Sinn Féin’s essential coolness or hostility to agrarian militancy was mirrored in its relation to the upsurge of trade union activity between 1917 and 1920. Wartime inflation that ate into working-class living standards, an increased demand for labour which, by 1917, had combined with the introduction of compulsory tillage to cause a labour shortage in agriculture, and resentment at the unequal impact of wartime hardships: these were the key factors in a major growth in union membership. Between 1916 and 1920 the numbers represented by the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (ILPTUC) rose from 100,000 to 225,000 – a quarter of Irish wage-earners.19 The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, established as a proto-syndicalist organisation by James Larkin in 1909, grew massively from 5,000 in 1917 to 130,000 at the end of 1920.20
Unionisation spread into new areas and hitherto unorganised sectors of the working class. Most explosive was the organisation of the most neglected stratum in the Irish countryside – the farm labourers. Although they constituted only 18 per cent of the agricultural labour force in the 26-country area in the early 1920s, they were a regionally concentrated group, only 6 per cent in Connaught but almost 33 per cent in Leinster. In twelve Leinster and east Munster counties labourers represented about a third of the agricultural labour force.21 They would contribute significantly to the growing number of strikes Ireland saw between 1917 and the slump that set in at the end of 1920. Such strikes, especially when accompanied, as they often were, by well organised picketing, sympathetic action and even active sabotage, and adopting the iconography of 1917, with red flags and even detachments of ‘Red Guards’, helped, in Fitzpatrick’s words, to ‘strike fear into the heart of republicans’.22 In June 1920 the illegal Irish parliament, Dáil Éireann, issued a proclamation clearly depicting such activities as sectional diversions: ‘The present time when the Irish people are locked in a life and death struggle with their traditional enemy, is ill chosen for the stirring up of strife among our fellow countrymen.’23
In 1919 the Dáil had created arbitration courts and a Central Conciliation Board. Like the Sinn Féin courts of justice and the land courts, these institutions had the dual function of dislodging the British administration and defusing unrest. Emmet O’Connor provides an astringent summary of the role of such institutions and of the Dáil’s Department of Labour, headed as it was by Constance Markievicz, the one Sinn Féin leader to proclaim herself a socialist:
These efforts had the practical effect of asserting Dáil Éireann’s legitimacy to employers and employees, reducing strife and settling grievances, usually on the basis of precedents set out by [British] government machinery … The Department also played a propagandist function being advertised by Sinn Féin as an illustration of its concern for trade unionists. However, nowhere is there any indication of structural reform appearing on the departmental agenda.24
When the post-war slump began to push up unemployment in early 1921, the republican government examined ways of dealing with it and put forward recommendations for increased tillage, extension of public works and the promotion of profit-sharing industries. It did not, however, contemplate legislation in any of these areas, contenting itself with appeals to patriotism. It ignored a shrill memorandum from Markievicz, forecasting a violent revolution unless the Dáil moved to deal with ‘disaffected workers’. Her proposals were hardly revolutionary: the establishment of food co-operatives, more road works and the gimmicky idea of seizing and re-opening a meat factory ‘to show the workers we had their interests at heart’.25
The largely integrative approach of Sinn Féin and the Dáil to labour issues, their refusal to take sides with labour against capital, was viewed by many in the labour movement as a poor response to the positive role of the ILPTUC and individual unions in the War of Independence. In 1918 the labour movement, outside the predominantly Unionist parts of Ulster, had joined in the campaign against conscription and on 23 April had organised a 24-hour general strike against it. In December the ILPTUC abstained from the general election to allow Sinn Féin a straight fight against the Parliamentary Party. In April 1920 the ILPTUC staged a two-day general strike for the release of republican prisoners on hunger strike. Other important examples of labour contributions to the nationalist campaign were the nine-day total stoppage organised by the Limerick Trades Council against British militarism in April 1919, and the seven-month dockers’ and railway workers’ action against the handling and movement of munitions. For Sinn Féin, this was little more than what would have been expected from any patriotic group of Irishmen. At the most it called for some show of listening to the voice of labour. Thus the Labour leader Thomas Johnston was allowed to draw up a statement of social aims which the first Dáil would adopt as its ‘Democratic Programme’. Considered too radical in its original form, the statement was amended by Seán T. O’Kelly and reduced to what O’Faoláin described as terms of ‘a purely pious and general nature that committed nobody to anything in particular’.26 It typified the largely verbal and emollient concessions that mainstream republicanism was prepared to make to keep labour within the ambit of a political and military strategy firmly under republican control. Only after the Treaty split and the onset of civil war did some republicans begin to fashion a version of the War of Independence that depicted the source of the ultimate ‘betrayal’ as the IRA’s predominating hostility to popular economic struggles.
The Civil War and the Emergence of Social Republicanism
Charles Townshend sums up the achievement of revolutionary nationalism by the time of the Treaty negotiations in December 1921 as follows:
Physical force, whether or not as a result of its alliance with politically sophisticated Sinn Féin, had demonstrably worked. It had extracted from the British concessions which they had hitherto refused. It had prised open, in the more dramatic metaphor preferred by its adherents, England’s grip on twenty-six out of the thirty-two counties of Ireland.27
Yet since physical force was incapable, in the words of the IRA’s effective commander, Michael Collins, of ‘beating the British out of Ireland militarily’,28 the militant nationalist aspiration for a republic was to be disappointed. The limit of British concession was to be dominion status within the British Empire and Commonwealth and, most offensive of all to the purer republicans, the provision for members of the parliament of the new Irish Free State to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch as head of the Commonwealth.
The debate on the Treaty split Sinn Féin and the IRA and led to a bitter civil war between the ‘Free State’ forces, which lost over 800 dead, and the anti-treaty ‘Republican’ forces, which lost many more. Casualties were far in excess of the numbers of Irish Volunteers killed in the period between 1916 and 1921.29 On the republican side in the Dáil the predominant concerns were issues like the Oath of Allegiance to the Crown, which symbolised the profound distance separating a 26-county British dominion from the republic proclaimed in 1916. Many commentators since have attempted to explain what one Treaty supporter disparagingly referred to as the ‘mystical, hysterical, neurotic worship of “The Republic”’.30
Part of the explanation must be sought in the necessary amorphousness of the political and social ideologies of the revolutionary elite. Predominantly lower middle-class professionals, journalists and teachers, their origins lay disproportionately in the ascending class in post-Famine Ireland, the rural middle class. Their thinking about the economic and social dimensions of ‘freedom’ tended towards pieties about the need to