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 avoid the extremes of capitalism and socialism and the massive industrial conurbations of Britain and other capitalist states, with their unhealthy polarisation of classes brought about by excessive disparities of income. Thus even the paper published by Arthur Griffith, the most vigorous advocate of tariff-based capitalist economic development, denounced the evils of the English factory system and ‘dreamed in Wellsian terms of technological revolutions that would make such developments unnecessary in Ireland’.31 Socialism and trade union militancy were often seen as twin examples of ‘foreign’ doctrines likely to divide the nation. Gaelic revivalism with its references to a ‘pre-conquest’ utopia of co-operative Gemeinschaft reinforced this approach, as did the Catholic Church’s attitude to social questions, based on Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum, with its discussion of the twin evils of socialist internationalism and the doctrine of the class struggle.32 Rejecting certain features of industrial capitalism while leaving unquestioned the current economic realities in Ireland, Sinn Féin was able to represent itself as a more profound challenge to British rule than the ‘bourgeois’ Parliamentary Party while not disturbing the equilibrium of its wealthier supporters.
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
