But precisely because the substance of Sinn Féin economic and social philosophy was an accommodation with the main lines of development of the post-Famine economic order, its rhetoric of difference with the Parliamentary Party took on a largely moralistic and ‘principled’ tone. This meant that it would prove difficult, and ultimately impossible, for the Sinn Féin elite to avoid a split when faced with such an impure settlement as the Treaty. For of course the Treaty was a compromise brought about by the realities of relative military and economic power. For many in the Sinn Féin leadership, just as the inspiring memory of a higher Gaelic civilisation would prove sufficient to insulate an independent Ireland from the ‘excesses’ of capitalism, so another act of revolutionary will would force the British finally to concede the unalloyed Republic. Despite the overwhelmingly political and constitutional focus of the Treaty debates, there was a link between the capacity of revolutionary nationalism to spiritualise real social and economic antagonisms into a language of ‘principles’ and abstract freedom, and its profound difficulty in adjusting to a situation in which the criteria which had so often been used to marginalise ‘sectional’ projects like that of labour, could now be turned against those who would settle for something less than complete independence.
The anti-Treaty position was given major social sustenance by the large reservoirs of agrarian dissatisfaction, particularly in Connaught, which would prove much more active in the Civil War than it had in the War of Independence. For many small farmers and farm labourers, republican intransigence was very clearly a function of perceived class interest. The defeat of the republicans would be accompanied by the simultaneous defeat of the remnants of agrarian radicalism: in Meath, Clare and Waterford pro-Treaty forces physically repressed small farmers’ and labourers’ militancy.33
As his cause went down to defeat, a leading anti-Treatyite would produce in prison the few brief notes on which much of the subsequent vocation of social republicanism based itself. Liam Mellows wrote to Austin Stack, who before the Civil War had been successively Minister of Justice and Minister of Home Affairs and was now a prominent anti-Treatyite. Mellows expressed his dissatisfaction with the republicans’ apolitical approach, which ‘could only judge of situations in terms of guns and men’.34 He was influenced by an editorial in a recent edition of the Workers’ Republic, the newspaper of the tiny Communist Party of Ireland (CPI), which had urged a social and economic programme capable of winning the masses to the support of the Republic. Mellows pressed the republican leadership to set up a government and to translate the Dáil’s 1919 Democratic Programme into ‘something definite. This is essential if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence.’ A more specific social programme was justified by his interpretation of the Treaty split which showed that,
the commercial interest, so called, money and gombeen men are on the side of the Treaty. We are back to Tone … relying on ‘the men of no property’. The ‘stake in the country’ people were never with the Republic … We should recognise that definitely now and base our appeals upon the understanding and needs of those who have always borne Ireland’s fight.
As the only radical document to be produced by a republican during the period, Mellows’s Jail Notes were to become a major inspiration for leftist republicans – especially after his execution at the hands of the Free State government. Charles Townshend refers to him as ‘the lone socialist within the leadership’.35 This judgment at once inflates the socialist component of Mellows’s outlook and encourages an underestimation of his longer-term significance. Only 21 when he met Connolly in 1913, he was already well integrated into the physical force underground tradition through his membership first of the republican ‘boy scout’ movement, Fianna Éireann, and subsequently of the IRB. His horizons are well summed up in his declaration to his mother in 1913, ‘I’m going to be another Robert Emmet.’36 Emmet had led a confused and doomed insurrection in Dublin in 1803, gaining entry to the republican pantheon largely through his florid speech from the dock and subsequent execution. Roy Foster’s judgment on Mellows’s hero is acerbic: ‘His ideas were those of elite separatism: neither social idealism nor religious equality appear to have figured.’37 A leader of the 1916 insurrection in Galway, Mellows then spent some time in the United States, where he displayed signs of being influenced by Connolly’s Labour in Irish History – though what took his attention was its assertion that capitalism was a foreign import and that pre-Conquest Ireland was a ‘communistic clan’ society.38
Mellows’s real significance becomes more apparent if certain dissonances in the Jail Notes are acknowledged. Thus he suggested that the new social programme should follow the lines of the CPI’s strategy calling for state control of industry, transport and the banks, as well as the seizure and division of ‘the lands of the aristocracy’.39 At the same time, he claimed that such a programme ‘does not require a change of outlook on the part of republicans, or the adoption of a revolutionary programme as such’. Although the IRA Executive had begun to develop a more radical land policy, it was at the very least ingenuous to suggest that the sort of specifically radical programme that the CPI was demanding would have been welcome to the great majority of the anti-Treaty leaders. Their moralistic republicanism would have bitterly resisted any ‘reduction’ of their cause to a class movement.
More fundamentally, the apparent radicalisation of Mellows’s republicanism simply served to provide another means of avoiding the realities of popular acceptance of the Treaty. The pro-Treaty position was conveniently ascribed to a rump of ‘pro-imperialist’ moneyed elements who, with the help of the British and the support of the Catholic Church and the ‘unprincipled’ leadership of the labour movement, were hoodwinking the people. As a radical nationalist, Mellows assumed the fundamental unity of the nation. Apart from the West British bourgeois excrescences, any divisions amongst the people were artificially fostered by ‘Imperialism’. This conjured out of existence realities like the Ulster Unionists, and in the 26-county area it reduced the substantial support for the Irish Labour Party and Trade Union Congress (until 1930 the political and trade union wings of the Irish labour movement were organically linked), which had given de facto support to the Treaty, to the question of the supposed corruption of its leadership: ‘The official Labour Movement has deserted the people for the fleshpots of the Empire.’ In fact, in the elections earlier in 1922 the ILPTUC had won almost as much support as the anti-Treatyites, with seventeen of its eighteen candidates elected.40
That there was more to the question than a corrupt leadership was at least partly recognised when, in his letter to Stack, Mellows mentioned a visit made by leaders of the ILPTUC to the republicans occupying the Four Courts in Dublin (it would be the shelling of the Four Courts by the pro-Treaty supporters that signalled the beginning of the Civil War): ‘They remarked that no effort had been made to put the Democratic Programme into execution.’41 Mellows concluded, therefore, that the working class was ‘naturally’ for the Republic, but had been temporarily alienated by the inadequate policies of the republican movement. That for many workers the Treaty was a regrettable but necessary compromise that could be built on, while the anti-Treaty cause threatened only a barren, internecine and destructive conflict, was not a thought that a republican like Mellows, no matter how radical some of his language, could contemplate.
What