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 of the Protestant working class formed the basis for a new optimism about the possibilities of winning Protestant workers to ‘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
