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 Mellows really signifies is not a turn to socialist republicanism but the first of a number of attempts to preserve intransigent revolutionary nationalism by tapping into perceived social discontent. Thus in a late communication he takes up the issue of unemployment:
The unemployment question is acute. Starvation is facing thousands of people … The Free State government’s attitude towards striking postal workers makes clear what its attitude towards workers generally would be. The situation created by all these must be utilised for the Republic. The position must be defined: Free State-Capitalism and Industrialism-Empire; Republic-Workers-Labour.42
All the ambiguity of social republicanism is in those lines: the Free State is identified with a mode of production – capitalism – but the Republic has no stated foundation except in solidarity with the vaguely defined cause of Labour. It was symptomatic that Mellows should have referred in his Jail Notes to Wolfe Tone and the ‘men of no property’. The Dublin Protestant who, with the assistance of Belfast Presbyterian radicals, would found the Society of United Irishmen in 1791 and play a crucial role in the events which culminated in the 1798 Rebellion, was subsequently canonised as the ‘Father of Republicanism’.43 In 1796 Tone had written:
Our freedom must be had at all hazards. If the men of property will not help us they must fall; we will free ourselves by the aid of that large and respectable class of the community – the men of no property.44
Rather than an ‘embryonic socialist statement’,45 this is a middle-class revolutionary’s acknowledgement that in certain circumstances it may be necessary to make an instrumental and risky appeal to the ‘lower orders’. As Richard Dunphy has noted of the limits of republican egalitarianism when it used the rhetoric of Tone,
What was under attack was the notion of aristocracy, not the existence of socio-economic inequalities. The old, Anglo-Irish ruling class, together with the large farmers, the ranchers, distinguished by blood, by titles would make way for those who had worked their way to the top. Hard work, forbearance, meritocracy – these were the corner-stones of the egalitarian faith of the republicans. Such a man, having worked his way to success, would not be a bourgeois but a patriot.46
This ambiguous populist egalitarianism would prove to be a potent resource for those who, in the next few decades, would indeed rework republicanism in a constitutional and ‘radical’ direction under the leadership of Eamon de Valera and the new political formation, Fianna Fáil.
The cross-class alliance of the War of Independence did not split along clear lines of class, but its ending released the defeated side from some of the restraints that had prevented Sinn Féin from taking up economic and social issues. Of course, there were still many in the anti-Treaty Sinn Féin and IRA who maintained a position of rigid and abstract opposition. The Irish Republic proclaimed in 1916 by a ‘Provisional Government’ had based its claim to the allegiance ‘of every Irishman and Irishwoman’ on a ‘right’ established by past insurrections: a real turn towards the solipsistic and self-referential, and away from those within the physical force tradition who still accepted the provision of the 1873 Irish Republican Brotherhood constitution forbidding its ‘Supreme Council’ from initiating a war with England until they had the support of the mass of the people.47 By the end of the Civil War there was much evidence of what Townshend describes as:
a Robespierrist vision of the public good … A sense of democratic values existed, but it was modified by the belief that Sinn Féin understood what ought to be the will of the people if they were sufficiently nationally aware.48
Thus Mary MacSwiney, one of the most prominent of Sinn Féin diehards in the inter-war period, gave a typical response to the popular majority for the Treaty:
The people of a nation may not voluntarily surrender their independence, they may not vote it away in the ballot box even under duress and if some, even a majority be found, who through force or cupidity, would vote for such a surrender, the vote is invalid legally and morally and a minority is justified in upholding the independence of their country.49
Increasingly, however, the lack of popular credibility of such purism began to force a degree of rethinking in Sinn Féin and the IRA. This was aided by the increasingly clear conservatism of the governing party, now called Cumann na nGaedheal, which helped to ‘socialise’ the Civil War fracture. The first post-Mellows attempt to associate the republicans more clearly with social radicalism came in a number of articles written by Constance Markievicz for the Scottish socialist paper Forward and republished as a pamphlet, ‘What Irish Republicans Stand For’. As a close friend of Connolly’s and a member of the Irish Citizens’ Army who had received a death sentence (commuted because of her sex) for her role in the 1916 Rising, Markievicz was the Sinn Féin leader most able to put a red gloss on republicanism.
The basic theme represents a Gaelicised version of Connolly. Thus Britain had spent 800 years trying to replace the ‘Gaelic State’ with the ‘Feudal Capitalist State’. The Free State was a further attempt to force ‘the English social and economic system’ on the Irish people. However there was resistance, as the people ‘cling instinctively and with a passionate loyalty to the ideals of a better civilisation, the tradition of which is part of their subconscious, spiritual and mental state’. Connolly’s admiration for ‘his Celtic forefathers, who foreshadowed in the democratic organisation of the Irish clans, the more perfect organisation of the free society of the future’, was quoted and linked to the claim that popular support for republicanism existed because ‘the ideals embodied in that Republic touched all that was most vital and most Gaelic in the imagination and race memory of the people.’ The Treaty was depicted as a counter-revolution ‘for the purpose of breaking up the development of the Co-operative Commonwealth in Ireland’.50
This was rewriting history with a dazzling mixture of red and green inks, and Markievicz clearly had difficulty
