by Brendan Behan as the
first item on their agenda—a split.
The
RC had started that spring, and by 29-30 September
it may have already ended for all practical purposes.
The tragedy was not that the members fundamentally
differed on the goal of a socialist, 32-County republic
following the 1919 Democratic Programme. Unlike others
draped in the republican mantle, the RC determined
to forward the idealistic demands of rebels. Not Pearse
but Connolly inspired them. The attendance of Nora
Connolly (O’Brien) ensured this symbolic and
actual continuity. O’Donnell led those favouring
action first, and resolutions later. The majority,
however, under Price, insisted that the RC form, through
Labour, militancy combined with a working-class, anti-imperialist,
anti-partitionist platform. The minority, under O’Donnell,
backed a united front of workers, small farmers vs.
“Imperialist and native exploiters.” (Gilmore,
45-51) Implacably, the two sides, as O’Donnell
recalled, debated a “slogan of action.”
The
Majority Resolution called for a “Workers Republic”;
O’Donnell feared this played into FF’s hand,
allowing “the Republican Party” under Dev
to claim that FF wanted an inclusive Republic while
the RC sought one only for the proletariat and smallholders.
Also, the Majority Resolution urged a “Worker’s
Republican Party”; the minority again wished
to appeal to those of all parties, or none. The Majority
won a pyrrhic victory. Radical supporters have attempted
to interpret this debate in terms of Marxian stagism;
the later Official-Provisional division in 1969-70
and the subsequent fate of Sinn Féin—The
Worker’s Party and the Democratic Left conveys
the continuing socialist and republican relevance,
and marginalisation, of such concerted contentiousness.
Conor
Foley finds irony in the fact that the united front
minority depended upon the Irish Communists (CPI)
to give it enough votes so the RC would not be seen
as communist. (Legion of the Rearguard: The IRA
and the Modern Irish State. London: Pluto, 1992,
pg. 144) Henry Patterson recognises that the RC could
hardly insist that its anti-imperialist campaign promised
more than FF, who had successfully convinced the majority
of 26-County voters of its anti-British credentials.
Bridging party lines cuts deep.
The
RC, historians today concur, was fatally detached
from reality. Northern Protestants would not join
an anti-Crown effort, even if renamed a “Workers
Republic” rather than an “Irish” domain.
Socialists summoned a commodified force of urban and
rural toilers which failed to reify itself. The masses
preferred Dev, presumably victimized by their false
consciousness. Even Seán Russell’s IRA,
obtuse as it was, gained more attention from the Irish
and British governments by their senseless Coventry
bombing. As Patterson summarises, O’Donnell and
his allies might despise the IRA’s intransigence,
but the leftists who had agitated for a united front
“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.” (The Politics of Illusion: A Political
History of the IRA. London: Serif, 1997, pg. 75)
Advocating socialism loosened Irish radicals’
insularities; allegiance to republicanism kept the
RC tethered.
For
few among the Irish majority in whose name the RC
sought to fight joined its ranks. Certainly unrelenting
anti-communist propaganda--despite the rise of fascism,
the Blueshirts, Fine Gael, and the Spanish Civil War--tainted
the left for many Irish. The Church possessed tremendous
influence in opposing revolution; the failure of the
RC to lure their proletarian brethren in the Six Counties
undermined their class-based message. Gilmore diagnoses
the failure of the RC to “break the illusion
that Fianna Fáil was leading the Free State
on to the Republic.” (63) Complacency remained
its enemy. Richard English criticises the myopic platitudes
that trapped the RC into an uncompromising faith in
the symbiosis of anti-capitalism and republican separatism.
This assumption, he challenges, depended too much
on a 1916-vintage mystique that played into Gaelicism
on one hand and communism on the other: a difficult
pitch to the non-sectarian, 32-county audience the
RC assumed was waiting. By April 1936, Ryan conceded,
the RC was “moribund.” (quoted in English,
255) The split at Rathmines drained away what energy
a unified front could have offered to the promotion
of an anti-capitalist republican alternative. Too
few cared, north or south of the border. While his
diagnosis may chill the true believer in the purity
of an unwavering cause, English asserts that such
fervent isolation prevented the RC from building its
broad front.
Investigation
into Connolly’s theories cannot occur within
this article’s limits. In brief, English alleges
that the RC fetishised the dogma (itself disregarding
Connolly’s own inconsistencies that his devotion
to his doctrine produced throughout his own lifetime)
of his central thesis. “The Irish masses were
held to be both socially radical and also instinctively
separatist,” these two threads interweaving.
(270) The RC, according to English--who has investigated
it far more thoroughly than any other preceding scholar
or participant--sealed its doom. The hardline separatists
still ruled the IRA—leading it to its demise
after Coventry confined many at the Curragh. The Irish
left failed to convince even the republican faithful.
The RC remained a footnote, albeit boldfaced by many
who promoted Marxian and class-based formulations
marrying radicalism with republicanism.
Piously,
the secular RC reprimanded those who debated theory
rather than took to the streets: “faith without
good works is dead,” chided the RC in a 9 June
1934 article. (quoted in English, 210) The IRA, it
thundered, “shirk the day-to-day struggles of
the working class. They bitterly oppose the unleashing
of the people which the Republican Congress will bring
about.” English assembles the psychological rewards
of socialist republicanism. Its zealotry, he concludes,
combines simplicity, stubbornness, smugness, crudity,
and evangelism. Its cult, politically simple in its
adherence to crude Connolly gospel, justifies by its
devotion a refusal to compromise with other republicans—who
can never be admitted if they do not also profess
socialism with its concomitant commitment to class
struggle, wealth redistribution, and centralised control
of resources and labour. This millenarian message—the
revolution was imminent—comforted them while
they wandered in the wilderness, for decades out of
power while Dev paraded, false messiah.
The
promised land of the Republic—like the river
Bann perhaps as its Jordan yet uncrossed—beckoned
from afar. Incorruptible, as others in the movement
took shelter in Second Dáil and the IRA as
the government of the Republic schemes, so the RC
assured those gathered that the conversion of the
loyalist, shoneen, and gombeen remained near. Like
missionaries, the RC sought solace in an international
calling on behalf of the downtrodden, that it would
never ally with fascists or dictators (although when
these were enemies of the Crown, as WWII would soon
prove, such assignations would lure Frank Ryan from
the anti-fascist Spanish to the heart of Nazi Berlin;
meanwhile Ryan Russell would remain allies even as
their ideas diverged). Finally, all those who had
labored for a Republic but who had failed to embrace
the tenets of the RC were expelled—Collins, Pearse,
DeValera, Dorothy Macardle, Liam Lynch. Gilmore, in
1978, admits that the RC, while ahead of its time,
still inspired him with his memory of the Shankill
faction battling the IRA guard shoving the RC from
laying wreaths on Wolfe Tone’s grave. He also
acknowledged that he doubted that the cry of “Come
on Shankill” would ever repeat at Sallins. (v)
A return to Redmondite nationalism, an embrace of
Brussels and Wall Street, he contemplated, seemed
far more likely in our Irish future.
The
relevance and the lessons of the RC I leave to others
to determine. True to The Blanket, I have offered
my own dissenting view. If we today wish to learn
from the legacy of the RC, I contend that its members
would wish us to be not only admiring of its efforts,
but cognizant of its failures to achieve its ambitious
goals. While its rhetoric may be inspiring, its achievements
fall far too short. We must ask why, and not blame
others before we hearken sharply to our own rote litanies.
Critics of the RC, like English, and promoters, like
Gilmore, recite cautionary tales. Too often, marchers
to Bodenstown, we commemorate icons without dusting
off the grime, to heed whatever admonition waits on
their gravestones, or what warning endures in their
eyes confronting us with a wary gaze.
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