Social Forces and the Irish Revolution
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