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 of the German Peasants’ Wars.17
A nationalism linked positively to the demands of the poorest and most marginal elements in the peasantry would have risked losing the support of the most powerful class in the Irish countryside and would have represented a substantially weaker challenge to the British state. Even if it had prosecuted the struggles of the smallholders against the ‘ranchers’, it would not have been creating the basis for a worker-peasant alliance: the aim of the land-hungry peasants was a comfortable holding, not the inauguration of some ‘co-operative commonwealth’. It was symptomatic of Connolly’s weakness in this area that he was forced onto the terrain of Gaelic revivalism in explaining supposed peasant openness to co-operation and alliance with workers by the invocation of a racial memory of ‘the traditions … of the common ownership and common control of the land by their ancestors’.18
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
