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