The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson

‘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