Sinn Féin and The Politics of Left Republicanism (Irish Left Republicanism)

Sinn Fin and the Politics of Left Republicanism
Sinn Fin and the Politics

of Left Republicanism
EOIN BROIN
PLUTO PRESS
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First published 2009 by Pluto Press

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has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
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Dedicated to Ihintz Oliden ... for everything
Thanks to ...
Inaki Soto for sarcasm, support and long walks by the sea
Roger van Zwanenberg for patience
Laurence McKeown for suggestions and corrections
David and Conor Kennedy for all the bad jokes
Catherine Broin for interest and support
Sara Burke for West Cork and other encouragements
Robert Ballagh for The History Lesson
and to Sinn Fin for thirteen years of comradeship, empowerment
and the opportunity to play a small part in one of the most important
periods in modern Irish history
CONTENTS
Introduction
1 The Origins of Left Republicanism

Republicans The United Irishmen Nationalists
Young Ireland The Fenians Socialists Conclusion
18
2 The Arrival of Left Republicanism

James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican
Party After the Irish Socialist Republican Party
Connollys Socialism Connollys Republicanism
Connolly and Unionism Connolly and Gender
The Connolly Paradox
80
3 Left-Republican Interventions
113
Left Republicanism on the Margins: 191626
Political Radicalism and Partition Left Republicanism
After Partition Left Republicanism and the Rise of
Fianna Fil Left-Republican Retreat: the Republican
Congress A New Departure: Clann na Poblachta
Discarding the Republic: From Official Sinn Fin to
Democratic Left Conclusion
4 A Century of Struggle
174
Arthur Griffiths Sinn Fin Sinn Fin After the Rising
Sinn Fin During the War of Independence Sinn Fin
After the AngloIrish Treaty Sinn Fin on the Margins
Sinn Fin Reorganises Sinn Fin in the 1960s Unionist
Hegemony and State Crisis Civil Rights and Conflict
Provisional Sinn Fin Political Expansion Changing
Dynamics Adapting to Changing Political Conditions
Towards a Lasting Peace The Peace Process
Agreement Building the Future Conclusion
vii
viii
SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM
Conclusion
The History Lesson Eight Theses on the Future of
Sinn Fin 2016: The Prospects and Risks of Success
289
Notes
Appendix 1: Sinn Fin Election Results 19822007
Appendix 2: Sinn Fin Policy Documents
Recommended Reading
Bibliography
Index
312
325
327
331
333
340
INTRODUCTION
This book is not a history of but rather a critical engagement with

the past, present and future of Sinn Fin and left republicanism.
I am neither a historian nor a political scientist. I am, first and
foremost, a political activist, committed to a particular political
project. That project is based on a certain critique of the existing
order of things, and a set of values about what is right and wrong,
what is just and unjust, in todays world. On the basis of this
critique and these values, I have consciously become part of a
broader political struggle for change, in Ireland and the wider
world. That struggle provides the context in which this book
is written and in a small way its writing is part of my activist
contribution to that struggle.
More specifically I am an Irish republican socialist. I believe
that the best form of democracy can be achieved in Ireland today
through the ending of partition, the withdrawal of the British
state from the north of Ireland and the building of a political
system in which all the people who inhabit the island of Ireland
are sovereign. My conception of sovereignty is neither insular
nor anachronistic, but a genuinely radical democratic one, in
which self-determination is vested in people in a plurality of ways
individual, communal, local, national, international while
recognising the complexity of life in todays internationalised
world. The challenge for Irish republicanism at the start of the
twenty-first century is to articulate forms of sovereignty and selfdetermination and to build institutions of governance that are
open, democratic, plural and just, in meaningful and materially
effective ways.
Central to this articulation has to be a socio-political and
economic critique of contemporary society that recognises
the structural inequalities embedded in the very fabric of our
1
lives. These structural inequalities along lines of class, gender,

race, religion and sexual orientation, to name a few form the
architecture in which we live our lives and which prevent us from
realising the meaning of equality. From such a critique we can build
strategies for removing these inequalities and continue the long and
uncharted process of building new architectures social, political,
economic based not on inequality and discrimination, but on
empowerment and solidarity. This process of critique, strategy
and struggle is what I understand to be socialism, albeit heavily
indebted to the parallel movements of feminism, anti-imperialism,
anti-racism and ecologism, which have motivated progressive
movements across the globe throughout the twentieth century.
This articulation is left republicanism: a commitment to radical
participatory democracy, popular pluralist sovereignty, social and
economic justice, and political and cultural equality, coupled with
a commitment to confronting and challenging the loci of power
and inequality which constitute the architecture of modern society
in order to radically alter the way in which we as human beings
organise our lives.
But why choose the term left republicanism? Most authors
prefer the labels socialist republicanism (English 1994, 2003)
or social republicanism (Patterson 1997) to describe Irish
republicans with left-leaning politics since the nineteenth century.
In fact, the term left republican is almost wholly absent from the
existing academic and historical literature. Nor is it widely used
in the everyday activist vocabulary of those on the left of Irish
republican political life. The value of the term is twofold. First,
social republicanism has pejorative connotations, especially in
the context of Pattersons work, implying a lack of socialist or
left-wing substance to what that author argues is the republican
populism of modern-day Sinn Fin. However the more strident
term socialist republicanism is too restrictive to capture the
broader historical reality of left-wing republicanism in twentiethcentury Ireland, particularly when socialism is used in its more
traditional, Marxian form. By using the term left republicanism,
therefore, I want to avoid Pattersons negative use of the social
label, while at the same time broaden the reference of the term
INTRODUCTION
to include left republicans concerned less with a traditional

economistic socialist politics than with a politics informed by the
radicalism of the New Left, anti-imperialism, feminism, ecologism
and other popular movements.
Left republicanism includes unambiguously socialist individuals
and formations such as James Connolly and his Irish Socialist
Republican Party (ISRP) at the turn of the twentieth century, and
Peadar ODonnell and the Republican Congress of the 1930s, but
also Sen MacBride and Clann na Poblachta, who in the 1940s
and 1950s, while certainly not socialist, did articulate a more
left-leaning radical republicanism. This label also includes the
left radicalism that helped bring Fianna Fil to power in the early
1930s. Likewise, the left-republican label adequately describes
Official Sinn Fin and The Workers Party during the 1970s and
early 1980s and contemporary Sinn Fin up to the present. Indeed,
left republicanism also includes individuals and tendencies within
the broader womens movement, the trade unions, sections of
the Green and Labour parties and associated movements and
intellectuals on the left of the Irish political mainstream. Thus left
republicanism as a term connotes all those republican activists,
intellectuals and organisations who during the course of the
twentieth century attempted, with varying degrees of success and
failure, to integrate a left-wing politics in the most plural sense
of the term with traditional republican demands for full national
independence and popular political sovereignty.
Semantic debates and grand rhetoric notwithstanding, the
actual business of political struggle is always less glamorous
and exciting than the history books suggest. It can be a slow,
monotonous, challenging and disempowering experience, with
defeat or compromise more readily available than victory. It is
also always a collective enterprise with all the attendant strains,
stresses and personal compromises involved. In the heat of all of
this, there is seldom time to step back, take stock and attempt to
glance, even momentarily, at the bigger picture. Equally difficult
is the task of self-reflection and self-criticism, as essential as it
is problematic, for political movements as much as individuals.
Opening oneself up and laying bare ones weaknesses for all to see
is a dangerous and at times traumatic undertaking, from which

friends and colleagues often recoil. Absorbing and learning from
the criticisms of ones opponents is even more difficult, as it
involves resisting the natural inclination to defend ones position
at all costs. Yet without such reflection and critique, without
regard for the arguments and positions of others, locked as we are
in the heat of ongoing struggle, how can we get a sense of where
we are, and what changes, if any, we need to make in order to
move our struggle one step further?
The questions that form the basis of this book emerge out of
these interrelated realities. They are an exercise in self-reflection
and self-criticism, exploring the development of the Irish leftrepublican project throughout the twentieth century, in order
to understand our failures so that we may better confront our
weaknesses and shortcomings in the present and in the future.
In doing so I want to trace the emergence of left republicanism
from its origins in the Europe and Ireland of the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, through to its critical interventions in Irish
political life during the twentieth century. This critical narrative
will frame a more detailed discussion of where left republicanism
is today, at the start of this century. My questions will be rather
simple: What constitutes left republicanism? Why did it emerge
and take the forms it did? Why did it move in certain directions
and take particular decisions at key moments in its history?
Crucially, I want to understand why left republicanism failed
to become hegemonic within the broader nationalist movement
during the first half of the twentieth century, and in Irish society
more generally into the present. Equally important is the ongoing
antagonistic relationship between republicanism and unionism
from the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth,
and the question of where this relationship is likely to travel in
the future.
The purpose of asking and possibly answering these questions
is not an academic exercise. At a time when left republicanism
is growing in political power and impact in Ireland, primarily in
the party political form of Sinn Fin, understanding these issues
takes on a more immediate importance. If we are to learn from
INTRODUCTION
the mistakes and miscalculations of the past and build a stronger

vehicle for change in the present, then we need to take a hard and
cold look at who we are and where we have come from.
Asking questions about the past of left republicanism will
lead to questions about its present and potential futures. Where
is left republicanism in the present? What are its strengths and
weaknesses? Where are the blind spots and shortcomings? Can we
seriously think about left republicanism becoming the hegemonic
political force in contemporary Ireland, and acting as the engine
for change across the entire spectrum of society? Do we have the
necessary political and social capital to offer a real alternative to
the existing though fragile status quo? Can we build a community
for change of sufficient strength to challenge those who benefit
from inequality and discrimination, and whose political function
is to preserve the present societal architecture at all costs?
In asking and hopefully answering these questions I want to
depart significantly from previous writings by republicans and
non-republicans alike. My purpose will not be to define the
true republicanism as if such a thing actually existed nor to
blindly defend republican principle from its detractors. I am not
interested in recovering a lost or authentic republicanism from
its apparently abused deviations. Such ideas are banal legitimisations used to avoid frank and open critical discussion. However,
while engaging seriously with critiques of left republicanism, I
also want to challenge many of their confusions and misreadings,
whether based on poor analysis or political prejudice.
Equally, I want to return left republicanism to its proper
international context. Writings on Irish politics and history,
whether by republicans or revisionists, are often too insular,
arguing that Irelands development is an internal and exceptional
affair, different from the normal path of European or indeed
world events.1 For a country as small and porous as Ireland
such an argument is patent nonsense, yet it continues to hold
widespread currency.
I also want to include discussion of what left republicanism has
ignored or misunderstood in the course of its history, the effect of
which has been to weaken the left-republican analysis of society
and in turn our political project. Crucial issues here are those
relating to gender and Irish unionism.
The result of all of this should be neither apology for the past
and present of left republicanism nor a surrender to the positions
of our critics, but rather an honest and critical reflection into the
past, present and future of left republicanism, by an active and
committed proponent the aim of which is to provide greater
understanding of the content and rationale of our political
tradition while at the same time strengthening the ability of the
project to achieve its aims.
As Irish society north and south settles into the twenty-first
century, there are clear signs of political change. The existing
hegemonies national, regional and global are stumbling, and
in the flux and uncertainty that marks our present transition many
opportunities are available to build a different kind of society. It
is incumbent on those of us who are motivated to play a part in
this change that we examine and develop the tools with which
we hope to shape the outcome of the process.
In Ireland today there are a number of conflicting and contradictory
understandings of republicanism as an ideology and as a political
force. Politicians, journalists and academics offer a wide array of
explanations, descriptions and assessments of where republicanism
has come from and of what its effects are on contemporary society
and politics. Republicans see themselves as agents of positive
and radical change. Whether in the form of Sinn Fin, the IRA,
other political or military groupings or independent activists and
writers, Irish republicanism is part of a long tradition that has been
at the forefront of campaigns for democracy, justice and equality
in modern Ireland. Indeed, this placing of republicanism at the
radical pole of Irish politics has meant that, for many republicans,
implicit in their self-definition is a commitment to a left-wing
socio-economic and political programme, however defined. Sinn
Fins constitution commits the party to the establishment of a
democratic socialist republic.2 In his presidential address at the
partys 2004 Ard Fheis (national conference) Gerry Adams outlined
the meaning of this commitment in the following terms:
INTRODUCTION
The past decade has been the decade of the peace process in Ireland. The
politics of Sinn Fins peace strategy is to empower people. But the past
decade has also been the decade of tribunals when the corrupt relationship
between leading politicians in this State and big business was exposed
as never before ... Communities suffered from atrociously sub-standard
housing in bleak estates without facilities. They endured the worst of the
drugs scourge and the poverty and the unemployment of the 1980s and
early 1990s. This party stood shoulder to shoulder with those people ...
We opposed cuts in health and education. We fought for facilities and
decent homes. We stood up to the drugs barons. We organised in the most
disadvantaged neighbourhoods. We protested at the senior politicians who
grew rich through criminality while they cynically urged the rest of us to
tighten our belts ... Since then of course and for the last decade the wealth
of this state has been greater than at any time in its history. We welcome
that. Do we have better schools, better hospitals, affordable homes? Have
people with disabilities beneted? No ... Let us send a clear message from
this Ard Fheis that Sinn Fin is in the business of righting these wrongs.
People have the right to a home, to a job, to education, and to health care
from the cradle to the grave. Campaigning on all of these issues is the core
of Sinn Fin activism. It is the key to bringing about change now. By acting
locally, while thinking nationally we tie together the great historic elements
of our philosophy ... Equality is the key. We are committed to building ...
an Ireland of equals, a united and free Ireland.3
Thus for republicans the struggle for an independent Irish democracy is
part and parcel of the broader struggle for a social and economic transformation of society based on principles of need and equality.
This self image contrasts sharply with the views offered by

Sinn Fins political opponents. In 2004, the former Progressive
Democrat (PD) Minister for Justice Michael McDowell described
Sinn Fin as a Nazi party. Speaking in an interview with the Irish
Star on Sunday the minister said: When it comes to the next
election, we [the Irish electorate] shouldnt do what the people of
Germany did in the 1930s when they elected to office people that
liked to have it both ways the Brownshirts and the Nazis which
were a threat to democracy.4 McDowells comments were echoed
the same weekend by a number of other government ministers
during the Ard Fheis of the PDs senior coalition partner Fianna
Fil. Sinn Fin had turned the border counties into an economic
wasteland, alleged one senior party spokesperson, and had made
politics with the ballot box in one hand and a cudgel in the other,
in the view of another.5 These themes of Sinn Fin as a danger to
democracy, a violent fascist or authoritarian force and a threat
to economic and social stability are not new. Similar views have
been expressed by senior British government figures, leaders of
unionism, the Social Democratic and Labour Party and other
nationalist political parties and journalists for almost a century.
Indeed such views have a wider currency than party political
opponents, and it is this currency that means such rhetorical
flourishes in the mouth of an election or on the eve of important
peace process negotiations cannot be ignored as the sabre rattling
of competitive party politics. They are ideas and opinions that are
embedded in many sectors of Irish public and private opinion.
Take for example the collection of essays Republicanism in
Modern Ireland, edited by Fearghal McGarry (2003). Eleven
essays written by a variety of commentators and historians trace
the development of republicanism through the twentieth century.
In his own introduction, McGarry describes republicanism as an
introspective tradition with a marked preoccupation with the
past and its own place within it.6 The primary characteristics of
this introspective tradition are abstention from participation in
electoral politics, refusal to acknowledge the reality of Protestant
support for the Union and commitment to the use of physical
force.7 However, contemporary republican leaders have, McGarry
argues, willingly consigned to the past such anachronistic
baggage8 and in doing so produced an irreversible revision of
republican ideology.9
What is interesting about McGarrys brief comments is the
distance between his characterisation of republicanism and that
maintained by republicans throughout the twentieth century.
Republicans see themselves almost universally as both internationalist in their thinking and actions and focused on the present
and future rather than the past. Indeed it would be hard to think
of any of the leading republicans, particularly left republicans of
INTRODUCTION
the twentieth century, as fitting McGarrys mould, whether one

is talking of James Connolly, Peadar ODonnell, Sen MacBride,
Toms MacGiolla or Gerry Adams. Equally, his confusion of the
use of armed struggle and electoral abstentionism as principles
rather than tactics suggests that somehow these aspects of political
strategy are actually defining characteristics of republicanism,
the abandonment of which involves an irreversible revision of
republican ideology.10
What McGarry is articulating is a view of republicanism as
inherently violent, narrow minded, suspicious of politics and
obsessed with the past all central ingredients of authoritarian
and fascistic politics. A variation on this theme can be found
in Eoin OMalleys paper Populist Nationalists: Sinn Fin
and Redefining the Radical Right.11 A further confusion is
articulated in another contribution to McGarrys volume. Irish
historian R.V. Comerford argues that there is, in fact, no ideal
or set of ideals that defines the boundaries of Irish republicanism,
past or present;12 what does define republicanism for Comerford
is the practice or advocacy of physical force insurgency under
the banner of independence.13 He goes further, taking mutually
exclusive connotations of democracy and republicanism,14 the
possibility of any democratic deployment of violence, or the
use of violence to achieve democratic goals, is absent from his
considerations. Republicanism is devoid of ideology, inherently
anti-democratic and exclusively violent. Unfortunately for
Comerford such descriptions fit neither the historical evidence
nor the self-definition of republicans themselves.
Comerford, McGarry and OMalley are respected and
academically accomplished historians and political scientists. The
views they express are widely held amongst their contemporaries. Indeed there is a clear continuity between the work of these
writers and the views expressed by politicians from a wide variety
of political parties and positions. Clearly there is more at stake
here than political point scoring and ideological positioning. If we
accept that these different views of republicanism are serious and
sincerely held by their proponents, then a number of questions
arise. How are these contrasting and contradictory views of
10
Irish republicanism possible? Which of these views is closest to

the actual reality of republican ideology and political practice?
Why does there appear to be such basic confusion about the
fundamentals of republicanism? Moreover, if the negative views
articulated by such a wide variety of academic, journalistic and
political individuals and groups are right, then why are a growing
number of people across the island of Ireland accepting the self
image of contemporary republicans and joining or voting for
Sinn Fin?
The answers partly lie in the fact that all commentators
approach the subject of Sinn Fin in the context of a protracted
period of armed conflict in which more than 3,500 people
have been killed. Thus all writers, including this one, whether
consciously or not, are protagonists in the broader political battle
of ideas that accompanies the conflict. The brutal reality of that
conflict, Sinn Fins role in it, and both state-imposed and selfimposed censorship, have produced an intellectual environment
ill equipped to the task of understanding Sinn Fin or its impact
on modern Ireland. Richard English, in his detailed history of
the IRA, rightly comments that republicanism post 1970 has
received little serious analysis and that much writing on the
subject has lacked rigour.15 This is particularly the case with Sinn
Fin. Before 2000, the majority of work on Irish republicanism
focused almost exclusively on the IRA. Sinn Fin was addressed
only as a secondary theme and consequently most writers failed
to deal adequately with the ideological and strategic development
of the party as a political force in its own right. Henry Pattersons
Politics of Illusion, first published in 1989, and Michael Laffans
archival history of the partys early years, The Resurrection of
Ireland, published in 1999, are two notable exceptions. Since 2002
there has been a significant growth in literature dealing specifically
with the history and politics of Sinn Fin. Works by Brian Feeney
(2002), Agnes Maillot (2005), Martyn Frampton (2005), Gerard
Murray and Jonathan Tonge (2005), Eoin OMalley (2006), John
Doyle (2006) and Kevin Bean (2007) have greatly improved our
knowledge of this history.
INTRODUCTION
11
Unfortunately much of this literature focuses on biography

and chronology rather than analysis and critique, or, where
analysis is attempted, it is based on poor research or political
prejudice. Despite the intentions of the authors they are unable
to tell us why Sinn Fin developed in the way it did. There are
also serious gaps in the chronologies themselves, with writers
failing to capture the detail and depth of Sinn Fins development,
particularly over the last thirty years. Crucially there is a lack of
appreciation for the external influences on Sinn Fin, whether
from other left-republican discourses and formations or from
the changing domestic and international contexts in which the
party operates.
Republicans have also failed to provide a convincing account
of our own history. Patterson is correct when he argues that
republicans display a pronounced tendency to project a
monochrome remembrance of [themselves] as a principled and
self-sacrificing minority which has challenged British rule down
through the centuries.16 Indeed there is a strong and powerful
tradition, annually served by commemorations of the rebellions
and leaders of Irish republicanism, through which contemporary
republican activists locate ourselves within a proud and long
tradition of political struggle against the British state. From the
mass commemorations each Easter to remember the 1916 Rising,
and the annual mobilisations celebrating the 1981 hunger strikes,
to a myriad of smaller events across the country and indeed the
world, republicans chart the ups and downs of political and
military confrontation with Britain from 1798 to the present,
and in doing so continually recreate a lived sense of community
and tradition.
Such events serve a number of functions. They allow us to
legitimise our political project on an ongoing basis, laying claim
to a rich and powerful political heritage, especially at times of
intense demonisation and criminalisation from the state and its
allies. They are also a reminder of the very real and serious
sacrifices of earlier generations of republicans, many of whom
gave their lives in the struggle for democracy and justice in Ireland.
This is not just a symbolic process, but also a very material and
12
human one, during which we individually and collectively draw

inspiration from the efforts and contributions of others in order
to motivate ourselves in the immediate future. Such commemorations are also important opportunities for political intervention
and popular mobilisation, whose purpose is contingent on the
politics of the day.
However, one of the consequences of this important and
valuable commemorative calendar and indeed its associated
rhetoric is that we tend to construct a linear and at times
ahistorical understanding of ourselves. We gloss over the contradictions and failures of the past in order to mobilise its
symbolic value in the service of present political immediacies. We
replicate, albeit for political expediency, the same mechanistic,
mythologising narrative of republican history as both earlier
generations of nationalist historians and more modern revisionist
critics. We talk of three hundred years of unbroken struggle
against British imperialism and one hundred years of Sinn Fin
as if throughout this entire period our political project, its form
and content, its shape and style, have all remained essentially
the same. As a result of this we have left ourselves open to the
criticism of historians and commentators that our vision of the
past is inaccurate, inadequate, and based on romanticised and
shallow readings of our political history. In turn, we have allowed
such writers to claim to occupy the ground of objective, accurate
and legitimate readings of that past.
More serious than this charge, however, is that in failing to
adequately understand the complexity and contradictory nature
of our own political history, we limit our ability to learn from the
mistakes of our past and strengthen our project in the present and
future. Examples of this can be found in many of the key historical
and political writings by republicans, such as Berresford Ellis The
History of the Irish Working Class and T.A. Jacksons Ireland Her
Own. Both books chart the development of republican, nationalist
and socialist politics in Ireland from Celtic times through to the
twentieth century. Both avoid the revisionist claim of telling
Irish history as a morality tale, instead offering the reader an
analysis that is as much based on class as it is on the interaction of
INTRODUCTION
13
AngloIrish power relations. The divisions within the Irish nation,

whether between unionist and nationalist or working class and
bourgeoisie, are as central to the account as the divisions between
Dublin and London, and the broader international context is
always present. However, despite the close attention to social and
economic context, and the structural factors which strengthen
or weaken the prospects for rebellion and social change at any
given moment, both writers find themselves unable to explain,
analytically, why successive generations of republicans failed in
their objectives of supplanting British rule in Ireland, ensuring
radical social and economic change, or even sustaining popular
public support for anything longer than brief periods of time.
The political rightness and justness of republican leaders and
formations from the eighteenth century to the present is always
in inverse proportion to their political failure. In turn this political
failure is always external to republicans themselves, laid at the
door of British repression and Irish treachery. We are told the
story of an unbroken line of political courage and sacrifice, from
Wolfe Tone to Fintan Lalor and Connolly, who, despite all their
best efforts, and when at the point of success, were betrayed and
denied victory.
Irish history is filled with state repression and political
compromise at the expense of real societal change, and these
factors are part of the overall picture of republicans failure.
But they are not adequate explanations in themselves. Why did
the United Irish rebellion fail in 1798, and the mass support for
republicanism dissipate by the end of the century? Why were the
Fenians unable to launch a successful rebellion at any stage in
the nineteenth century, despite considerable social and political
support? Why were Connollys ISRP and Citizen Army such
marginal forces in the decades preceding the 1916 Rising, and,
despite intensive industrial unrest, why did the Irish left exert
such little influence in the post-1921 political order? These are
questions which Jackson, Berresford Ellis and their successors are
unable to answer other than by blaming conservative nationalist,
Catholic and unionist political and religious leaders colluding with
14
British imperial interests and deceiving the Irish working class.

Are these really credible answers?
We cannot properly understand why republicanism has
repeatedly failed to achieve its objectives if we do not also
critically assess the contribution of republicans themselves to that
failure. Elevating our political forefathers/mothers to the status
of icons does not serve the politics for which they fought and in
many cases died for. However, we must also avoid the revisionist
demand to abandon our political history altogether. The validity
of revisionist critiques of nationalist and republican narratives of
our political past does not automatically validate their narrative
of those historical moments themselves or their proscriptions in
the political present.
John Newsinger, writing in his 1994 study Fenianism in MidVictorian Britain, argues against those readings which view
republican history as an
unbroken tradition of struggle against British rule that goes back 800 years.
This tradition is in fact an ideological construct, a manufactured history
that was invented to give legitimacy to the modern nationalist cause. It
celebrates a mythical past rather than helping to understand the actual
development of Irish society.17
Instead he suggests that we assess republicanism as a series of

distinct movements of opposition to English, later British rule,
that were the products of specific conditions and circumstances.18
Newsinger, unlike mainstream revisionist writers, does not deny
the existence or legitimacy of the republican political tradition
or ideology, but rather asks the student of history to locate the
emergence and development of republicanism within its shifting
and changing socio-economic and political contexts with all
of the similarities and differences, continuities and contradictions, which that involves. His challenge is a formidable one, to
rewrite our own history in ways that acknowledge its limitations,
weaknesses and failures as much as its strengths, successes and
possibilities, and in so doing to produce a narrative which is
both respectful of the historical continuity over three hundred
years of Irish republicanism while at the same time sensitive to
INTRODUCTION
15
the contingent and specific contexts from which republicanism

has emerged and impacted in distinct and forceful ways on the
broader development of Irish society.
Thus the work that follows tries to offer a more rounded and
comprehensive framework for analysing and understanding
the historical development and contemporary manifestations
of Sinn Fin to that offered by supporters, opponents or selfprofessed objective observers. I want to apply a more materialist
approach, focusing on the specific historical context in which left
republicanism develops and evolves. How did the past and readings
of the past shape left republicans conception of themselves? How
did left republicans develop their own ideological, organisational
and strategic repertoire? What happened when these repertoires
came up against the political or economic forces of the day? How
did left republicans respond, adapt and develop in response to
the strategies of their opponents?
Central to this approach is the issue of context, national and
international. It is impossible to understand the history and
development of Irish left republicanism outside of the national
and international context in which it is operating. This may seem
a very obvious statement, but is one which is not taken into
account in practice by many writers on the subject. To do so
involves understanding the complex and reciprocal relationship
between international, European and domestic events and
left-republican ideology and political practice. It also requires
a reading of how these overlapping and interlocking contexts
produce limitations and disruptions to republicanism and how in
turn left republicanism addresses and responds to these factors,
not just in tactical but also in strategic and ideological ways.
Equally, left republican ideology needs greater exploration. We
need to move away from the common-sense understandings that
pervade academic and journalistic texts and outline the historical
evolution of left republicanism as an ideology, what it stands
for, how it changes, wherein lie its contradictions, blind spots
and omissions as much as its positive and conscious content. In
addition to ideology, there is also the question of policy, in the
16
broadest sense of the term. What do left republicans have to say

about matters political, social, economic, cultural, institutional
and international? How have these policies changed over time,
and why? What are the areas of policy where left republicanism
remains silent or ambiguous and what does this tell us?
More ignored than policy in the literature but just as important
is the question of form. How do left republicans make politics
and where do they make it? What are the locations of political
struggle, the modalities of struggle, the strategies and the styles?
How and why have these forms changed and, again, what does
this tell us about the broader politics of left republicanism? What
is the interaction between ideology, policy and form, and how
does each inform and mould the other?
How, furthermore, has left republicanism managed and
responded to the fundamental antagonisms in modern society,
in particular those of nation, class and gender? Where are the
gender and class politics of left republicanism in terms of ideology,
policy and form?
And finally, what are the outcomes of left republicanism as
distinct from its motivations? What are the political, institutional,
economic, social and cultural consequences of left republicanism?
How does it impact on the world around it and shape its own
context? How does it relate to and impact on other political
protagonists, whether institutional or social? To what extent do
these outcomes measure up to the stated intentions and objectives
of left republicanism?
These six indicators will form the framework for the
discussion of left republicanism that follows. They will allow
me to describe and assess the various moments and manifestations of left republicanism. In doing so I want to offer the
reader an understanding that is substantially different from that
available elsewhere. More importantly, for this author at least,
it will also provide left republicanism with a more critical and
therefore more useful reflection on our past, the aim of which is
to strengthen our ability to intervene in the present and shape
our collective futures.
INTRODUCTION
17
To understand society deeply, argues Brazilian social theorist

Roberto Mangabeira Unger, is always to see the settled from
the point of view of the unsettled allowing us to uncover the
perilous, uncertain, malleable quality of society.19 If what follows
is unsettling, particularly for republican readers, then this book
will have gone some way to achieving its intended task.
1
THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM
Left republicanism is a twentieth-century political phenomena.

In ideological and organisational terms its arrival was signalled
by the formation of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896,
and in the writings of James Connolly from that time through
to his execution for participating in the republican Rising of
1916. However, the origins of left republicanism are to be found
in the political and economic context and radical ideological
and organisational formations of late eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century Ireland and Europe. Proper consideration
will be given to Connolly and the ISRP in Chapter 2, but before
that it is important to understand the foundations upon which
left republicanism was built.
Republicans
It is impossible to understand the emergence and character of
the mass revolutionary republican movement that developed in
Ireland at the end of eighteenth century outside the context of
events in England and Europe in the proceeding hundred years.
Europe, during this period, was in the grip of what historian Eric
Hobsbawm has called the dual revolution. The political power
of the old monarchies was being challenged by the revolutionary
demands for parliamentary democracy on the part of emerging
bourgeois republicans. Simultaneously, the old feudal economic
relations between landlord and peasant were being undermined
by the arrival of capitalism and the explosion of the industrial
revolution.1 Neither of these revolutions were quick or simple
processes, and their emergence, development and eventual
18
19
triumph was to shape the continent throughout the course of the

seventeenth, eighteenth and much of the nineteenth centuries.
In Ireland the particular political manifestation of these two
revolutions came in the form of United Irish republicanism. Its
character and shape were not unique by any standards, drawing
both structurally and consciously on the experience of their
European counterparts. Indeed Irish republicanism was very
much part of the European mainstream. However the particular
political and economic relationship which existed between the
English state and Ireland at this time, a relationship undeniably
colonial, conditioned Irish republicanism in ways which would
mark it as profoundly different from that mainstream, not so
much in its political and practical character as in its implications
and legacy for future AngloIrish relations, and for Irish society
more generally.
England experienced these great challenges to feudalism and
monarchy almost a century before the rest of Europe. At the heart
of the confrontation, which led to the English Civil War of 1641
to 1653, was the republican challenge to the old order. However,
unlike its European counterparts, the confrontation did not end
in bourgeois victory and the declaration of a republic, but in a
very typical English compromise. The Glorious Revolution of
1688 was the product of a trade-off between the two competing
political forces of seventeenth-century England, the emerging class
of merchants and business people and the old landed gentry and
royal court. The compromise was, in the view of its protagonists,
necessitated by a fear of the consequences of popular revolt and a
challenge to the privileges of both classes by the lower orders.2
A constitutional monarchy was established, stopping short of the
republic demanded by more radical forces; feudal tenures were
abolished without providing for common ownership of the land;
government interference in industry ended, leaving employers and
the market in control of industry and neutralising the democratic
demands of small artisans and labourers; and religious radicalism
was undermined by allowing the union of church and state to
remain. Thus the post-Civil War settlement created a space for
the coexistence of the old feudal regime and the new bourgeois
20
order, thereby blocking the erosion of the social fabric threatened

by the proliferation of radical political movements, such as the
Levellers and the Diggers, in the space that had opened up during
the conflict.3 In the longer term the bourgeois character of this
compromise was to triumph, but through a longer and more
cautious process than in the rest of Europe. In this way England
remained effectively insulated from the revolutionary currents
that would sweep Europe in the century that followed.
In Ireland, however, the post-Civil War settlement not
only failed to resolve the key fault lines of local politics, but
left intact fundamental antagonisms which, as the eighteenth
century dawned, would make the Irish more fertile subjects for
the subsequent French and American revolutionary challenges to
absolutism and English colonialism. The social, economic and
political conditions which prevailed in Ireland throughout the
late seventeenth and early to mid eighteenth centuries were as
much a product of the failure of the English Glorious Revolution
to resolve questions of land, property and liberty in Ireland as
they were part of the broader European bourgeois challenge to
the feudal relations of the old order. Berresford Ellis describes the
general condition of the Irish people in the eighteenth century [as
one of] extreme wretchedness and poverty. In the 1740 famine
it was estimated that 400,000 people died while famines in
1757, 1765 and 1770 increased their desperate condition.4 Roy
Foster confirms this bleak picture when he describes the general
unanimity of contemporary impressions: that where Ireland
was poor and backward, it was astoundingly so.5 Berresford
Ellis rightly emphasises the impact of the unreformed landlord
system as central to the hardship and grievances of the rural
Irish peasants. But equally, political corruption, negligence and
indifference were all the hallmarks of the Ascendancys rule of
the Irish parliament.
In addition to the poverty of the masses, the penal laws
continued to deny political and religious rights to the emerging
Catholic and dissenter middle classes. Combined with government
restrictions on Irish, predominantly Presbyterian-run, trade and
restrictions on Catholic ownership of property, such inequalities
21
ensured that a significant level of grievance among the propertied

classes would run parallel to that of the peasant majority of the
population.6 These grievances would lead to both social classes
engaging in significant levels of political activism throughout the
course of the eighteenth century.
The Irish parliament, representing the Anglican landed elite,
was at the centre of these grievances, and operated as a colonial
outpost, taking every measure to ensure its own survival. The
parliaments legitimacy was based not on popular or democratic
support, even by the limited standards of the time, but on political
and military backing from London. Because of this central fact, the
political and economic exclusion of Catholics and Presbyterians
was seen as essential in maintaining Anglican power and privilege.
Thus the demands for economic and political reform and Catholic
emancipation which came to dominate the politics of opposition
to the parliament during the first half of the eighteenth century
could only lead to a more radical confrontation, as such reform
would inevitably be denied.
When it came to Ireland, England was primarily concerned
with the broader strategic and geo-political implications of
the island. Internal matters were read against the backdrop of
potentially greater external threats, particularly in the postFrench revolutionary period. Maintaining order in Ireland was
paramount, and the AngloIrish Ascendancy was viewed as having
an integral part in this. Their control of Irish affairs ensured
broader strategic safety for England. Thus London adopted a
different set of priorities in Ireland than it did at home.7
The compromise of the Glorious Revolution ensured stability
in England by providing the old Anglican gentry and Crown
and the emerging Presbyterian propertied classes with a shared
stake in the political and economic order. In Ireland it simply
served to consolidate the power and privilege of the Ascendancy
at the expense of the Presbyterian and Catholic middle classes.
In Fosters words: Whereas in England the revolution meant the
victory of Parliament, in Ireland it represented the final guarantee
of colonial ascendancy.8 Thus not only was Ireland ripe for
the radical promise of revolution, but in the process it would
22
create a space whereby the political and economic programme

of republicanism would become wedded to the institutional and
constitutional demand for separation from England.
However, any challenge to the political authority of the
Ascendancy would be viewed as an assault on the integrity and
security of England itself. The emergence of the United Irishmen at
the end of the eighteenth century was not merely a matter internal
to Ireland, or a dispute between different social and political
classes, but an issue which went to the very foundations of the
English state. It is impossible to understand the response of that
state to the United Irishmen in anything other than this context.
The United Irishmen

Irish republicanism emerged, like its counterparts across Europe,
as a demand by the middle classes for greater political representation in parliament and less governmental interference in their
economic activity. In France, such demands were made against the
monarch and his arbitrary system of absolutist and aristocratic
patronage. However in Ireland, as in America, the grievances were
made against a parliament unrepresentative of the interests of the
propertied classes and supported by a colonial power in London.
Thus the demands for change were not only directed against the
local government. The very structure of the relationship between
Ireland and the English state was being called into question.
In their earliest manifestation these demands were for a
programme of parliamentary reform, and as such were more in
line with the prevailing English radical Whig tradition than the
emerging French republicanism. In their own words, the United
Irishmen were calling for a complete reform in the Legislature,
founded on the principles of civil, political and religious liberty.9
In general terms, the early United Irish conception of liberty
drew great inspiration from Paines Rights of Man, and they
were instrumental in popularising the tract throughout Ireland.
Paines argument in favour of the inclusion of the commercial and
manufacturing sectors in government was a powerful one for the
urban radicals in Belfast and Dublin.10 However, even within this
23
group there were significant divisions as to who exactly should

receive the franchise. In 1792 as the Society was drafting its first
programme of reform, a disagreement emerged over whether or
not to use ownership of property as a precondition to voting
rights. The committee voted eleven to nine in favour of the more
radical principle of universal manhood suffrage, and in doing
so initiated a process of alienating more cautious middle class
reformers who had much to fear from the full exercise of rights
of citizenship by the lower classes.11 The radicals had clearly won
the day, but events beyond their control were soon to alter their
project in profound ways.
The unfolding revolution in France had two consequences
for Irish republicans. The first was that it provided them with
great political and ideological encouragement and held out the
prospect of practical support. However, it also provided radical
Presbyterians with a set of arguments in favour of a new political
alliance with the Catholic majority population on the island.
The fact that the French Revolution took place in a Catholic
country and abolished the relationship between state and
church together with its system of taxation to fund religious
orders created an opening in the Presbyterian mind which
was quickly recognised and acted upon by United Irish leader
Wolfe Tone. At the centre of his much celebrated 1791 text, An
Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland, was not only
an argument against the inequities of the exclusion of Catholics
from political and economic power, but more importantly the
claim that ending these unjust conditions depended on an alliance
between dispossessed Catholics and radical Presbyterians against
both the Ascendancy and, crucially, the institutional link between
Ireland and England.
Nancy J. Curtin tells us that Tones pamphlet was an enormous
success, with sales of 6,000 by early 1792, and that it did much
to overcome prejudices [against Catholics] in Belfast, and the
pamphlet took pride of place, second only to Paines Rights
of Man, in the canon of Belfast radicalism.12 Later that year
the Society of the United Irishmen held its first public meeting,
inaugurating its existence and tabling motions which were to
24
become its founding principles. Three resolutions were passed

unanimously, all of which were drafted by Tone. They declared:
First, that the weight of English inuence in the government of the country
is so great as to require a cordial union among all the people of Ireland to
maintain that balance which is essential to the preservation of our liberties
and the creation and the extension of our commerce.
Second, that the sole constitutional mode by which this inuence can be
opposed is by the complete and radical reform of the representation of
the people in parliament.
Third, that no reform is practicable, efcacious, or just which shall not
include Irishmen of every religious persuasion.13
It was on this basis that the United Irishmen sought and were
successful in securing a tactical and strategic alliance with the
representatives of Catholic Ireland. A Catholic Committee in
opposition to the penal laws was formed in 1773 by the Catholic
middle class. It experienced a period of radicalisation at the end
of the 1780s, as its leadership passed from the more traditional
gentry and into the growing numbers of urban professionals and
businessmen. A mood of optimism that a period of change was
coming assisted the development of a more aggressive approach
which led to the call for a Catholic Convention in 1792. Jackson
highlights the radical implications of the event, calling as it did
for a petition to be sent to the king demanding full equality with
Protestants.14 However, the full detail of the convention reveals
a more nuanced picture. Curtin describes the deliberations as
moderately Whiggish in its proceedings.15 And while delegates
endorsed Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform,
they stopped short of supporting republicanism and emphasised
the long-standing middle-class Catholic belief that the British
constitution provided the best backdrop against which to
campaign for equality. Clearly the alliance between Presbyterian
radicals and the Catholic middle classes was tactical, and cannot
be read at the expense of ignoring deep-seated ideological and
strategic differences.
25
Differences of opinion notwithstanding, the government moved

quickly to counter this dangerous political alliance, particularly
after the declaration of war against France. Legal restrictions on
meetings, associations, bearing arms and forming militias were
introduced, United Irishmen meetings broken up, and the group
declared illegal. The impact of the governments response was
twofold: the United Irishmen, at a strategic level, moved from
reform to revolution and thus closer to their French counterparts,
and their Catholic allies began to adopt a deeper understanding of
the utility of republicanism. Curtin confirms this double shift:
Reform by conventional and legal methods appeared impossible under the
existing system. Faced with a corrupt and unresponsive administration,
reformers became revolutionaries. Many Catholics who had optimistically
and patiently looked to the eventual removal of their grievances by the
government now turned to the United Irishmen and sought redress through
rebellion. ... Catholic leaders declared that though there was a time when
they looked no further than a reform in parliament and a full emancipation
of the Catholic body, yet now their interests were general and not conned
to themselves; the question to be determined was no longer a Catholic
question but a national one the freedom of Ireland. The Catholics had
become patriots.16
In turn the republicans responded by launching a concerted drive

to recruit the ordinary mass of Catholics, localised agrarian and
urban radicals knows as Defenders, to the cause of national
rebellion. In addition French military support was sought. The
stage was set for rebellion. United Irish mobilisation was met with
a serious and sustained response by the state. As Curtin describes:
The policy indeed the system of government in Ireland was to
be one of unrelenting assault against the United Irish conspiracy.
British troops became much more numerous as the crisis became
more acute.17 The Earl of Camden put it more bluntly when he
proclaimed that government meant to strike terror.18
On the eve of the rebellion itself the United Irishmen claimed
to have half a million members, over half of whom were allegedly
armed. French assistance proved ineffectual, the rising poorly
coordinated, the rebels badly armed, and the degree of active
26
commitment to the rebellion concentrated in particular parts of

the country, notably Antrim, Down and Wexford. Roy Foster
described the result as probably the most concentrated episode
of violence in Irish history ... By the end of the summer [of
1798] the death-toll on both sides, from various causes, had
been estimated at 30,000.19 Foster goes on to describe the postrebellion retribution by the state, amounting in his estimation
to 231 sentences of death, 240 transportations of local leaders,
24 executions and 12 imprisonments.20 The rebellion was over,
and the United Irishmen crushed. The government in London
moved in 1800 to abolish the Irish parliament and, with the
Act of Union, to institutionally and morally integrate Ireland
into the United Kingdom. Despite strong protestations from the
Ascendancy, London recognised that its own interests and indeed
those of Ascendancy privilege were best preserved, if only in the
short term, by formal legislative union.
Assessment
How should we understand the United Irishmen? Who were
they, what did they stand for and whom did they represent? Of
course none of these questions have a singular answer and part
of our understanding needs to grapple with the complex and at
times contradictory nature of the programme and activities of
these eighteenth-century radicals. Indeed it would be wrong to
treat the United Irishmen as a single homogeneous entity with a
defined and coherent programme. This is simply not an accurate
historical account. Their political and ideological evolution was
as dependent on their context and political alliances as it was on
questions of social class.
In the first instance they were bourgeois parliamentary
reformers who wanted better government in order to advance
their own political and economic interests. The intransigence of
government in London and Dublin and the general revolutionary
climate throughout Europe and America led them to argue for
rebellion to achieve their goals. However, more important than
the means was the end, as separation from Britain became an
27
integral element of the radical pole of the movement. In Tones

famous words, the intention was To subvert the tyranny of our
execrable government, to break the connection with England,
the never-failing source of all our political evils, and to assert the
independence of my country these were my objects.21
Clearly the leadership of middle-class Catholics, as evidenced by
the Catholic Committee, was not wedded to separatism as a matter
of principle, but rather as a matter of circumstance. For them
Catholic emancipation was the end goal, and by the mid 1870s
separatism appeared the best route by which to achieve it.
Beyond these two groups was the mass of Irish peasants,
poor, hungry and without allegiance either to the Ascendancy
or to the English King. Urban artisans and rural radicals with
a history of localised opposition, political and violent, to their
social and economic circumstances, were ripe for a political
project that by connecting their immediate concerns with the
demand for legislative independence transformed them for the
first time in history into a coherent political force. Thus the United
Irishmen contained three distinct social groups, with separate yet
overlapping interests and demands. The uniting element was a
common enemy, the Ascendancy and their political masters in
London, and a common goal: separation.
However, while separatism was not in question, the detail of
who would govern after the rebellion and how remained an openended matter. The issue of the franchise was a case in point and
a key litmus test of the depth of radicalism at any given moment.
In an age when the mass of the population was viewed even
by European radical republicans as uneducated, uncivilised and
unable to make meaningful political decisions, the question of
the franchise was never clear-cut. Priscilla Metscher, in her study
Republicanism and Socialism in Ireland, illustrates the point:
Whitley Stokes, a Fellow of Trinity College, commented that the lower
classes are better qualied to choose an honest neighbour, than to judge of
a member of parliament. Even William Drennan did not think it advisable to
give every man a vote until Ireland had advanced considerably in knowledge
and civilisation. Thomas Addis Emmet, on the other hand, came out boldly
28
in favour of universal manhood suffrage, arguing that every male aged

eighteen upwards should have a vote. The nal adoption of the principle
of universal suffrage accepted by the committee on reform by a narrow
majority led seemingly to a considerable withdrawal of membership.22
Such sentiments were shared among the leadership of the Catholic

middle classes, whose interests were in securing rights, not for
all Catholics, but for the commercial and professional strata of
the community. While the republicans adopted universal male
suffrage this cannot hide the degree of opposition, or the political
and ideological tensions it created, which were to surface at a later
stage with significant and negative results.
It is also instructive that the final agreement was for manhood
suffrage. Womens rights did surface within the radical milieu in
Belfast through figures like Mary Ann McCracken, in the formation
of Womens United Irish societies, and in the pages of radical
publications such as the Northern Star but the extent to which
these ideas permeated even into the politically conscious leadership
of the broad United Irish movement has yet to be established,
and there is no reason to believe that female emancipation was a
serious or widespread demand of the movement as a whole. The
society was, in the first instance, primarily interested in securing
rights for the emerging male middle classes, like its counterparts
in America and France. The unlimited extension of political rights
to the lower orders of society presented an equally serious risk
to eighteenth-century republican notions of liberty and property
as did the existing undemocratic order of things. Moreover the
adoption of a more radical stance on the franchise, apart from
those who ideologically believed it its inherent value, was as much
a product of tactical necessity and conjectural reality as it was of
evolving political belief.
The same underlying tensions are to be found in the republican
approach to issues of property and poverty. Berresford Ellis
argues that the social programme of the United Irishmen can
best be summed up in the phrase the greatest happiness of the
greatest number.23 He goes on to quote at length a United
Irish manifesto with an endorsement from James Connolly
29
describing the manifesto as international, democratic and of

a class nature.24 At the heart of this reading, common among
twentieth-century left republicans, is the view that taken to its
logical conclusion the broad social approach of the United Irish
movement was based on the same values which would inspire
the labour and socialist movements of the following century.
However, eighteenth-century republicans were not taking their
own rhetoric to its logical conclusion, as is demonstrated by the
reaction of merchant republicans in Dublin whose opposition to
trade unionism and equality of property led them to differentiate
themselves from more radical seventeenth-century English groups
such as the Levellers. Metscher argues that:
the early aims and ideals of the Society are a reection of the middle-class
composition of its membership ... The majority of the United Irishmen from
the Presbyterian and Catholic middle class made it quite clear that equality
was political and not social equality. By liberty we never understood
unlimited freedom, not by equality the levelling of property. The lower
classes were to be enlightened by the most rapid of all instructors a
good government.25
The notion of the greatest happiness to the greatest number was

not a radical demand for the unlimited redistribution of wealth and
power across all classes and genders of society, but a more modest
demand for inclusion of the male middle classes into the centres
of political and economic power. Where radicals did include the
lower classes in their considerations it was in a more paternalistic
manner, believing in notions of civic responsibility to educate and
improve the well being of the poor through good government.
Curtin describes the social basis of the United Irish movement as
made up of petty-bourgeois activists whose opposition to the
status quo was based upon its obstruction of good government
and consequent economic prosperity.26 Their attitude to the lower
classes is best described by borrowing Marxs famous phrase
from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte: They cannot
represent themselves, they must be represented.
However, even such a limited form of radicalism contained
within it serious tensions, especially in the context of the republican
30
alliance with the urban and rural poor. When Tone announced
that 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, he was making a call echoed
by republicans across Europe for a broad democratic alliance
with the popular classes. Once mobilised, however, the popular
classes often took a different view of their ability to represent
their own interests and began to demand the full outworking of
the social and political logic of the republican demands for liberty
and equality. As with the franchise, the question of property rights
once extended runs the risk of undermining the basis of bourgeois
demands for reform and in turn challenges the very alliance that
is required to achieve these reforms. Eric Hobsbawm has called
this tension the dramatic dialectical dance:
This ... dance was to dominate the future generations. Time and again we
shall see moderate middle class reformers mobilising the masses against
die-hard resistance or counter-revolution. We shall see the masses pushing
beyond the moderates aims to their own social revolutions and the
moderates in turn splitting into a conservative group henceforth making
common cause with the reactionaries, and a left wing group determined
to pursue the rest of the as yet unachieved moderate aims with the help
of the masses, even at the risk of losing control of them.27
While Hobsbawm was speaking about the revolutions that swept

Europe in 1848, the dialectical dance was no different in late
eighteenth-century Ireland. It highlights not only the tension but
also one of the fatal weaknesses of the alliance that underpinned
the United Irish movement. As the moment of rebellion arrived
the revolutionary fervour of many, and particularly the rank and
file, would be undermined by the cautious timidity of many of
the leaders.28
Some revisionist scholars such as Henry Patterson have dismissed
the radical content of the United Irish moment as ambiguous
populist republicanism on the basis of its shallow commitment
to the principles of liberty and equality. However to do so is to
miss the point. Tone was expressing the unambiguous demands of
the emerging Irish middle classes for the abolition of privilege in
31
the feudal sense of the term and its replacement by the values and
virtues of good bourgeois government and economic management.
The values were radical for their time, despite the paternalism
and caution inherent in their Whiggish liberalism. However,
the real political and economic radicalism of the United Irish
movement emerged at the moment when both the Presbyterian
and Catholic middle classes entered into an alliance with the urban
and rural lower classes. At that point the extended possibilities of
republican demands were opened up in new and fundamentally
more challenging ways. While this challenge, following its defeat
in the rebellion of 1798, would not re-emerge until the Young
Ireland and Fenian movements of the following century, its force
and relevance cannot be dismissed.
Latter-day left-wing republicans are wrong to retrospectively
read a socialist intent into the discourse of the United Irishmen,
for such an intent is clearly not there, nor indeed was it there for
the popular classes, whose demands and grievances were more
localised and specific. However, what cannot be denied are the
more radical left-wing implications of the republican discourse
of liberty, equality and fraternity when developed in the context
of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The United Irish men
were not socialists, but without the existence of their political and
ideological project the development of radical and socialist politics
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland would have been
very different. Crucially they linked the demand for social and
economic equality to political liberty and national independence in
a way that would make the emergence of Irish cultural nationalism
and labour socialism during the course of the nineteenth century
more democratic than many of their European counterparts.
Alongside the political content and ideological legacy of the
United Irish movement consideration must be given to the forms
and modalities of politics that they adopted and developed to
achieve their aims. Through newspapers, pamphleteering and
the dissemination of political thought, Irish republicans took up
where radical movements of the seventeenth century such as the
Levellers and Diggers left off. Curtin described them as possessing
a real genius for disseminating their ideas.29 However, such
32
compliments miss the real significance of what was happening.

Kevin Whelan explains:
To achieve their aim of making every man a politician, the United Irishmen
relied on the power of print (suitably customised) to shape politics out
of doors. Especially successful were populist, scaled-down versions in
pamphlet form of classic English authors ... Nor did these activities stop
at mere distribution. In 1795 William Putnam McCabe, the charismatic
United Irish emissary and organiser, was distributing Paines Age of Reason
among mill-workers in Belfast, following that by discussions in which he
answered their several objections to any part of it.30
The significance of this is hard to appreciate from todays

perspective, when such popular styles of political education and
mobilisation are commonplace. However, in eighteenth-century
Europe to distribute and popularise political literature and
ideas in order to actively mobilise public opinion was not only
deeply radical and indeed illegal but represented an attempt
to fundamentally shift the location of politics, away from the
royal court and institutions of government and into the street
and village where the mass of the population lived. The United
Irishmen were pioneering an approach to political life that was
about democratising, and therefore challenging, the existing order
of things. Politics was being presented as a public phenomenon,
as belonging to all the people by right, rather than the preserve
of the educated or enlightened classes. As much as the satirical
and radical political messages or radical political theory being
discussed, the form, space and location of such discussion was
groundbreaking.
This democratisation of political life would only begin to take
hold across Europe after the 1840s, yet the success of the United
Irishmens attempts to make every man a politician is evidenced
in their ability to connect local grievances in relation to rents,
taxes and tithes into a coherent national programme of radical
political action. This extra-institutional and popular approach
to political activity was to become one of the hallmarks of Irish
republicanism, making empowerment and participation two of its
33
defining features, even as mainstream European republicanism was

becoming institutionalised into nineteenth-century liberalism.
Of course, in a society which rigidly adhered to a gendered
division of both labour and social space in such a way that women
were confined to the private sphere of the home, the empowering
participatory forms of eighteenth-century republicanism would
remain out of reach to the overwhelming majority of women,
despite the interventions of a small number of important women
activists such as Mary Anne McCracken, Bridget Dolan and Mary
Shackleton Leadbeater.31
Nonetheless the United Irish rebellion failed. Thousands were
killed, hundreds exiled, and the most dramatic political result in
the short term was the consolidation of English and Ascendancy
control over Irish affairs symbolised by the Act of Union.
Contemporary republicans need to come to terms with such
failure as much as we need to explore and celebrate the significant
contribution of the United Irishmen to the development of radical
political thought and action over the course of the centuries that
followed. So why did the rebellion fail?
Berresford Ellis offers three reasons: lack of coordination,
the superior intelligence of the state, and the application by the
administration of a policy of divide and rule.32 In the first two of
these he would be supported by the weight of historical research.
The rising was badly planned, resourced and carried out. Indeed
much of this can be accounted for by the concerted efforts of the
government, not only in the operation of intelligence and spies,
but through brute force, the striking of terror in Lord Camdens
memorable phrase. However, these reasons are not enough and
indeed too localised to explain not only the failure of the rebellion,
but also the complete crushing of the movement before the end
of the century.
Berresford Ellis third reason divide and rule only partly
explains the collapse of the movement. There is no doubt that
the state mobilised politically as well as militarily in its counter
insurgency efforts. In particular, the flagging Orange Order was
reinvigorated as a political and cultural tool in the service of
34
the Ascendancy. Whelan talks about the refurbishment of the

faded repertoire of commemoration, from which the state had
retreated as politically obsolete in the 1780s.33 But in the charged
and volatile 1790s a sectarianism deliberately injected by the
government as a counter-revolutionary strategy of tension had
a compelling and attractive logic.34 Its effect was that it
inserted an implacable barrier to the linking of the United Irishmen and
Defender territories; it stopped the spread of radical Freemasonry; it pulled
Protestants in general rmly to a conservative pro-government stance; it
split the nascent PresbyterianCatholic alliance in mid-Ulster; it checked
United Irish infiltration of the yeomanry and the militia. Given these
advantages, which were soon apparent to strategic thinkers like Knox and
Richardson, the government quickly abandoned its earlier weariness and
espoused the Order covertly.35
Thus contrary to the claim of revisionist historians that the

republican alliance with the Defenders and peasantry debased the
purity of their liberalism and in turn compromised their avowed
non-sectarianism by exploiting and exacerbating confessional
hostility,36 it was the state which reintroduced and mobilised
sectarian communalism into the body politic in order to counter
the spread of the radical non-sectarian message of the United
Irish movement.
However our analysis should not stop here, as the ability of
the state to intervene in this way with such a degree of success
highlights a more fundamental weakness that lay at the heart
of the United Irishmen. While the state may choose to mobilise
whatever counter-revolutionary strategy it likes, such strategies
can only succeed if they are able to exploit existing contradictions
and tensions within the progressive movement. Whelan argues
the point as follows:
The United Irishmen continued to believe passionately in the power of
the national concept to harmonise the internal discordances of Ireland
... The decisiveness of the failed revolution of 1798 exposed the limits of
[their] understanding of the cleavages within Irish society, and the extent
to which the 1790s had polarised Irish politics. ... The United Irishmen
35
consistently underestimated the powerful groundswell of support for

conservatism; the popular appeal of the Orange Order and the yeomanry
indicated that this was not just a chimera engineered by establishment
politicians. Like the French Jacobins ... [they] could not comprehend how
there could be a genuinely counter-revolutionary impetus of this type;
in their reading, it could only be articially induced by government and
Ascendancy connivance.37
The overlapping tensions of class and religion which sat

uncomfortably at the heart of the United Irish alliance between
middle-class Presbyterians and Catholics and the urban and
rural poor were too fragile to withstand the pressure of both the
revolution and the counter-revolution. The logical consequences
of the mobilisation of the popular classes split the moderates
into a potentially conservative group and a more radical faction.
While government repression in the lead up to rebellion served
to hold these two factions together, the rebellion itself and the
mobilisation of popular reactionary Protestantism drove a wedge
between the different religious and class interests. The failure of
the rebellion, and indeed of the broader United Irish project, was
as much the particular outworking of Hobsbawms dialectical
dance as it was to do with matters of poor organisation or
counter-insurgency.
If the defeat of the United Irish rebellion was to be lasting
it would need more than military success. It would require a
restructuring of Irish politics in ways that would consolidate
the conservatism of those sections of Irish society prized away
from republicanism through the fear of a Catholic peasant revolt.
The middle classes, whether Protestant or Catholic, had been
defeated, but their future needed to be secured in order to keep
them away from future rebellions. As the eighteenth century gave
way to the first decades of the nineteenth, government policy in
London shifted, not away from supporting Ascendancy privilege,
but towards creating a space for the Presbyterian and at a later
stage Catholic middle classes. The accommodation of the former
was without question successful, as former Presbyterian radicals
became bulwarks of conservative and liberal unionist interests.
36
However, the accommodation of the latter social group came too

late to guarantee a similar effect. The great innovation of United
Irish republicanism was also its Achilles heel, the cross-class and
religious alliance which has marked it out from all of its successors
was too fragile to withstand the various pressures coming from
within and without. Having lost the initiative even before the
rebellion started, the fragmentation of that alliance supplemented
by the various strategies and incorporations of the state created
a realignment of political allegiances that was to shape much of
the century which followed.
Nationalists
If eighteenth-century Europe was characterised by the initial confrontations between the rising middle classes and the old feudal
regimes, the nineteenth century marked the decisive victory of
the former over the latter. Indeed the two overriding dynamics,
which run through the entire century, shaping the political and
economic life of the continent, were capitalism and colonialism.
The nineteenth century was the first truly global century, as the
marketplace became a worldwide phenomenon, owing to the
European colonisation of the majority of the worlds productive
territories. Mass markets created in turn mass industrialised
populations, destroying the old feudal social relations and identities
of the previous century. Agriculture was also transformed,
becoming an industry in its own right, and experiencing its own
boom during the middle of the century. By the 1850s, Hobsbawms
dual revolution had come of age. Not only was Europe and the
ever-internationalising world experiencing dramatic economic
and social changes, but two subsequent political forces were also
taking root, namely democracy and nationalism. As the republican
liberals of the French revolutionary era were moved to mobilise
the masses against the old order, they opened up a new political
force which, when combined with the impact of industrialisation on the emerging lower-middle and working classes, was to
make the nineteenth century one of significant political turmoil
and rebellion.
37
Although the nineteenth century saw the birth of ideologies

that would dominate the twentieth liberalism, conservatism and
socialism in the 1800s it was nationalism that truly triumphed.
Hobsbawm asks: What were the international politics of the years
from 1848 to the 1870s about?, and his answer is definitive: it
was about the creation of a Europe of nation-states.38 This was
the century of Italian and German unification, and of struggles for
independence in Poland, Hungary, Romania and Croatia. It was
also, albeit later, the century of the first anti-colonial struggles for
national liberation in South America and the Caribbean, Africa
and most prominently India. Ireland, occupying a place both
in the European and colonial worlds, straddled both of these
separate but intersecting political dynamics, and the course of
the movements for independence during this century reflect this
dual reality.
For England, unlike say Germany or Italy, the issue was not
unification or the assertion of nationhood, as those matters had
been effectively resolved by the end of the seventeenth century,
with the exception of Ireland. The nineteenth century was the
age of English, and increasingly British, supremacy on the world
stage. The industrial revolution and rapid territorial colonisation
across all the continents of the globe made Britain the workshop
of the world and unparalleled in her economic and strategic
power. As Britains influence and interests grew, and the pace
of change at home deepened, the importance of Ireland for the
policy makers and political rulers in London receded considerably.
British considerations were increasingly geo-political even if
the word itself is from a later age as its assessment and agreed
action on any given matter became interdependent with its geopolitical consequences for other areas of concern. British economic
expansion at home became so intertwined with colonial expansion
abroad that neither sphere could be thought of in isolation. More
than anything else this new reality had an increasing relevance
for AngloIrish relations. The pattern established by the English
reaction to the 1798 rebellion severe repression in order to
block French strategic interests being advanced in Britains closest
neighbour coupled with ad hoc attempts to neutralise or co-opt
38
potential causes of disaffection was to become the dominant

paradigm for assessing and responding to the perpetual crisis that
was to become known as the Irish Question in British politics. In
Ronald Hyams words:
Whitehalls view of the problem of Ireland was at bottom and traditionally
an unashamedly strategic one ... The Act of Union (1800) was passed
during the French wars in order to strengthen Irelands position within the
United Kingdom. It was therefore in the nineteenth century an integral
part of the United Kingdom, sending MPs to Westminster. Its position was,
however, deeply ambivalent, and in some ways a halfway house between
the metropolis and the empire.39
Thus AngloIrish relations would be governed by two overlapping

sets of relations during the nineteenth century. The general context
would be shaped by the needs and imperatives of British industry
and Empire. In turn the detail of the relations would be constrained
by the interaction of the strategic requirements of the British
state and the demands of sections of the emerging Irish nation.
The ambivalent position of Ireland as a halfway house between
metropolis and empire would give much of this relationship its
distinctive and for both contemporary British politicians and
modern Irish historians confusing colour.
Irish politics in the nineteenth century was dominated by
issues of Catholic emancipation and Protestant revivalism;
radical agrarian mobilisation and reform; the reality and legacy
of the Great Hunger; starvation and mass emigration; emerging
nationalism and unionism; the waning of the old Ascendancy;
and the increasingly powerful and popular demand for the return
of the Irish parliament whether in the form of Repeal or Home
Rule. The century saw two significant nationalist rebellions, one
in 1848 and the second in 1867. As the centurys end approached
the country experienced the solidification of the political forces
and social relations that were to dominate the first half of the
1900s. However none of this can be properly understood outside
the overarching context of Irelands position within the United
Kingdom and by extension within the broader British Empire.
Indeed, as Joseph Lee argues, this is the era of Irish modernisation,
39
not in terms of a dramatic rupture with an agrarian or feudal past

as was the case with so many new world colonies but rather
in the form of a gradual yet accelerating process of change which
began at the end of the eighteenth century and crystallised between
the 1880s and the early years of the twentieth century.
Describing the social reality for the mass of Irish people at the
start of the nineteenth century, Berresford Ellis characterised the
situation as one of unspeakable misery, telling us that:
The war between England and France had raised the cost of living and
rents; evictions of peasant farmers unable to meet high prices were
increasing. As so often happens during periods of extreme poverty in a
country, the population increased dramatically. Between 1800 and 1847
it nearly doubled.40
Famines in 1817 and 182122 added to the hardship. As the

population increased, the economic hardship worsened, and
in turn created a localised and spontaneous spiral of agrarian
violence. Roy Foster argues that the early nineteenth century saw
the proliferation of rural protest movements, leading to a serious
escalation by the 1830s.41 Coinciding with this episodic warfare
were Daniel OConnells mobilisations in favour of Catholic
emancipation. The Catholic middle classes had returned to the
strategy of pursuing emancipation through parliamentary and
constitutional means, using popular mobilisations and electoral
contests to impress upon the Whig government in London the
merits of their cause. Set against the backdrop of the agrarian
unrest and the ever-present danger of the cross-class and denominational alliance produced by the United Irishmen, the Liberal
government chose reform rather than coercion to resolve the
mounting crisis. Nineteen-twenty-nine brought about Catholic
emancipation, in so far as it lifted the legal ban on admission of
Catholics to parliament, the civil service and the legal profession.
However the actual size of the Catholic electorate was dramatically
reduced by an act disenfranchising the 40-shilling freeholders. The
impact was to reduce the county voters from 216,000 to 37,000.42
In addition the Catholic Association, OConnells political vehicle,
40
was banned outright. Despite the limited nature of emancipation

it served not only to raise expectations, but to give an additional
psychological boost to the emerging Catholic middle class.43
Clearly the Whigs had learned the mistake of the 1790s, using
reform to defuse the mounting political crisis, and in so doing
driving a wedge between that emerging Catholic middle class and
the general population of urban and rural poor.
Fresh from the success of the emancipation agitation, OConnell
embarked on a second reform project, this time focused on
repealing the Act of Union. The campaign, which dominated
Irish politics in the decade preceding the Great Hunger, produced
a level of mass mobilisation unprecedented not just in Ireland but
across Europe. It also coincided with continued rural agitation,
primarily on the issue of the tithes (land taxes). It is important to
stress that Repeal was not a demand for either independence or
a republic, but a more modest proposal of legislative autonomy
within the United Kingdom. OConnell wanted to use the mass
mobilisations and indeed the agrarian revolts to apply pressure
on the Liberal establishment in London, who for a time depended
on his parliamentary presence to maintain a majority. However,
as Foster asserts, OConnell overestimated the degree of interest
among Liberals and radicals on the issue of Repeal.44 Following
the Tory electoral success in 1841 and their tactical victory
over OConnell at Clontarf in 1842, the Repeal movement was
effectively defeated.
Young Ireland
As Ireland was about to be engulfed by the Great Hunger, some
radical political figures were asking if the returns from almost
25 years of Repeal campaigning and mobilisation were enough.
Emancipation had raised expectations but granted rights to only
a tiny minority of the Catholic population. Rural poverty and
dispossession continued and with it agrarian violence. Repeal was
lost, and the political leaders of the movement were becoming
increasingly institutionalised within the British parliamentary and
state system. Emerging out of this negative balance sheet was
41
the Young Irish movement, once supporters of OConnell and

the emancipation and Repeal movements, but now increasingly
radicalised by events inside and outside of Ireland. Labour historian
Emmet OConnor has suggested that Young Irelands expulsion
[from the Repeal Association] led to a large swing in working-class
support away from OConnell.45 However rather than seek to
mobilise the growing section of urban tradesmen and labourers,
Young Ireland focused instead on rural grievance. Despite this,
their influence never extended much beyond Dublin, notwithstanding the significant readership of their paper The Nation.46
Young Ireland was part of a broader European phenomenon.
Hobsbawm describes one of the consequences of the general split
in European revolutionary trends before 1830 as the emergence
of self-consciously nationalist movements.47 Led by Young
Italy, countries such as Poland, Switzerland, Germany, France,
Turkey and Ireland were all host to societies who were for the
first time advocating and mobilising for national consciousness
and independence. While their political ideologies were based on
versions of the earlier eighteenth-century revolutions, their focus
was more clearly national, and their discourse and tactics more
cultural and at times romantic. Hobsbawm attributes the rise of
these movements to a discontent among lesser landowners and
the emergence of a national and even lower middle class.48
Unlike many of its counterparts, Young Ireland never developed
beyond a purely intellectual movement failing to develop a mass
following. Under its banner, those sections of the population
most disappointed with the outcome of Catholic emancipation,
supported by those still in search of the promise of the French
revolution, split from OConnell and formed, in 1847, the Irish
Confederation. Its stated purpose was protecting our national
interests and obtaining the Legislative independence of Ireland by
the force of opinion, by the combination of all classes of Irishmen,
and by the exercise of all the political, social and moral influences
within our reach.49 The Confederation was an assortment of
Repealers, agrarian radicals and republicans who in the pages
of The Nation developed a new political discourse combining
the secular and rights-based politics of the United Irishmen with
42
social radicalism, cultural nationalism, opposition to the politics

of Empire and an appeal albeit rhetorical to the use of armed
force, if the government remained unwilling to listen to the force
of opinion.
Such an eclectic mixture of interests was always prone to
invite tensions and splits. The unwillingness of some to embrace
the demands of the English Chartists led radicals such as John
Mitchel to break away, forming an alternative current centred
on the newspaper The United Irishman. While avoiding urban
radicalism, Young Ireland focused on the agrarian radicalism of
Fintan Lalor, powerfully linking the issues of landlordism, peasant
proprietorship and Repeal.
The strategic threat of such a radical discourse was not lost on the
British administration. Set in the context of European revolutions
and the interplay of AngloFranco relations, preventing rebellion
in Ireland was not merely an internal matter of law and order, but
part of the broader battle to maintain the current balance of power
in Europe and ensure British dominance. As Sloan comments:
This fear of insurrection and treason can be detected throughout the period
1815 to 1850 when Britains continental rival France was both internally
unstable and militarily weakened. In 1848, the year of the Paris Commune,
the Duke of Wellington remarked: there can be no doubt now of the object
of the disaffected in Ireland to deprive the Queen her Crown! And to
establish a republic. To obtain that objective they are ready to arm and
attack the City of Dublin.50
However, Young Ireland was never to develop into the strategic

threat envisioned by the Duke, as their plans were overtaken
by the cataclysmic events of the Great Hunger. Massive crop
failure caused by potato blight, combined with the laissez-faire
response of the British government and the export of food from
Ireland for the British market, left between 1 and 2 million people
dead, with a similar number emigrating.51 As the country was
crippled by famine and death, the British government introduced
a Coercion Act, further dividing the moderates from the radicals
within Young Ireland. Mitchels United Irishman caused a degree
of concern amongst the government in London and the political
43
establishment at home, as it advocated and secured an alliance

with radical currents in England.
The worsening realities of the Famine and the French revolution
of 1848 brought the disparate factions of Young Ireland together
temporarily, as both The Nation and the United Irishman began
to call for armed insurrection and revolt.52 Plans for a rising were
hastily produced, closer cooperation with the Chartists took
place, and the government responded in kind with the rushing
through parliament of a Sedition Act in a single day.53 Young
Ireland leaders were arrested, convicted and transported to the
colonies. When the rising finally came it was short and ineffectual.
OConnor described it as inglorious:
On 22 July, as Confederate leaders prepared for insurrection, the
government acted decisively. Parliament suspended habeas corpus, the
Confederate Clubs were suppressed, and arrests were intensied ... Poor
preparation, confused planning, clerical hostility and popular debilitation
after three years of famine combined to frustrate ... the rising zzled out
ingloriously.54
And so the rebellion of 1848 was an abject failure; lacking in

popular support or serious organisation and planning, it served
only to emphasise the desperation of a nation in the grip of mass
starvation. However, if the Young Ireland movement failed to
build a mass movement and seriously challenge the political status
quo in Ireland, they did leave an important legacy laying the
seeds for future confrontations with the state. The large displaced
population of rural poor in the cities of the United States and
Britain, pregnant with first-hand experience of the Famine,
ensured that the political message of Young Ireland remained
alive and would give birth to a more substantial challenge to the
British government in the form of the Fenians.
The Fenians
F.S.L. Lyons has described the period after the Great Hunger as
years of rapid and cataclysmic change. It was not just that in
Ireland the whole structure of society seemed to be threatened
44
by the Famine, but that in Europe at large red revolution stalked

through country after country.55 The resentment fuelled by
mass emigration was compounded for those who remained by
a sustained agricultural crisis. Evictions rose dramatically, from
3,000 in 1845 to 58,000 in 1852.56 The 1849 Encumbered Estates
Act replaced many English landowners with a growing number of
native landlords and ended many of the traditional arrangements
between tenants and landlords. Land holdings dropped from
568,000 in 1861 to 546,000 by 1867.57 Poverty and insecurity
lead to an upsurge in agrarian radicalism and violence.
The formation of the Tenants Rights League in 1852 returned
the focus on parliamentary action to alleviate the plight of the
tenant farmers. Galvanised by the efforts of a loose coalition of
campaigners including farmers, religious leaders, former Young
Irelanders and Repeal MPs, the aim of the League was to protect
and extend the Ulster Custom. To this end they demanded a Land
Act that would provide tenants with fair rents, fixity of tenure
and free sale. The coalition was indeed loose and following a
hung parliament in the 1852 general election, pro-Tenant Rights
League MPs from Ireland held the balance of power. However the
attraction of patronage was strong enough to buy off a number of
the Irish MPs, allowing the Liberals to form a government and bury
the nascent Tenants Right Bill. For Foster, the subsequent collapse
of this social and electoral coalition saw county politics settle
back into the landlord dominated mould.58 More importantly
it left the issue of tenant rights and agricultural crisis unresolved.
With the potential of continued agrarian violence, a dangerous
political vacuum opened up.
From within this vacuum emerged the Fenians. Founded in
1858 as the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB), the Fenians
brought together veterans from the Young Ireland period into a
secret oath-bound society whose primary aim was to secure Irish
independence. Joseph Lee quotes from their proclamation of the
Fenian Provisional Government in 1867:
our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who,
treating us as foes, usurped our lands, and drew away from our unfortunate
45
country all material riches ... today, having no honourable alternative left,
we again appeal to force as our last resort ... unable longer to endure the
curse of monarchical government, we aim at founding a Republic based on
universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of labour. The
soil of Ireland at present in the possession of an oligarchy belongs to us,
the Irish people, and to us it must be restored. We declare, also, in favour
of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of church
and State ... we intend no war against the people of England; our war is
against the aristocratic locusts whether English or Irish, who have eaten
the verdure of our elds.59
This radical coupling of an appeal to agrarian discontent with

the demand for legislative independence was a powerful mixture.
Both the English government and Irish middle-class interests were
at stake. To make matters worse the deliberate secularism of the
Fenians was certain to alienate the Catholic Church.
A number of chance events led the emerging Fenians to realise
the level of public support available for a project more radical
than that offered by the conservative nationalist political leaders.
The funeral of 1848 veteran Terence Bellow McManus has been
described as a turning point in Irish public opinion.60 The crowd
of between 50,000 and 100,000 was a signal to Fenian leaders
that the moment for an armed rebellion was approaching. All
efforts focused on securing financial and political support, from
Irish emigrant communities in the United States and Britain, and
from other revolutionary forces in Europe, such as the newly
established International Workingmens Association. Domestically,
considerable effort was put into creating a national organisation,
establishing local branches, providing basic arms-training and
building up a network of committed revolutionaries.
In predictable fashion political mobilisation was followed
by arrests, trials and deportations of key Fenian leaders. Most
notably Luby, OLeary, Kickham and ODonavan Rossa in
1865. A series of internal disputes and leadership displacements
led to a failed rising in 1867, which was significant only in the
numbers mobilised. A series of further events, including the
botched Manchester escape plot, the Clerkenwell bombing and
46
the hanging of the Fenians tried for the killing of a policeman

during the Manchester escape, further debilitated the organisation
while simultaneously generating public support in Ireland and
political fear in England. As with Young Ireland, the insurrectionary activities of the Fenians were a miserable failure. However,
unlike their predecessors, the Fenian legacy was more tangible.
Lee argues that:
Fenianism was the rst political movement to channel the energies of
agricultural labourers and small farmers, hitherto expressed in ribbonism
and faction ghting, into a national organisation. By permeating local
discontents with a national perspective the Fenians ... helped broaden petty
horizons and foster a sense of national political consciousness.61
Badly armed and poorly planned amateurs the Fenians may have
been, but by virtue of building a national movement, their legacy
was as much organisational as ideological. The IRB continued
in existence, albeit in clandestine form, for another 50 years,
and played a key part in the emerging nationalist movement
for Home Rule and the late nineteenth-century Gaelic cultural
revival through to the 1916 Rising. Indeed Fenians were central in
assisting the Parnell-led New Departure in the 1870s and Davitts
Land League the following decade, both of which were to play
a key role in shaping the consolidation of nationalist politics in
the final decades of the century. Despite a decline in the IRBs
organisational strength, it was also instrumental in assisting the
development of the New Nationalism of the early twentieth
century, through its role in the Gaelic Athletic Association, the
Irish Language movement, advanced nationalist publications
such as Griffiths United Irishman and Alice Milligans Shan
Van Vocht, and most importantly through its role in infiltrating
the Irish Volunteers and coordinating the republican Rising of
Easter 1916.
While the United Irishmen had succeeded in organising a
significant and threatening rebellion, they had been unable to
build a truly national organisation. Young Ireland failed both to
effectively build a mass following and to wage successful rebellion,
but it left an important literary and ideological legacy. The Fenians,
47
while following the failure of the Young Irelanders in the field,

and failing to make significant advances on United or Young Irish
ideologies, were most effective in building a national organisation
and an international network of support. Their impact on Irish
society lasted for over half a century and their members played key
roles in every important political and cultural development within
nationalism through to the Civil War in the 1920s. Even when
they were at their weakest organisational point they remained an
important reservoir of political personnel and practical skills.
Assessment
Although Young Ireland and the Fenians were two separate
movements, their historical proximity and overlap in personnel
and ideas requires a single treatment. As with the United Irishmen,
we need to ask who they were, what was the origin of their
ideas, and why were those ideas so potent and popular while
their military insurrections were such a failure? Equally we need
to understand the contradictions and tensions that lay at the heart
of their complex and at times contradictory political discourse.
Young Ireland activists centred on The Nation newspaper were
primarily lower-middle-class cultural nationalists, influenced
by the growth in like-minded nationalist movements across
Europe. Most were impatient Repealers with a conservative
social worldview pushed leftwards after the failure of OConnells
Whig alliance and the devastation of the Famine. Some were
uncomfortable with the rise of trade unions and alliances with
Chartists, others were ambivalent about the full implications
of Lalors agrarian radicalism, and only embraced these more
radical currents when other potential avenues of political strength
such as support from landlords were not forthcoming. Young
Ireland ideologues like OBrien and Duffy are said to have feared
social disorder, preached class harmony, and not had time for the
Chartists in Britain.62
However the radical currents were as strong within Young
Ireland as their more conservative counterparts, and should not be
underestimated. Lalors writings on agrarian reform were indeed
48
radical for their time, and represented a profound challenge to

the prevailing landlord system. Mitchels embrace of the emerging
labour currents and radical demands for parliamentary reform
were at the vanguard of contemporary radical democratic politics.
His rejection of free trade in favour of economic protectionism also
secured the support of both indigenous industry and the emerging
trade union movement, anticipating economic nationalism by
almost half a century. The unrelenting secularism of the movement,
in a country where Catholic and Protestant religious revivalism
was on the increase, was remarkable. Most importantly, through
their popular writings in The Nation and United Irishman, they
developed a political language that was at once nationalist and
anti-imperialist. Both newspapers critically covered issues of the
British imperial expansion in India, Persia and the Americas, and
connected the demand for Irish legislative independence with a
rejection of the British imperial project.63 They also did much to
articulate a radical and renewed sense of pride in Irish cultural and
national identity. However, as always, contradictions remained,
with Davis support for colonised peoples in the British Empire
standing in stark contrast to Mitchels support for Confederate
slavery during the US Civil War.64
The position of women, as with the United Irishmen, was
clearly marginal. OConnell has suggested that a small number
of women became involved in male dominated organisations such
as the Young Irelanders.65 Through their contributions to The
Nation women like Ellen Mary Dowling, Mary Eva Kelly and Jane
Francesca Elgee helped to create a sense of national identity, often
as authors of patriotic poetry and ballads. It is instructive that, when
writing, these women often used genderless or male pseudonyms.
Feminist historian Maria Luddy has argued that while such women
were not ignored within the broader Young Ireland movement,
they were kept in a subordinate role.66 Moreover, the structure
and politics of the emerging cultural nationalist movement was
laden with culturally constructed concepts of gender, which in
turn helped to define clear gender specific roles.67 Whether it
was through the emotional appeal of poetry or direct appeals to
Irish women to use their roles as consumers in promoting Irish
49
industry, womens position as activists and supporters was clearly

demarcated and rarely strayed into the more serious business of
practical or theoretical matters.
Young Ireland, conscious of the failure of post-United Irish
nationalism to successfully appeal to Protestant opinion, made
a number of concerted attempts to recreate the Presbyterian
Catholic alliance of their forefathers. Indeed the political and
economic climate seemed to provide fertile ground upon which
to build such a strategic connection. Tenant insecurity and the
attractions of Repeal offered a space for dialogue that was all but
absent by the 1880s. Indeed, Davis has argued that the Young
Irelanders appeared well-qualified to win Protestants to their
all-embracing nationalism.68 However, their own ideological
confusions vis--vis understanding the cultural and economic basis
of Protestant unionism, coupled with the continued resonance of
Orangism and Presbyterian revivalism, were to prove too harsh
a climate on which to build any successful alliance.
At the heart of the Young Ireland project was an eclectic
mixture of cultural and political views. Separatism, cultural
revivalism, agrarian radicalism, Chartism, bourgeois repeal
nationalism, radical conservatism, secularism, anti-imperialism
and a masculinised conception of social space and political
responsibility were all key elements. While primarily literary
in form, the inevitable political contradictions between these
different elements were never far from the surface. However,
though clearly divided at various times and on key issues between
radical and more conservative elements, the combined weight of
the movement presented the political and religious establishment
in Ireland and Britain with a substantial ideological, if not organisational, challenge. Clearly Young Ireland was not a cohesive
political movement nor did it offer a unified political programme.
However, the presence of such internal differences does not justify
the movements dismissal.69 It produced a rich reservoir of ideas
whose import only became apparent in the period directly after
the Great Hunger.
This significance is most clearly found in the Fenians. Again
it would be wrong simply to see the IRB as a manifestation of
50
Young Ireland twenty years on. Irish political life had been altered
radically by the Famine, and although British strategic interests
remained the same vis--vis rebellion in Ireland, the domestic
political dynamics were, for a brief period, open to change. The
failure of the Tenant Land League, and the subsequent discrediting
of parliamentary intervention in the eyes of many, reopened the
space for a radical challenge to the bourgeois politics of the Irish
nationalist MPs and a resurgent Catholic Church under the
leadership of Cardinal Cullen.
Coupled with a change of context was a more sophisticated
and indeed internationalist series of ideological influences on key
Fenian leaders. While their foundations were clearly those of the
United Irish and Young Ireland rebellions albeit reinterpreted to
suit the 1860s they also drew on French and Italian influences
such as Luis Blanc, August Blanqui and Giuseppe Mazzini. John
Devoy and James Stephens both joined Karl Marxs International
Workingmens Association while living in the USA, although
neither is reported to have played an active role.70 However,
the emerging Socialist International took great interest in Irish
politics, the development of the Fenians and the release of Irish
political prisoners.
These links have led some contemporary opponents and
sympathetic historians to retrospectively reinterpret the Fenians
as a socialist political organisation.71 Clearly this is not the case.
Hobsbawm is right when he says that the Fenians lacked the core of
socialist labour organisation, or perhaps the inspiration of socialist
ideology, to develop in such a manner.72 However the significance
of the Fenians lay in their ability to mobilise new sections of the
population against the political establishment, in an attempt to
attain their political and economic rights, defined both individually
and nationally. Newsinger argues that while Fenianism did not
have a social revolutionary programme, its very existence as a
working-class revolutionary organisation inevitably challenged
the position and authority of the Protestant ascendancy, the British
and, of course, the Catholic middle class.73 For Hobsbawm, the
novelty of the Fenians ... was that they were entirely independent
of the middle-class moderates, that their support came entirely
51
from among the popular masses ... and that they were the first to
put forward a programme of total independence from England,
to be achieved by armed insurrection.74
However, within this mixture of influences and forces lay an
important tension. The primary influence which the Fenians
gained from their radical continental allies was organisational and
oppositional. From Blanqui came the oath-bound secret society
committed to armed rebellion. From Mazzini and Marx came an
opposition to the existing political and economic order of things.
From the United Irish and Young Ireland movements came the
demand for political independence based in a civic republicanism
and an anti-imperial nationalism. What was absent, however,
were positive ideological alternatives to the status quo. Again
Hobsbawm suggests that the Fenians
wholehearted concentration on an Irish Republic won by armed struggle
replaced a social and economic, even a domestic, political programme ...
Fenianism was mass nationalism in the epoch of triumphant liberalism.
It could do little except reject England and demand total independence
through revolution for an oppressed people, hoping that somehow this
would solve all problems of poverty and exploitation.75
Hobsbawms conclusion is that the Fenians generated the force

which was to win independence for most of Catholic Ireland
but, since they generated nothing else, they left the future of
that Ireland to the middle-class moderates, the rich farmers and
small-town tradesmen of a small agrarian country who were to
take over their heritage.76
The Fenians relationship to the Catholic Church is also
important. Their political growth and popularity came despite
widespread clerical opposition. Indeed their emergence on the
post-Famine political landscape was mirrored in some respects by
the centralisation and modernisation of the Catholic Church under
Cardinal Cullen. The Churchs opposition to the Fenians was
unambiguous, and Cullen was their archenemy. However, despite
the strongly articulated opposition to clerical censure and religious
involvement in the political sphere, the Fenians as individuals
remained in general devout Catholics. Newsinger comments that
52
the Churchs hostility to revolution did not, in Ireland, produce the

ferocious anti-clericalism that was to characterise revolutionary
movements on the Continent throughout the nineteenth and into
the twentieth century.77 Indeed, he argues that, the contrast with
European revolutionary movements in this period could not be
more dramatic. While the Fenians responded blow for blow to
clerical condemnation and censure, in every other respect the
clergy were treated with all due reverence.78
Of course the position of the Catholic Church in nineteenthcentury Ireland, and its relationship to the mass of ordinary
Catholics, was fundamentally different to that of their coreligionists in France, Spain or Italy. Catholicism was not the
established church, and was not identified with the primary centres
of wealth and power. Indeed Catholicism was becoming, in the
context of the post-Famine devotional revolution led by Cardinal
Cullen, one of the key defining features of Irish cultural identity. In
addition to legislative independence and agrarian reform, Catholic
emancipation was a central element in the worldviews of many
nineteenth-century Irish radicals. Understanding the religious
devotion of Fenians who supported a secular political project
vehemently opposed by the Catholic Church is less difficult in
this context. However, one of the unintended consequences was
a greater degree of social conservatism in a movement that was
nonetheless politically and constitutionally radical.
Despite the avowedly anti-clerical and secular political
message of the Fenians, they were unable to build the same crossdenominational alliance with Protestant Ireland, as did their
eighteenth-century predecessors. While it is clear that Anglican
landowners, north and south, were never open to the radical
implications of the IRB movement, their inability to mobilise
sections of the northern Presbyterian farmers and merchants is a
more significant failure. During much of the nineteenth century,
significant disparities continued to exist between Anglicans
and Presbyterians in much of the north of the country, in
terms of economic position and political influence. In addition
Presbyterians continued to, in the main, occupy the liberal end
of the political spectrum. Catholic and Protestant cooperation
53
on issues of land reform was common throughout much of this

period, bringing together not just nationalists and liberal unionists
but also sections of the Orange Order. However, two factors were
decisive in blocking the integration of this section of the Protestant
community into the broader republican movement.
First, northern Catholics were slow to embrace Fenianism
as a political project. Marion Elliot suggests that organised
nationalism took a very long time to gain a foothold in Ulster, and
when it did it was solidly constitutional. Militant republicanism
held little attraction ... Fenianism itself was weaker in Ulster
than in any other province.79 Second, while an alliance between
poorer Protestant and Catholic tenants was always a possibility,
the existence of the Ulster Custom in the north, and the desire on
behalf of many landlords to preserve such arrangements, made
northern farmers less susceptible to the radical demands of the
Fenians. Protecting the Ulster Custom and the rights it entailed
was best achieved through legislative action in Westminster.
Of course, set against the backdrop of religious revivalism
evident not just in Ulster but across Ireland and Britain, there were
more powerful factors pulling poorer Presbyterian farmers and
merchants towards a liberal-conservative unionist alliance than
one with nationalists and republicans. This Protestant alliance
was consolidated following Gladstones Land Act of 1881 that
drove a wedge between the liberal Presbyterian land reformers
and their more radical Catholic and nationalist counterparts. The
cause of this failure to build a truly cross-denominational alliance
combining radical agrarian reform with demands for legislative
independence is unclear.
By the 1880s the effective integration of the Belfast Presbyterian
middle classes and growing working class into the economic
realities of imperial free trade added another key bind in the
unionist alliance, which in the context of the looming battle over
Home Rule would become almost entirely conservative in character
by the centurys end. By the second half of the nineteenth century
a division had opened within the Irish body politic between a
Protestant unionism and a Catholic nationalism, which although
neither inevitable nor at this stage permanent, would nonetheless
54
become solidified during the Home Rule crisis and the first two
decades of the twentieth century. Fenianism was less capable of
understanding, never mind intervening in, this development, and
by the 1880s had abandoned any meaningful attempt to build
that cross-denominational alliance which had been key features
of both the United Irish and Young Ireland movements.
Fenianism had other significant blind spots that also need
exploring, most notably with regard to the issue of gender. Both
The Nation and the United Irishman appear silent on the question
of womens rights, and most importantly the extension of the
vote to women. In this they are not unlike the Chartists and
other European political movements of the time. Those women
that were involved played a similar role to their predecessors
in the 1840s. Luddy describes women as playing a supporting
role, carrying dispatches between the local leaders of the Fenian
movement in the 1860s, and organising support committees for
families of Fenian prisoners.80 She also describes the more general
mobilisation of women during elections, protests and food riots.
What is clear is that organisationally, politically and culturally
Fenianism contained strict gendered divisions of labour. Luddy
is right in asserting that equality between women and men was
rarely advocated.81 Indeed, not only did the Fenians do little
to challenge the exclusion of women or the gendered nature of
politics, which had been a fact of life in eighteenth- and early
nineteenth-century nationalist movements, in one important
respect their prioritising of the secret, oath-bound, conspiratorial and insurrectionary modes of politics effectively pushed these
issues further into the background. While the United Irishmen
and Young Irelanders had adopted similar organisational tactics,
it was as a matter of circumstance rather than self-definition.
Fenianism, particularly by the 1880s, became in essence a secret,
revolutionary underground movement. The opportunities for
women to access this conspiratorial world were even more difficult
than in the public participative politics of the United Irishmen or
the literary cultural publications of Young Ireland.
That a political movement, whose key organisational features
were those of an oath-bound secret society, would produce such
55
an exclusively male-dominated political environment should not

be surprising. As the civic and rights based republicanism of the
United Irish and Young Ireland movements gave way to the insurrectionary, culturally nationalist and socially conservative politics
of the Fenians, the marginalisation of women within the political
discourse of republicanism became further embedded, and was to
remain so until the start of the twentieth century. Hobsbawms
assertion that the Fenians generated the force to win independence
but left the political content of that independence to the middleclass moderates equally applies to the gender dimension of
their politics and organisational culture. As Cardinal Cullens
devotional revolution continued to imbue Irish nationalism with
its conservative social content as the nineteenth century came to
a close, Fenianism would slowly become a political force both
revolutionary in terms of its challenge to the existing institutional
and constitutional order and simultaneously conservative in its
social and economic attitudes, particularly when it came to
questions of gender and class. The space for exceptions to this
rule was never closed, but exceptions they undoubtedly were.
On balance, the Fenians inherited many of the contradictions
of their Young Ireland and United Ireland predecessors. They
provided Irish society with a radical pole of attraction around
which a disparate array of grievances could be organised,
with legislative independence as its core. In doing so they
created a national movement, and more importantly a national
consciousness, which tied these grievances together in the popular
mind, producing a deep reservoir from which later generations of
radicals could drink, as the more constitutional and conservative
methods of addressing these and other issues came up against the
intransigence of British government policy in Ireland. However,
the limitations of the continental influences which informed
their political practice Blanqui and Blanc combined with
their inability to develop a truly national, cross-denominational
movement and their failure to develop a positive political and
economic project which would provide rights and equality for all
sections of society, meant that Fenianism contained within itself an
56
almost irresolvable contradiction, whose significance would only

become apparent in the first decades of the twentieth century.
Neither radical nor revisionist historians assessments of the
Fenians are fully adequate, despite both containing elements
of truth. Like earlier manifestations of Irish republicanism,
revisionists such as Foster and Elliot are too quick to dismiss their
truly radical nature, while left historians such as Berresford Ellis
and Jackson are too quick in ignoring the many contradictions
and weaknesses. Understanding the Fenians inherent contradictions allows us to appreciate both their revolutionary importance
at the same time as their conservative limitations.
Socialists
While the major narrative of nineteenth-century AngloIrish
history was preoccupied with the energies of Irish nationalists
and republicans vying against conservative and liberal unionists,
a minor but nonetheless important narrative tells the story of the
rise in the organisations of labour and from within this milieu the
emergence of organised socialist politics in Ireland. Indeed, as the
European nationalist movements of the first half-century began to
take root, their ascendancy opened up a new political fault line
between those who owned wealth and those who produced it.
The mobilisation of popular opinion in the revolutions of 1848
connected with older currents of cooperation and unionisation
creating a new and powerful political force. As the century
unfolded, the emerging working-class movements began to look
for political influence and eventually parliamentary representation. From within these new movements emerged a smaller
political current, socialism, whose real influence would become
apparent only during the course of the twentieth century.
If government policy in London focused its energies on
responding to land agitation and the spread of radical republican
and separatist ideas in Ireland during the nineteenth century, at
home its concerns were more with its own labouring classes.
Rapid industrialisation and urbanisation had brought into
being a new urban working class who were influenced by the
57
radical politics of the revolutionary waves sweeping across the

continent. While the forms of organisation of this class were
not in themselves new combinations of artisans had existed
for almost 100 years their size, degree of organisation and
sense of common purpose was of an entirely different order. For
Hobsbawm, the rapidity of the social change which engulfed
this new class, encouraged the labourers to think in terms of an
entirely changed society, based on their experiences and ideas
as opposed to their oppressors.82 Hobsbawm confirms that the
dual revolution produced a distinctive working class during the
first half of the nineteenth century in France and England, and
throughout the rest of the continent in the decades that followed.
In England this new class found expression in two forms the
new trade unions and the Chartists both of which were to
have an important impact on Ireland. In turn the anxiety created
amongst the political and business establishment by this new and
dangerous social force produced counter-measures, both coercive
and reforming, which in turn shaped the emergence of Irish labour
and socialist politics.
The earliest collective organisations of labourers in Ireland were
known as combinations. These localised and often temporary
associations of skilled artisans in the towns of the seventeenth
and early eighteenth centuries focused mainly on protecting the
interests of those operating within the profession, attempting to
limit the number of apprentices, excluding outsiders and fixing
wage rates. Legislation prohibiting such combinations was enacted
by the Irish parliament from the 1730s, however serious concern
regarding their impact only began to surface in the latter decades
of the century. Emmet OConnor has observed that in 1780, the
Irish Grand Committee for Trade concluded that combinations
were becoming a threat to prosperity, and that in the same year
20,000 artisans paraded in the Phoenix Park in protest at the
introduction of legislation which in effect liberalised the system
of apprentices and provided penalties for absence from work or
for violence resulting from combination.83 Economic hardship,
trade slumps and inflation produced, among the skilled and
58
manual urban labourers, similar conditions to sections of the

rural poor. Thus, as the end of the eighteenth and first decades
of the nineteenth century were marked by agrarian violence, the
towns responded with an increasing propensity to strike.
Artisans played their part in the 1798 rebellion, as artisan
and trader alike shared opposition to government interference
in trade. Indeed so prominent were Dublin and Belfast artisans
in the politics of 1798 that one Labour historian has described it
as in part a trade union revolt.84
Following a campaign for reform, the anti-trade union laws
were overturned in Westminster in 1824. However the motivation
of those responsible was not benign, as they believed that the
Combination Acts encouraged unionisation and workplace
violence. Removing the prohibition, they hoped, would reduce
workplace tension and restore order. The effect of course was
the opposite, so much so that the following year new restrictions
were placed on unions. Strikes were made illegal, but significantly
combinations were permitted, although only for the limited purpose
of negotiating wages and hours of work.85 Thus in the decades
that followed localised unions grew in number and strength across
Ireland and England, and began to employ full-time officials. By
mid century they had begun a process of federation which would
transform them from parochial to national associations.
However, it is important to remember that this first phase of
unionisation was very different from that we associate with trade
unions today. Indeed they operated more like craft unions of an
earlier century. They represented the most skilled and prosperous
sections of the labour force, operating to strictly limit the numbers
working in any given trade, and primarily benefiting the masters
in the said trade. In addition to providing such protections,
combinations also offered their members the status of being a
recognised artisan, an opportunity to defend the wider interests
of the trade, and a social comradeship.86 In many respects the
function of the combinations was to reach an accommodation
with their employers that would be mutually beneficial to both.
They avoided formal involvement in broader political issues and,
representing as they did the upper strata of skilled labour, had
59
a significant investment in the prevailing economic status quo.

However, like the republicanism of the late eighteenth century,
once the ideology and methods of working-class self-organisation
became available, there would always be those who would take
them to their logical conclusion.
The emergence of the English Chartists in the 1830s is a case in
point. Labour radicals based in English cities began to press for
more political demands, and generated significant levels of support
among the grassroots of the emerging trade union movement. The
Peoples Charter of 1838 the document that gave the Chartists
their name contained demands for fundamental reform of the
parliamentary system that would enable working men to play
a role in the politics of the day. The Charter sought universal
male suffrage, annual elections to parliament, secret ballots in
parliamentary elections, equal electoral districts, the ending of any
property qualification for MPs and a salary for elected representatives. While such demands would have to wait several decades
before appearing on the statute books, and then only slowly and
piecemeal, the Chartists brought the combinations out of their
individual workplaces and both onto the streets through a series
of mass mobilisations and into the broader political arena. The
insistence upon some form of parliamentary representation for
the interests of labour was to remain one of the central demands
of the trade unions until the early twentieth century.
In Ireland, while the Chartists had some success in recruiting
among the urban artisans of Dublin, and within the more
radical end of the Repeal movement and what would become
the Young Ireland faction, it was the campaign for Catholic
emancipation that had the most immediate politicising effect
on the Irish combinations. While organised artisans had played
a part in the United Irish movement, support for emancipation
and then Repeal was more formal and organised. Labourers
formed Political Unions, first at a local and then at a national
level, to support and agitate for Repeal of the Act. By the
1840s protection for indigenous industry became a key plank
of nationalist political rhetoric, and business and labour once
again shared key strategic goals. OConnor argues that for labour,
60
these strategic interests lay with self-government in opposition

to the dominant laissez-faire political economy guiding English
economic and trading interests.87
However, this alliance between the emerging Repeal movement
and the trade unions was never an uncomplicated one. OConnell
himself was ideologically committed to free trade and only political
expediency convinced him to state otherwise publicly. For their
part the Repealers radical wing was equally ambivalent on the
value of trade unions, often seeing them as a danger to economic
prosperity and private property. The Repeal movement continually
rejected the support offered by Chartists from across the Irish Sea,
and when a Dublin branch of the radical group was formed in
1839, the pro-Repeal Trades Political Union successfully set about
ensuring that it would have no future in the city.88
The end of the 1840s would see a greater degree of radicalisation and volatility among the more advanced sections of the
Repeal and trade union movements. OConnells expulsion of
the Young Irelanders as noted above also saw the departure
of much of his labour support. While the majority faction of
Young Ireland saw a strategic alliance with rural agitation as
their primary focus, the minority led by Mitchel and his United
Irishman paper moved to the left and actively worked to build a
relationship with Feargus OConnor and the English Chartists.
Despite the temporary uniting of these factions following the
French Revolution of the same year, defeat and exile ended what
was in truth a brief period of radical labour political activity.
Over the next generation, concluded OConnor, labour would
turn to more conservative forms of organisation and politics.89
The post-Great Hunger period would see three related but
distinct developments in Irish trade unionism. Industrialisation
around Lagan Valley, in the north east of the country, would
produce the most concentrated centre of labour organisation in
Ireland, but one whose interests and politics became wedded to the
economics and politics of Union and Empire. Simultaneously, as
the post-Famine Fenians entered into an alliance with Parnell, in
the campaign for Home Rule, trade unionists in the remainder of
the country supported self-government and the broad protectionist
61
aims of the nationalist movement. Most significant of all, and

most enduring, the second half of the century saw the emergence,
in Britain and Ireland, of a new model of trade unionism. These
large, centralised general unions, though cautious at first, were
more successful in placing the political interests of their members
at the centre of the political stage.
The unique character of industrial development in the north east
linen, cotton and later shipbuilding would make employers
and workers more sympathetic to the governing interests in
Westminster, dependent as they were for their success on British
economic and imperial expansion. While the primary political
contests in Belfast and the surrounding regions at the time were
between liberal and conservative unionists, the emergence of labour
organisations simply added a new set of interests to this contest,
rather than challenging its basic structure. Repeal, Home Rule
and economic nationalism held little popular appeal. In addition,
OConnor has argued, industrial growth intensified sectarian
divisions in Ulster and particularly in Belfast.90 Competition for
jobs and resources took on a distinctly sectarian character as
religious denomination and political affiliation became barriers
to participation in the economic expansion. As with agriculture,
religious segregation and discrimination in urban employment
became a fact of life from the 1850s onwards. Contemporary
statistics clearly indicate that whereas Anglicans were primarily
landowners, in the emerging industries Presbyterians held the
dominant position in both the middle and working classes.
Catholics for their part were disproportionately represented in
the lower, manual and unskilled sectors of the labour force. While
trade unions were not responsible for the sectarian distribution of
economic resources and power, their modes of operating served to
perpetuate it, and at times of conflict they often became vehicles
for defending sectarian privileges.91
Economic prosperity and organisational strength gave the new
Belfast working class a desire to play a more prominent role in
politics. William Johnston is credited as being the first workingclass elected MP, standing as an Independent Conservative, with
considerable trade union support in his campaign. His re-election
62
campaign some years later was organised under the banner of

Belfast Orange and Protestant Workingmens association. It is
important to stress, however, that Johnstons political project
focused primarily on the skilled artisans and small businesspeople, rather than the mass of labouring poor in the city, whether
Protestants or Catholic. However, his relevance lies in the political
space he carved out for later generations of labour unionists such
as William Walker, who powerfully, if at times uncomfortably,
mixed working-class labourism and Presbyterian populism, in
what was to become known as social-imperialism.
Across the remainder of the country, and despite the involvement
of many working-class activists in the Fenian rebellion, unions
were becoming concerned with distinct organisational interests,
separate from politics, and were being drawn into the values of
social consensus and moderation.92 Yet in OConnors phrase,
Fenian echoes persisted. Indeed one of the great successes of
Fenianism of the 1850s and 1860s was its articulation of a national
consciousness that permeated among the great mass of ordinary
rural and urban labourers and artisans. While the formal business
of the unions remained focused on workplace issues, such as pay
and working hours, the sympathies of many union members were
clearly nationalist. Unions and trades councils played a key part
in the mobilisations commemorating the Manchester Martyrs and
campaigning for the release of Fenian prisoners. Likewise both
the IRB and Parnell put considerable effort into mobilising labour
organisations to support the Home Rule movement, with all the
same tensions and contradictions that had bedevilled OConnell
decades earlier. The formation, by Michael Davitt, of the Irish
Democratic Trade and Labour Federation in 1890 was a selfconscious attempt to resolve some of these tensions by asserting
labours claims within the nationalist movement. However the
very nature of the demand for Home Rule, focusing on the form
of government rather than its content, allied to the lead role being
played by conservative forces within both the IRB and Parnells
Irish Party at Westminster, meant that the labour agenda would
always take second place. It is instructive to note that Parnells
63
most concerted attempt to mobilise the political strength of labour

came after his loss of influence within the Irish Party.
While the emerging modern forms of nationalism and trade
unionism clearly held sway with much of the rank and file of the
labour movement, at an official level the primary focus of the
trade union leadership took a more neutral political line. The
new model of nationally organised mass unions, which developed
from the 1850s, took a new turn as general unskilled unionisation
gathered pace in the 1880s and 1890s. Organisations such as
the National Union of Dock Labourers were responsible for a
wave of industrial action aimed at improving the lot of the most
disadvantaged section of the labour force, the manual working
class. Gradually these general trade unions became the mainstay
of the labour movement, with huge membership, significant levels
of funds for strike and other purposes, and opposition from an
increasingly hostile political and economic establishment.
The first phase of this new model was marked by a cautious
policy of consolidation, discouraging strikes, and focusing on
maintaining demand for labour through control of apprenticeships and enforcement of restrictive practices.93 However, the
second and in many ways more significant phase of this model,
from the 1880s onwards, was more militant in industrial terms,
focusing to a greater extent on the unskilled and mounting
ever greater challenges to the existing position of workers. The
dockworkers strike in Belfast of 1907 is an example of this
newfound spirit of confrontation.
However, while a willingness to confront the plight of
the unskilled ensured that the older guard of the trade union
movement frowned upon the spread of such syndicalist ideas,
the younger organisers shared a certain degree of political
caution with their elders. As organised labour grew in strength,
and incurred the legislative wrath of Tory governments when
in office, it sought to increase its own influence on legislation.
Rather than advocate a separate political party, or support the
emerging but still small socialist organisations, the mainstream
of the British labour movement developed a working relationship
with the Liberals. This LabourLiberal reform alliance, articulated
64
primarily through groups such as the Labour Representation

League, acted as a constraining influence on the overt politicisation of the movement.94
In Ireland, notwithstanding the developing relationship
between organised labour and nationalist MPs and the rise of
local government labour representation in the 1890s, the political
policy of organised labour became increasingly complicated by
the tensions between nationalists and unionists in the battle over
Home Rule. The Irish Trade Union Congress, established in 1894,
influenced both by the LiberalLabour reform agenda and a desire
to avoid becoming embroiled in the broader Home Rule debate,
observed a studied political neutrality. It confined its business to
issues of working hours, wages, conditions and internal labour
organisation matters. However, as the Home Rule issue gathered
momentum, and its Irish protagonists moved to secure the support
of labour, organised or otherwise, the trade unions could not
remain detached from what was becoming the most pressing
issue of the day. OConnor has argued that during this crucial
period in its history, Irish labour hovered between two contending
conceptions of progress.95 They could either follow the Britishbased model and tread the path of political neutrality, or they
could embrace the logic of a labour nationalism, in an attempt
to ensure that when Home Rule came its form would be inclusive
of the needs of the working classes. However, the strength of the
emerging labour unionism led by Belfast Trades Council figures
such as William Walker made such a decision more difficult than
OConnor estimates. The consequence, however was the same,
as organised labour became sidelined in what was to become the
decisive political contest of late nineteenth- and early twentiethcentury Ireland.
Industrial militancy would continue through the first two
decades of the new century as evidenced by the great Dublin
lock-out of 1913. But the degree of political influence which
the formal trade union movement would have was sidelined,
in the north east of the country, as labour unionism collapsed
into reactionary working class loyalism, and in the remainder
of the country as nationalism whether reformist or separatist
65
once again focused on the question of the form rather than

the substance of legislative independence. In the end organised
labour was sidelined, or in the eyes of some sidelined itself, on
several counts. While the majority of its supporters were fast
becoming unionists and nationalists, its leaders were wary of
division at a national level if they embraced either side. Following
the predominant political trade union strategy of the day, they
preferred engagement with existing political formations in order
to secure influence rather than creating an alternative political
force in the form of a Labour Party.
Thus as the nineteenth century gave way to the twentieth, trade
unionism in Ireland was stronger in terms of membership and
legislative protection than at any earlier stage in its history, but
in terms of political influence it remained marginal. In Britain,
following the dramatic defeat of the unions in the Taff Vale legal
case whereby unions were made liable for the costs incurred
to business resulting from strikes the need for political and
parliamentary influence led to the demise of LabourLiberal
reformism in favour of an independent Labour Party. In Ireland
however, the policy of political neutrality and the political realities
on the ground ensured that organised labour would have to wait
for several decades before it followed its British counterparts.
Although political neutrality and caution was a distinctive feature
of mainstream trade unionism in Ireland and Britain during
this period, both movements contained within them minority
currents of radicals and socialists arguing for more forthright
forms of political intervention. While these dissidents were not
entirely new, drawing on earlier traditions of social and economic
thinking and activism such as the cooperative movement of the
1820s, the Chartists of the 1830s, the International Workingmens
Association in the 1860s, and even Michael Davitts advocacy
of land nationalisation in the 1880s their form and content
ensured that their ability to mount a challenge to the political and
economic status quo was more substantial. To this was added the
involvement of many Irish migrants in the labour and emerging
66
socialist movements in Britain and the United States, whose

influence on returning to Ireland was also important.
The new context, shaped by the rise of the trade union
movement and greater demands for franchise reform and political
participation by the working class, generated what has become
known as the British socialist revival in the mid 1880s.96 The
engagement of new self-consciously socialist organisations such
as the Democratic Federation (later Social Democratic Federation)
and the continued interest of the International Workingmens
Association in issues relating to Fenian Amnesty campaigns, land
reform and Irish nationalism, created the space for organisational
and ideological dialogue between Irish radicals and their English
and continental European counterparts. The consequence of this
was both the spread of socialist ideas into Ireland and a number
of attempts to create distinctively socialist associations and
organisations, primarily in Dublin. The foundation of the Dublin
Democratic Federation in 1881 and the Socialist League a few
years later produced a number of centres of discussion which, in
the early 1880s, linked Irish and foreign radical currents. Leading
figures of the British socialist movement such as William Morris
in 1886 visited Ireland to discuss and debate the meaning and
implications of socialism with Dublins intellectual elite.97 While
such societies provoked a degree of public debate, it was not
until the formation of the National Labour League in 1887 that
socialist ideas began to take on a more organised political form.
The Leagues formation coincided with an upsurge in labour
militancy in Dublin, centring on the rights of the unemployed.
Mass public meetings at Harolds Cross and the Phoenix Park
in the same year brought speakers from the League to public
prominence as advocates of a self-consciously socialist programme
modelled on that of the Social Democratic Federation.98 Despite
this initial success, Lane suggests that unfortunately for the
league it was activated at a time when nationalist Ireland was
mobilising in opposition to the new coercion bill ... [and] the
Labour League was wholly uninterested in accommodating
itself within the nationalist movement.99 Isolating itself from
the broader issue of Home Rule ensured that the League would
67
be unable to develop any meaningful mass public following, and

it soon dissolved, as did its debating predecessors. However out
of the same milieu emerged a succession of similar groups, with
a continuity of both aims and personnel. The Dublin Socialist
Club, the Saturday Club, the Progressist Club and the Fabians
were all spaces for Dublin and Belfast based radicals to continue
the intellectual debate about socialism.
As the new unionism began to take hold during the 1890s,
intellectual radicals and labour organisers began to look at local
and national government as a possible forum for advancing the
cause of socialism. The Dublin Trades Council agreed such a
course of action in 1892 and was followed by the formation of the
Belfast Labour Party in the same period, with regional towns such
as Waterford and Cork following shortly afterwards. However,
as with the broader union movement, prospective candidates
for local or national government were always under pressure to
align themselves with broader political currents of nationalism or
unionism. While space for the development of a labour nationalism
was proved possible by the success of nationalist MPs such as J.P.
Nannetti, the fate of labour unionists such as William Walker
demonstrated that while unionism was intent on mobilising the
Protestant working classes, it would have to be at the expense of
the interests of labour and working-class unity.
Assessment
In the opening years of the twentieth century, after one hundred
years of significant organisational and ideological development,
English socialists, and indeed many of their contemporaries across
the European continent, were about to embark on a period of
significant political growth. In Ireland however, socialists continued
to be consigned to the margins of political life. Fintan Lane, in his
authoritative account of socialism in nineteenth-century Ireland,
suggests that the realities of rural Ireland, the enduring influence
of religious revivalism, both Catholic and Protestant, and the
centrality of nationalism and Home Rule to the politics of the
time, provided obstacles which Irish socialism was either unable
68
or unwilling to overcome. Combined with the refusal of the

broader trade union movement to fully embrace its own political
possibilities, for a variety of different and at times contradictory
reasons, the organisations of labour and their minority currents
of socialist dissent singularly failed to carve out a sustainable
political space in Irish society.
The issue of land dominated the politics of nineteenth-century
Ireland. Both before and after the Great Hunger, Irish nationalist
politicians depended for their political success on their ability
to link agrarian grievance with Repeal and Home Rule in order
to mobilise popular support. OConnell and Parnell, whatever
their differences, understood the centrality of rural Ireland in
their efforts to pressurise the British government to adopt their
desired legislative reforms. While at the start of the twentieth
century almost one third of the Irish population lived in towns,
the majority of these, unlike their English counterparts, relied on
the countryside for their livelihood. Even in its urban life, with the
exception of Dublin and Belfast, Ireland was a profoundly rural
and agrarian society.100 One of the key failures of the Dublin and
Belfast based socialists was their inability to understand this reality,
which not only cut them off from the majority of the population
in the countryside, but also made their politics irrelevant to the
agricultural labourers in the towns. The uncritical transposition of
an urban and labourist socialism, from figures such as Hyndman
and Morris in England and Henry George in the United States,
led either to an ignoring of rural Ireland completely or to the
advocacy of programmes for land nationalisation. The idea of
land nationalisation was political suicide, forcing even popular
land agitators such as Michael Davitt into political obscurity.
Thus, while the inability of early Irish socialists to integrate their
socialism with the realities of agrarian politics prevented them
from developing a broad base of support in the countryside, the
same cannot be said for the urban working class, which although
smaller than its European counterparts, could nonetheless have
offered a more stable political base from which to operate. Indeed
the conditions of the urban working class in Belfast and Dublin
provided ample ground from which to build. Here, the crucial
69
question for the socialists was the issue of legislative independence,

and again the uncritical transposition of socialist discourse and
labour modes of organisation from Britain prevented even the
Labour League from capitalising on their initial success.
In Britain the rise of political labour was based on the need for
legislative reform within the existing state. In Ireland, nationalism
from 1798 onwards, and unionism from 1880s onwards,
succeeded in integrating the advancement of popular demands
for rights with the discourse of either support for or opposition
to legislative independence. In the north, the coalescing of socialimperialism, labour unionism and sectarian conservatism at the
end of the century succeeded in mobilising the Protestant working
class to the cause of Empire and Union. Nationalists, including
labour nationalists, saw political change in the context of Home
Rule and later, complete independence. The political space simply
did not exist for the articulation of a successful socialist project
outside of these parameters. As the ideological conflict between
republican socialism and labour unionism drew William Walker
and James Connolly into a war of words from 1905 onwards,
those socialists and trade unionists who attempted to stand aloof
were consigned to obscurity or political impotence.
Irelands nineteenth-century socialists advocated the
programmatic socialism of the Social Democratic Federation, or
ideas articulated by artists like William Morris and trade union
leaders like Kier Hardie, despite the inability of these sources to
provide an adequate response to Irish conditions. Irish socialism
before Connolly simply refused to be drawn into the issue of
Home Rule. However, their disinterest in issues relating to Home
Rule should not be overplayed, as their English mentors had just
as little success during the 1880s and 1890s in securing a popular
base for socialism. Understanding this shared failure requires two
additional elements that Lane ignores. British and Irish socialists
at this time displayed a distinct lack of interest in the emerging
working-class movements, seeing trade unionism as inherently
orientated towards compromise with the capitalist system.
Attempting to develop a self-consciously revolutionary political
space, demands for improvements in conditions for employees was
70
deemed irrelevant in the broader struggle for the transformation

of existing property relations. While such a doctrinaire position
would not last into the twentieth century, at this crucial stage of
working-class politics, as labour electoral associations were being
formed in towns and cities and the LiberalLabour alliance was
coming under increasing strain, the socialist non-engagement with
trade unionism cut it off from what was its only possible source
of meaningful political support.
Of equal importance in understanding the socialist isolation
from the mass of working people is an understanding of the
origin of much of their political discourse. The SDF and its
subsequent English and Irish offshoots were all loosely part of
the broader socialist movement emerging across Europe. The
formal inauguration of the Second International in Paris in 1889
began a process of codifying the doctrine of Marxist-inspired
Social Democracy that came to dominate socialist politics until
its first major crisis during the First World War. Ideologically and
organisationally, early British and Irish socialism focused more
on importing emerging strands of revolutionary thought from
continental Europe, and gave little thought to its applicability to,
or malleability for, more local political and economic conditions.
The net result was that in both Ireland and Britain socialism
began its life in the form of theoretical discussion clubs, with
little intervention in or meaning for the outside world. The
more organic relationship of labourism to the English working
classes, and nationalism and unionism to their Irish contemporaries, ensured that in both countries socialism would remain
detached from the social forces it sought to represent and was
thus relegated to a minor player in the major political movements
of the twentieth century.
In a sense nineteenth-century Irish socialists were a minority
tendency within a social and political movement the trade unions
who were themselves a minor current in Irish society more
generally; so their failures should neither surprise us nor be held
against them. A more profound failure, however, clearly can be
laid at the door of the trade union movement itself. Despite a
considerable national network, a formidable national congress
71
structure, and significant levels of mass mobilisation from 1880

through to the 1920s, trade unionism remained effectively
impotent on the political front. There is a certain irony in the
fact that the only nineteenth-century political movement in Ireland
able to build a substantial cross-denominational base of popular
support was unable to transform this into an effective political
force independent of nationalism or unionism. Capitulation to
unionist sectarianism and imperial conservatism in Belfast, and
retreat into the isolation of political neutrality in Dublin, rendered
the two main centres of trade union membership and leadership
politically dependent on their respective Home Rule adversaries.
These trends would be challenged during the early twentieth
century, most notably by trade union leaders such as Jim Larkin
and socialist republicans such as James Connolly.
Both the Irish trade union movement and the emerging socialist
societies failed in another profound respect, with respect to the
position of women. While the 1880s and 1890s saw the first
powerful challenge to the exclusive gendered space of Irish
politics in the form of the Ladies Land League, and of suffragette
societies formed first in liberal circles in Belfast and Dublin to be
followed by the most advanced sections of nationalism, the strict
gendered division of labour in society was not only mirrored
by but perpetuated in the form and content of trade union and
socialist politics. Lane recounts that despite the widespread
struggle for the extension of the franchise in trade union circles,
and the growing advocacy by women for the vote albeit it
with the property qualification many radicals failed to envisage
women as part of the suffrage demand.101 Although some notable
exceptions among the socialist and trade unionist ranks, such as
Will Thorne, encouraged women to join trade unions, women
were in the main seen as a threat to the security of male labour
and actively excluded from most fields of employment and active
trade union membership. Again, a rigid gendered demarcation
of the labour market, and the active exclusion of women from
trade unions, would be subject to profound challenges in the
coming decades. But as the nineteenth century came to a close
womens role in this sphere of radical politics was much the same
72
as it had been among the Fenians, Young Irelanders and even the
United Irishmen either wholly absent, or when admitted wholly
subservient to a patriarchal view of the world.
Conclusion
Left republicanism is a distinctively modern phenomenon in Irish
politics. Despite various attempts by historians and activists to
retrospectively read a socialist republican content into eighteenthand nineteenth-century radical Irish politics, the reality is that
until the formation of the Irish Socialist Republican Party in
1896 no ideological or organisational formation combining these
two positions existed. However, this is not to imply that left
republicanism has no origins in eighteenth- or nineteenth-century
Ireland. Clearly it does. The various radical currents described
above laid the foundations upon which James Connolly and
subsequent generations of socialist republicans attempted to
build in order to legitimise their interventions into contemporary
political and economic realities. The fact that, from Connolly to
the present, left republicans have continually misread the way
in which these foundations shaped their own political reality
is lamentable. That they more often used this history purely
to legitimise rather than to understand is indeed unfortunate.
However, it is impossible to understand the emergence and
subsequent history of left republicanism from the end of the
nineteenth century through to the present outside the historic
context sketched out above. We must interrogate the ideological
and organisational legacy bequeathed by these various radical
movements, and in doing so come to grips with their weaknesses
and contradictions as much as their strengths.
First, it is crucial to understand the context within which these
movements emerged. While the colonial relationship between
England and Ireland during the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries undoubtedly forms the overarching framework for this
understanding, it is important not to reduce all of the disparate
forms of radicalism to this one cause. One of the great weaknesses
of many left-republican readings of this period is its reduction of
73
Irish history to an unbroken, continuous, essentialist tradition

of opposition to British rule in Ireland. That the United Irish,
Young Ireland and Fenian movements opposed British rule is not
in question. But the various reasons behind this opposition, and
the broader attitudes of Irish society to these demands, are more
complex and indeed at times contradictory.
Eighteenth-century radicals wanted an end to Ascendancy
interference in trade, and greater access to the emerging British
colonial markets. Nineteenth-century nationalists were concerned
with the negative impact of free trade on emerging Irish industry.
Likewise rural, urban, Presbyterian and Catholic Ireland,
throughout these centuries, were all more likely to support the
moderate aims of Liberals, Repealers or Home Rulers, and seek
redress for their grievances within the context of the Union, than
to give support to the more radical demands for separation.
What was decisive in shifting popular support from reform to
rebellion, and from accommodation to separation, at each point
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was the actions of
governments in London. Irish republicanism was not, for the most
part, a matter of principle, but a strategic and tactical response to
the policy of the British state that continually placed its interests
before those of the people it was governing. The particular nature
of English rule in Ireland, as distinct from the rest of the Union,
ensured that the integration of legislative independence with a
broader social, economic and political agenda for change would
become the dominant political paradigm from the end of the
nineteenth century. However, as subsequent developments after
the War of Independence show, if these disparate interests and
grievances could be partially or temporarily resolved on the basis
of less than the full demand for independence, then support for
more modest change would grow and undermine the strength
of republicanism.
While there is little doubt that the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Protestant Ascendancy would have been unable to
support either the moderate or more radical political positions
of nationalists and republicans, the position of northern
Presbyterians was less clear. However, their grievances, as
74
articulated at the end of the eighteenth century, were gradually

resolved within the context of the emerging British Empire, a
fact misunderstood by many republicans. The success of the
unionist political project from the 1850s onwards was its ability
to construct a cultural hegemony among northern Protestants
Anglican and Presbyterian on the foundations of religious
revivalism and anti-Catholic sectarianism, and welding this to
the economic benefits of industrial development in the context of
the Empire and political union with Britain. As the era of mass
participation in politics opened up at the end of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries, the integration of the Protestant urban
working class into this project secured is future, and closed off the
possibility of recreating the CatholicPresbyterian alliance central
to the strength of the United Irishmen. While there was nothing
inevitable in this formation, and its future would be volatile and
insecure, its existence cannot be reduced to the machinations of
political elites in London or Belfast. There is little doubt that these
elites invested significant energy and resources in this project. But
the success of social-imperialism was never solely a matter of its
considerable backing in Westminster.
These three key facts, the colonial nature of English later
British rule in Ireland, the contingent nature of Irish popular
support for republican aims, and the organic nature of Ulster
unionism, are the contextual fabric within which we must asses the
development of republican and socialist politics in these centuries.
Of course the broader European context of the industrial, national
and democratic revolutions is the more general continental
context within which AngloIrish relations must be read, in terms
of the structural antagonisms which modern European society
was developing such as class and gender; the ideological and
organisational influences which impacted on the contours of Irish
republicanism and socialism; the priorities, policies and strategies
of the state; and the concerns and allegiances of the public.
At an ideological level Irish republicanism during this period
developed a distinct character. It was civic in its aspirations
towards governance, disagreements over the extent of the
franchise notwithstanding. It was nationalist in its conception of
75
the people. It was also secular, anti-imperial and revolutionary.

It sought the maximum degree of political change as understood
by particular protagonists at particular times. However, in social
terms, particularly from the mid nineteenth century, the failure of
Fenianism to develop a parallel social critique of the status quo,
coupled with early Irish socialisms ideological and organisational
weakness, ensured that a conservative Catholicism would prevail
on matters beyond the purely political.
In practical policy terms republicanism sought legislative
independence from Westminster, although only gradually did
this develop into a programme of full national independence.
It always opted for the most advanced position on the question
of the extension of the franchise prevalent within (male) society
at the time. It effectively linked concrete social and economic
grievances with this broader programme for constitutional and
institutional change. At times such connections were sincere and
integral elements of the republican programme, however on
occasion this was more a matter of expedience or necessitated
by the need for strategic alliances among different sections of the
population. Socialism, again owing to its underdevelopment and
self-distancing from these more practical realities, was content to
debate the issues of exploitation and class politics, without ever
developing meaningful policies or programmes.
Contrary to the writings of contemporary historians, and
many contemporary adherents, republicanism was not primarily
a physical-force tradition. The United Irish, Young Ireland and
Fenian movements all adopted constitutional and parliamentary
tactics at various stages in their development. The first two
supported armed rebellion only after reform failed to produce
meaningful results, while the Fenians were for most of their
existence involved in some form of constitutionalism, whether
through Parnells New Departure, the IRBs cultivation of
advanced political and cultural nationalism from the 1890s, or
indeed their role in and position on the Treaty negotiations after
the War of Independence. Indeed, for the IRB, armed and constitutional strategies and tactics were often deployed simultaneously
not unlike their adversaries in the British state despite the
76
IRBs rhetorical insistence on privileging the former over the latter.

Interestingly, early Irish socialism was affected by the separate but
similar debates current within English socialism which, although
not as crystallised as it was to become, engaged in heated debate
about the merits of reform over revolution, and insurrection over
parliamentary engagement.
The form of republican politics as it evolved during the hundred
years from the 1780s is equally important, combining as it does the
participatory and very public approach of the United Irishmens
desire to make every man a politician with the underground,
conspiratorial modalities of revolutionary armed rebellion. The
popular dissemination of literature, and the popular forms of
such literature, such as ballads, poems or political tracts, did more
than just popularise political ideas, they shifted the location of
politics into the public realm where the overwhelming majority of
the male population lived. United Irish street-based polemicising
reached new audiences when adopted by trade union and socialist
activists in the second half of the nineteenth century, creating a
level of political knowledge and activism which would profoundly
challenge the status quo of the political elites. However, despite
being driven by necessity, the more clandestine culture of the
Fenians would sit uneasily with this radically democratic
approach. As oath-bound societies became the primary mode of
organisation within republicanism from the 1860s, it undoubtedly
lost albeit temporarily one of its most innovative components.
State repression and the fear of coercion, while primarily to blame
for this shift, cannot be held responsible for the continuance of
a culture of intrigue and secrecy dominating republican forms of
organisation into the twentieth century.
Arriving at a similar position but for very different reasons,
the decision of the early Irish socialists to remain apart from the
growing working-class trade union movement, and their more
singular focus on debating societies, produced an elitism which
acted as a barrier to a more meaningful relationship between
socialist ideas and working-class political or industrial action.
77
Possibly the most complex and contradictory legacy left by

both socialism and republicanism concerns their different understandings of the fundamental antagonisms which existed within
Irish society and between Ireland and Britain. From the time
of the United Irishmen through to the Fenians, the antagonism
of metropolis and colony was understood, and formed the key
ideological and programmatic link between the two distinct
periods and movements. However, the parallel antagonisms
which existed between landlord and peasant, between employer
and labourer, between men and women, and between Catholic,
Presbyterian and Anglican, were of a more problematic nature.
The Presbyterian United Irishmen understood the inequities of
religious discrimination and actively formed an alliance with the
Catholic Committee and Defenders. However their commitment
to the full extension of rights political, social and economic
to all sections of Irish society was much more conditional and
contradictory. While the radicals endorsed universal male suffrage,
few were willing to explore and challenge the inequities of wealth
and economic power, or to contemplate the implications of Paines
rights for women. The result was a union with the men of no
property on the most limited and fragile of bases.
Young Ireland were a more diverse mix, containing a left, centre
and right, as agrarian radicalism mixed shoulders with Carlylean
Tory radicalism, with neither faction ever gaining ascendancy
and both positions often competing within the same individual
at different moments in their political career. Subsequently
the Fenians resolved such problems by relegating questions of
social and economic policy to a secondary position. Despite the
close relationship between senior IRB leaders and Marxs First
International, post-Famine republicanism became singularly
political in its focus. While undoubtedly part of this was a result of
the desire to generate and preserve national unity, particularly in
the post-1916 era, there was nonetheless an ideological imperative
which saw the attainment of political objectives as strategically
and chronologically prior to the form and content of a postindependence government.
78
The socialists for their part returned the Fenian serve by focusing
purely on questions of class and ignoring the broader political
realities that surrounded them. All of these radical movements,
however, refused to consider, even in its most moderate form, the
reality of societys social, economic, political and institutional
exclusion of women. The rigidities of a gendered society in which
male and female roles were clearly demarcated were never in
doubt. But the refusal of male radicalism, whether republican
or socialist, to respond in anything other than the negative
when these inequalities were challenged should both surprise
and disappoint. Figures such as Mary Ann McCracken, Anna
Doyle Wheeler, William Thompson, Isabella Tod, and Fanny and
Anna Parnell, all challenged the masculinised nature of politics
throughout this period. The challenge would have to wait until
the twentieth century before it would be finally heard, and even
then changes within republicanism and socialism would be slow
and reluctant.
If these are the ideological, organisational and policy contours
of republicanism and socialism as they developed from the 1870s,
what were its consequences? Here the balance sheet is just as
mixed. By the end of the nineteenth century both republicanism
and socialism were marginal political positions, overshadowed
on the nationalist side by the Home Rule movement, liberal and
conservative unionism, and apolitical trade unionism. In terms
of generating mass popular support or organisational strength
the indications were not positive. An ideological and organisational legacy should not be confused with a meaningful and
measurable political impact. Indeed, the 1880s and 1890s were,
for the most part, an inhospitable period for the growth and
development of radical politics in Ireland. Conservative unionism
was gaining strength in the Protestant north; Catholic nationalism
was near hegemonic among the remainder of the population;
both political positions were succeeding in mobilising the newly
enfranchised lower classes to their respective causes; three
successive republican rebellions 1798, 1846, 1857 all ended
in failure; no republican or socialist organisation of any size or
credibility appeared to exist; and, most significantly, the British
79
Liberal governments policy, reliant as it was on Irish MPs in the

Commons, seemed close to resolving the key nationalist issue of
legislative independence for Ireland. Despite the dramatic events
of the previous one hundred years, there seemed little to show
in terms of meaningful outcomes for either republicanism or
socialism in Ireland.
2
THE ARRIVAL OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM
European politics from the 1880s through to the outbreak of the

First World War was dominated by three overlapping realities,
whose interactions did much to shape the contours of the twentieth
century. Imperialism, democratisation and the growth of labour
would together alter the map of domestic and inter-state political
relations among the nations of Europe, and instigate a series of
profound changes in the nature and shape of national, continental
and global politics.
Although colonial expansion had been a key feature of the
eighteenth century from its outset, the 1880s ushered in a period
in which much of the surface of the world was partitioned between
the dominant powers of Europe. It was also during this period
that Britains colonial dominance was challenged, principally by
her emerging rival, Germany. Imperial historian Ronald Hyam
described this period as the decline of British pre-eminence,
arguing that for Britain:
The key theme for the latter nineteenth century was ... a pessimistic search
for stability in the context of an international scene dominated by the
re-emergence of Britains expansionist rivals. All European powers were in
the grip of the same worries about being left behind in the scramble for
nite resources.1
Imperial competition and the need for colonial stability would

become dominant themes in both Liberal and Conservative
governments policy towards all colonies, including Ireland. It
is impossible to understand the emerging Home Rule crisis or
the British reaction to the republican Rising of 1916 outside of
this context.
80
81
Imperial competition, and in particular the rise of Germany

as Britains main economic rival on the world stage, also had
a relevance for Britains strategic considerations of the Irish
Question. While Sloan has suggested that from 1904 to the
outbreak of the First World War, Germany had replaced France as
Britains main European and naval rival, the reality was that such
concerns predated the advent of the twentieth century.2 German
technological innovations and economic expansion from the
1880s onwards compounded what was perceived as Britains long
term relative economic decline.3 If British policy makers came to
view Ireland as the Achilles heel of British defences against French
revolutionary politics from the 1780s through to the 1860s, the
threat from the 1890s onwards was decidedly a German one, a
fact not lost on the emerging Irish separatist movement.
This period was also one of considerable colonial insurgency
and conflict. The outbreak of the AngloBoer War in 1899
was followed by the Afrikaner rebellion in 1914 and the Irish
rebellion in 1916, and by conflict in India and Egypt after 1918.
The First World War itself had its origins in the breakdown of
the balance of power relations, established during the latter half
of the nineteenth century as a check on the expansionist policies
of the major powers. The desire by some to extend this influence
beyond the limits set would usher in the most sustained period
of violence in world history, engulfing not just the continent of
Europe but its colonial possessions. At its heart, the First World
War was an imperial war in the deepest meaning of the term.
The consequences of all of this for AngloIrish relations were
significant. Political developments in Ireland were intricately
connected, both in reality and in British policy makers minds,
with the broader imperial and AngloGerman strategic considerations. The fate of the Empire and the security of Britain
itself often appeared to rest upon the shoulders of Londons Irish
policy. Following the advent of the Home Rule crisis in 1886,
Gladstones policy of supporting reform for Ireland was viewed
by many within the British political establishment as threatening
to disrupt the unity of the empire and promote social revolution
at home, as opening the way to the relinquishment of Gibraltar,
82
the abandonment of India, the repudiation of the Colonies, and

the resignation of our duties as a great fighting powers, and as
sending a signal to every subject race ... that we [England] were
no longer able to cope with resistance.4 Ireland was fast becoming
the battleground upon which differing conceptions of imperial
policy were increasingly fought.
Behind this battle over imperial policy lay a more fundamental
conflict that went to the very heart of British parliamentary
politics. While Ireland was certainly not the cause of this deeper
conflict it became, like the question of Empire, the site upon which
a fundamental realignment of party politics would take place,
as the British state began to respond to the increasing democratisation of political life. Home Rule was no longer about the
amelioration of localised Irish political grievances, but was to
become one of the key issues around which the emerging political
formations of twentieth-century British politics would coalesce.
Indeed, if the period in question can rightly be termed one of
crisis in the British state, then Ireland would be one of the sites
both for the experiencing of that crisis and for the articulation
of its eventual resolution.5
From the early 1880s onwards a number of franchise reform
acts were passed through the Westminster Parliament, the effect
of which was to significantly increase the degree of male suffrage.
Wood estimates that after the 1884 act, about 60 per cent of the
adult male population was enfranchised and the wealthier section
of society often had the right to several votes in different constituencies.6 He argues that in England more than half of those now
on the electoral register were working class.7 Women remained
excluded from these changes and would have to undertake
considerable agitation up until 1918 to ensure that the franchise
would be extended. In Ireland, the extension of the franchise to
more than half a million considerably strengthened the hand of
those campaigning for Home Rule. The need for urgent land
reform and a continued belief in the merits of repealing the Act of
Union were the dominant themes of nationalist political discourse.
In this context, this extension of the franchise had two significant
consequences on the nature of politics in Ireland and Britain.
83
The election of 85 Home Rule MPs to Westminster in 1885,

placed Irish concerns at the centre of British parliamentary politics.
Gladstone, converted to the cause of reform in Ireland by the
numerical strength of his new parliamentary allies, announced
his intention to introduce a Home Rule bill the following year.
Despite the defeat of the bill, 1892 once again gave Home Rulers
the balance of power at Westminster, ensuring Gladstone would
give the bill a second try. While this second attempt would fall
in the Lords in 1893, renewed campaigning by the post-Parnell
Irish Parliamentary Party under the leadership of John Redmond
would ensure that the bill would eventually become law in 1914,
only to be suspended until after the looming European war.
The centrality of Home Rule had a profound impact on politics
in Britain and the north of Ireland, providing the occasion if
not the cause for a significant realignment of popular politics. It
produced an increasingly aggressive Imperial discourse amongst
Tory radicals led by Churchill and his emerging allies within the
Chamberlain wing of the Liberals. Hyam notes that time and
again Gladstones bill was denounced as a scheme for the disintegration of the Empire. A typical contention was: once start
the dangerous principle of disruption, once foster destructive
centrifugal forces, and no-one could say where the end might
be.8 By the first decade of the twentieth century the Home Rule
issue had
mobilised the Conservative Party around a single, radical and unifying
cause. The threat of treason, armed rebellion and civil war [making] 1910
a year of profound political crisis, the magnitude of which threatened not
just particular party policies but the foundations of the political institutions
themselves.9
For the Conservatives, Home Rule, and emerging Ulster Unionist

resistance to it, was to become a battleground with the Liberals
for control at Westminster. Tory Leader, Bonar Law, emphasising
the point at a rally in Balmoral, argued that Home Rule was a
conspiracy as treacherous as had ever been formed against the
life of a great nation.10
84
The impact of Tory mobilisation against Home Rule was to

consolidate the emerging trend within northern Protestant politics,
following the defeat of the Irish Liberals in 1885. A new, crossclass political constituency was taking root in the north east of the
island, supplanting the liberal ascendancy politics that dominated
unionism in the rest of the country. The growing Lagan Valley
working class was mobilised in a novel social-imperialist project
through interventions such as the signing of the Ulster Covenant
by more than 200,000 men in 1912. This emerging movement
explicitly linked opposition to Home Rule with maintenance of
the material and cultural privileges of Empire. While securing
significant support from Conservative allies in London it is
important not to underestimate the organic and autonomous
nature of this new movement.
And so, Ireland at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth century was dominated by the politics of imperialism and
legislative independence. Empire was to be the focal point around
which democratisation in an Irish context was to take root, with
nationalism and unionism providing the intertwined political spaces
within which popular mobilisation would take place. Demands for
land reform and Home Rule would dominate nationalist Irelands
political horizon, while for unionists, maintaining the benefits of
Empire would characterise theirs. Trade union mobilisation would
also experience a significant expansion during this period, but
always within the context of, and in many respects subservient
to, the meta-narratives of unionism and nationalism. Despite the
tendency of many historians to view such developments as internal
to Ireland, the overriding importance of both Liberal and Tory
interventions into these spaces cannot be ignored. Home Rule was
no localised dispute between the inhabitants of Britains closest
colony. The investment of considerable energy and resources by
Tories and Liberals did much to frame the nature of this emerging
conflict, whose outcome was as conditioned by events in and
interventions from Westminster as those in Belfast or Dublin.
Equally, the eventual form of a settlement the AngloIrish treaty
and partition owed more to the requirements of British political
elites than those in Dublin or Belfast. While subsequent British
85
governments would demonstrate a desire to extricate themselves

from the Irish Question when its utility had expired, this should
not distract us from the central role they played in constructing the
political framework which would dominate AngloIrish relations
for the century that followed.
James Connolly and the Irish Socialist Republican Party

It was into this highly charged political climate that Irelands
first explicitly republican socialist formation came into being. Its
character, content and eventual failure cannot be fully understood
outside the specific context of Irelands position within the British
state system and the broader imperial crisis of the time. The ISRP
was formed in 1896, during a meeting of the Dublin Socialist
Society, and at first appeared to be another addition to the small
collection of radical debating societies which were emerging in
Ireland, according to Fintan Lanes description, as an outpost of
the British socialist revival.11 The initial manifesto of the party
demanded the
Establishment of An Irish Socialist Republic based on the public ownership by
the Irish people of the land, and instruments of production, distribution and
exchange. Agriculture to be administered as a public function, under boards
of management elected by the agricultural population and responsible to
them and to the nation at large. All other forms of labour necessary to the
well being of the community to be conducted on the same principles.12
The ISRP was not, however, just another progressive debating

society like the Saturday Club or Dublin branch of the Social
Democratic Federation. Rather, this new radical party was
determined to break with two of the prevailing practices of Irish
socialists. They wanted to actively engage with the working class
through campaigns and electoral interventions and to attempt
to formulate a meaningful connection between the politics of
Irish republicanism and the then dominant European social
democratic project.
Under the influence of their full-time organiser, James Connolly,
the ISRP outlined a new and distinct programme which combined
86
an understanding of the radical Fenian tradition of Fintan Lalor,

as relayed through the words and activism of Scottish radical
John Leslie, and the British and Scottish strands of the Marxist
Second International. Their initial manifesto was clearly an
attempt to integrate the by now standard features of a social
democratic programme and strategy with the demand for full Irish
independence. The documents ten-point plan included a series
of demands for public control of national resources, expansion
of public services, reform of the tax system in order to increase
available public expenditure, legislative improvements in workers
conditions, and universal suffrage.13 These were followed by what
was to become a classic definition of socialist republicanism:
That the subjection of one nation to another, as of Ireland to the authority
of the British Crown, is a barrier to the free political and economic
development of the subjected nation, and can only serve the interests of
the exploiting classes of both nations.
That, therefore, the national and economic freedom of the Irish people
must be sought in the same direction, viz. the establishment of an Irish
Socialist Republic, and the consequent conversion of the means of
production, distribution and exchange into the common property of society,
to be held and controlled by a democratic state in the interests of the
entire community.14
The manifesto went on to assert that the conquest by the Social

Democracy of political power in Parliament, and on all public
bodies in Ireland, is the readiest and most effective means whereby
the revolutionary forces may be organised and disciplined to attain
that end.
Contained in this founding document is a clear expression of the
fundamental tenets of socialist republicanism at its very moment
of birth. The interrelationship between class exploitation and
colonial exploitation, the need for national control of production,
distribution and exchange, and a belief in the utility of democratic
and parliamentary interventions to achieve these objectives, were
to provide the cornerstone of the ISRPs political composition and
activity for the following seven years.
87
For the duration of its short life, Connollys party remained

a small and marginal element of the broader Dublin radical
scene. While it gained some exposure in its campaign activity
with republicans and nationalists particularly through the
anti-jubilee protests, the 1798 centenary commemorations, and
the mobilisation on the Boer war its electoral interventions
demonstrated a stark absence of any real popular support.
Initially supporting the Trade Union Congress inspired Labour
Electoral Association (LEA), when fielding their own candidate
in the 1899 Dublin municipal elections the ISRPs Stewart failed
to secure election while the LEA took 20 per cent of the vote. The
LEAs subsequent incorporation into the nationalist United Irish
League (UIL) the following year saw relations with the ISRP sour.
However, even the poor record of former LEA councillors did not
alter the radicals electoral standing, as the ISRP failed to elect
their candidate Thomas Lyng in 1900, and even Connolly himself
could only muster a paltry 431 votes in 1902 and 243 votes in
1903. The 1902 election witnessed the partys peak, securing 800
votes in total for three candidates.
While historians have rightly pointed to factors such as the
small size of the Dublin working class, the strength and appeal
of other parties, and the impact of clientelism as reasons for the
ISRPs electoral failure, in themselves these factors do not fully
explain the inability of the party to offer any significant opposition
to the more traditionalist candidates of the LEA or the UIL.15
If electoral success evaded the small republican socialist party,
they compensated for this with an intense volume of publications
and campaigning. The Workers Republic appeared periodically
from 1889 through to the partys dissolution in 1904. It covered a
broad range of national and international issues and was, in many
respects, groundbreaking for its time. The paper even extended
its coverage to trade union issues, unusual for a social democratic
publication. However, as Lynch points out, a comparison of the
space devoted to industrial issues as compared with the Boer War
or local government elections clearly demonstrates that the party
did not see the emerging trade union movement as a central arena
of political engagement.
88
The bulk of their political time and energy was devoted

to campaign alliances with advanced nationalists from the
constellation of organisations that gravitated around the Gaelic
Revival and the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB). The ISRPs
republicanism made common cause with such groups in the
context of the 1798 centenary and Boer War mobilisations logical.
However, their opposition to Home Rule nationalism led to
conflicts over who had the right to participate in these campaigns.
Such arguments were illustrative of the distinction drawn by the
ISRP between the conservatism of traditional Irish nationalism,
as evidenced by the UIL at a local and Westminster level, and
the more radical advanced nationalists such as Arthur Griffith.
Connollys support for this latter group was always contingent on
the specific moment and issue, and the Workers Republic was not
slow to criticise radical nationalists if it felt the occasion required
it. Connollys belief that honest and uncompromising nationalist
friends would be forced to adopt ... uncompromising hostility to
all half way men and measures, while true, would come to pass
at a different time and in a different manner to the one envisioned
by republican socialists.16
Ultimately the failure of the ISRP to develop electorally, in
the very arena of political intervention it saw as central to the
advance of its objectives, created strains on what was in truth a
small and overstretched organisation, whose active membership
never reached more than 80 people. Ideological disagreements
over the relationship with the emerging trade union movement;
failure to expand beyond the small circle of radical groups in
Dublin; disagreements over whether to pursue revolutionary or
reformist strategies; and its unsettling political relationship with
nationalism, were all eventually too great for the party to bear,
and in 1903 Connolly resigned as full-time organiser. The inability
of this republican socialist project to grow, and its failure to exert
any meaningful influence on the broader advanced nationalist
movement let alone position itself to become a hegemonic force
in what was to emerge a decade later as the driving force of
early twentieth-century Irish nationalism is a question I will
return to at the end of this chapter. For the moment however,
89
it is sufficient to observe with Fintan Lane that, irrespective of

its organisational and electoral failures, the ISRP introduced a
new vocabulary into the Irish left. Socialist republicanism was
Marxian, revolutionist, strongly anti-imperialist and rooted in a
sense of historical place.17
After the Irish Socialist Republican Party

Following a period of political and trade union activism in the
USA, Connolly returned to Ireland in 1910. The three movements
that constituted Dublin radicalism on his departure advanced
nationalism, socialism and trade unionism had all experienced
significant organisational and political advancements in the
intervening years. The remnants of the ISRP and the Dublin
branch of the Independent Labour Party founded the Socialist
Party of Ireland (SPI) in 1904. Sinn Fin had been formed in
1905, and Arthur Griffiths daily newspaper the United Irishman
had a significant circulation. James Larkin and the National
Union of Dockworkers were redefining the nature of trade
union mobilisation through a series of dock strikes in Belfast
and Dublin in 1907 and 1908. Although the political geography
of the island was still dominated by the nationalist and unionist
movements and the political debate over Home Rule, it was clear
that radical political currents were beginning to impact on the
broader political landscape. However, on Connollys arrival, the
three different elements of the Irish radical scene had little political
engagement with each other. The SPI was highly critical of what it
saw as the conservatism of Griffiths petit-bourgeois nationalism.
For their part, and despite significant internal disagreements, Sinn
Fin was by and large hostile to both the SPI and the trade unions.
The latter, in turn, maintained a singular focus on labour issues,
partly by design and partly through circumstance.
For the next five years Connolly would immerse himself in the
world of trade union organising, which had, since the arrival of
Larkin some years earlier, focused on mobilising unskilled workers
into large general unions, determined to use their collective strength
and radical strike action to secure improvements in working
90
conditions and pay. This new model unionism, emerging across

the European continent during the period, challenged the timidity
of the established craft unions and radicalised a growing section
of workers. OConnor rightly described these new developments
as an international acceleration of militancy ... representing, in
particular, an Irish variant of syndicalism.18
Employed by the Irish Transport and General Workers Union in
Belfast from 1911, Connollys focus was on organising unskilled
dock labourers and women mill workers from the predominantly
nationalist north and west of the city. This was his first direct
experience of the emerging Protestant working-class, Orange and
unionist sectarianism, and the labour unionism articulated by
William Walker. Connolly was also never far away from more
explicitly political debates, focusing on which party-political form
the emerging labour movement should support.
A failed electoral contest in the 1913 municipal elections in
Belfast and the outbreak of what was to become the Dublin lockout brought Connolly back to Dublin following the arrest of Jim
Larkin. The eventual defeat of the labour movement, in what
was without doubt its most important battle to date, coupled
with the continued unwillingness of organised labour, whether
north or south, to fully embrace the republican socialist party
form that Connolly espoused, produced a degree of despondency.
The onset of the First World War and the collapse of the Second
International threw radicals across the continent into a deep
political and ideological crisis, as the foundations of their outlook
were increasingly challenged by the conservatism not only of
the labour and trade union leaders, but of the rank-and-file
membership as well. The growing disillusionment of socialists
such as Connolly with the electoral strategy of social democracy
was compounded by the increasing inability of Home Rule politics
to advance the cause of legislative independence. Advanced
nationalist groups, whether in the form of the IRB or Griffiths
Sinn Fin, were articulating a more profound challenge to the
impotence of the Irish Parliamentary Party in Westminster. As war
approached, radical socialists and nationalists in Ireland believed,
often for different reasons, that a new political space was opening
91
up from which a more profound, indeed revolutionary, challenge

could be mounted against both the conservatism of mainstream
Irish political opinion and, more importantly, the political heart
of the Empire itself.
In the same way as new model trade unionism had radically
altered the political geography of labour politics north and south
during the first decades of the twentieth century, equally the
increasing mobilisation of populist unionism as evidenced in
the mass signing of the Ulster Unionist Convention (1905) and the
creation of the Ulster Volunteer Force (1912) indicated a further
consolidation of the social-imperial project opposing Home
Rule. Its success in articulating a cross-class political identity,
as discussed earlier, ensured that opponents of Home Rule in
Britain would have a stronger argument in support of some form
of exclusion of the north of Ireland from the eventual Home Rule
settlement. Equally, while nineteenth-century Irish unionism was
neither unified nor hegemonic amongst the countrys Protestant
population, by the time the Home Rule bill came to pass in 1914 it
was clear that an independent and autonomous northern unionism
had succeeded in constructing a solid social and economic base,
whose existence, notwithstanding nationalist wishful thinking,
could neither be easily ignored nor undermined.
In response, advanced nationalists, both radical and
conservative, began a process of mass mobilisation and militarisation through the IRB-inspired Irish Volunteers. While still
very much a minority political persuasion at the wars onset,
the determination of republicans to use the cover of the World
War, and possible logistical support from Germany, to launch an
armed rebellion against British rule in Ireland ensured that the
hegemony of the Home Rule establishment was to be challenged.
The Volunteers acquired a membership of some 30,000 members
by 1914, as both Home Rule nationalists and radical republicans
vied for control of the organisation.19 At the outbreak of war
Redmond led the majority into the National Volunteers in order
to participate in the war as part of a strategy of securing British
support for postwar implementation of the Home Rule bill. Lee
92
estimates that less than 10,000 remained in the anti-war Irish

Volunteers, committed to some form of rebellion.
Connolly had taken up the leadership of the Irish Transport and
General Workers Union in 1914 following Larkins departure to
the United States. In addition he also acted as editor of the unions
paper, the Irish Worker, and chairperson of the small Irish Citizens
Army, a socialist variant of the Irish Volunteers. The departure
of Redmond from the Volunteer movement enabled a working
relationship between the socialists and advanced nationalists to
develop. As preparations for rebellion approached, Connolly
became convinced of the need for a socialist republican presence
at the centre of events. Despite their misgivings, the IRB eventually
allowed Connolly on to the Executive Committee responsible for
planning the Rising.
While undoubtedly a military failure, the Easter Rising of
1916 acted as a turning point in the popular Irish nationalist
imagination, fatally undermining the conservative Home Rule
politics, and replacing it with a more militant separatism. Lees
assessment is probably the most balanced, recognising that for
the rebels themselves victory would not have been unthinkable,
particularly when one considers the balance of military forces in
Ireland at the time.20 Moreover his assessment that the Rising, and
its declaration of a republic, was dedicated to the modernisation
of Irish society is undoubtedly correct.21 By promising equality
of political, social, economic and religious opportunity for all
the citizens of the country, it held out a definition of the republic
that enabled advanced nationalists, republicans and republican
socialists to participate.
Connollys participation in the Rising, and his execution as one
of its leaders, has provoked considerable debate among the Irish
left. Desmond Greaves, in what is the classic republican socialist
treatment of the issue argues that
Connolly held that the national revolution was a prerequisite of the socialist
revolution. But he did not arrive easily at a clear conception of their mutual
relationship. At rst he was inclined to identify them. Later he distinguished
them as the political and economic aspects of the process. Finally he
93
reached the conclusion that they were two stages of one democratic reorganisation of society.22
Morgan, however, rejects the retrospective imposition of this

stagist interpretation of Connollys involvement in the Rising:
It is disingenuous to maintain that Connolly was working for a socialist
revolution, though a stagist conception of an imminent bourgeoisdemocratic revolution is more credible, if it could be shown that he
was simply using nationalism to break through a historical obstacle
... Connolly had little faith in popular revolutionary activity, and he
based his expectations on the McNeill volunteers. The ICA secured his
admission to the IRBs military council, and Connolly went to his death an
unapologetic Fenian.23
There is little doubt that Greaves is guilty of imposing his

own conceptual framework for socialist advance in Ireland on
Connolly and his involvement in 1916. Nonetheless, Morgan is
equally mistaken to dismiss the radical potential contained in the
Rising for socialist republicans. His assertion that there were
many opportunities to articulate a socialist project ignores the
central fact that Connollys move to embrace the rebellion was
born out of the post lock-out collapse of the labour movement,
its failure to move beyond the conservative restraints of Walkers
labour unionism or the political caution of the southern TUC,
and the more general crisis of parliamentary European socialism.
That Connolly was a Fenian should not be in doubt, if Fenian
implies an anti-imperial and radical democratic articulation of
the republican project. Nor should there be any dispute that his
confidence in the ability of organised labour to advance socialist
republican objectives, whether in trade unions or political parties,
was clearly undermined by his practical experience. However,
his participation in the Rising was not the result of either a
maturing of his politics, as argued by Greaves and Metscher, or
an abandoning of socialism in favour of nationalism, as argued
by Morgan. Rather, caught in the specific political moment,
with the available options limited to participating in an alliance
with advanced nationalists and republicans or remaining on the
94
margins of what was becoming one of the central dynamics of

Irish politics, Connollys political instincts drove him towards
rebellion. That this participation was the logical outcome of both
his socialist republican ideological framework expressed from
1896 onwards and his practical political experience over 20
years in Ireland and the United States is without doubt. Nor was
his participation in the IRB-dominated insurrection without its
own limitations and contradictions, the consequences of which
would only become clear in the post-Rising period.
In the end, the rebellion, while failing to succeed in its immediate
objectives of establishing a national republic, did force a widening
of the existing space for a popular radical republicanism, the
existence of which would, within a decade, displace Home Rule
nationalism as the dominant force in Irish politics, present a more
profound challenge to the continued British control over Irish
affairs, and mobilise a more direct confrontation with both Irish
unionism and British imperialism. The participation of Connolly
and the Irish Citizens Army in these events did not displace the
dominance of the more socially conservative Fenianism of the IRB,
but it did ensure that a more radical socialist republican discourse
would continue to be available for later generations of activists
seeking to combine the national and socio-economic dimensions
of the republican project.
Assessment
Connolly, and more generally Irish socialist republicanism
during this period, have received an unprecedented amount
of scholarly and political attention. Despite the undisputable
political failure of all of the party political formulations in which
he participated, and the limited ideological impact his writings
had on the broader radical socialist and nationalist scene in
Dublin at the time, historians and political commentators have
expended a considerable degree of time and energy debating
the history and impact of republican socialist politics and ideas.
Indeed the result, in terms of articles and books, is well out of
proportion to the actual impact Connolly and his ideas had
95
on their time. This is as much a reflection of his importance to

subsequent generations of radical intellectuals as it is a symptom
of the lack of subsequent figures of equal historical or intellectual
importance. The end result is that Connolly remains one of the
most studied political figures of early twentieth-century Ireland,
and in turn these studies reflect a series of broader debates within
and about the Irish left.
The history of the mobilisations of Connollys ideas in the service
of subsequent political projects has meant that his activism, ideas
and their impact continue to be a matter of significant contest.
He has been used as an ideological weapon by nationalists, left
republicans, Leninists and revisionists alike, in order to legitimise
specific interventions into Irish history and to debate left republicanisms relevance to and place within that history. In the
immediate post-1916 period, Connolly, like the other executed
leaders of the rebellion, was transformed into a nationalist icon.
Pamphlets by activists like Constance Markievicz (1925) and
historians such as Owen Dudley Edwards (1968) did much to
emphasise his contribution to national struggle while simultaneously downplaying the relevance of his socialism.24 Subsequently,
and following the influential publication of Greaves biography
of Connolly in 1961, he was held to support the then official
communist line on national liberation struggles, endorsing broad
working classpetit-bourgeois alliances in a stages conception
of history where national revolution preceded social revolution.
Berresford Ellis History of the Irish Working Class, published a
decade later, emphasised this point.
However, such deterministic readings of Connolly faced a
significant challenge from left-revisionist political historians from
1979 onwards, following the publication of Bew, Patterson and
Gibbons The State in Northern Ireland in that year, Morgans
biography in 1988, and Pattersons The Politics of Illusion
published in 1989. These writers have produced a considered and
powerful critique of the central tenets of Connollys socialism, with
a particular focus on the relationship between nationalism and
socialism, and Connollys treatment of the issues of unionism and
the politics of land. More recently Allen (1990), Metscher (2002)
96
and Lynch (2005) have reasserted the importance of Connollys

socialist republicanism, but have failed to either respond to or
counter the substance of the revisionist claims. Indeed, while
accepting the limitations of earlier nationalist and orthodox
socialist readings of Connolly, they repeat the same mistake by
retrospectively imposing their own ideological frameworks and
political desires onto their subject matter. The end result is that the
complexities and contradictions of Connollys activism and ideas
remain uninterrogated as these writers seek not only to defend
the idea that Connolly continues to have relevance today for the
advancement of republican socialism, but also attempt to mobilise
him in support of their own specific political projects.
Political parties have also sought to mobilise various interpretations and critiques of Connolly in the service of their own
organisational and ideological projects. Sinn Fin continue
to emphasise the importance of Connolly in their attempt to
articulate a modern form of left republicanism, as is evidenced
by Gerry Adams chapter on socialism in the Politics of Irish
Freedom (1989) and the partys recent Sinn Fin: 100 Years
of Struggle (2005). The Irish Labour Party vacillate between
embracing Connollys historical importance as one of the
founders of Irish social democracy and distancing themselves
from the more radical consequences of his republican and trade
union militancy. Meanwhile smaller and less influential left
organisations such as the Socialist Workers Party, the Socialist
Party and the Workers Party frequently quote Connolly against
each other in the perpetual and peripheral battle over who has
access to the correct interpretation of their founding father.
However, like their academic counterparts, all of these parties
and this includes Sinn Fin in their rush to lay claim to the
mantle of Connolly, fail to grasp either his historic significance
or his contemporary relevance.
The end result is not so much a debate on the issues at hand as
an arid ideological stand-off between defenders and detractors
of multiple Connollys and their legacies, the former ignoring
his limitations, weaknesses and contradictions, arguing that
he provides a template for contemporary political thought and
97
action, while the latter refuse the possibility of any contemporary

relevance, calling on the reader to abandon him completely. In
this authors view, a more sensible and fruitful position can be
found somewhere between these two.
Connollys Socialism
Connollys socialism, as articulated from the foundation of the
ISRP, was grounded in the intellectual influences absorbed during
his political apprenticeship in Edinburgh during the early 1890s. A
member of the local branch of the Social Democratic Federation,
his knowledge of international socialism and the ideas of Karl
Marx were acquired through the particularly English prism
of Henry Myers Hyndman, who was the driving force behind
Britains first coherently socialist political party.
Hyndman was a controversial figure in the emerging European
socialist scene at the time, receiving support from leading figures
such as Kautsky while attracting the derision and suspicion
of Engels and Marx. Lane notes that Hyndman perceived the
imminence of profound political and social changes in Britain
but, as he wrote to Marx in February 1880, he wished these
alterations to occur without troubles, or dangerous conflict. He
wanted a peaceful social upheaval.25 This gradualism was to be
characteristic of Hyndmans approach to socialist politics. As a
result of his developing commitment to Marxism, he formed the
Democratic Federation (DF) in 1881 in an attempt to mould the
then disparate radical political currents in England into a single
socialist political movement. His eclectic first manifesto, entitled
England for All, mixed ambiguous support for the benefits for
Empire and the need for universal male suffrage with the Marxist
critique of capitalist exploitation of the working class, as outlined
in Das Kapital. Eighteen-eighty-three saw the publication of the
more overtly socialist Socialism Made Plain, which outlined the
basis of Hyndmans critique of and alternative to capitalism:
So long as the means of production, either of raw materials or of
manufactured goods are the monopoly of one class, so long must the
98
labourers on the farm, in the mine or in the factory sell themselves for a
bare subsistence wage. As land must in future be a national possession, so
must the other means of producing and distributing wealth. The creation
of wealth is a social business, where each is forced to cooperate with his
neighbour; it is high time that exchange of the produce should be social too,
and removed from the control of individual greed and individual prot.26
The following year the DF formally changed its name to the Social
Democratic Federation (SDF), and although it never developed a
membership of more than several thousand, it would do much to
shape the form and character of future British socialist politics.
Developments in Britain mirrored events across Europe, as
socialist groups were forming alongside the expansion of the trade
unions. Similar parties emerged in Germany, Italy and France.
While there was no necessary correlation or relationship between
these radical parties and the growing trade unions, their parallel
appearance was part and parcel of the broader democratisation
of working-class life throughout the continent.
Eighteen-eighty-nine saw the coming together of left leaders
from across Europe to form the Second International, whose
proceedings would codify the developing socialist movement,
providing it with its language and logic until its implosion
provoked by the arrival of the First World War. This emerging
movement, according to its most accomplished historian Donald
Sassoon, had, as its long-term goal, the destruction of capitalism
and the establishment of a society where production would be
subjected to the associated control of the producers, and not left
to the mercy of the spontaneous decisions of millions of consumers
and the calculations of thousands of capitalists.27 However, the
primary political focus of the Second International was on the
attainment of a series of basic reforms the aim of which was to
make working-class life under capitalism endurable and dignified,
and to enable workers to organize freely and independently.28
Sassoon argues that this codification involved three basic
propositions that did much to shape the contours of early
twentieth-century European socialism. The first being that the
inequalities of capitalism were caused by the relationship between
99
the wage labourer and capital. The second was that history is made
up of epochs defined by differing economic systems, implying
that the present system, capitalism, was neither permanent nor
secure. And third, that workers constituted a unified political
subject in their own right, who through collective organisation
could overthrow capitalism and lead humanity into a new era of
social and economic equality.29 While early socialist parties were
slow to appreciate the importance of organised labour in this
third proposition, it would become increasingly apparent that
political power and trade union strength were two sides of the
one organisational and strategic coin.
Thus, the basic features of early European socialism were
revolutionary in aspiration while strategically reformist, simultaneously appealing to the increasingly conscious industrial working
class while threatening the liberal and conservative political elites
who dominated the continents political landscape.
All of these elements were incorporated into Connollys
socialism, through his exposure to SDF lectures and publications
before his arrival in Ireland. Indeed the founding statement of
the ISRP is in many respects a direct transposition from existing
SDF documents of the time. While its innovation lay clearly in
its demand for Irish independence and the recognition of the
negative impact of imperialism, its socialism was no different
from the European mainstream. Yet, while Connollys continental
contemporaries experienced a dramatic period of initial political
growth from the 1880s through to 1914, in Ireland socialism
made little significant headway in either its republican or labourunionist forms.
Unfortunately for Connolly and the ISRP, Ireland in the 1890s
and indeed in the first decades of the twentieth century bore little
comparison with the rapidly industrialising countries of Europe
such as Britain, Germany, France or Italy. With the exception of
the Lagan Valley shipbuilding industry and northern linen mills,
all located in the north east, the economy was almost exclusively
agricultural. The demand for land reform and legislative
independence dominated local politics, leaving little space for
the kind of socialism articulated by the parties of the Second
100
International. Lee is correct is arguing that Connollys fatal

tactical error was his reluctance to acknowledge the existence of
rural Ireland.30 While the period witnessed the rapid expansion of
Social Democratic and Labour parties in other parts of Europe, the
crowded political space of Ireland, with the issue of Home Rule at
its axis, ensured that there was little prospect of a party such as the
ISRP, or more generally the ideas of a socialist such as Connolly,
taking any firm root in Irish political soil. While those socialist
organisations that predated the ISRP simply refused to engage
with the broader politics of Irish nationalism, thus relegating
themselves to the margins of Irish political life, Connolly simply
bolted a radical Fenian-inspired republicanism onto an already
existing socialist formula developed to suit a different political
and economic context.
In short, the three fundamental pillars of Second International
socialism had little purchase in Ireland at the turn of the century.
The primary relationship of exploitation was an imperial one,
pitting landlord against peasant and nationalist against imperialist.
Irelands history did not fit into the strictly defined schema of
a progression from feudalism to capitalism, since its colonial
relations placed it outside the normative narrative of continental
European Marxism. Indeed, that narratives privileging of the
working class as the subject of revolutionary change jarred
against the reality of Ireland, where the only existing industrial
working class was increasingly and aggressively defending the
imperial, constitutional and social status quo, while supposedly
backward and feudal rural labourers and small landowners were
the driving force behind radical movements for change throughout
the course of the nineteenth century. As a theoretical framework
for understanding Irish society and guiding political engagement
and action, Second International socialism was wholly unable to
comprehend or respond to the contingent political and economic
circumstances that existed in Ireland.
For Morgan, the rigid application of Second International
Marxism proved a poor guide to political action, obscuring
the agrarian backwardness of Ireland in 1896 while failing to
appreciate the political significance of regional industrializa-
101
tion in Ulster.31 His point being that, rather than supporting a

reactionary nationalism, Connolly would have been better served
engaging with the emerging labour-unionist politics of Walker and
others. A more balanced assessment would argue that by applying
a political programme and theoretical framework developed in
a significantly different social and economic context, Connollys
socialism had little relevance or meaning to the working class or
rural labourers in late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
Ireland, north or south, and as a consequence remained marginal
to their concerns.
What ensured the ideological survival of Connollys ideas, in
contrast to the many other socialist writers and activists of the
time, was his embrace of republicanism. By playing a role, albeit
minor, in the important oppositional anti-imperial campaigns
of the day, and ultimately in the 1916 Rising itself, he would
continue to have a relevance where others clearly did not. But his
inability to articulate a socialist project which spoke to the specific
and contingent needs of Irish society at the time not only explains
why his political project failed where that of radical or advanced
nationalists succeeded, but surely provides the most compelling
explanation for the failure of either the ISRP or Connollys other
investments to become anything resembling an important national
political force. That Connolly shares this failure both with his nonrepublican socialist contemporaries and subsequent generations of
republican socialists alike, simply serves to make the point more
salient in the present.
Connollys Republicanism
Connollys republicanism was, like his socialism, learned during
his early years of political activism in Scotland. The source,
however, is of a distinctly Irish origin. The influence of John
Leslies Present Position of the Irish Question cannot be underestimated, and contributed as much to the formation of his socialist
republicanism as Hyndmans Socialism Made Easy. Leslies history
of nineteenth-century Irish radicalism mobilised Fintan Lalor, the
Fenians and the Land League in the defence of an Irish republic,
102
seeking to combine the struggle for legislative independence with

the social content of ownership of the land by the people. For
Leslie, the failure of nineteenth-century Irish radicalism was a
consequence of the narrowing of its political vision, focusing
exclusively on the form of Home Rule to the virtual exclusion
of its social content. Thus, Leslies republicanism is closest to
that of Lalor and Davitt than to the Fenian mainstream.32 The
importance of Lalor to Connolly was further reinforced following
his attendance at Fred Ryans 1896 lecture on The Social Side of
the Irish Question.33 According to Allen:
Connolly saw a parallel between Lalors fight within the nationalist
movement against the majority of Young Irelanders and the ISRPs ght
with the Home Rulers. Soon after the Ryan lecture, Connolly produced
excerpts from Lalors writings in what was the ISRPs rst pamphlet. ... It
presented a deliberate attempt to root the ISRP in an earlier tradition of
Irish nationalism.34
Allen is clearly right to highlight both the influence of Lalor on

Connollys politics, and his attempt to situate the ISRP within
the broader radical Fenian tradition. But it is more likely that
he drew a parallel with Lalors critical engagement with Young
Ireland in relation to the ISRPs developing collaboration with
the advanced nationalists of the IRB and Griffith rather than his
opposition to the Home Rule movement, who would have been
viewed as akin to the social conservatism of OConnell rather
than the more radical Young Irelanders.
All of this begs the question, however, as to what constituted the
basis of Connollys support for the radical republican demand for
national independence. Indeed the ideological departure that this
position entailed was not just a break with the prevailing socialist
currents in Ireland at the time, none of which were seriously
engaged in the national question, but represented a serious break
with the Second International. Allen rightly points out that the
International generally assigned a passive role to the working
class of colonised countries seeing their welfare as dependent
on the primary struggles being carried out in the metropolitan
centres of the developed capitalist states.35 Supporting Home
103
Rule was certainly compatible with such an approach, but only

when couched in a paternalistic discourse of improving the lot of
the citizens in the colonies rather than affording it any progressive
potential in its own right.
Despite considerable debate, there remains no convincing
account of the why of Connollys republicanism. Accounts of
his acquiring an ethnic consciousness from the Irish diaspora in
Edinburgh (Ransom); his developing critique of social democratic
reformism in the ILD and SDF (Allen); or the revisionist argument
that in fact Connolly only developed a nationalist identity in the
last two years of his life (Morgan), all lack empirical foundation.
While the sources of his republicanism (Leslie, Ryan, Lalor) are
not in doubt, nor is its centrality to his developing political
consciousness from the foundation of ISRP onwards, one of the
most interesting questions how and why he came to break
with conventional socialist thinking on the subject, enabling him
to make what is without doubt his most important intellectual
innovation, namely, the articulation of a socialist republicanism
will remain, for the moment, unanswered. However, this
should not prevent us from fully understanding the detail of
that innovation.
From the very outset of the ISRP Connolly argued for an
integrated approach to the social and national aspects of the
struggle for Irish freedom:
The struggle for Irish freedom has two aspects: it is national and it is social.
Its national ideal can never be realized until Ireland stands before the world
a nation free and independent. It is social and economic because, as long
as one class owns as their private property the land and instruments of
labour, from which all mankind derives their subsistence, that class will
always have it in their power to plunder and enslave the remainder of their
fellow creatures.36
Thus, the republican aspiration to political independence,

breaking from the bondage of colonial domination by Britain, is
only one element in the emancipation of the Irish people; indeed
it is a prerequisite for their complete emancipation through the
dismantling of capitalist relations of exploitation. Connollys
104
republicanism intertwines the political and social, making them

mutually dependent. The logic of this interdependence would
not only impact on the ideological and strategic character of that
struggle the party which would aspire to lead the Irish people
from bondage to freedom must then recognize both aspects37
but would also provide an innovative definition of the Irish
nation itself. On the eve of the 1916 Rising Connolly asked:
We are out for Ireland for the Irish. But who are the Irish? Not the rackrenting, slum-owning landlord; not the sweating, prot-grinding capitalist;
not the sleek and oily lawyer; not the prostitute pressman the hired liars
of the enemy. Not these are the Irish upon whom the future depends. Not
these, but the Irish working class, the only secure foundation upon which
a free nation can be reared.38
And here lies the most powerful explanation of why his

republicanism remained, as did Lalors, a minor current within
the broader nationalist movement. Connollys definition of the
nation, and his privileging of the working class as the sole agent of
progressive social and political change, collided with the cultural
and social reality of nationalism and unionism. While operating
within the broader nationalist movement ensured that his ideas
and activism would take their place as a minor narrative within
the broader struggle, that same nationalist political and cultural
context, with its implicit and explicit avocation of pan-class
alliances, was probably the greatest obstacle that confronted
modern socialism.39 Lanes assessment, however, is only part of the
picture. In the same way as Connollys rigid application of Second
Internationalist Marxism failed to articulate a social project which
had any direct meaning for the majority of Irelands working
class and rural labourers, likewise the impact of his Marxism
on earlier forms of radical social republicanism rejected the then
hegemonic cultural and political identities of Irish nationalism and
unionism. Irelands macropolitical context was that of the politics
of Empire and its colonial relationship with Britain. The countrys
dominant political subjectivities were formed in response to that
context, something that Marxism was ill equipped to understand
at that stage of its development. For labour unionists Connollys
105
republicanism ran in direct contradiction to their material and

cultural interests, while for advanced nationalists the logical
conclusion of his Marxism held little practical organisational or
strategic value. The end result was the same: failure. Connollys
political life ended as it had started, advocating a marginal
ideological position, connected primarily with organisations that
had little popular support or meaningful political impact.
Connolly and Unionism

For revisionists such as Patterson, Bew and Morgan, Connollys
embrace of nationalism and rejection of municipal labourism
and unionism marks one of the central theoretical weaknesses of
the socialist republican project. Connollys inability to properly
understand the complex relationship between the unionist working
and middle classes, they argue, is a function of his uninterrogated
acceptance of cultural nationalism, and nationalisms failure to
appreciate the structural nature of Irish working-class unionism
and its relationship to the British state. The revisionists are correct
to highlight the superficiality of those republican narratives which
argue that the Protestant working classes were manipulated or
duped by their political leaders in the Ulster Unionist Party and
Orange Order, in turn adopting political positions and strategies
at odds with their objective class interests, that is, support
for republican socialism. Bew, Patterson and others have, in
response, attempted to return Protestant working-class agency
to their accounts of the period. In doing so they have argued
that nationalist/republican readings of unionism have led to an
underestimation of the depth and autonomous nature of unionist
opposition to Home Rule and subsequent support for partition.
In turn, they argue, the issue of working-class unionist support
for the union is conveniently removed from republican political
horizons, leading to the naive belief that once the historic imperial
antagonism which lay at the heart of AngloIrish relations was
resolved, the illusions of Orangism would collapse, undermining
the always brittle cross-class alliance that constituted Ulster
unionism, enabling northern Protestants to discover their true Irish
106
cultural and political identity.40 Thus, for Patterson, Connolly

seriously under-estimated the capacity of the Protestants of Ulster,
including the majority of Belfasts working class, to frustrate the
aspiration for territorial unity.41
The substance of Patterson and Bews critique is stronger when
applied to subsequent generations of left republican readings of
Connolly, than to Connolly himself. First, they underestimate
the degree of fluidity that existed in working-class Protestant
political and cultural subjectivities at the start of the twentieth
century. It would not have been impossible for Connolly and his
contemporaries to imagine significant Protestant working-class
support for Home Rule infused with social democratic politics
rather than partition as a defence of social-imperial privileges.
Graham Walker, in his biography of leading unionist Labour MP
Harry Midgley, argues that even as late as 1920 a Home Rule
settlement with the maintenance of close ties with the rest of the
United Kingdom had been desired by the majority [of the Labour
movement] including Midgley.42 While Midgleys own political
career testifies to the dramatic closure of this political space in
the decades after partition, it also undermines the rigid political
subjectivity retrospectively imposed by revisionist readings of
the Lagan Valley Protestant working class at the turn of the
twentieth century. That this imposition is a consequence of their
uncritical acceptance of later twentieth-century political and
cultural identities is clearly the case, as the revisionists mobilise
their own cultural and economic essentialism in opposition to the
cultural essentialism of Irish nationalism. In so doing they close
themselves off to the possibilities which clearly existed during
Connollys time.
Both Connolly republicans (Greaves, Allen and Metscher) and
their revisionist critics (Patterson, Bew et al.) are guilty of allowing
essentialism (the former cultural, the latter economic) to limit their
readings of the interrelationship between socio-economic realities
and political affiliations. In so doing, both have failed to grasp the
materially contingent nature of unionism in general and workingclass unionism in particular as a political force in Irish politics.
However, a closer reading of Connolly suggests that, while clearly
107
constrained by the limitations highlighted by the revisionists, a

more sophisticated reading of unionism is available.
The revisionists also conflate the dominant cultural nationalism
of fin de sicle nineteenth-century Ireland with the republican
socialist conceptions of citizenship that underlay Connollys
nationalism. In his debate with the leading Belfast labour unionist
William Walker in 1911, Connolly argued that he did not care
where you were born we have had Jews, Russians, Germans,
Lithuanians, Scotsmen, and Englishmen in the SPI but I do
care where you earn your living, and I hold that every classconscious worker should work for the freedom of the country
in which he lives.43 In response, Walkers argument rested on an
appreciation that much of the economic benefit of his own section
of the Irish working class rested on maintenance of the union and
its imperial dividend. However, as evidenced in the 1905 north
Belfast by-election, labour unionism was as willing to mobilise
sectarian rhetoric in its opposition to constitutional change as its
conservative counterpart, ensuring that unlike Connollys civic
Irish nationalism, Walkers unionism was more communal and
exclusivist than internationalist. Indeed rather than blind him
to the reality of northern working-class Protestant attachment
to the union, Connollys refusal to embrace a culturally or
ethnically based nationalism enabled him to see the materially
constructed nature of the unionist cross-class alliance, albeit with
less sophistication than was probably required.44 His attempts
to articulate a class-based conception of citizenship allowed him
to see beyond the cultural and political subjectivities forming
around the opposing poles of nationalism and unionism, enabling
him to imagine the possibility of a different conception of who
constituted the Irish nation and on what basis.
That subsequent generations of Connolly republicans chose to
ignore the contingent and historically specific moment in which
Connolly was writing is clearly a failing rightly exposed by the
revisionists. The general crisis in the nature of Irish and British
state politics from the end of the nineteenth through the first two
decades of the twentieth century involved a period when political
identities in both countries were fluid and in transition. That
108
the AngloIrish settlement and its creation of two partitionist,

culturally homogeneous states narrowed and eventually closed
off the possibilities that existed in Connollys time is without
doubt. While the failure of Connolly republicans to understand
the specificities of his moment ensured that their grip on the
political and cultural reality that was post-partition unionism
would always be tenuous. However, the revisionists deterministic
reading of the cultural and economic base of unionism equally
closed them off to the possibilities that existed at the start of the
twentieth century, and which could return should the contingencies
of history allow.
Connollys failure to build any meaningful Protestant workingclass support was a function of the material and cultural benefits
of Empire and social-imperialism set against the promise of
socialist republicanism as a marginal element of a broader national
project whose economic and cultural benefits were hard to see
from the position of the Lagan Valley. But while this failure was
not inevitable, considering the balance of forces in play, it was
always probable.
Connolly and Gender

There is no doubt that Connolly, both in his writings and political
activism, was one of the most advanced campaigners for womens
equality of his day. Indeed he is the first Irish republican to both
articulate a detailed position on the issue of gender inequality and
to advocate and involve himself in the collective organisation of
women in pursuance of social, economic and political change.
From the very outset, in the founding manifesto of the ISRP of
1896, the party advocated universal suffrage and free maintenance
of all children, the effects of which would have empowered women
greatly in both the political and the domestic sphere. However, as
Anderson rightly points out, the ISRP did not devote its energies
to an active campaign in favour of womens rights the party
in fact did not have a single woman member.45 Despite this, the
significance of the inclusion of womens rights in the discourse
of the party should not be dismissed. The more comprehensive
109
demand for complete political and social equality between the

sexes was central to the Independent Labour Party founded by
Connolly and others in 1912.46 And it is widely believed that
the inclusion of women as an independent political subject
Irishmen and Irishwomen in the opening lines of the 1916
Rising proclamation, as well as its commitment to equal rights
and equal opportunities to all its citizens was a consequence of
Connollys involvement. For Connolly, ending gender inequality
was as central to his political project as ending class oppression:
Of what use to such sufferers can be the re-establishment of any
form of Irish state if it does not embody the emancipation of
womanhood.47
More than this, Connolly understood the structural nature
of gender inequality in capitalist society. He made explicit the
relationship between private property, patriarchy such as male
inheritance of that property and the exclusion of women from
economic power. He also understood the double exploitation
of women workers as workers but also as women: The worker
is the slave of capitalist society, the female worker is the slave
of that slave.48 This in turn led Connolly to become an active
campaigner for female suffrage after his return from the USA,
as well as a keen organiser of women workers, particularly in
the linen mills of Belfast. He argued that they should interest
themselves in the organisation of the working women and girls,
not for suffragette purposes alone, but for the material benefits
of the workers as well.49
However, while Connolly understood gender inequality in
political and economic terms, he was unable to apply the same
logic to social relations, particularly when it came to the role
of women within the family. The politics of sex, divorce and
parenting, and the gendered division of both domestic life and
the division of the public and private sphere, remained beyond his
intellectual and cultural horizons. He had carried the egalitarian
logic of radical republican socialism as far as it could go but
was unable to un-think the gendered nature of social relations
which characterised contemporary Irish and British society. In
this sense he was both more advanced than both the mainstream
110
of the internationalist socialist and labour movement and Irish

nationalism and republicanism, while simultaneously anticipating
many of the limitations that would be subject to the criticisms of
socialist feminists half a century later.
The Connolly Paradox

There is something very ironic in the fact that Connollys
greatest ideological achievement the articulation of a coherent
socialist republican politics is also the source of that projects
perpetual political failure. It is this paradox that socialist
republican and Marxist writers and activists have studiously
ignored and revisionist scholars exposed with such fervour. The
reasons for both the enduring attraction of Connollys socialist
republicanism and its continual marginalisation from the Irish
political mainstream are surely to be found here. The tragedy of
Connolly scholarship and political debate is that, in the rush to
legitimise specific political projects in the present, writers have
chosen not to see what is of most benefit in his project, namely
the practical political relevance to the present of the failure of his
specific left-republican articulation in the past.
That Connolly developed, in systematic fashion, a coherent
political logic and discourse resting on the interconnectedness
of the national and social struggles for political and economic
emancipation of the Irish people unquestionably met a number
of ideological needs for radical movements in Ireland at the turn
of the twentieth century. The overlapping realities of imperialism,
capitalism and patriarchy constituted the overarching political
context within which localised struggles for reform and change
were taking place. Connollys socialist republicanism spoke to
these struggles and provided them with an explanatory framework
until then absent in Irish society. His recognition that national
independence would prove meaningless unless coupled with a
parallel transformation of the economic and social architecture of
contemporary Irish society was proved correct in the immediate
post-26-County independence period. Likewise, and contrary to
the claims of left revisionists, his reading of the dangers of social-
111
imperialisms appeal to the unionist working class and the dangers

of partition for the political development of the island was also
borne out by subsequent political developments.
Yet, while Connollys intellectual framework spoke to the
generality of the specific historical moment in which he lived,
it was in the outworking of that framework that its weaknesses
emerged. At an ideological level, the limitations of Second
International Marxism, combined with Connollys inability to
meaningfully integrate his socialism with a radical democratic
conception of the nation, led to a series of political, strategic and
tactical pitfalls which neither he nor his successors would find easy
to overcome. His inability to articulate these two central elements
of the socialist republican project in a form more conducive to
building a popular movement for change in Ireland led ultimately
to his failure. Subsequent generations of left republicans, unwilling
or unable to interrogate this central weakness, have ended up
either strategically privileging one side or the other in the national/
social relationship choosing nationalism or socialism as the task
in most urgent need of attention, or jettisoning one in favour of
the other, all with equally limited success.
To his credit, Connolly was the first to successfully articulate a
left-republican project, that, while unsuccessful, at least offered a
way of integrating the complex issues of class, gender and nation,
in turn holding out the possibility of a truly radical democratic
project for national and social emancipation.
The job of work for left republicans today is not simply to
use Connolly as a declarative resource in the slogan-dominated
battles for ownership of our shared ideological inheritance. A
more successful enterprise may be found in a critique and rearticulation of those elements that form the core of the socialist
republican enterprise. While the historical context has not always
been conducive, nor the appropriate theoretical and organisational
tools always available for such an endeavour, the fact remains
that despite the great volume of discussion and debate, this central
paradox of Connollys socialist republicanism has remained
obscure as contemporary politics continues to prevent various
protagonists from getting to grips with the utility of Connollys
112
failure. In a sense, defenders of Connollys project are right to

view him as providing a powerful explanatory framework for
understanding and attempting to change contemporary political
and economic realities, while at the same time revisionist writers
have, albeit often for the wrong reasons and with the wrong
conclusions, pinpointed the substantial weaknesses in the way in
which that framework was deployed by Connolly and continues
to be deployed by later generations of Irish radicals.
There is a need for a renewed debate about the ideological
resources and limitations offered by the writing and activism of
James Connolly. Central to this must be an attempt to unpack
his nationalism, socialism, feminism and anti-imperialism.
Understanding that these articulations were contingent on his
specific historical location does not devalue them in the present.
Rather, it requires us to readjust and recalibrate their form if
they are to have any utility for our interventions in the present
political conjuncture.
3
LEFT-REPUBLICAN INTERVENTIONS
Left Republicanism on the Margins: 191626

The year 1916 is rightly viewed as a turning point in modern
Irish history. The military and political intervention by the radical
separatist Irish Republican Brotherhood and the subsequent British
government response imprisonments and executions actively
undermined the hegemony of John Redmonds conservative Irish
Parliamentary Party (IPP) across much of Ireland, while simultaneously consolidating that of Edward Carsons Ulster Unionist Party
in the north east of the island. That the Rising itself was contingent
on a series of other factors, such as the inability of the IPP to
secure the enactment of Home Rule and the threat of conscription
by the British government, is not in dispute. Nor is the fact that
the political impact of the actual rising was less significant than
that of the states response to the insurgents, both in terms of the
execution of the primary leaders and the imprisonment of the large
number of advanced nationalists. Irish republicanism emerged in
the immediate post-Rising period both stronger and more cohesive
and with a greater degree of public support.
However the real significance of the Rising is often missed in
mainstream historical accounts, whose focus is primarily on the
internal dynamics of Irish politics at the time. If, as argued in
Chapter 2, the period following the 1880s can be understood as a
crisis in the British state, and by extension in both the composition
of the Irish state and its relationship to London, then 1916 is
both the high point of that crisis and the opening moment of
its eventual, if only partial, resolution. As noted in the previous
chapter, the period surrounding the 1916 Rising was marked by
anti-colonial insurgencies in South Africa (1914), India (1919)
113
114
and elsewhere. While Hyam is right to suggest that the First

World War brought in its train a number of shocks, providing
widespread evidence of the growing unpopularity of British rule
and the imperial connection, the war in itself cannot explain the
deeper structural crisis underway at that time.1 Indeed, rather
than view the crisis as one of imperial decline, as does Hyam, it
may be more fruitful to follow Langan and Schwarzs thesis in
describing it in more specific terms as a crisis of the late-Victorian
liberal state.
Langan and Schwarz argue that in the closing decades of
the nineteenth century the liberal state and its attendant modes
for regulating civil society could no longer be reproduced by
means of liberal policies, practices and objectives.2 Paraphrasing
Dangerfields seminal study, The Strange Death of Liberal
England, they suggest that in the years from 1910 to 1914 the
multiple threats to the social order manifest in the struggles of
the syndicalists, the suffragettes and the opponents of Irish Home
Rule had, even before the outbreak of war, brought about the
death of liberal England.3 As the old liberal hegemony crumbled,
a number of new collectivist and statist projects emerged,
competing for dominance in the race to recast and rebuild the
new state formation after the war.
In the British context, Langan and Schwarz identify these new
formations as social-imperialism, new liberalism and Fabianism,
corresponding to the emerging forces of twentieth-century British
politics: Tory populism, post-Victorian liberalism and labourism.
As these new political projects were settling down into the routine
of postwar political contestation within the newly formed
institutions of the modern British state, their ability to proceed
with business as usual was continually disrupted by the Irish
Question. While broadly understood as an internal, specifically
Irish affair, the degree of dissatisfaction within nationalist Ireland
at the failure of Gladstonian liberalism to resolve their grievances
through granting Home Rule was in direct proportion to the
effectiveness of Tory populism in feeding the strength of Ulster
unionism; not so much because of opposition to Home Rule,
but in order to use that opposition as a secondary battleground
115
in the bigger political struggle for hegemony within the British

state itself.
That Irish unionism was a political force organic to the
conjectural moment in Ireland at the turn of the twentiethcentury is no less true than the fact that much of its strength,
particularly during these crucial years, came from its exploitation
by conservative political elites in London whose actual interest
in Ireland would rapidly diminish when Irish unionism had lost
its utility. However, by that stage conservative Irish nationalism,
with its willingness to accommodate domestic grievances within
the existing, imperial AngloIrish frame of reference, had been
supplanted by a more assertive and organised republicanism, the
resolution of whose demands would require greater compromise
on the part of Westminster if the inconvenience of the Irish
Question was to be prevented from disrupting the consolidation
of the postwar British state. Wilson is correct when he argues
that from 1880 to 1930,
the crisis of Ireland was a central, integral factor in the crises of Westminster
governments and the British state. More than anything it was under the
impact of events in Ireland that the mid Victorian constitutional system
disintegrated. In these years the conguration of political struggle in Britain
was persistently refracted through the Irish issue.4
Central to this disintegration was the assault from Tory

populism against the existing liberal regime, fought out primarily
on the issue of Home Rule and through the mobilisation of a new
political force, Ulster unionism and the Ulster Volunteer Force.
Placing 1912, 1916, the subsequent War of Independence and
the AngloIrish Treaty of 1921 in this wider context not only
provides a more compelling account of the structural dynamics at
work in this foundational period of modern Ireland, but reinserts
the British state as the key protagonist in those dynamics both
in the lead up to and aftermath of partition. The 1916 Rising
and subsequent guerrilla campaign by Collins Irish Volunteers
was indeed a reflection of separatist ambitions, but the fact that
it was able to generate mass support in all but Ulster Unionist
Ireland was as much a function of British state failure on the part
116
of Gladstone, and Conservative Party opportunism on the part of

Chamberlain and Bonar Law, as it was a product of internal Irish
concerns, whether the legitimate grievances of nationalist Ireland
or the equally legitimate fears of unionist Ulster.
The ability of Sinn Fin and the Ulster Unionist Party to simultaneously hegemonise the popular political imaginary of the
overwhelming majority of people in Ireland was, as with their
British counterparts, a function of the emerging collectivism of
the post-Liberal era. Unionism was to a greater or lesser extent the
Irish equivalent of the social-imperialism of Tory populism, albeit
mediated through the specifically Irish lens of Ulster Presbyterian
reaction. For its part, Sinn Fin nationalism (and later its Fianna
Fil and left-republican offshoots) approximated some of the
statism of British labourism (Lemass) and working-class radical
collectivism (ODonnell). However, post-partition, such tendencies
were always subservient to a more conservative rural-based Irish
communitarian Catholicism (de Valera).
Looked at from this position, the emergence of two theologically
dominated conservative state formations in Ireland, post-partition,
was not an aberration from the normal European frame of
reference i.e. that of a formal leftright opposition such as
with the Conservative and Labour parties in postwar Britain but
rather a consequence of the process of British state formation
itself, which in turn skewed the parallel process in Ireland by
undermining functioning democracy and manipulating Irish
political antagonisms for particularly British ends. None of this
seeks to deny specifically Irish political agency, whether nationalist
or unionist, in the formations which emerged in Ireland, but
rather to argue that the limits of such formations were clearly
circumscribed discursively and institutionally as a result of
the interventions, and indeed the non-interventions, of political
elites in Westminster.
Political Radicalism and Partition

All of the above provides an illuminating insight into the
successes and failures of various political formations in post-
117
partition Ireland. To provide another answer to the question

posed at the end of Chapter 2, the failure of Connollys socialist
republicanism was at one level a consequence of the unavailability
of any political space within the structure of Irish politics at the
period of the formation of the two Irish states. While variations
within unionism and nationalism were to some extent possible,
the further they strayed from the central discursive apex of either
sectarian unionism or conservative nationalism, the more difficult
they found it to sustain themselves as viable political projects.
While openings clearly existed in the period of the state crisis
itself, once that crisis entered the phase of resolution, from the
1920s onwards, such spaces narrowed and eventually, if only
temporarily, closed. The marginal position of left republicanism
was partly a consequence of these structural factors. However, that
this position occurred at a time when both the material conditions
of the country and the subjective consciousness of large sections
of the population were clearly conducive to mobilisation around a
counter-hegemonic project also demonstrates left republicanisms
own weakness, namely its inability to read the political moment
intelligently or respond effectively.
Inflation caused by the First World War had a negative impact
on the living standards of the urban and rural working class
across Ireland. Labour shortages caused by migration, enlistment
and compulsory tillage did not lead to a matching rise in wages.
Resentment at the unequal impact of wartime hardships ensured
that alongside the political concerns of Home Rule and Empire,
social and economic antagonisms did much to define the political
contours of the moment.
That such a context produced one of the most substantial
periods of popular political and economic militancy in Ireland
since the start of the nineteenth century is hardly surprising. Indeed
the rising tide of Irish industrial working-class mobilisation and
womens self-organisation was part of a broader, European-wide
phenomenon. Conor Kosticks Revolution in Ireland, Popular
Militancy 1917 to 1923, and Margaret Wards Unmanageable
Revolutionaries, Women and Irish Nationalism, both chart the
118
rise of political, trade union and suffragette radicalism during

this period.5
In 1911 James Larkins syndicalist paper the Irish Worker had
a circulation of between 20,000 and 90,000. Nineteen-thirteen
witnessed the centurys most significant and embittered labour
struggle in Dublins famous lock-out. The Russian Revolution of
1917 generated significant interest and modest but not negligible
solidarity among sections of Irelands socialist movement. The
years 1917 and 1918 were to witness one of the most sustained
periods of trade union affiliation and mobilisation in Ireland,
with numbers of strikes reaching unprecedented levels and
union membership up 50 per cent from the preceding years.6 As
the War of Independence gathered pace, trade unions began to
intervene either to counter specific government measures, to block
the movement of British soldiers and munitions, or in support
of political prisoners. While often written out of mainstream
historical narratives of the War of Independence, there is little
doubt that labour mobilisations were as central a part of the
destabilisation of British control of Ireland as was IRA activity
or other forms of civil society intervention.
Womens radical activism, in the form of the Ladies Land
League and the Irish Suffrage Society, both formed at the end of
the nineteenth century, laid the basis for considerable political
agitation at the start of the twentieth. Organisations such as
Inghinidhe na hireann, Cumann na mBan, the Irish Womens
Workers Union and the Irish Womens Franchise League were
centres for political activism by women or on womens issues,
bringing new perspectives and forms of activism to the mainstream
of male-dominated nationalist and trade union politics. That
tensions existed, both between the womens organisations and
their male counterparts such as over the issue of whether or
not to support franchise reform from Westminster or between
women themselves whether to prioritise their unionism,
nationalism, labourism or feminism does not undermine the
central fact that in terms of participation and influence in the
political mainstream, women were playing a more active part
than at any previous period in modern Irish history.7 Despite
119
their removal from conventional historical narratives of the time,

they played a substantial if not fully equal part in the political
struggles of the day.
However, in spite of the powerful ideological legacy left by
Connolly after the Rising, the growing strength of the trade unions,
the substantial mobilisation of feminism, and the emerging strength
of radical nationalism and social democracy in the forms of Sinn
Fin and the Irish Labour Party, the period immediately after
the Treaty negotiations in 1921 saw the almost complete eclipse
of radical working-class, feminist and left-republican activism.
There is little doubt that the internal divisions within the Labour
Party and trade unions led them to withdraw from taking a clear
and unambiguous position with regard to the Treaty. The desire
of some to maintain all-Ireland organisational unity coincided
with those both unionist and nationalist who were happier
to allow their respective party political expressions Sinn Fin
and the Ulster Unionist Party to provide unchallenged political
leadership. As a consequence, Labour remained outside the central
political dynamics of the moment, and was thus relegated to a
secondary position in both post-partition states, complete with the
unresolved ideological and organisational divisions that came with
a single body in a constitutionally and socially divided country.
Similarly, as the international womens franchise movement
was deeply divided over the question of the First World War,
in Ireland the added factor of the 1916 Rising shattered the
remaining groups, and rendered all movements feminist and
labour irrelevant in comparison with the task of completing
the national revolution.8 As the War of Independence gave way
to the Civil War, whose outcome led to the dominance of the
most socially conservative section of the nationalist movement
Cumann na nGaedhael mirrored by their unionist counterparts
in Belfast, the two new states mobilised considerable resources
to limit if not put a complete end to the available space for
womens participation in public life. While for much of the labour
movement the withdrawal from post-partition politics was a
strategically driven choice, for women it was an imposition, no
120
less strategic, but on the part of the new states and their emerging
political elites.
If labour withdrew from the primary arena of political
engagement in order to maintain its unity, and women were
forced out in order to restore patriarchal privilege, left republicans
fell victim to the creative ambiguity mobilised by the broader
nationalist movement in order to maintain the cohesion of a
cross-class nationalist alliance that was increasingly characteristic of post-1917 Sinn Fin. As will be discussed in more detail in
Chapter 4, the revitalised party led by Eamon de Valera focused
on the single issue of the republic, arguing that its precise form
would be a matter for the Irish people once it was established.
Industrial, agrarian or gender radicalism was acceptable only in
the context of the broader strategic requirements of undermining
British government authority in Ireland. Where such radicalism
disrupted the operation of the cross-class alliance, central to de
Valeras strategy, it was actively opposed. Nowhere was this
tension more apparent than over the question of land agitation,
on which Sinn Fins position shifted dramatically depending on
the geographical location and political moment.
Thus, an uneasy but stable alliance was allowed to exist under
the ever-broadening Sinn Fin banner. Conservatives, pragmatists
and social radicals were all able to cooperate while the focus was
clearly on the war with London. Crucially, the radical poles of
the nationalist movement were willing to put on hold their social
and economic demands at the moment of confrontation with the
British, in the hope of having their concerns addressed in the postimperial settlement. However, once negotiations got underway
and a compromise agreement emerged in the form of the Treaty,
not only did the fragile unity implode and the divergent strands
of the republican movement go their separate ways, but those
most disappointed by the proposed settlement were those whose
discursive and organisational matrix brought together the most
progressive strands of the struggle, namely socialism, feminism
and republicanism.
In his authoritative two-volume account of the Irish War of
Independence and Civil War, Michael Hopkinson outlines the
121
development of and eventual fault lines around which the nationalist

movement would both grow and fracture. That radicals such as
Peadar ODonnell, Liam Mellows or Hanna Sheehy Skeffington
were to be sorely disappointed with both the political and social
content and implications of the Treaty was as much a function
of their own miscalculation as it was a demonstration of the real
balance of forces within the national movement. Sean Faolins
retrospective assessment that the radical Democratic Programme,
which marked the high point of the lefts ideological influence
in the independence movement, was listened to and discussed
for precisely twenty minutes and fifty seconds, and then buried
forever, suggests that the left never really understood their own
subservient position.9 Ernie OMalley, closer to the mainstream of
the movement than either ODonnell or Skeffington, was wrong
when he concluded that Irish nationalism at the time of the Treaty
was at the political stage. We had not the faculty for thinking
things through sufficiently.10 Rather, the creative ambiguity
referred to above, whose social and economic implications were
always present despite being concealed, inherently privileged
the centre and right of the independence movement, effectively
removing rather than delaying any process for the resolution of
the social and economic contradictions which existed in the Irish
state under British rule.
As the independence movement increased political strength
from 1917 through to 1921, the potential social and economic
dimensions of the revolution receded, as did the political strength
of the radical social, economic and gendered elements of the
movement, despite the rhetorical centrality of their demands
as expressed in the 1916 Proclamation and 1919 Democratic
Programme.
Cumann na nGaedhaels victory in the subsequent Civil War
was a consequence of their success in hegemonising the majority
of nationalist Ireland during the Treaty debates and subsequent
election campaign. This would not have been possible had the
social and economic content of the nationalist project remained
at the centre of the independence movements considerations as
demanded by the Proclamation and Democratic Programme. By
122
accepting the deferral of these aspects of the revolution, whether

actively or passively, left republicans ceded enormous ground
to the right, a fact evidenced in the narrowness of the Treaty
debates, whose considerations seldom strayed onto the issues
of partition or social and economic change. That the ability of
Cumann na nGaedhael to win the political battle for a majority of
nationalist Ireland was greatly assisted by the threat of war from
Westminster, and Londons subsequent pressure for and assistance
in the Civil War, does not change the central fact that conservative
Irish nationalisms victory was not only at the expense of the left,
but equally a consequence of the lefts own strategic miscalculations and weak social support.
Battered by civil war and unable or unwilling to respond,
ideologically or organisationally, to the dramatically shifting
context that was the emerging states north and south, radical
republicans, socialists and feminists could find virtually no
foothold for meaningful political intervention in the post-Treaty
consensus which emerged between the political elites in London,
Dublin and Belfast. Despite holding out great promise, both for
radical political, social and economic transformation and for
the development of left republicanism, the revolutionary period
ended in failure.
Contrary to anti-Treaty nationalist and left-republican discourse,
it is misleading to say that the revolution was betrayed. Indeed in
retrospect, considering the positions adopted by all protagonists
during its evolution and the ensuing balance of forces, it is doubtful
if things could have ended otherwise. However, the discourse
of betrayal, so prominent in contemporary and future debates,
provided a dangerous degree of comfort for subsequent leftrepublican readings of the revolutionary moment. Such readings
allowed left republicans to lay the blame for the revolutions failure
squarely on the opponents of the socialist republic within the
broader nationalist movement, and in so doing absolved themselves
of any culpability for that failure and avoided any degree of critical
self-reflection. Misunderstanding their own mistakes in the past
had the inevitable if clichd result of condemning left republicans
to repeat them in the immediate future.
123
Left Republicanism After Partition

If radical left and feminist republicans were guilty of a degree of
miscalculation during the period of the War of Independence,
the more general defeat of republicans during the Civil War
followed by a decade of socially conservative and classicalliberal economic government from Cumann na nGaedhael in
the south and a sectarian semi-authoritarian Ulster Unionist
administration in the north ensured that the demands for unity
and cohesion would dominate ideological debate and organisational imperatives among anti-Treaty republicans. That the left
continued to believe in the utility of an alliance with both the
pragmatists and traditionalists in Sinn Fin and the IRA was
as logical as it would be self-defeating. However, as with the
war against Britain, no alternative political position was either
imaginable or sustainable.
The immediate post-Civil War moment was one of imprisonment,
introspection, inactivity and regrouping. During their period in
jail key anti-Treatyites discussed the reasons for their failure.
The main strategic concern in the immediate aftermath of the
Civil War was how to respond to and engage with the two new
states on the island. Traditionalists such as Mary McSweeney and
pragmatists such as de Valera continued to advocate the same
strategic imperatives that they adopted to British rule: withhold
consent, abstain from participation, and continue to agitate
for the republic. As the new political conjecture unfolded and
public support for both administrations took root, the republic
as articulated by the traditionalists inside Sinn Fin increasingly
took on a purely symbolic and abstract meaning, driving a wedge
between the anti-Treaty republicans and their potential support
base. The emergence of Fianna Fil, resting as it did on an
acceptance of partition and the Free State, was a consequence of
the growing inability of pre-partition Sinn Fin discourse to meet
the new demands of the post-partition settlement. The dispute
between these two sections of the independence movement was
a narrow one, focusing on the relevance of and engagement with
the new state institutions north and south.
124
For left republicans such as ODonnell, the success or failure

of the anti-Treaty movement would not be decided solely on the
basis of these considerations. A failure to reintegrate the social
and economic dimensions of the revolution would lead to yet
another defeat without a radical social programme to win the
masses to the Republic.11 ODonnells thinking was the result of
a cross-fertilisation of ideas between radical social republicans
such as himself and Liam Mellows, and the emerging analysis of
the Irish Communist Party (CPI). The most significant outcome of
this dialogue, at least for the subsequent development of twentiethcentury left republicanism was Mellows 1922 jail notes smuggled
from Mountjoy Prison. They were part of a broader discussion
that was taking place both within the anti-Treaty republican
movement, and between republicans and their allies on the left. The
debate came as both the popular mood and the military direction
of the Civil War appeared to favour the pro-Treaty faction. How
to motivate the general public behind the cause of the republic,
and the apparent causes of the weakening of the republican side,
were implicit themes in Mellows considerations. One of the most
crucial sections of the short document states that
The Programme of Democratic control (the social programme) adopted
by the Dil coincident Declaration of Independence January 1919 should
be translated into something denite. This is essential if the great body of
workers are to be kept on the side of Independence. This does not require
a change of outlook on the part of Republicans, or the adoption of a
revolutionary programme as such ... It should be made clear what is meant
by it. Would suggest therefore that it be interpreted something like the
following which appeared in the Workers Republic of July 22nd last...12
Mellows goes on to quote the editorial from the CPIs newspaper

Workers Republic advocating state control of industry, transportation and banks and the repossession and redistribution
of agricultural lands. 13 While reminiscent of the founding
manifesto of Connollys ISRP 40 years earlier, and serving to
validate those republicans seeking to integrate social and national
concerns, Mellows argument departed from Connollyite socialist
republicanism in one crucial respect:
125
In our efforts now to win back public support to the Republic we are forced
to recognise whether we like it or not that the commercial interest, so
called, money and the gombeen men are on the side of the Treaty, because
the Treaty means imperialism and England. We are back to Tone and it is
just as well relying on the great body the men of no property. The stake
in the republic people were never with the republic.14
Mellows is not articulating an integrated republican socialism,

as proposed by Connolly or the Workers Republic, but rather
a more limited tactical alliance between the republicans and
the working class. Greaves argument that Mellows jail notes
constitute a serious return to revolutionary republican socialism
overestimates their sophistication and underplays their contradictions.15 Indeed, there is a significant distance between Connollys
attempt to integrate Second International socialism and Fenian
republicanism as two equal halves of the same discursive and
organisational project, and Mellows more tactical return to the
men of no property as a potential reservoir of support for the
republic. In this instance Mellows is clearly closer to the political
expedience of the United Irishmen, whose alliance with the masses
was not, in the first instance, born out of ideological commitment
to radical social and economic change, but rather a consequence
of the need for political strength in the pursuance of more limited
political and social goals. Mellows jail notes, while important in
linking the republican socialism of Connolly and the post-partition
generation of republican radicals, contain both ideological and
strategic limitations which need to be explored.
Pattersons critique of Mellows is a more valuable starting
point than Greaves if we want to understand these limitations.
Following ODonnell he argues that
social discontent was not something that an existing republican leadership
could use for its own purposes; rather it demanded a transformation in
republicanism, which would become a broad popular alliance capable
of completing the national revolution in a socially and economically
radical way.16
That Mellows jail notes did not constitute such a transformation

is clear, arguing as they did for the existing republican position to
126
be bolstered by appeals to the urban and rural working class on

the basis of social and economic issues. While clearly a genuine
attempt to construct a meaningful alliance between republicans
and the working class, Mellows own political underdevelopment
meant that he drew on his only available ideological resource,
namely the United Irishmen. His uncritical adoption of the men
of no property alliance ensured that the contradiction at the heart
of the United Irishmen project, which had fatally undermined the
revolution in 1798, was transposed onto the foundational moment
of post-partition left-republican thinking.
However, it would take ODonnell several decades before
he reached this conclusion himself. In the immediate post-Civil
War moment, the key fault line within the anti-Treaty republican
movement was not that of republican socialism versus a tactical
alliance with workers, but rather the second of these options
versus a more narrowly defined nationalism, nervous of any
appeal to social radicalism. While the heady days of the late 1920s
afforded a degree of unity within the ranks of the IRA, positioning
themselves to the republican left of the new Fianna Fil party, the
contradiction contained within the left of the movement could
not remain concealed indefinitely.
This reality was reinforced if not compounded by the tactical
decision of the IRA to offer critical and conditional support to
the new Fianna Fil party. Not only were left republicans unclear
about the relationship between their republicanism and their
socialism, but they were once again entering into a relationship
with a less radical political partner, albeit more conditional than
before, in the hope of securing political and economic outcomes
which would be in direct contradiction to those desired by their
would-be allies.
Left Republicanism and the Rise of Fianna Fil

The first decade of post-partition Ireland was dominated by
simultaneous state-building projects north and south. The
contrasting styles and content of William Cosgraves Cumann
na nGaedhael and James Craigs Ulster Unionist governments
127
were to mark the subsequent development of both states. The

cautious Catholic conservatism of the former produced stability
and democracy but with little economic development, while the
populist Orange sectarianism of the latter expanded the already
existing levels of industrialisation, while substituting any normative
conception of democracy with structural discrimination and
profound communal antagonism. Despite the considerable levels
of grievance from substantial minorities in both states, centring
around the social, economic and political exclusions inherent
in both new formations, Craigs and Cosgraves conservative
administrations were to prove remarkably successful, at least in
the immediate term, in articulating and implementing their new
state-building projects.
However, while both states were socially conservative,
economically liberal and tended towards authoritarianism when
dealing with political opponents (whether real or perceived), there
was a profound difference between them from the outset. The
new Free State was founded on the outcome of a civil war whose
dynamics shaped the character of its political contestation but
never foreclosed the possibility of change. The greatest achievement
of the Cosgrave government, despite its many failures, was to
produce a political system whose defining structural features were
normatively democratic, always allowing for the possibility of
peaceful social, economic, political and constitutional change.
Power could, and did, change hands.
The Unionist administration, however, was different. While
sharing many of the formal characteristics of its southern
counterpart, its structural foundations were of a different order. It
was not merely undemocratic at its beginning, but required, for its
continued existence, a profoundly undemocratic state formation,
considerably outside the normative European standards of the
day. While not classically authoritarian, it can be more accurately
described as informally authoritarian, utilising the social networks
of local government, the Loyal Orders, the trade unions, the
shop floor and the Ulster Unionist Party as networks for the
distribution of social, economic, political and cultural power
and privilege. That its structure a pan-class unionist alliance
128
was always riven with contradictions was never in doubt, as the

Outdoor Relief riots of the 1930s or the growth of the Northern
Ireland Labour Party in the 1960s demonstrated. Notwithstanding these temporary breaches of Ulster Unionist hegemony, the
states existence rested on systematic if informal institutionalised exclusions, discriminations and inequalities. These were not
consequences of the state, but fundamental aspects of its very
architecture. Its inability to countenance reform as structurally
unthinkable as it was practically impossible, even in the face of
massive domestic and international pressure (the detail of which
will be discussed in Chapter 4) was secondary only to the
ever-present power of the British state in Westminster. Londons
interventions and non-interventions invested the Orange state
with a power and security substantially greater than it could
accumulate by itself.
Thus, these were the two radically altered political contexts in
which left republicans found themselves in the immediate postpartition settlement. The British government had withdrawn,
believing the Irish Question resolved. The new political elites
north and south got on with the business of building their new
states. Meanwhile the defeated opposition began to search for
new discursive and organisational spaces from which to launch
their next political assault. In the northern statelet it would
take almost fifty years for the nationalist minority to come to
terms with the failure of early twentieth-century nationalism to
respond to the new political dispensation, locked as they were in
the rigid structures of the increasingly communalised sectarian
matrix of the Stormont administration. However, in the south,
following a brief period in the political wilderness, anti-Treaty
republicanism began to emerge from the Civil War defeat posing
a serious challenge to Cumann na nGaedhael in the form of de
Valeras new Fianna Fil party.
The policies of the Cosgrave government, while doing much
to ensure institutional stability, were ideologically disinclined
to engage in any serious programme of economic expansion or
wealth redistribution. Grda describes the administrations
economic policies as having rejected industrialisation through
129
import substitution and monetary experimentation ... [and] placed

its main hopes on a dynamic agricultural sector specializing
in livestock and dairying.17 Fiscal and monetary policy was
regressive, while unemployment rose, ensuring significant levels
of social discontent. Foster confirms this bleak picture when he
describes the social policies of the Cosgrave administration as a
form of ruthless government which, grappling with the realities
of fiscal autonomy, cut the old-age pension and offered minimal
unemployment benefits.18
In such a context, the defining features of Fianna Fil, formed
in 1926, were bound to prove popular. A rhetorical commitment
to the republicanism of the War of Independence years ending
partition, dismantling the remaining vestiges of British rule in the
26 Counties, and the restoration of Irish language and culture
coupled with a vague but radical social and economic programme
were to ensure de Valera a speedy assent to power. That he was
able to display a degree of institutional pragmatism for which
he was not previously known served to confound his opponents
in both Cumann na nGaedhael and Sinn Fin. Bew et al. have
correctly described the key themes of the party as an apparently
radical, populist nationalism.19 In contrast to Cosgraves themes
of security and stability, which dominated the first decade of
the Free State, Fianna Fil held out the allure of change, in the
first instance governmental, but also political and economic, thus
appealing to all those sections of 26-County society who were
excluded from the new state. Dunphy, in charting the rise of the
party, argues correctly that
from its inception Fianna Fil fought on the basis of an economic and
social programme with specic appeal to broad sections of the electorate.
Nationalist rhetoric helped to subdue nascent class themes; but the appeal
to nationalism was tied up with concrete policy proposals that enjoyed
widespread popularity for example, economic protectionism with its
promise of prosperity for Irish businessmen and employment expansion
for workers.20
Where Cumann na nGaedhael were elitist, non-interventionist,

anti-national and responsible for the economic status quo,
130
Fianna Fil were populist, expansionist, national and offering,

at a time of economic decline, growing emigration and poverty,
the prospect of both national and economic renewal.
All of this created a dilemma for left republicans within the
broad anti-Treaty movement, the focal point of which was the
IRA and its weekly newspaper An Phoblacht. Indeed the rise to
prominence of left-wing republicans such as ODonnell, Price and
Gilmore owed much to Fianna Fils success at attracting other
progressive republicans away from the IRA and into the new
party, typified by figures such as Lemass, OMalley and Aiken. For
those who remained in the IRA, the issue now was what position
to take in relation to de Valeras new party. Clearly, the IRA saw
itself as having an important political, if not military function, in
the context of ensuring that Fianna Fils rise to power would not
be at the expense of their radical republican commitments. Thus
the IRA became a self-appointed guardian of the republican ideal,
a kind of external political conscience to de Valeras new party.
For the centre of the organisation, personified by chief of staff
Moss Twomey, the issue was the republic, and the continuing
material and symbolic vestiges of British rule in Ireland. For the
republican left, their horizons were set considerably higher. The
motivating factor was not simply transforming the Free State into
a republic, but the nature and distribution of power and resources
within that republic. The adoption of the Saor ire initiative
in 1931, with its radical call for an independent revolutionary
leadership of the working class and working farmers towards
the overthrow in Ireland of British Imperialism and its ally, Irish
capitalism,21 suggested that the ODonnellite wing of the IRA
were ascendant. However, the fact that it had been rejected by the
IRA only a year previously clearly indicated that this ascendancy
was not secure. That both tendencies could coexist productively
within the IRA was more a function of Twomeys acceptance of
Mellows tactical shift to the left, rather than the actual adoption
by the IRA of the more radical social republicanism of ODonnell.
A distinction that would have significant consequences after de
Valera came to power.
131
Coinciding with the formation of Fianna Fil, Peadar ODonnell

and other left republicans initiated a campaign on the issue of land
annuities payments by Irish farmers to the British exchequer
following the pre-Free State land purchase schemes. The campaign
was the embodiment of the kind of political direction ODonnell
wanted republicans to travel, simultaneously mobilising the most
disenfranchised sections of Irish society around an issue which
was national and economic, symbolic and material, and whose
outcome would be the instilling of a left-republican consciousness
in the mass of Irish poor farmers. English notes that
in ODonnells view there existed the potential for the land annuities issue to
become transformed into an overwhelming uprising of Republican feeling.
Moreover, the Republic if restored through a struggle on this level, would
be a Republic of the poor, achieved by the poor, for the poor.22
ODonnell was acutely aware that the annuities campaign even

with the support of the IRA which was itself divided over the
issue did not have sufficient strength to become a political
force capable of overturning the defeat of 1921. However, he
equally understood that while Fianna Fils support would greatly
benefit the campaign, if left to their own devices, they would drift
into soft talk of the burden of those payments on the national
economy, and of the good use they would make of this money
when they got into government.23 And here was the bind. Left
republicans such as ODonnell understood that even a radicalised
IRA had its own limitations, but equally they understood the
limited ambitions of Fianna Fil. Any potential alliance would
be fraught with risks and uncertainty. And yet, unable to think
beyond the organisational and operational limits of the IRA and
without an alliance with a party-political formation such as Fianna
Fil, the annuities campaign would remain a marginal issue at the
level of the state itself. Thus the left-republican strategy was to
develop the revolutionary potential of the IRA as a vanguard in
the classical revolutionary sense of the term as much Fenian as
Leninist while mobilising the masses to push Fianna Fil into
an ever more left-republican political and economic space.
132
For their part Fianna Fil were cautious of the land annuities
issue from the beginning. Following approaches from the partys
principle conduit to the labour movement and republican left, Sean
Lemass, Fianna Fil agreed to join the campaign provided it could
do so in such a way that it would not appear to be jeopardising
the ownership of property.24 As the campaign unfolded, what
began as an attempt by left republicans to mobilise popular
public opinion in order to shift de Valera to the republican left
through a radical demand for non-payment of annuities became
appropriated by Fianna Fil into a central element of de Valeras
broader electoral strategy. Annuities would not be abolished, but
reduced and invested by a future Fianna Fil government into the
promise of employment expansion and greater job security and
a guaranteed minimum wage for agricultural labourers.25 While
less radical than ODonnell would have hoped, such policies were
still significant from a left-republican point of view. Indeed there
is little to suggest that, despite their intuitive scepticism of the
party, left republicans could not sincerely believe that the growing
Fianna Fil party would be socially progressive and radically
republican, albeit in a more social democratic and gradualist form
than the radicals gravitating around An Phoblacht.
For their part, Fianna Fil were developing a political strategy
and policy programme that was to prove central for its rise to
power by the end of the decade. That such a strategy was often
sincere and always organic should not be doubted, despite the
scepticism of writers such as Dunphy and Bew et al. De Valera
was keen to maintain a close relationship with those sections of
the IRA and republican left who had not joined the new party.
Their support, and more importantly the need to avoid any serious
electoral competition from the republican left, was central to
the partys electoral appeal to small farmers, the urban working
class and anti-Treaty republicans. An appeal, it must be said,
greatly assisted by divisions and weaknesses within the Labour
Party. At the same time, these sections of the southern electorate
would not, by themselves, provide Fianna Fil with sufficient
support to propel de Valera into power. He needed, and actively
sought, a broader alliance with the emerging urban and rural petit-
133
bourgeoisie the small to medium sized farmer, the shop keeper,

the publican, the small businessman all those sections of the
Irish middle class whose social and economic position was made
precarious by the conservative and liberal policies of Cumann na
nGaedhael. If Lemass was emblematic of the working-class quasisocial democratic wing of the party, Sean MacEntee represented
the more economically conservative wing. The genius of Fianna
Fil at the end of the 1920s was in successfully articulating a new
form of nationalism, which simultaneously held out the promise
of economic expansion and development, mutually beneficial to
the working class and small farmers and to the emerging middle
classes. The evident contradiction contained in such a project was,
however, concealed, though never fully, by the intermeshing of
nationalist and economic expansionist demands, as evidenced in
Fianna Fils alternative approach to the land annuities.
For such a strategy to work, Fianna Fil would need to co-opt left
republicans to their campaign, while simultaneously neutralising
their impact on the party and Irish society more generally. On the
one hand they quickly realized the political value of a programme
of social reforms; pensions and social-welfare assistance were a
relatively small price to pay to ensure the adherence of the most
desperate social strata, thus reducing the potential political threat
from either the left republicans or the Labour Party. While at the
same time, the party clearly prioritised the development of the
private sector, accepting the primacy of capitalist leadership of
the economy.26 Dunphy outlines the issue as follows:
how far should the party defer to the immediate and unmediated interests
of the bourgeoisie, whose consolidation Fianna Fil aimed at and upon
whom it depended for the successful implementation of its development
strategy; and how far should it impose sacrices upon that class, and make
concessions to other social forces, in order to secure political and social
stability and ensure its own dominance?27
Fianna Fils success in the general elections of 1932 and 1933,

secured with support from the IRA and other left forces such as
the Communist Party of Ireland, was also the moment of left
republicanisms failure, although few understood it in this way at
134
the time. Promises of accelerated land redistribution; a proposed

National Housing Council to address the countrys housing
crisis with a target of 40,000 new homes; strong opposition to
repressive legislation such as the Public Safety Act; support for
the land annuities campaign; all combined to secure the support
of those political or economically marginalised by the postTreaty dispensation. Once in power Fianna Fil immediately
set about addressing its pre-election commitments. Employment
was provided through the expansion of large-scale public works;
modest tax increases on high earners and banks were introduced;
social welfare payments for those in greatest need were introduced;
and IRA political prisoners were released; all solidifying Fianna
Fils support among the urban and rural working class, to the
detriment of those forces to their left, whether the Labour Party
or left republicans in the IRA.
Part of Fianna Fils success during this period was secured
through keeping the left-wing of the republican forces at arms
length: not too far to alienate them, not too close to incur any
danger.28 However, it would take left republicans some time
before they realised that their tactical alliance with Fianna Fil,
rather than moving the government to the left, served to simultaneously co-opt and marginalise the left themselves.
The rightward turn of the government from the mid 1930s
onwards exposed the inadequacies of the left-republican approach.
Patterson is correct when he argues that the radical element in
Fianna Fils appeal in 1932 was heavily influenced by the pressure
of social radicalism. The annuities campaign had developed in a
way that appeared to vindicate ODonnells line inside the IRA.29
Indeed, the social radicalism of early Fianna Fil was as much a
product of the successful mobilisation of left republicans during
this period as it was of careful strategising by Fianna Fil to
neutralise that pressure. However, Dunphys conclusion is also
correct. The success in the short term was also the ultimate source
of failure, as left-republican activism assisted the electoral growth
of Fianna Fil at the expense of, rather than in support of, longer
term left-republican objectives.
135
The reproduction of Fianna Fil centrality in conditions unconducive to the

partys credible promotion of economic growth the essential common
denominator which binds together otherwise ssile social groups requires
the decisive neutralisation ... of one of the two fundamental social groups
which still form a large part of the partys support base the working class
and the bourgeoisie.30
The conditions of 1930s Ireland were clearly unconducive to

substantial and sustained economic growth, despite the best
efforts of the quasi-social democratic wing of Fianna Fil. That
it was the working class and small farmers whose political position
and economic well being was neutralised was as much a function
of the internal balance of power within Fianna Fil as it was
a consequence of left-republican political weakness post 1932.
The end result, however, was the same, namely the failure of a
conscious attempt by left republicans to hegemonise 26-County
Irish nationalism, in the service of an integrated republican
socialism, the purpose of which was to further the building of a
Republic of the poor, achieved by the poor, for the poor.
Left-Republican Retreat: the Republican Congress

The first years of the new Fianna Fil government were marked
by an approach to government which, in contrast to Cumann
na nGaedhael, was progressive if not radical. The release of
republican political prisoners and the lifting of the ban on the IRA
and An Phoblacht did much to please republicans. Meanwhile the
Blueshirt controversy saw, albeit initially, a degree of republican
unity at a local level. The 1933 Land Act opened a process of
land reform that went some way to addressing the existing
inequities of the system inherited after partition. This agrarian
progressivism was complemented by a concerted attempt at stateled economic expansion with the launching of state companies
such as Aer Lingus, Bord na Mona, Irish Life and the Irish Sugar
Company.31 Twelve months after the coming to power of de
Valera, left republicans could still maintain the belief that political
developments were in their favour.
136
However, the economic recession during the early 1930s

continued to close off the traditional safety valve of emigration
to the United States. Rural discontent remained as the pace
and depth of land reform were held in check by Fianna Fils
competing allegiances to the rural working and middle classes,
which inevitably disappointed many of its small farmer and urban
working class supporters.32 With 500,000 claimants for land
and an estimated 720,000 acres available for redistribution it is
hard not to conclude, with Bew et al., that, having decided to
leave the fundamental structures of Irish agricultural production
untouched, the agrarian policy [of Fianna Fil] increasingly ended
up pitting one section of the small and medium peasantry against
the other.33 Similarly, while economic development policies were
starting to take root, wages remained low and unemployment
high, producing continued levels of industrial unrest, despite the
governments characterisation of such activity as unpatriotic.
Allen notes that while from 1926 to 1930 the number of workdays
lost exceeded 100,000 just once, after 1933, it was consistently
above that figure.34 He goes on to argue that the rising levels of
industrial discontent and militancy were a direct result of Fianna
Fils industrialisation programme.35
For the first two years of the de Valera administration, the
credibility of a left republicanFianna Fil alliance appeared to
be bearing fruit; ODonnell admitted as much when he retrospectively reflected that Fianna Fil could offer so many concessions
to the Republican viewpoint that it was bound to blur the issues
that still divided us.36 By 1934, however, left republicans could
not but read the growing rural and urban discontent as the
logical outcome of the inherent contradictions of the Fianna
Fil project. Equally, the fragility of the lefts influence inside the
IRA was increasingly apparent, following the 1933 IRA Army
Convention, which represented a clear retreat from the Saor ire
position two years earlier. During the Convention itself, a leftrepublican proposal to develop an alliance with other separatist
and radical groups was defeated.37 In addition ODonnell and
others were censured for their left-wing direction of An Phoblacht.
The subsequent Convention Statement, The Constitution and
137
Governmental Programme of the Republic of Ireland, promised

social reforms, restrictions on wealth, and welfare for the poor,
but also stressed the right to private property and provided for
the safe guarding of private enterprise.38 This was a far cry
from the revolutionary programme of Saor ire, and bore much
in common, at least rhetorically, with the then platform of de
Valeras government. The ability of the mainstream of the IRA
(Twomey, MacBride, etc.) to remain committed, even tactically, to
the radical social programme of ODonnell and others was clearly
damaged by the concerted campaign of the Catholic Church in
the aftermath of Saor ires launch.
Thus the dual strategy of left republicans to radicalise the IRA
internally (Saor ire) and shift Fianna Fil to the republican left
through external pressure (the land annuities) had, by 1934,
clearly failed. That years IRA Army Convention witnessed a
final attempt by the left to shift the balance back in their favour.
Proposals for the adoption of a Workers Republic as the primary
objective of the organisation and a call for the formation of a
broad-based Republican Congress with other radical groups
to wrest the leadership of the National Struggle from Irish
Capitalism were both rejected. The left, realising defeat, withdrew
formally and permanently from the IRA.
Immediately ODonnell, George Gilmore, Michael Price and
Frank Ryan began to mobilise their own Republican Congress.
Founded at two events, held in Athlone and Rathmines later in
the same year, the Congress brought together a broad range of
Irish radical republicans. In addition to the ODonnellite wing of
the IRA, the Communist Party of Ireland and the representatives
of 14 trade unions and trades councils, including Irish Transport
and General Workers Union vice-president William McMullan,
were in attendance.39 Their founding manifesto stated:
We believe that a Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved
except through a struggle that uproots capitalism on its way. We cannot
conceive of a free Ireland with a subject working class; we cannot conceive
of a subject Ireland with a free working class. This teaching of Connolly
represents the deepest instinct of the oppressed Irish nation.40
138
The new project, while remaining faithful to the ideological

foundations of Connollyite republican socialism, represented a
profound break with the strategic direction of left republicanism
from the mid 1920s. The emphasis was no longer on radicalising
the existing organs of republicanism i.e. the IRA in an attempt
to shift Fianna Fil to the republican left. Rather a new formation
was brought into being as a direct challenge to the government
party. The manifesto continued by stating: Our policy and Fianna
Fils are as far apart as Connolly and Griffith; as irreconcilable
as the Dublin workers in 1913 and Martin Murphyism.41 English
argues that the Congress aim was not only of displacing, but of
cutting in two de Valeras party.42 No longer were left republicans
attempting to hegemonise Fianna Fil from without, rather their
aim was to split the social basis of Fianna Fil, detaching its rural
and urban working class from their pro-capitalist leadership,
thus displacing Fianna Fil from its hegemonic perch.43 That the
Congress is estimated to have had, at its height, between 6,000
and 10,000 members suggests that such objectives were not as
fanciful then as they may appear in retrospect.
Yet, despite such an impressive opening, the Republican
Congress never moved past the starting block. Its second major
event, held in Rathmines in September 1934, was marked by
bitter divisions and a split, whose effect was to end the new
movement at the very moment of its birth. Allen describes the split
as being primarily a result of differing attitudes within Congress
towards Fianna Fil. He argues that the left of the Congress,
centred round Roddy and Nora Connolly and Michael Price,
argued for a complete split with the government party and a
declaration that they do not stand for de Valeras sort of Republic
but for the definite issue of the Workers Republic, suggesting
the formation of a new, explicitly socialist, political party.44 As
indicated above, ODonnell, Gilmore and Ryan stressed the need
for an alternative strategy, the aim of which would be to win a
substantial section of Fianna Fil activists and supporters to a
united republican front, breaking the pan-class foundation of de
Valeras hegemonic control of the nationalist movement. Englishs
139
assessment is clearly more nuanced than Allens when he argues

that the dispute was
a question of tactics. ODonnell, Gilmore and Ryan adopted a primarily
republican emphasis not because they were less socialist than their rivals,
but because they felt that republicanism offered the framework and
language most appropriate to that particular moment.45
The united-front proposal won the day, though by a small

majority, leading to a significant split in the ranks of the fledgling
organisation. The ODonnellite wing of Congress won with
crucial support from Sean Murrays Communist Party of Ireland
delegates, who were to become the main organisational basis
of subsequent Congress activity. Though weakened, campaign
activity continued for two years, including various mobilisations
on industrial and political issues, the regular production of their
newspaper, and various unsuccessful attempts to secure Fianna
Fil and Labour membership of the Congress. By 1936 leading
figures such as Ryan and Gilmore were conceding that the project
had failed.
Strategic disagreements and splits notwithstanding, it is doubtful
that Congress would have ever advanced much beyond a loose
collection of the most marginal sections of the Irish republican
and socialist left. The unwillingness of the mainstream trade union
movement and Labour Party ideologically and organisationally
wedded to their role within the northern and southern states cut
Congress off from an important reservoir of support. Likewise
its inability to draw any interest let alone support away from
Fianna Fils urban and rural working-class activists or supporters
clearly indicates that strategically and organisationally Congress
was ill suited for the task. That they underestimated Fianna Fils
ability to successfully articulate a political project that successfully
integrated the needs and aspirations of large sections of the Irish
working and middle class is without doubt. However, a more
significant failure was their inability to provide a project, organisational or discursive, which could have mobilised those sections
of the rural and urban poor excluded from the networks of benefit
social, economic or political offered by Fianna Fil. Once
140
the broad-front strategy of Congress had failed to materialise,

only a new political party could have served such a purpose.
However, after two intense decades of radical political activism,
the generation of left-republican leaders, surrounded by failure
and defeat, receded from Irish political life into the battlefields
of the Spanish Civil War or the more accommodating climate of
Irish cultural life. It would be another decade before a new leftrepublican challenge would emerge in the 26 Counties, once again
from within the IRA, but without the involvement of those figures
whose thinking and activism had dominated since 1916.
A New Departure: Clann na Poblachta

It is doubtful whether the political context of the 1930s could
have allowed the Republican Congress to become a serious
political force, even if unity had been maintained. While its key
thinkers understood the contradiction that lay at the heart of the
Fianna Fil project, and the inability of the IRA or Sinn Fin to
provide any meaningful challenge to the new government, these
facts were not yet apparent to the general public, particularly
those whom Congress hoped to win over to a more overtly radical
republican position.
By the 1940s, however, ten years after Fianna Fils coming to
power, the political and economic context was shifting. Grda
notes that the two decades or so between independence and 1945
yielded little worthwhile improvement in the living standards
of most Irish people. During the Second World War, Irish wage
levels fell considerably behind those in Britain.46 However, de
Valeras successful articulation of Irish neutrality did much to
divert attention from his own governments responsibility for its
failure to tackle a stagnant economy. Grda argues that there is
a good deal of validity in the official portrait of a country united
behind a popular policy [non-alignment] and experiencing a sense
of satisfaction at sustaining that policy in the face of pressure,
real and imaginary, from the old enemy.47 However, the public
solidarity that existed during the years of the Emergency was
soon to come under the increasing strain of economic hardship.
141
A significant drop in industrial productivity, a significant rise in

unemployment, a series of bad harvests and the reintroduction
of food rationing combined to create, according to one observer,
wartime conditions without a war.48 The years 194547 brought
a significant increase in industrial action by laundry workers, farm
labourers, teachers and bus and tram drivers. Allen quotes an
Irish Times editorial from September 1947, commenting on the
rise of industrial unrest, declaring our society is drifting towards
anarchy.49 De Valeras credibility with the urban working class
and rural labourers was being severely tested.
Meanwhile, Fianna Fils republican credentials were also
under the spotlight. The deaths of IRA prisoners in Mountjoy
jail Tony DArcy and Jack McNella in 1940 and chief of staff
Sean McCaughey in 1946 caused widespread public outrage,
even amongst those whose support for the IRA had long since
waned. A significant body of agitation on the issue of political
prisoner conditions and release had been organised by the
Republican Prisoners Release Association. However it was not
until the intervention by Sen MacBride during the McCaughey
inquest that the issue of the treatment of republican political
prisoners became a national political issue. MacBrides forensic
questioning of the prison doctor made front-page news, led to
sharp exchanges in Leinster House and a protracted debate in
the letters pages of the Irish Times between MacBride and Fianna
Fil minister Sean MacEntee.
For Fianna Fil all of this was bad news. Despite having won
six consecutive general elections in 14 years, the most recent
in 1944, and notwithstanding a weak and divided opposition,
it was clear that two of the fundamental pillars upon which
Fianna Fils political dominance rested were clearly in danger.
In the presidential election of 1945 the independent anti-Treaty
republican Patrick McCartan secured 20 per cent of the vote.
Backed by Labour, Clann na Talmhan, independent TDs and
republicans growing concerned about the failure of Fianna Fil
to deliver on issues such as partition and political prisoners,
McCartans result shocked many, especially within Fianna Fil,
142
despite their candidate, Sean OKelly, winning comfortably with

49.5 per cent of the vote.
Labour should have been the principal beneficiary of Fianna
Fils difficulties. But despite an initial resurgence, securing 15.7
per cent of the vote in the 1943 general election its best showing
since 1922 the party split in 1944. The existence of two separate
Labour parties would effectively neutralise their ability to mount
a serious electoral challenge to Fianna Fil, ironically at a time
when it was most available.
However, any complacency in government circles at the lack of
credible opposition was quickly put to rest when in July 1946 a
new party, Clann na Poblachta, was formed at a public meeting in
Barrys Hotel, Dublin. Initiated by Sen MacBride, Noel Hartnett
and Peadar Lehane, the new party was made up of anti-Treaty
republicans no longer satisfied with either the IRA or Fianna
Fil. Twenty-two of the partys twenty-seven strong Provisional
Executive were former IRA volunteers. Their founding statement
constituted a direct challenge to Fianna Fil and laid claim to the
working- and lower-middle-class republican constituencies so
central to Fianna Fils political strength. It read:
For many years a large section of republican opinion has felt that republicans
should take an active part in the political life of the Nation. It was felt
that it would be possible to work for the achievement of republican ideals
by purely political means ... Various causes combined to prevent political
development. Not least of these was the low standard of political morality
set by those who in the name of republicanism secured ofce. The continual
inroads on elementary rights (quite apart from Emergency legislation) also
rendered it difcult to instil in republicans condence in political action
... The nation is being weakened by the forced emigration of its youth. A
small section has been enabled to accumulate enormous wealth while
unemployment and low wages, coupled with an increased cost of living,
are the lot of workers.50
Thus from the outset, and notwithstanding the new partys

decision to leave the formulation of detailed policy until its first
Ard Fheis, Clann na Poblachta was articulating a broad-based
platform that on the one hand discarded the isolationism, electoral
143
abstentionism and militarism of Sinn Fin and the IRA while

on the other rejected the corruption and political and economic
failure of Fianna Fil. Partition, underdevelopment, inequality and
corruption were to be the central themes of the new party, and
de Valera its principle political target. Three by-elections in 1947
enabled Clann na Poblachta to mount its first challenge to Fianna
Fil. The timing could not have been more favourable to the new
party, as Fianna Fils republican and labour constituencies were
becoming increasingly restless at the failure of the party to deliver
on what they believed were fundamental issues.
The constituencies of Dublin County, Tipperary and Waterford
were to be Clann na Poblachtas first testing ground. While not
all Fianna Fil seats, taken together the election was a serious test
of the governments strength and credibility. Clann na Poblachta
fought the election on a solid economic platform, arguing for
a policy of full employment and production based on the
development of our natural resources backed by our national
credits.51 In the meantime, they argued, the cost of living can
and must be reduced immediately by temporary remedies; Food
subsidies; Price control; Tribunals of Producers and Consumers
and free supplies of fertilisers.52 Clann was arguing for a level of
government intervention and a degree of wealth redistribution
considerably to the left of any other Irish party. Commenting on
the republican and radical nature of the new partys programme
MacBride argued that if we get a republic in name it would mean
nothing unless it ensured economic and social freedom for all of
the people of the country. We have to ensure that no section of the
people will be exploited by another section.53 Having secured its
republican and progressive credentials, and backing this up with
a surprising level of energy and efficiency within the constituencies, the by-election results were to shock the entire political
establishment. MacBride and Patrick Kinnane won the Dublin
County and Tipperary seats, with the help of a significant level of
transfers from Labour, while Fianna Fil took Waterford.
De Valera, clearly rattled by the surprise victory of the two
Clann candidates, responded immediately, announcing an early
general election for 1948 in the hope of minimising the ability
144
of the new party to develop its organisation across the state.

The scene was now set for a major confrontation between two
contending forces of Irish republicanism.
At its first Ard Fheis, held in November 1947, Clann delegates
dealt with a wide range of social and economic issues including
unemployment, poverty, poor housing and tuberculosis. The party
advocated the establishment of a minimum wage, infrastructural
and state employment schemes, substantial expansion of public
housing, hydro-electrification, rural regeneration and radical
changes to the social security system, including comprehensive
social insurance.54 In doing so they broadened the appeal beyond
disgruntled anti-Fianna Fil republicans attracting non-republicans
such as Noel Browne into the fold. Buoyed up by a mixture of
electoral success, naive enthusiasm and a clear public desire for
change, Clann entered the 1948 general election with a hugely
inflated expectation of its potential, fielding over 90 candidates.
In the end, they secured 13 per cent of the vote state-wide, and
20 per cent in Dublin, taking ten seats, a significant return for a
party barely two years old. The level of expectation both inside
and outside of the party ensured that the result was viewed more
negatively. Crucially, however, Clann had denied Fianna Fil an
overall majority, the government party losing eight seats and
almost 10 per cent of its 1944 vote.
The question now arose as to who would form the next
government. Having campaigned under the slogan Put Them
Out, Clann were not in a position to contemplate a coalition with
Fianna Fil, a proposition equally distasteful to de Valera. Despite
its novelty, the business of forming the countrys first multi-party
coalition got underway. The end result was a government involving
Fine Gael, both Labour parties, the farmers party Clann na Talmhan
and Clann na Poblachta. From the outset it was unclear whether
such a diverse coalition of ideological and constituency interests
could produce a stable let alone coherent government. However
15 years of one-party rule had created an appetite for change, and
the space from which such government could emerge.
In retrospect, Clann na Poblachtas 1948 election results were
impressive. However, they contained within them a number of
145
weaknesses that were to undermine the party from the outset.

Whether a small, left-republican party could survive in such a
broad-based coalition, when its electorate was so desirous of
social and economic change, is doubtful enough. In addition, the
fact that Clann had yet to establish a real national organisation,
let alone an effective structure connecting its new parliamentary
deputies to their constituencies, fatally undermined its ability to
sustain its political and electoral momentum. More significantly
MacBrides retrospective assessment that our economic policies
[in the 48 election] frightened the people meant that despite
its initial success Clann would become the most cautious of the
coalition partners, further undermining its ability to deliver on its
manifesto commitments.55 Nowhere was this more evident than
in the debacle over free medical care for mothers and children.
Noel Browne typified what was most novel in Clann na
Poblachta. With no history of involvement in the IRA or partypolitical republicanism, his attraction to Clann was based on
their progressive social and economic policies. Believing that the
time had come for a new kind of party in Ireland, Browne was to
become as emblematic of Clanns appeal to a younger generation
tired with the established parties as MacBride was emblematic of
the disappointment of a revolutionary generation with the failures
of Fianna Fil and Fine Gael. That MacBride chose Browne as
his co-minister in the new coalition government was as shrewd as
it was controversial, causing tension with the ex-IRA faction of
the party. Browne embraced the Department of Health with the
same freshness, radicalism and enthusiasm that was so central to
Clanns electoral success.
A firm believer in state medical provision, Browne was
instrumental in a number of successful policy initiatives on
becoming minister, most importantly in the dramatic reduction
in Irelands tuberculosis infection rate. Popular and committed,
Browne was keen to see the implementation of the 1947 Health Act,
which had been shelved by the previous Fianna Fil government
on the basis of objections from both the Catholic hierarchy and the
medical profession. The most controversial aspect of the bill was
the proposal to provide free medical care to pregnant mothers and
146
their children. The medical establishment opposed the proposal

fearing it to be the thin end of a public health system wedge, while
the Catholic Church feared a weakening of their own influence
arising from any increase in state provision of services. Faced
with the combined opposition of the Irish Medical Association
and the Catholic Church, the majority of coalition parties also
withheld support for the controversial proposals. Following a
protracted period of negotiations, and the refusal of Browne to
withdraw the Bill, Sen MacBride, with the backing of Clanns
national executive, demanded Brownes resignation as Minister
for Health. Browne resigned but not before providing the Irish
Times with all correspondence of the affair, the publication of
which caused widespread public anger, and substantial damage
to Clann na Poblachtas public image.
What is significant here is not the impact of this specific political
dispute on the position and credibility of Clann na Poblachta,
serious as that was, but rather what it tells us about the party more
generally. Clann emerged not only in opposition to Fianna Fils
failure to deliver on core republican political and socio-economic
objectives, but also on the promise of bringing something new and
dynamic to Irish politics. It railed against conservatism, inequality
and inaction. While always careful to guard against Fianna Fil
claims of communist infiltration still powerful amongst a
devoutly Catholic population it nonetheless stood for change,
in style and substance. Entering coalition with Fine Gael, the party
of the AngloIrish treaty and victors in the bitter Civil War, was
going to be difficult enough. Thus, Clanns success was going to
be determined by what it actually achieved in government. What
the Mother and Child controversy demonstrated was not simply
Clanns numerical weakness as a small coalition partner but
more importantly its unwillingness to stand up to Fine Gael or
other powerful vested interests in pursuit of the change its election
manifesto promised.
Browne and fellow Clann TD Jack McQuillan left the party and
joined Clann-founder Peadar Cowan on the independent benches
of Leinster House.56 A bitter and public debate ensued between
the two wings of the party further exposing the rift between
147
those remaining faithful to the initial mission of the party and

those whose focus had shifted to maintaining the unity of the
coalition government. Two subsequent general elections, in 1951
and 1954, saw a rapid demise of the party as an electoral force.
Of the original ten TDs elected in 1948, four stood against the
party in 1951, three as independents and one for Labour. Only
MacBride and John Tully retained their seats for Clann. In the
1954 contest they faired somewhat better, winning three seats, but
turning down an offer from Fine Gael to participate in the second
inter-party coalition, choosing to support it externally instead.
That support was short-lived when MacBride tabled a motion of
no confidence in Costellos cabinet, in 1957, leading to the end
of the coalition and MacBrides defeat in the subsequent general
election. While Tully retained his seat until 1965, when the party
formally disbanded, the 57 election spelled the effective end of
Clann na Poblachta as a meaningful political force in Ireland.
Eithne McDermott, in her history of the party, is right to credit
Fianna Fil as partially responsible for Clanns short political
life span. De Valeras decision to call the snap election in 1948,
while bringing an end to his government, served a more valuable
longer term function of denying Clann the opportunity to develop
at a more natural pace.57 But she is also correct in placing the
majority of the blame on Clann themselves. The decision to
enter coalition before the party was ideologically or politically
ready placed substantial strains on the partys differing interests.
Moreover, the failure of the party, ostensibly under MacBrides
leadership, to act as the coalitions most radical pole, fearful
as he was of scaring the electorate or indeed other centres of
established social or political power, meant that the cohesion of
the party could never be maintained. Coalition with Fine Gael
challenged its republican support base while the Mother and Child
debacle challenged its left constituency. The end result was organisational implosion and political suicide.
It would be wrong, however, to dismiss Clann na Poblachta on
the basis of its failure to produce long-term stability or success.
The party was innovative both outside and inside of government.
Clann were the first party to utilise modern election techniques
148
such as the political broadcast screened on the side of dance

halls from mobile projectors gramophone record ads and
modern newspaper advertising. They were also the first party to
contest a post-independence election on a detailed and coherent
manifesto outlining economic policies in a wide range of areas.
In government their two ministers were amongst the most able,
leaving significant legacies that influenced the departments of
Foreign Affairs and Health for decades in both Fianna Fil and
Fine Gael led governments. Indeed it is doubtful if Costello as
Taoiseach would have declared a republic if it had not been for the
presence of Clann in government. Likewise, the fact that the first
inter-party coalition was the first to seriously embrace economic
planning ensured that those inside Fianna Fil such as Lemass
would be strengthened in their advocacy of similar policies.
However their failure to successfully understand the social and
economic basis of their support, and the scale of the longer-term
challenge they presented to Fianna Fil, led Clann na Poblachta
to squander their long-term potential for short-term influence in
government. What the consequences would have been for Clann
na Poblachta, Fianna Fil and 26-County politics more generally
if Clann had said no to coalition is one of the most interesting
counterfactual questions of the time.
Discarding the Republic:

From Ofcial Sinn Fin to Democratic Left
Clann na Poblachta were the only political party during the
first 50 years of the southern states existence who seriously
challenged Fianna Fils near monopoly on political power.
Whether they realised it or not, their powerful mixture of
substantive republicanism and egalitarian social and economic
interventionism posed a threat to de Valera that no other party
could produce. That Fianna Fil understood this better than
anyone else is not only evidenced in their immediate reaction to
the 1947 by-elections, but more profoundly in how it affected
the partys development during the 1950s. The long standing
battle between the conservative fiscal restraint of MacEntee
149
and the semi-Keynesian corporatism of Lemass was effectively

ended by the two inter-party coalitions, convincing the Fianna
Fil party that their political and electoral hegemony required a
more interventionist and innovative approach to the economy in
general and the needs of the urban working class in particular.
Lemass succession as leader of the party and government in 1959;
the capital investments by both Fianna Fil and Fine Gael led
governments during the 1950s; the opening up of the economy to
foreign investment; and the improving global economic context
all combined to produce a level of unprecedented growth in the
southern economy.58 The primary political beneficiary of this
was, of course, Fianna Fil, who enjoyed 16 years of unbroken
government from 1957 through to 1973.
Fianna Fils new approach to the economy rested on three
principles; attraction of inward investment; improving the efficiency
of indigenous industry; and the introduction of a form of social
partnership tying the growing trade union movement and employers
into a series of National Agreements. The immediate consequences
of Fianna Fils first two Programmes for Economic Expansion
(1958 and 1964) were increasing investment, employment, wages
and public spending. As a consequence, Lemass share of the vote
in 1965 increased significantly. As noted by Patterson it was the
first time in the partys history that it gained votes as an incumbent
government after a full term of office.59
Alongside the liberalisation of the economy, southern society
was experiencing a period of important cultural and social change.
Nineteen-sixty-seven saw Fianna Fil introduce free secondary
education and increase the availability of third level grants.
Government legislation brought a relaxation of censorship on
books and films. Television brought political and popular cultural
events from the wider world into an increasing number of homes
across the country, while growing economic prosperity enabled
more young people to remain in Ireland, producing a shift in
cultural values and political expectations the consequence of which
would only become clear by the end of the decade. Lemass attempt
to redefine his governments relationship with its counterpart in
Belfast, giving de facto recognition to the northern state in 1963
150
and visiting Stormont in January 1965, was viewed as indicative

of the optimism and fresh thinking of the time. The success of
Fianna Fil during these years owed much to its ability to be seen
as agents of these changes, while casting its new economic and
political profile within a rearticulated nationalism rather than a
simple abandonment of the partys founding principles.
However, increasing prosperity also brought with it greater
expectations, as evidenced by the rise of trade union militancy and
the growth of the Labour party. Both Allen and Patterson have
documented the sharp upturn in industrial conflict during these
years.60 That workers were seeking a greater share of the benefits
of the economic boom was as logical as it was inevitable. However
the failure of Lemass programmes for economic development
to equally lift all boats created an opening for a more radical
approach to industrial and parliamentary politics.
Labours new leader Brendan Corish, and a younger generation
of activists within the party such as Brendan Halligan, Conor
Cruise OBrien and Justin Keating, brought about a significant
shift in the partys language and positioning typified in the 1969
New Republic election manifesto. While the turn to socialism
alienated many among the partys traditional rural base, the party
overtook Fine Gael in Dublin in the 1969 election, taking 23 per
cent of the vote. The division that opened up between these two
sections of the party would prevent it from further capitalising
on the new political context and confirm its position as a minor
player in the primary political contest between Fianna Fil and
Fine Gael.
While it would be wrong to overestimate the depth or speed of
the changes taking place in Irish society during this time, there is no
doubt that change was taking place and forcing the states principal
political parties to rethink and readjust to the new context. Irish
republicans, occupying an absolutely marginal position within Irish
society at the time, could not remain immune to these changes.
While Clann na Poblachta were trying to articulate a new form
of left republicanism in the mid 1950s, the remnants of both the
IRA and Sinn Fin remained wedded to older and less relevant
ideological and strategic imperatives. Nineteen-fifty-six saw the
151
launching of Operation Harvest, a short-lived and unsuccessful

attempt to provoke a widespread insurrection across the north
through the use of small groups of flying columns operating across
the border. The campaign saw eleven republicans and six RUC
officers killed in action, and 250 republicans interned. When
public support for the armed campaign failed to materialise the
IRA brought the campaign to an end. Sinn Fins vote in the 1959
Westminster election dropped from its 1955 peak of 152,310 to
a mere 36,393. Likewise in the southern general election of 1961
the party lost three of their four TDs elected in 1957. Citing the
attitude of the general public as their primary motivation, the
IRA formally ended their campaign in 1961.
The failure of the border campaign to deliver any measurable
political or military achievement provoked the IRA to reassess its
position and role in Irish society. Cathal Goulding, who was to
take up the position of chief of staff in the aftermath of Operation
Harvest, actively engaged left-wing opinion outside the republican
movement in an attempt to bring Sinn Fin and the IRA into a
less marginal and more politically engaged position. The influence
of former members of the British-based Connolly Association
was key to Gouldings emerging strategy. At the heart of the
reassessment was a desire to move away from the militarism
and isolationism that had characterised both the IRA and Sinn
Fin since the 1930s. Gouldings frank assessment, published in a
1970 interview, highlights the extent of the critical re-evaluation
taking place:
The question was: how could we get the people to support us? The evidence
was that the Republican movement had no real policies. Without objectives,
we couldnt develop a proper strategy. Tactics were all that we had
employed. The actual ght for freedom had become an end in itself.61
Emerging from a lengthy debate was a series of ideas around

which Goulding and his supporters hoped to transform the IRA
and Sinn Fin from a closed, secret, armed conspiracy into an open
mass revolutionary movement. Central to this shift were proposals
for a broad-based National Liberation Front of left-wing antiimperialist groups north and south; for building a civil rights
152
movement in the north; for a new focus on agitational single-issue

politics on social and economic concerns; and for the ending of
abstentionism from electoral politics. An IRA discussion document
found by the Garda in 1966 argued for the transformation of the
closed clandestine republican movement into a movement [that]
will be a political national and social revolutionary organization
with an open membership and legal existence.62 Patterson is
correct when he argues that the leadership principle of the IRA
was being transformed from the military idealism of traditional
Fenianism into a semi-Leninist one.63
In 1968 a Structure Commission was set up to formally
develop proposals for the structural and organisational renewal
of the broad republican movement. Its work was completed
and formally accepted by the IRA in 1969, and was due to
be endorsed by the 1970 Sinn Fin Ard Fheis. However, the
internal redevelopment of the IRA and Sinn Fin was being
overtaken by political events in the north of Ireland. The unionist
backlash against the civil rights movement was gathering pace,
and northern republicans were frantically trying to respond to
events on the ground. As they scrambled for financial and military
resources to defend nationalist communities under attack from
the unionist state, a growing resentment was coalescing among
long-standing republicans who believed that the southern IRA
leadership was increasingly detached from the needs and realities
of the new situation. A critical mass of anti-leadership volunteers
within the IRA was emerging, particularly in Belfast, opposed
to Gouldings strategy.
The 1970 Sinn Fin Ard Fheis brought the two camps into
the open. Peter Gibbon, in a New Left Review opinion piece
sympathetic to the Goulding faction written at the time, argued
that the
basis of these differences revolved ideologically on competing conceptions
of imperialism. The physical force tendency regarded imperialism as a
formal colonial occupation and exploitation of Northern Ireland by Britain.
The agitational tendency regarded it as a system of economic, social and
ideological domination both sides of the border.
153
He went on to argue that for the anti-Goulding faction routing

imperialism was in the first instance a matter for military action,
while for others armed struggle was only one of a series of
possible tactics.64 These differences were fought out at the Ard
Fheis around motions dealing with the formation of the National
Liberation Front and proposing the abolition of abstentionism.
While passed by a majority of delegates, the latter did not secure
the two-thirds majority required for it to come into force. In
response, a Goulding loyalist proposed a vote of confidence in
the leadership of the IRA as a means to move forward with the
proposals. The vote passed, and the anti-Goulding faction left to
form Provisional Sinn Fin.
Gouldings faction Official Sinn Fin and the Official IRA
no longer hindered by those opposed to their strategy, embarked
upon a course that would see the party radically transform
itself in the coming years. The transformation was to involve a
significant ideological and strategic reorientation north and south.
In the 26 Counties the primary focus of activists was to engage
in radical grassroots political and economic agitation around
tenant struggles, housing action groups, unofficial shop stewards
committees and community control issues,65 with the effect
of building a social and electoral base of socialist republicanism,
aimed at challenging Fianna Fil and Fine Gael control of the
state. In the north Official Sinn Fin opposed the abolition of
the Unionist dominated Stormont parliament, arguing for an
alliance of nationalist and loyalist workers around a programme
of institutional reform. All of this was set in the context of the
demand for Irish reunification. Patterson is again correct in
stressing that for the Officials, the reforms advocated, whether
in the area of civil rights or economic and social conditions,
must help to weaken imperial control ... The need to reunify
the nation dominated the immediate horizon. No demand should
be formulated without this demand in mind.66 Thus, while
ending partition remained the primary political objective of the
Officials, a new strategic approach was advocated requiring, in
chronological order: reforming the northern state; uniting the
nationalist and loyalist working classes; uniting northern and
154
southern working classes; advance towards socialist revolution

and national reunification.
However, any meaningful possibility of building a mass
movement in the south or cross-community workers unity in
the north was shattered by the rapid descent into conflict from
1971 onwards. Increasing levels of loyalist, police and British
Army violence, the introduction of internment, and the realisation
that ONeills Unionist government was either unable or unwilling
to countenance significant reform of the northern state further
radicalised working-class nationalist communities, leading to
a substantial increase in republican armed resistance. That the
support base and activists of the Official IRA in the north backed
such a radical response created serious problems for Gouldings
strategy. In the increasingly polarised political climate of the early
seventies the Officials could either become a protagonist in the
military conflict, thus blocking their access to non-republican
working-class support north and south, or advocate reform and
lose all credibility within working-class nationalist communities
in Belfast and Derry heartlands.
For a time it did both, focusing on political engagement in the
south, such as involvement in the anti-EEC accession campaign of
1972 while simultaneously waging war in the north. On the streets
the Officials maintained a sustained military presence, while their
southern-edited United Irishman newspaper continued to advocate
the reform of Stormont, the politics of civil rights and loyalist
engagement. The tension inherent in such an approach was not
resolved, despite the Official IRA calling a ceasefire in May 1972.
Serious disagreements between those such as Seamus Costello,
advocating armed struggle, and those closer to the party ideologue
Roy Johnston and United Irishmen editor Eoin Murchu, led
to the resignations of senior personnel. However, the significant
breakthrough in the 1973 6-County local government elections,
winning 80 seats and 10 per cent of the vote in constituencies
contested under the Republican Clubs banner, enabled some to
believe that the strategy remained on course.
The IRA Army Council of the same year passed a resolution
committed to transforming the movement into a party, the
155
philosophy of which would be Marxist and the organizational

principles Leninist.67A second Structure Committee report
outlining options for the resolution of the ongoing tension between
the Officials military and political strategies recommended
a number of options ranging from the immediate abolition of
the IRA to a more gradual winding-down of the organisation.
Although the majority of the IRA leadership at the timer favoured
the first option, they adopted the gradualist approach hoping
to prevent a split. By 1974, however, it became clear that the
Costello faction was secretly organising to overturn the existing
leadership, leading to Costellos expulsion from both the IRA
and Sinn Fin. In December of the same year Costello formed the
Irish Republican Socialist Party and the Irish National Liberation
Army. A bloody feud in Belfast between the Officials and the
INLA resulted in seven deaths and seriously undermined Official
Sinn Fins election campaign to the new Northern Assembly.
The 1977 Ard Fheis voted to change the partys name to Sinn
Fin the Workers Party (SFWP). Behind the move was a significant
shift in the primary focus of the party; increasingly preoccupied
with industrial analyses and issues in the 26 Counties, the party
was actively disengaging from the political turmoil in the north
and from republicanism as its foundational ideology. The Irish
Industrial Revolution, published in the same year by the Officials
Department of Economic Affairs, was the most comprehensive
reassessment of the traditional left-republican position published
to date. Its introduction argued that the
national question for this party has nothing to do with the setting up of
Independent Ulster or the removal of British troops. These are symbols not
substance. For us the national question can only be formulated as peace
among the divided working class in the two states in Ireland so as to allow
a united Irish working class to conduct democratic and militant struggle
for the creation of an industrial revolution in all Ireland, and ultimately the
construction of an Irish Workers republic.68
The document implicitly criticised the traditional left-republican

notion of a cross-class alliance between small farmers, the petitbourgeoisie and the working class advocated by Connolly in
156
1916, Peadar ODonnell in the 1930s and Clann na Poblachta

in the 1940s. It also argued that Irelands political and economic
underdevelopment during the course of the twentieth century
was the result not of British imperialism, but rather of Irish
conservatism, and that the attainment of a Workers Republic
required the provoking of an Irish industrial revolution. It also
argued against outright opposition to multi-national capital and
membership of the EEC. Much of the analysis consisted of detailed
technical industrial critique and proposals for such a revolution.
Its political implications, however, were clear, as both the
ideological and strategic underpinnings of left-republican strategy
were abandoned in favour of a revisionist Marxist analysis of
Irish history and contemporary political realities. While the 1977
Ard Fheis adopted resolutions endorsing much of the thrust of
this analysis, it would take the party another decade to fully
absorb its implications. Significant figures within the party such
as President Toms MacGiolla and future TD Joe Sherlock would
remain ambivalent.
While the deepening cycles of conflict in the north appeared
unconducive for such a radical revision of republican strategy, in
the south the worsening economic climate of the 1970s, coupled
with the failure of the Labour Party to fully embrace its 1960s
leftward turn, opened up a space for a more radical socialist
party, particularly amongst working-class communities in the
states major cities. That Labour was tied to a conservative Fine
Gael coalition from 1973 to 1977 clearly restricted its ability
to respond to the growing economic crisis. The 1972 oil crisis
witnessed a tenfold increase in oil prices with a devastating
impact on the incoming coalition governments plans for economic
recovery. Unemployment was rising, reaching 12 per cent by
1977, while government projections for growth and public
spending were failing to materialise. The increasing tax burden
on both working- and middle-class employees was generating
growing levels of public anxiety, soon to explode in the PAYE
revolt of 1978 and 79.
In response, SFWP in the south focused its energies on
developing its influence within the trade union movement,
157
amongst public sector workers, and in the media, particularly

in Radio Telefis ireann. Increasingly directed by figures such as
Eamonn Smullen and Eoghan Harris, both of whom had strong
support from Goulding, the partys weekly paper, the United
Irishman, in publication since 1950, was replaced by the Irish
People (weekly) and Workers Life (monthly) at the end of 1979.
From 1980, moves were initiated to remove the Sinn Fin element
of the partys name. An unsuccessful Cumann motion to this effect
was defeated at the 1980 Ard Fheis. However by 1982 the same
motion was carried unanimously, despite considerable unease
from figures such as Sherlock and MacGiolla.
Despite these reservations the economic section of the party
was becoming increasingly influential over those closer to more
traditional left republicanism. In the 1981 general election SFWP
had their first breakthrough, with Joe Sherlock becoming TD for
Cork East, whose vote against Fianna Fils Charles Haughey and
abstention on Fine Gaels Garret FitzGerald was key to the election
of the new coalition government. Following the collapse of the
short-lived Fine GaelLabour coalition government, SFWP secured
three TDs, including Proinsias de Rossa in Dublin and Paddy
Gallagher for Waterford. A second election later the same year
saw the party lose a seat, possibly owing to their external support
for the highly controversial Haughey-led Fianna Fil government.
Their fortunes recovered, however, winning four seats in the 1987
general election and increasing it to seven by 1989.
While electorally the 1980s appeared good for the Workers Party
in the south, they were dogged by a series of internal divisions
and constant media exposs of the activity of the Official IRA.
At an ideological level the party were comfortably becoming a
Eurocommunist party similar to counterparts in Spain, Italy, France
and the Basque Country. Their adoption of a clear parliamentary
route to socialism, rejection of any form of armed struggle and
active engagement in the trade union movement accompanied the
move away from their republican roots. However, by the middle
of the decade the growing distance between the party north and
south was becoming apparent. Taking a hard line against Sinn
Fin, the SDLP and Fianna Fil, and a soft line on state violence,
158
while supporting an internal settlement to the conflict, was a recipe

for electoral disaster. Standing under the name Republican Clubs
in the 1973 local government elections in the north the party
secured eight seats and 3 per cent of the vote. By 1981 their share
of the vote had dropped to 1.8 per cent in the local government
elections winning them three seats. In 1985 they witnessed a seat
increase, to five, despite a marginal drop in their vote, however
the pattern was reversed by the end of the decade with four seats
and 2.1 per cent of the 1989 local government vote.
The differing electoral success of the party north and south
was a reflection of the fact that its direction was increasingly
orientated by its southern leadership, to the active detriment of
the partys growth in the north. Nowhere was this seen more
clearly than on the issue of the partys relationship to the Official
IRA. In 1982, James Flynn, a senior Dublin-based Official IRA
volunteer was shot dead by the INLA, who claimed it was in
response to the Officials shooting dead of INLA leader Seamus
Costello during the 1977 feud. The killing confirmed for many
the accusations featured in the April edition of Magill magazine.
This widely read investigative magazine, edited by prominent
journalist Vincent Browne, devoted two editions to the activities
of both the Official IRA and the Workers Party. Again in 1986,
following the RT current affairs programme, Today Tonights
expos detailing the armed activities of the Official IRA, the
Workers Party came under fire. Senior figures, including party
president Toms MacGiolla TD and future President Proinsias
de Rossa TD, rejected the accusations.
By 1992, however, both ideological differences and continued
Official IRA activity were making the position of the southern
party leadership untenable. By the end of the 1980s it was clear that
the parliamentary party section of the party had travelled the same
path as their continental Eurocommunist colleagues, gradually
abandoning Marxist-Leninism and, following the collapse of
the Soviet Union, adopting social democracy. The publication in
1990 of the pamphlet Necessity for Social Democracy, despite
opposition from the party leadership, emphasised this trend.
Smullen and Harris resigned in 1990 after the party failed to
159
formally adopt the social democratic route. There were also

rumours that high-profile TDs Pat Rabbitte and Eamonn Gilmore
were close to leaving.
Responding to the growing crisis, party president Proinsias de
Rossa called an extraordinary Ard Fheis in February 1992, in an
attempt to reconstitute the party. In a letter to party members he
outlined the gravity of the situation, arguing:
If opposing views were all that were at issue certainly a compromise, a
working relationship could be found. The problems, however, are deep
and fundamental. Reconstitution is intended to establish the rights of the
general membership and to guarantee that democratic decisions, once
made, are implemented.69
De Rossas motion sought to effectively stand down the party,

allow all members the right to reapply, and to abandon both
democratic centralism and the concept of revolutionary tactics.
In short, the party would be reconstituted minus the Official IRA,
the ideology of Marxist-Leninism, and any existing members who
continued to adhere to either of these aspects of the partys past.
The Ard Fheis was bitter and acrimonious, as de Rossa and his
parliamentary colleagues were accused of hypocrisy and dishonesty
in their denials of Official IRA activity and financing of the party.
The reconstitution motion failed to secure the required two-thirds
majority and thus fell, forcing de Rossa and five of the partys
seven TDs to leave the Workers Party, and found Democratic Left.
MacGiolla, who remained as the Workers Partys sole TD, lost his
seat in the 1997 general election. Democratic Left also fared badly,
losing two seats after a brief period in John Brutons 1994 Fine
Gael led coalition government. While clearly damaged by both the
split and involvement in government, the demise of the party was
as much a consequence of the absence of any available political
space for them to operate within. The growth of the Workers
Party during the 1980s was at the expense of the Labour Party
and on the basis of a left-wing programme aimed at the larger
partys working-class electorate. By the 1990s Democratic Lefts
programme increasingly resembled the more middle-class liberal
agenda responsible for both the election of Mary Robinson as
160
president in 1991 and the subsequent Spring tide of 1992, giving

Labour its largest vote share and seat return in history (19 per
cent and 33 seats).
By 1999 it was clear that Democratic Left had no future other
than merging with Labour, a move which secured the seats of
its four sitting TDs but added no extra political or electoral
strength to post-merger Labour, who held the same number of
seats in 2002. Patterson was correct when he wrote that the new
organisation turned out to be less than the sum of its constituent
parts, as the smaller partys more radical, campaigning edge and
its commitment to those excluded from the benefits of the Celtic
Tiger were absorbed without a trace in Labours parliamentarist
blandness.70 A similar path was followed by other Eurocommunist
parties across Europe, most notably Euskadiko Ezkerra in the
Basque Country, but also in slightly different form by The Party
of Democratic Left in Italy and Left Unity in Spain.
The Workers Party continues to exist both north and south,
without electoral or political support, consigned to the absolute
margins of politics in both states.
The history of the party, from Official Sinn Fin to Democratic
Left, can be characterised primarily as one of a gradual but
traumatic ideological transformation from a left-republican
formation to a social democratic one. En route the party discarded
republicanism as its organising principle; adopted unionist
positions on the northern conflict; advocated Marxist-Leninist,
then Eurocommunist, then Social Democratic organisational and
ideological principles and political strategies; finally ending up as
part of a party that throughout its entire political existence it had
chastised for conservatism. De Rossas desire to reconstitute the
party in 1992 effectively brought to an end the political lives of both
strands of the party, which by the end of the decade were playing no
meaningful or distinctive role in Irish political life north or south.
Patterson and Hazelkorns assessment, that Democratic Lefts
poor performance was a result of the spectacular performance
of Labour and the difficulties inherent in constructing a viable,
radical Left alternative is too generous, explaining away the
partys own failures by focusing on external forces.71
161
Conclusion
Throughout the course of the twentieth century, left republicans
made successive attempts to build a coherent and successful
political project, aimed at ending partition and transforming the
social and economic architecture of Irish society. The republican
left inside and outside of Fianna Fil during the 1920s, the
Republican Congress in the 1930s, Clann na Poblachta in the
1940s and 1950s, and the Workers Party in the 1970s and
1980s, all consciously located themselves within an ideological
tradition stretching from the United Irish movement through to
Connolly and Mellows. All appealed to the sentiment of the 1916
Proclamation and the content of the 1919 Democratic Programme
of the First Dil as the basis of their political and economic
project. All articulated social and economic programmes aimed
at redistributing the nations wealth. And all understood the limits
of the nations development as originating from an alliance of
British imperialism and Irish capitalism.
But all of these projects failed. Not only were they unable to
build sufficient political momentum to challenge the hegemony
of the more conservative forces within the nationalist movement,
they also failed to become an effective opposition. Eighty years
after the founding of the state, Fianna Fil remains the dominant
political party in the south of Ireland, and Fine Gael the principal
opposition. While these two parties were to prove the enduring
players of the century, all of the left-republican parties discussed
in this chapter lived short and unfruitful political lives, rarely
surviving for more than a decade or two, and with little meaningful
impact on the political or economic dynamics of their day. Despite
containing the potential to seriously challenge the political and
economic status quo, left republicanism in its different manifestations clearly failed to realise this potential, and it is to this question
I now want to turn.
Why is the history of left republicanism characterised by failure?
Was the context in which it was operating unconducive to its
development and growth? How did left republicanism understand
this context, and what were its responses? To what extent were its
162
ideological and policy formulations responsible for this failure?

What of organisation and strategy, how did these contribute to the
various outcomes? Understanding the answers to these questions
is essential to assessing the nature of left republicanisms failure
in the twentieth century.
Context
The context in which the various political formations discussed
above were operating was a constantly changing one. The
revolutionary moment from 1916 to 1922, the process of
early state formation from 1922 to the 1930s, the political and
economic challenges of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-1970s
crisis of both northern and southern states, were all substantially
different moments. The extent to which radical republicans
could constitute a threat to the stability of the state, and in
particular to Fianna Fils hegemony within it, owes as much to
the structural forces at play at a given moment as to the actions
of left republicans themselves.
The marginalisation of left republicanism, feminism and
socialism at the end of the revolutionary moment has been dealt
with above. From a structural point of view, what is significant
about the two decades after partition is that while the context
changed radically, from one of conflict and instability to one of
state formation, the space for radical politics remained marginal.
While the possibility of a challenge to the conservatism of both
Cumann na nGaedhael or the Ulster Unionist Party was indeed
possible, as the rise of Fianna Fil demonstrated, any successful
challenge would require the combined forces of the political
opposition, rather than just its left. Fianna Fils success relied
on its ability to mobilise all those different sections of society
excluded or disappointed by a decade of Cumann na nGaedhael
government. A left-republican or petit-bourgeois challenge alone
would not have had sufficient strength. However, by combining
the two, a serious hegemonic challenge could be mounted. In
some respects the marginalisation of the republican left post
1932, their eventual departure from the IRA, the failure of the
163
Republican Congress and the escape to Spain to fight against

Franco, were as much a consequence of the absence of any real
space for a left-republican project as they were a result of their
own miscalculations.
However, by the 1940s a much more significant space had
opened up, as over a decade of Fianna Fil government had left
those on the republican left of the party disappointed with the
lack of progress on social, economic and constitutional issues. The
dramatic success of Clann na Poblachta in mounting a serious
challenge to Fianna Fil was a consequence of this opening. That
they failed to become a serious long-term challenge to de Valera,
or a serious contender for political power, was more to do with
their own response to the unfolding political situation. But there
is no doubt that the 1940s represented in structural terms the first
real opportunity for a left-republican project to seriously challenge
conservative nationalisms hegemony within Irish politics.
Left republicans would have to wait another 30 years before
such an opening was again available. The crisis of both the
southern and northern states, from the end of the 1970s part
of a more general crisis of capitalism and the post-World War
social democratic state contained within it possibly the most
significant opportunity for left republicanism since 1916. The
development of Sinn Fin in the north will be the subject of the
following chapter. However, in the south it was the Workers
Party who emerged as the possible contender, much as Clann
na Poblachta had done three decades earlier. Again, their failure
to capitalise on the opportunities created through the economic
and political crises of the time owe more to the weakness of their
own interventions.
Thus in contextual terms, the twentieth century was not a
completely inhospitable place for a political project attempting
to combine republican and socialist politics. The failure of
both Clann na Poblachta and the Workers Party to successfully
capitalise on the opportunities available to them owe more to
their own ideological, organisational and strategic failures, to
which I will now turn.
164
Ideology and Policy

There is little doubt that throughout the twentieth century the
ideological foundations of left republicanism have been confused
and under-theorised. Despite having a significant body of political
writings left by Connolly, twentieth-century republicans, in
contrast with socialist and communist movements across Europe,
by and large avoided serious ideological discussion or critique,
with the obvious exception of the Workers Party. The absence
of any theoretical tradition within eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Irish republicanism; the preference for literary and
historiographical forms of expression over more philosophical
or analytical forms prevalent across Irish political culture; and
an emphasis on political or military action often in opposition
to debate and ideological argument left twentieth-century Irish
republicanism ill equipped to understand, critique and change
its own ideological foundations. That the most common form of
writing by radical republicans post Connolly is fiction (ODonnell,
Faolin, Adams, Morrison), or history and biography (Jackson,
Greaves, Berresford Ellis), rather than analytical or theoretical
investigation, is indicative of this emphasis. Yet despite this almost
anti-ideological sentiment, ideology has played a key part in the
failure of left republicanism during the century.
One of the primary difficulties for left republicanism has been
its inability to articulate the distinction and in turn integration of
nationalism, republicanism, socialism and feminism as component
elements of their ideological foundations. In turn this has led to
policy formulations and choices that failed to speak to a significant
minority let alone a majority of the population. While Connolly
achieved a degree of sophistication in terms of his ideological
articulation at the end of the nineteenth century, the unwillingness
of subsequent generations of left republicans to interrogate
whether his formulations were a key element of the failure of his
political project left important lessons unlearned. As suggested in
Chapter 2, this failure has meant that Connollys main function
for subsequent generations of republicans has been superficial
and declaratory offering a reservoir of slogans and justifica-
165
tions, rather than providing meaningful ideological tools for

understanding and changing society. The great failure at the heart
of Connollys project was not, contrary to the arguments of the
revisionists, that socialism and republicanism are incompatible,
but rather that his specific articulations of these ideological projects
were unable to speak to the needs, interests and aspirations of
the urban and rural working class of his time. That subsequent
generations of left republicans failed to recognise this meant they
simply repeated his central mistake, ensuring that their political
discourse would remain marginal to the concerns of the day.
Indeed it was only when left-republican political formulations
moved away from Connollys unsuccessful ideological articulation
of socialism and republicanism unconscious in the case of Clann
na Poblachta and conscious in the case of the Workers Party
that achieving a measure of political success appeared possible.
However in both of these cases, what emerged proved ultimately
unstable and incapable of providing a secure foundation upon
which to build strategic or policy stability to which I will
return below.
While Connolly attempted to integrate Second International
socialism with nineteenth-century Fenianism, joining the ranks
of advanced nationalism after the failure of any independent
republican socialist party and the crushing of the 1913 lock-out
meant that the nationalist objective of independence came to
precede the social and economic objectives of socialism. On this
point the revisionists are right. While Mellows tactical return
to the men of no property appeared to revert to Connollys
earlier integration, it was in effect based on political expedience
rather than ideological consistency. The split in the Republican
Congress, and the victory of the ODonnelliteCommunist Party
alliance, in some respects represented the return of the Republic
First formulation. The difficulty was that on the basis of this
formulation only an alliance with more conservative nationalists
was possible, seeking to advance the democratic demands of
independence, a position subsequently advocated by Desmond
Greaves and Anthony Coughlan in a different context. That
the Nora Connolly faction in the Republican Congress simply
166
reverted to the already failed articulation of the ISRP secured their

further marginalisation, once again demonstrating the inability of
Connollys legacy to provide anything other than a starting point
for a viable left-republican project.
For Clann na Poblachta, their intuitive articulation of national
and socio-economic concerns side by side appeared at first to
overcome the redundancy of both sides in the Congress dispute.
The success of the new party was based on the fact that it appealed
simultaneously to republicans concerned with issues of partition,
prisoners rights and civil liberties at the same time as urban and
rural working-class interests who wanted some form of social
and economic change. The combined image of Sen MacBride
and Noel Browne encapsulated this formula, irrespective of the
degree to which the party understood the conditions of its own
success. However, as will be discussed below, the partys organic
ideological formulation, unconscious and under-theorised as
it was, was unable to withstand the pressures of internal and
external political events. From an ideological point of view, Clann
na Poblachtas inability to understand the foundations upon which
its success was based meant that when they took decisions, they
did so unaware of the consequences they would have, and thus
unable to anticipate the negative impact of entering coalition or
adopting various policy positions whether from within or beyond
those coalitions.
Of all the parties discussed in this chapter, only the Workers
Party attempted to engage in a serious ideological self-examination
and re-articulation, not once but several times in the course of
their history. Emerging from the failure of the 1959 border
campaign and influenced by radical currents at home and
abroad, the party critically assessed the utility of the republican
tradition to contemporary Irish society. The consequence was
much more than the abandoning of long-cherished tactics such
as armed struggle or electoral abstentionism. The transformation
from a left-republican ideological formation to one increasingly
influenced by Marxist-Leninism led, by 1982, to the effective
abandonment of republicanism as an ideological resource, despite
the rhetorical claims of many within the party. However the rapid
167
replacement of Leninism with Eurocommunism and then social

democracy during the 1980s not only created the organisational
and personality tensions leading to the implosion of the party in
1992, but also shattered the ideological coherence of the party,
making its demise inevitable. While this demise came much earlier
in the north than in the south, it nonetheless served to demonstrate
that the ideological changes, driven as they were by the emerging
political leadership, were located in and responding to the changes
taking place in the southern state. Ironically, at the very moment
when the partys political and electoral strength and ideological
influence in the south appeared to be strongest, at the end of the
1980s and beginning of the 1990s, the partys abandonment of
democratic socialism in favour of mainstream European social
democracy sealed their fate, and it was only a matter of time
before that same political leadership would dissolve into their
main political rivals the Irish Labour Party.
Throughout the course of the century left republicans have failed
to understand in a critical way the ideological foundations of their
own projects. In turn they were unable to successfully articulate
a political, social or economic policy platform that spoke to a
significant proportion of the population. Ideological uncertainty
produced policy confusion. Combined, these confusions actively
undermined the success of their own projects.
Organisation and Strategy

The importance of ideology for political parties is that,
irrespective of whether they are conscious of it or not, it provides
the intellectual resources from which organisational models,
strategic imperatives and policy platforms emerge. A political
partys success does not necessarily depend on understanding this,
but the ability of any political formation to respond effectively
to its historical moment can only be strengthened by a degree
of ideological clarity. Left republicanisms ideological confusion,
from the 1920s through to the 1980s, was mirrored by confusions
in the organisational, strategic and policy dimensions of each
formation discussed above.
168
At an organisational and strategic level, left republicans were

deeply suspicious of parliamentary politics and in turn of the
political party form itself. They privileged grassroots campaigns,
popular mobilisations, and trade union engagement. They were
deeply suspicious of building alliances with other political parties,
even when actively trying to move them in certain directions or
joining coalitions with them. When they did engage with political
parties, either externally (land annuities campaign and Republican
Congress), or when they formed them (Clann na Poblachta or
the Workers Party), they did so reluctantly or in a contradictory
and confused manner. Such attitudes were deeply ingrained in the
experience and discourse of Irish radical politics, distrustful as it
was of the British parliamentary system and knowledgeable of the
failure of Irish politicians to successfully engage with that system
pre- and post-partition (OConnell, Parnell, Redmond, Collins,
de Valera). Unfortunately, the absence of anything other than an
experiential understanding of party politics and in particular an
absence of either a theoretical critique of the party-political form
or an understanding of similar debates taking place elsewhere
in Europe, particularly among Western European communist
parties meant that left republicans were both unaware of and
unable to resolve the contradictions inherent in their approach
to political parties.
Those reluctant to engage in party politics left the field
uncontested, to the benefit of Fianna Fil and Labour. This was
particularly the case both in the role played by left republicans in
assisting the coming to power of Fianna Fil and in the Republican
Congress. In both instances the organisational objective was to
build a mass movement in order to influence Fianna Fil, the
strategic purpose of which was either to move Fianna Fil to
the republican left or to force a crisis within that party in order
to strengthen the mass movement. However the conditions
were clearly not conducive to building such a mass movement.
While the land annuities campaign came closest, Fianna Fil
was successfully able to neutralise its radical potential once in
government. As the southern state stabilised post 1932, and
the business of politics became primarily one of parliamentary
169
democracy centring on Fianna Fil and Fine Gaels hegemonising

of state power, left republicans were either unwilling or unable to
think of establishing an alternative political party. With a trade
union movement accepting its role as representative of labour
within the new parliamentary system, and an IRA unsure of its
political role or purpose, left republicans in the 1930s and early
1940s simply had no vehicle, ideological or organisational, with
which to engage politically.
That this fact was understood by those republicans in the late
1940s who formed Clann na Poblachta was not in doubt. However,
their organisational difficulties were of a different order. That a
radical political project requires a different form of party politics
was intuitively understood. The difficulty was how to build and
manage such a party while participating in a conservative coalition.
The tensions between delivering political, social and economic
change while maintaining coalition cohesion and unity were in
the end too much for Clann to cope with. Likewise, without a
mobilised social force external to the parliamentary party, the
strength of the government ministers was determined solely by
their electoral strength. The lessons of the War of Independence, in
which the strength of a small military offensive led by the IRA and
a formally powerless political party Sinn Fin and alternative
government the First Dil were strengthened by trade union
mobilisation, civic society and the general population, played no
part in Clanns organisational strategy once in government. In
effect, their political party formation, despite rhetorical appeals
to the contrary, quickly came to resemble that of the other parties
in government, which alienated its activist and electoral base.
The Workers Party is again the clear exception, in that for the
first time in twentieth-century left-republican history, there was
a concerted attempt to consciously think through the ideological
and organisational requirements for achieving their stated political
aims. In organisational terms the party moved from the suspicion
of parliamentary politics characteristic of other left republicans to
an embrace of the democratic centralism of Leninism in the late
1970s and an embrace of the parliamentarism of Eurocommunism
in the 1980s. They did this through recourse to developments
170
within the Western European communist movement of the time,

first through the influence of Irish communists radicalised in the
Connolly Association in Britain and then through its knowledge
of and engagement with Italian, Spanish and French communist
parties of the 1980s. Indeed their ultimate abandonment of
democratic centralism as a fundamental organisational principle
in the early 1990s owed much to the impact of the fall of Eastern
European communism on the Italian Communist Party. However,
while conscious of the organisational model being utilised, the
difficulty for the Workers Party was twofold. First, many of
the organisational changes were imposed on the organisation
from above. Neither its activist base nor its wider support base
fully understood or supported the changes being proposed. The
absence of any organic or democratic process of evolution within
the party led to tensions, defections and an absence of internal
cohesion. Additionally, each of the organisational changes (from
left republican to Marxist-Leninist, to Eurocommunist to social
democratic) took the form of an uncritical adoption of organisational forms from other national political and historical contexts,
applied with little discussion or understanding of their suitability
to the Irish context. Each phase of change secured the support
of a small number of ideologically engaged activists, but in the
end failed to convince activists or supporters. If the failure of
Clann na Poblachta was a consequence of the failure to adequately
theorise the ideological basis of their project and in turn to assess
the consequences of their organisational model and strategic
approach, the Workers Party suffered from the opposite problem
a tendency to over-theorise and shift organisational models and
strategic choices at a speed which neither the activists nor indeed
the broader political and economic context could support.
Despite these limitations and failures, all of the left-republican
formations discussed above involved innovative forms of political
action. Their concern not to be limited by a narrowly defined
parliamentarism and political party model led them to explore
different ways of thinking about and making politics. Early left
republicans, particularly during the land annuities campaign,
returned to the radical democratic example of the eighteenth and
171
nineteenth centuries in an attempt to build a mass movement.

The aim was not to take power, or to build an alternative base
for a new political party, but to force those in power to move in
a certain direction, to affect the policies and decisions of existing
political parties. For their part, both Clann na Poblachta and the
Workers Party sought to radicalise the party political form itself,
through a mixture of innovative approaches to campaigning and
propaganda in Clanns case, and through engaging and infiltrating
trade unions, the media and civil society in the case of the Workers
Party. The Republican Congress sat somewhere between these
two models, neither a mass movement nor a political party, but
aiming to achieve the objectives of both.
If there is a common thread that marks the failure of these
different organisational models it is the inability to effectively
combine parliamentary political engagement and grassroots
community mobilisation in ways that allowed both modes to
complement and strengthen each other. In each case these forms
ended up jarring or conflicting, to the point that one was chosen
over the other, ultimately undermining the viability of the organisational model itself. Without a political party left republicanism
was left at the margins of political life; but when fully adopting the
bourgeois political party model left republicanism lost its radical
campaigning edge and was neutralised within the parliamentary
political system.
Exclusions: Gender and Unionists

In all of the periods described above left republicans marked
themselves out by their commitment to political and economic
equality and territorial and social unity. The rhetoric of each
organisation placed great store in the egalitarian and antisectarian discourse of the United Irish movement and the 1916
Proclamation. However, with respect to issues of gender equality
and engaging with Irish unionism, none of these organisations
moved much beyond that rhetoric.
At an ideological, organisational and strategic level none of the
various left-republican formations discussed in this chapter made
172
any serious attempt to think through and act out an understanding

of their relationship to gender or nation, in a way that would
have opened up new and meaningful relationships with women or
unionists, and important constituencies of interest. The existence
of a valuable reservoir of thinking and activism on these issues,
whether from Connolly, Sheehy Skeffington or Faolin,
makes this failure all the more inexcusable. Despite the formal
rhetoric of equality for all and the unity of Protestant, Catholic
and dissenter, central to all articulations of left republicanism,
a concerted gender blindness and refusal to think critically on
issues of identity, culture and nation meant that, for most of the
twentieth century, left republicanism would be an inhospitable
place for women and unionists. In turn left republicanism would
replicate the exclusions and marginalisations of both women and
unionists prevalent in mainstream conservative nationalism and
Irish society more generally.
Once again the Workers Party are an exception in both
respects, investing a considerable effort to address the ideological
exclusions and organisational disengagements with both constituencies. However while their gender politics were to evolve into
a rounded and robust feminism, at least at a theoretical level,
their engagement with unionism became, in the end, an adoption
of some of the most regressive forms of unionist politics, to the
extent that by the late 1980s there was little to distinguish the
Workers Party from either northern unionist party on touchstone
issues such as partition, policing, sectarianism, equality or Orange
parades.
The failure of left republicanism to think through issues of
gender and nation and to engage with women and unionists was
to become a major preoccupation of Sinn Fin from the mid 1980s
onwards, with various degrees of success and failure, the detail
of which is discussed in the next chapter.
Failure
The failure of the various left-republican formations detailed above
can be read in two contrasting ways. The first is that as a political
173
project any combination of socialism and republicanism, of the

desire for national democracy and for socio-economic justice,
is doomed to failure. The second is to be found in the failure to
successfully articulate, organise, strategise and build specific forms
of left republicanism during specific historic moments.
At one level the first argument would appear to have some
purchase, as each generation of left-wing republicans, attempting
to influence or secure political power, organising and mobilising
in different ways, one after another, failed to become a sustained
political force, let alone successfully challenge for political power.
However, despite these failures, left republicanism continued
to have a popular appeal, particularly for those excluded or
marginalised from the political and economic status quo at any
given moment in history. Indeed, left republicanisms role as a
repository of ideas and forms available for those seeking to pursue
a radical programme of political and economic change in Ireland
has not diminished despite a century of failure. That the most
successful left-republican political project of the century, Sinn
Fin, lays claim to this position is a clear indication that the
failure of other left-republican projects is not necessarily because
of some inherent contradiction within left republicanism per se,
but a consequence of either an inhospitable political and economic
conjuncture or of flawed ideological, organisational or strategic
decisions made by left republicans during those moments when
their potential was at its greatest.
Whether contemporary Sinn Fin is consciously learning the
lessons of this history of failure is an open question. However,
as will be detailed in the next chapter, they have arrived at a
point which no other left-republican formation in the history of
modern Ireland has reached before. Whether the context in which
they are operating and their engagement with it enables them to
significantly challenge the social, economic and political status
quo remains also an open question.
4
A CENTURY OF STRUGGLE
The history of Sinn Fin during the course of the twentieth century
is more a history of different organisations operating under the
same name than it is that of a single continuous political party.
While personnel, symbols and at times policies remained constant
over defined periods of time, both the detail and form of the
party, and its response to the specific historical conjuncture,
were more often than not radically different, marking the partys
history more by discontinuity than its opposite. There are in fact
several Sinn Fin parties to be found in the century of struggle,
from the organisation founded in 1905 to the party that elected
Gerry Adams as president in 1983. Understanding contemporary
Sinn Fin requires a close reading of this discontinuity. It also
demands that we understand the external influences on the party,
whether from the IRA, other left-republican political formations,
or ideologies, policies, events and actors beyond the party itself.
Arthur Grifths Sinn Fin

As detailed in Chapters 2 and 3, Irish politics at the end of
the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth was
dominated by the political demand for Home Rule. The Irish
Parliamentary Party (IPP), led by Charles Stewart Parnell until
1891 and then by John Redmond, was the primary if not sole
political voice for nationalist Ireland. Its close relationship with
the British Liberal Party, and reliance on parliamentary means
to secure its political ends, made it dependent on the political
will and strength of politicians in Westminster. Despite attempts
by the more radical Irish Republican Brotherhood to infiltrate
174
175
the party and move it in a separatist direction, the IPP remained

wedded to the objective of securing a limited level of administrative independence from Westminster without challenging the
constitutional status quo.
However, from the end of the nineteenth century, Ireland,
like many of its small European neighbours, was experiencing
a significant upsurge of radical nationalist cultural and political
ferment. The Czechs, Norwegians, Hungarians, Slovaks, Latvians
and Estonians were all rediscovering the cultural nationalism of
the earlier revolutionary period of 1848. Demands for cultural
revival and political independence became intertwined, producing
the seeds of a political movement that would eventually displace
the conservatism of the IPP. The Young Ireland Society, founded
in 1881, sought to revive the thought and activism of the Young
Ireland movement of the 1840s.1 Like the Young Irelanders, the
Young Ireland Society was primarily intellectual, focusing on the
Irish language, and Irish culture and history. The Gaelic Athletic
Association was founded in 1884 to promote Irish sports and
culture, and quickly became the single largest social organisation in
the country. Conradh na Gaeilge was founded in 1893 to promote
Irish culture, language and industry. The Gaelic League, founded
in 1898 also sought to revive Irish language and culture, and by
the start of the twentieth century it had become a truly national
organisation consisting of 200 branches, 100,000 members and
an ability to distribute, according to one source, 50,000 Irish
language textbooks annually.2
While much of this work was cultural, the outbreak of
the Boer War in South Africa in 1899 and the visit of Queen
Victoria to Ireland the following year provided a more political
focus for separatist and republican sentiment. Quoting W.B.
Yeats observations on the period, historian Diarmaid Ferriter
comments that Ireland would be like soft wax for years to
come, as it was entering a new period of political activity.3
Ferriter also talks about a new sense of cultural vibrancy ...
[where] debate was intense and intellectually challenging.4 And
behind all of these developments encouraging, promoting, and
financing if not completely controlling was a rejuvenated and
176
rapidly expanding Irish Republican Brotherhood, committed to

promoting cultural nationalism and political separatism in as
many forms as was possible.
This emerging advanced nationalist movement had no lead
organisation, no political party, and no single spokesperson.
Rather it was an organic, plural and diverse collection of political,
economic and cultural interests. What bound them together was
a belief in the need to restore and promote a sense of Irishness,
a sentiment encapsulated in the phrase Sinn Fin. Meaning
ourselves, Sinn Fin was a slogan used by a range of nationalist
speakers and organisations from the end of the nineteenth century.
The journal of Conradh na Gaeilge, An Claidheamh Soluis, used
it regularly to promote Irish-made goods. In 1902, Sinn Fin:
the Oldcastle Monthly Review was launched, with future 1916
rebellion leader, Padraig Pearse, speaking at the launch event.
The Reviews first editorial described Sinn Fin as the movement
that is at present being carried on by thinking men and women
of Ireland to revive our ancient language, music, literature, our
National sports and pastimes, our decaying industries, and the
cause of Temperance.5 The Review also assured its readers that
while Sinn Fin is in existence it will champion the cause of the
oppressed against the oppressor and will be the stern champion
of the labouring class.6
It was from within this very specific historical moment, and
surrounded by these radical influences, that Arthur Griffith
emerged. A member of the Young Irish Society and the IRB, and
an employee of the Irish Independent newspaper during the heady
days of the 1880s, Griffith was to become a writer, polemicist
and activist of enormous importance. Following his return from
the Boer War, Griffith founded his own newspaper, the United
Irishman, in 1899, with financial assistance from the IRB, and
began to articulate a form of advanced nationalism in direct
opposition to the Irish Parliamentary Party. In 1900 he formed
a political association, Cumann na nGaedhael, with the aim of
cultivating a fraternal spirit amongst Irishmen ... supporting Irish
industries ... teaching of Irish history, literature, language ... the
discountenancing of anything tending towards the Anglicisation
177
of Ireland ... [and] the development of an Irish foreign policy.7

Griffith was also instrumental in the creation of the National
Council, a campaign group opposed to the visit of King Edward
VII to Dublin in 1903. Historian Brian Feeney estimates that by
this time the United Irishman had a circulation of 30,000 ...
[and] as many as 250,000 readers.8 It was through the pages of
his publication that Griffith first explained the detail of a political
programme that would transform Sinn Fin from a mere slogan
into a political movement.
In 1904, over 27 weekly instalments in the United Irishman,
Griffith serialised what was to become his key work, The
Resurrection of Hungary. Published in complete form as
a pamphlet later the same year it sold 5,000 copies within a
matter of hours, and more than 20,000 during the twelve months
that followed.9 Describing the pamphlet as seminal, Ferriter
summarises it as
an argument promoting the merits of establishing AngloIrish relations
along the lines of the Austro-Hungarian model of dual monarchy,
recommending that Irish MPs should abstain from Westminster, in the
same manner that Hungarian deputies had withdrawn from the imperial
parliament in Vienna.10
Griffiths dual-monarchy approach was not born out of any

ideological support for monarchy per se, but, according to Feeney,
he knew most Irish people were not republican and therefore a
dual monarchy was a compromise that he believed would satisfy
the majority.11 Feeney also argues that in this way Griffith hoped
to win Irish unionists to his cause.12
Within a year, Griffith had published a second pamphlet
entitled The Sinn Fin Policy. The publication was an attempt
to persuade members of the Irish Parliamentary Party, gearing
up for the 1906 Westminster election, to adopt an abstentionist
position. In addition to the arguments made in The Resurrection
of Hungary, Griffith also issued a detailed economic critique
of the impact of the Union with Britain and a comprehensive
economic programme based heavily on the German economic
nationalist Friedrich List. The pamphlet was another success,
178
receiving widespread circulation and impact in Ireland and internationally.13 As a consequence:

By spring 1905 Sinn Fin had become an all-embracing description for
attitudes and behaviour, be they political, social, sporting, educational,
cultural or economic, which were separatist or Irish Ireland. It was a
movement. It was not yet an organisation. It expressed an attitude of mind
and offered an ideology and a political programme to those who wanted
to break the connection with England.14
But Griffith was not interested in building a political party.

Rather he was primarily interested in ideas, their formulation and
dissemination in an attempt to influence the broader nationalist
movement. Despite being deeply critical of the IPP in the pages of
the United Irishman, Griffith had no desire to create an opposition
to the main nationalist party. Rather he hoped that the growing
frustration arising from the lack of progress with Home Rule would
pressurise IPP members into adopting a more radical path.
Griffiths radicalism, it has to be said, was contradictory
supporting womens equality through the promotion of women
into senior positions within Sinn Fin, while vehemently opposing
labour struggles such as the Irish Transport and General Workers
(ITGWU) mobilisation against businessman William Martin
Murphy in the 1913 lock-out. Despite Griffiths opposition to the
ITGWU, other prominent members and elected representatives of
the emerging Sinn Fin movement such as Constance Markievicz,
P.T. Daily, William Partridge and Michael OLehane were active
supporters of organised labour.
There were other points of disagreement within advanced
nationalist circles. The IRB was strongly opposed to the dualmonarchy idea. Other advanced nationalists felt the time had
come to challenge the IPPs hegemony over the nationalist
electorate. At its first convention in November 1905, the National
Council agreed to begin the process of building a national political
organisation, despite opposition from Griffith. While retaining
the name National Council, the new organisation adopted Sinn
Fin as their primary slogan. Simultaneously the Dungannon
Clubs, an Ulster-based IRB front, took a decision to wrest control
179
of the emerging Sinn Fin movement from those supporting

Griffiths line. Those arguing that Sinn Fin should become a
political organisation rather than a lobby group were given added
momentum when, following the Liberal landslide in the 1906
Westminster election, the IPPs political influence waned and the
prospect of Home Rule receded.
In 1907 the Dungannon Clubs and Cumann na nGaedhael,
along with other advanced nationalist groups and individuals
loosely associated with the Sinn Fin movement, formally merged
under the name The Sinn Fin League. Griffith and the National
Council remained outside the new organisation for several months,
eventually joining in September 1907. The League was committed
to the broad policies contained in Griffiths Sinn Fin Policy,
advocating economic nationalism, dual monarchy, non-violent
political agitation and electoral abstentionism from Westminster.
At a strategic level the League sought to influence IPP policy. All of
this suggested that Griffith had won the day; however, the victory
was somewhat pyrrhic, as the IRB, while not opposed to the
programme, clearly did not intend to actively support it. Rather
they saw the united organisation as a temporary instrument for
unblocking the route to an Irish republic.15
Occupying a half-way position between a lobby group and
a political party, the League was ambivalent about electoral
contests. In 1908 they secured the support of a significant
minority of councillors on Dublin Corporation. However it was
the resignation of C.J. Dolan MP from his Leitrim North seat
that pushed Sinn Fin into its first direct contest with the Irish
Parliamentary Party. Dolan resigned in protest against the IPP
in order to force a by-election in which he intended to contest
his own seat but under the Sinn Fin banner. He polled poorly,
receiving only 27 per cent of the vote to the IPPs 73 per cent.
The ideas of Sinn Fin may have been popular amongst advanced
nationalists and within intellectual circles in Dublin, but this had
not as yet translated into political or electoral support.
The 1910 Westminster elections provided an important fillip for
the IPP, giving them the balance of power in the British parliament.
Redmonds support for Asquiths Liberal Party and in particular
180
his 1911 Parliament Act, weakening the power of the House of

Lords, was rewarded with a promise of Home Rule legislation.
Asquith delivered in 1912 with a Home Rule Bill, which was
passed in 1914. Despite having its implementation interrupted
by the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, events seemed
to favour the IPP, offering little political space for advanced
nationalists to build any credible alternative project. Indeed the
entire country was consumed with the politics of Home Rule,
following the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1913
and the Irish Volunteers the same year. The strength of unionist
opposition, the threat of partition, and the prospect of some form
of self-government, eclipsed all other political issues at the time.
Of course, the Irish Republican Brotherhood believed that the
Home Rule crisis opened up another possibility, for an armed
rebellion against British Rule. But beyond the small secretive
circles of the IRB Central Council, the success or failure to secure
Home Rule was the political issue of the day.
Sinn Fins fortunes thus suffered as a consequence of the
apparent imminence of Home Rule. In 1909 the party appeared
to have less than 50 functioning branches and little organisational
strength or influence outside of Dublin. The 1910 Ard Fheis was
poorly attended and in 1913 no Ard Fheis took place. Disputes
with the IRB members of the Leagues executive over how to
respond to the Home Rule crisis led the republicans to effectively
disengage from the organisation. By 1915 Sinn Fin was unable
to pay the rent on its Dublin headquarters. A decade had passed
since its foundation, and despite initial signs that it might mount
a serious challenge to the IPP, events had conspired to produce a
different outcome. One contemporary supporter commented on
the state of the party thus:
The Sinn Fin organisation, from being a serious threat to the Irish
Parliamentary Party in 1907, had dwindled away until, at the time of
the insurrection [1916], it was practically conned to one central branch
in Dublin; while it survived as a political policy through Mr Griffiths
paper Nationality.16
181
On the eve of what was to be the foundational moment of

twentieth-century Irish republicanism, the 1916 Rising, Sinn
Fin was a small, marginal, isolated group of Dublin-based
intellectuals, disconnected from the two primary forces of
the broader nationalist movement, the IPP and the IRB. The
Irish Parliamentary Party continued to pursue the increasingly
plausible possibility of Home Rule via parliamentary representation in Westminster, while the Irish Republican Brotherhood
was conspiring to incite armed rebellion to achieve a complete
separation from Britain. There was little space for dual monarchy
or electoral abstentionism between these two poles of nationalist
attraction. Despite more than two decades of effort Griffith had
achieved little in terms of political influence. However he had
created both a political philosophy and an organisation that,
unbeknownst to him, would become a valuable resource in the
immediate aftermath of the Rising. Ironically, Sinn Fin in its
first phase of existence was not a republican organisation, its
egalitarianism was uneven and conditional, and it was neither
left-wing nor socialist. It was in essence a cultural and economic
nationalist organisation. Indeed Griffiths nationalism was at
times both xenophobic and anti-Semitic. Its strategic approach
to politics eschewed both armed confrontation with the British
state and party political competition with the IPP. Writing in the
Irish Nation in 1909 James Connolly described Sinn Fin thus:
Sinn Fin has two sides its economic teaching and its philosophy of selfreliance. With its economic teaching, as expounded by my friend Arthur
Grifth ... Socialists have no sympathy, as it appeals only to those who
measure a nations prosperity by the volume of wealth produced in a country,
instead of by the distribution of that wealth amongst the inhabitants ... But
with that part of Sinn Fin which teaches that Ireland must rely upon itself
... with that side of Sinn Fin Socialists may sympathise.17
Sinn Fin After the Rising

The period surrounding the IRB Rising of 1916 was one of great
flux and uncertainty. Indeed, as discussed in the preceding chapters,
182
the events in Ireland were a small part of a much bigger process

of state crisis and reformation in Ireland and Britain. Political
parties as we understand them today were not the norm, and
political and organisational membership and allegiances were fluid
and at times contradictory. When John Redmond and his Irish
Parliamentary Party called on members of the National Volunteers
to join Britains war effort in 1914, in the hope of securing political
advantage after the war, this caused republicans to split and form
the Irish Volunteers, controlled directly by the IRB. Only 12,000 of
an estimated 180,000 volunteers left. Eighty thousand volunteers
enlisted in the British army within twelve months of Redmonds
call. Griffith and the small circle of Sinn Fin activists actively
supported the new anti-Redmond Volunteers, both through his
newspaper Sinn Fin and as an active member of the new grouping.
However the IRB, including some of its more senior figures such
as Michael Collins, remained contemptuous of Sinn Fin. At the
heart of this tension lay issues of policy (separatism versus the
dual monarchy), strategy (armed confrontation versus political
persuasion) and style (younger and more militant separatists
versus an older generation of advanced nationalists).
Yet the 1916 Rising quickly became known as the Sinn Fin
rising, despite the fact that Griffith and Sinn Fin had nothing to
do with it. Redmond and sections of the Irish media disparagingly
referred to the Rising as such, in an attempt to demonstrate its
lack of public support. However, as the Rising emerged from the
conspiratorial world of the IRB, the general public and many
of those involved in or supportive of it lacked a vocabulary to
express what the Rising was about. As Sinn Fin referred more
to a set of ideas than a specific organisation, it was the most
appropriate vocabulary available and almost unintentionally both
opponents and supporters of the Rising came to refer to it as
the Sinn Fin Rising. In turn Sinn Fin, the organisation, was to
become the vehicle through which the IRB would seek to give
political expression to the politics of the Rising in its immediate
aftermath. According to Feeney, although the IRB adopted a
disparaging attitude to Sinn Fin ... it was the Volunteers who
made Sinn Fin the political wing of separatism and shaped it into
183
a national political party in 1917, but only after they created it

in their own image.18
The immediate post-Rising climate witnessed a significant
shift in public opinion away from the IPP and Home Rule. The
execution of 1916 leaders, the diminishing prospect of Home Rule,
and the threat of conscription into the British army all combined
to open a space for an alternative, more radical nationalist project.
As volunteers imprisoned after the Rising were released they
joined Sinn Fin and the party experienced a rapid transformation with almost 1,240 branches coming into existence within
twelve months of Easter 1916.19 The party started to contest
elections, directly challenging Redmond. Its first victory came
in February 1917, in a Westminster by-election in Roscommon,
taking 3,022 votes to the IPPs 1,708. This was followed with
a second by-election victory in South Longford in May of the
same year. The influx of new members and committed republicans
gave, according to the Irish Independent, the Shinn Finers ...
remarkable organising powers. Their posters are displayed at
every crossroads and village in the constituency and their colours
float from the treetops and the roofs of houses. Pamphlets are
being handed out by the thousands.20 The election of recently
released 1916 volunteer Eamon de Valera in the East Clare byelection in July proved another boon. That de Valera gained 5,000
votes to the IPPs 2,000 secured his stature as the emerging leader
of the Sinn Fin party. The East Clare victory was shortly followed
with the election of future Taoiseach W.T. Cosgrave for Sinn Fin
in Kilkenny. The dramatic organisational and electoral growth of
Sinn Fin not only placed the IPP under severe political pressure, it
also opened up a conflict between the more cautious Griffith wing
of the party and the more radical republican wing exemplified by
de Valera and supported by the IRB and Volunteer movement,
from which the partys new-found strength came.
When it became clear that de Valera was intending to challenge
Griffith for the presidency of Sinn Fin at the 1917 Ard Fheis, the
partys founder chose not to stand. However a lengthy series of
negotiations between the different factions of the party took place,
leading to, in Laffans words, a compromise formulae suggested
184
by de Valera ... which gave the republicans all they wanted while
at the same time conciliating the moderates and enabling them
to save face.21 The new constitution stated Sinn Fin aims at
securing the international recognition of Ireland as an independent
Irish Republic. Having achieved that status the Irish people may
by referendum freely choose their own form of government. The
constitution also stated that the party could use any and every
means available to render impotent the power of England to hold
Ireland in subjection. The compromise agreement was put to the
Ard Fheis in October, at which 1,700 delegates represented 1,000
branches nationwide. Conference unanimously agreed a new
party constitution and de Valeras scheme of organisation for the
party.22 While the moderates were kept on board, the Ard Fheis
saw control of the party decisively change hands from its founders
to a mixture of de Valera volunteers and IRB republicans. Sinn
Fin was now a centralised, national political party, committed to
achieving a republic and supportive of the right of the Irish people
to use force, if necessary, to achieve that objective. In Laffans
words, The Sinn Fin movement, a sentiment or attitude
which was almost as vague as nationalism or separatism, had
been transformed into an organised political force.23
Though early 1918 brought a number of electoral defeats, the
anti-conscription campaign gathered momentum and the partys
fortunes started to rise. Sinn Fin continued to grow, unequivocally
demonstrating its hegemony within nationalist Ireland in the
general election of 1918, the first to be fought following extensive
franchise reforms. These reforms increased the size of the electorate
from 700,000 to 1.9 million, the overwhelming majority of
which women, the young and the working class were more
in tune with the radical message of Sinn Fin than the IPP. Sinn
Fin took 474,859 votes to the IPPs 220,226 and the unionists
289,025. With 73 seats to the unionists 26 and the IPPs 6, Sinn
Fins victory was overwhelming, though less so in Ulster. Of
the countrys 32 counties, 24 returned only Sinn Fin TDs, in an
election described by historian Brian Feeney as a victory greater
than any achieved by any party before or since.24
185
Having eclipsed both the IPP and the struggle for Home Rule,
Sinn Fin had succeeded in mobilising a clear majority of the Irish
people in favour of separation from Britain and the establishment
of a republic. That it was helped in this by circumstance is
without doubt. The ambiguity that lay behind the core demand
for independence enabled a broad range of people, particularly
younger people, to join and support the party. Gaelic revivalists,
those angry at conscription, those disappointed by the failure of
the IPP, economic nationalists and protectionists, socialists, trade
unionists, suffragettes and agrarian radicals all combined in the
struggle for the republic. However, all disagreed profoundly as
to the form and content of that republic and on the social and
economic order of things that should accompany it. Sinn Fin
was less a political party with a detailed and coherent policy
programme than an emerging national movement, expressing and
legitimising a broad range of grievances and aspirations under the
one umbrella. While the struggle was against the British, and in
pursuance of a republic, a degree of unity and cohesion could be
maintained, however precariously. However, the strategic detail of
how to struggle for that republic and the ultimate outcome of that
struggle would be determined by the balance of forces between
the different ideological and organisational factions which made
up the national movement. Beyond the republic, the identity and
purpose of Sinn Fin was uncertain.
Sinn Fin During the War of Independence

The Ireland from which the new Sinn Fin party emerged was a
country in revolt. The five years that followed were to witness an
unprecedented period of political, military, social and economic
conflict. The transformations that took place during this period
established what we understand today as modern Ireland. Sinn
Fin was only one protagonist in this process, and one whose
role was of diminishing importance as the events of the War of
Independence and Civil War unfolded. As the party grew rapidly
from 1917 onwards so too did two other organisations whose
efforts were central to the process of undermining the British
186
administration, namely the Irish Volunteers under the control of

the IRB and the trade union movement, with the ITGWU in the
vanguard. The labour movement was deeply divided between
nationalists, unionists and socialists, leading to its absence from
the 1918 Westminster election. However, unable to remain on the
sidelines, other than in Belfast, trade unions played an increasingly
important part in the national movement. Other currents such
as spontaneous acts of agrarian radicalism were also becoming
widespread. And all of this was mirrored by an increasingly
radicalised unionism centred on the Ulster Unionist Council and
Ulster Unionist Labour Association.
Sinn Fin moved quickly to assert its newly won political
strength and implement its election manifesto. At the end of
1917 it announced a 22 point economic programme arguing
that
industries should be encouraged; land purchase should be completed and
absentee landlordism curtailed; a mercantile marine and a tariff commission
should be established; a department of public health should be created; and
a distinct Irish currency should assert Irelands separate national existence
in International Trade and Finance.25
Its most significant act was the establishment, in January 1919,

of the first national parliament, known as the First Dil. The
parliament was open to all MPs elected in the previous years
election, and during its first sitting the assembled deputies issued
a declaration of independence, adopted a republican constitution,
agreed a cabinet and issued a Democratic Programme for the
new government. While the First Dil was primarily a symbolic
body, defiantly asserting Irelands democratically expressed wish
for independence, it also set about securing as much actual
institutional power as circumstances would allow. Unionist MPs
boycotted the new institution, refusing to grant it any political
or legal legitimacy.
The Declaration of Independence was based on the Proclamation
of 1916, and conferred sovereignty on the people of Ireland. The
Democratic Programme was a much more innovative document.
While also based on the sentiment of the 1916 Proclamation, it
187
went further, declaring the right of the people of Ireland to the

ownership of Ireland and that our country be ruled in accordance
with the principles of Liberty, Equality, and Justice for all. It
stressed that no child shall suffer hunger or cold from lack of food,
clothing or shelter, and promised a sympathetic native scheme
for the care of the Nations aged and infirm. The Programme
called for the development of the Nations resources ... in the
interests and for the benefit of the Irish people while asserting that
it shall be the duty of the Republic to take such measures as will
safeguard the health of the people and that the Republic would
have a duty to adopt all measures necessary for the recreation and
invigoration of our industries. The Programmes final sentence
called on the incoming government to seek the co-operation of
the Governments of other countries in determining a standard
of Social and Industrial Legislation with a view to a general and
lasting improvement in the conditions under which the working
classes live and labour.26
In comparison to any previous republican declaration or
programme the Democratic Programme was the most detailed,
particularly in terms of social and economic issues, and the most
self-consciously left-wing. It argued for a level of state intervention
in the economy and resource redistribution through social
provision which was well beyond the contemporary European
norm. Historians disagree on the motivations and importance
of the Programme. Feeney argues that it was extraordinarily
left wing in its contents for an Irish political party, [and] was
designed to appeal to the Second International soon to meet in
Berne, Switzerland.27 Laffan, however, suggests that the document
was drafted jointly by San T. OKelly of Sinn Fin and Thomas
Johnson of Labour ... [but] the imbalance of power between the
two sides ensured that the document was pruned of much of
its socialist content, but some of the original radical elements
survived.28 Laffan believes that such sentiments can be seen as a
debt of honour to the Labour Party, as a gesture of appreciation
for its recent abstention from the general election. They were also,
perhaps, an attempt to win over support which Labour might
otherwise gain in future.29 Kostick also comments on the need
188
to maintain good relations with the Labour party, particularly

on the eve of the Berne Second International conference.30
Whatever its origins, and mindful of Sean Faolins caustic
though accurate retrospective commentary quoted in Chapter 3,
the Democratic Programme represented both the apex and the
limits of the lefts influence within both Sinn Fin and the newly
created First Dil.
As Sinn Fin began the process of establishing its authority in
the political arena, the Irish Volunteers initiated their military
campaign against British rule. What became known as the War of
Independence started spontaneously, and almost independently of
political events in Dublin. Across the country, semi-autonomous
units of the Volunteers commenced a guerrilla campaign. The
Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC), the British Army, and later the
Auxiliaries and Black and Tans, were the focus of the Volunteers
military actions. In the three years of fighting that followed,
1,400 people were killed, 624 of whom were from the British
forces and 752 were Volunteers.31 The military campaign was
complemented by a massive and again spontaneous withdrawal
of support from the RIC by the local population, through the
effective boycotting of its members, particularly in rural areas,
forcing them to withdraw into the larger towns and cities. In turn
the trade unions exerted significant pressure through a series of
strikes by railway workers opposed to the transporting of military
goods and personnel, and through a general strike in support
of republicans and trade unionists on hunger strike in Dublins
Mountjoy Prison.32
The existence and activity of the Dil, the Volunteers guerrilla
campaign, and trade union and civil society mobilisations against
the British military repression, all combined to propel the issue
of Ireland to the centre of the British political agenda. Sinn Fins
political dominance was confirmed during the local government
elections of 1920 where the party won 258 of the 263 county
council seats in Connaught and Munster while in Leinster they
won 26 per cent of the seats.33 In Ulster Sinn Fin won 79 seats
to the Unionists 81.34 In total Sinn Fin won 550 seats, Unionists
355, while the Nationalists took 238. However, as the War of
189
Independence progressed, and the activities of these three forces

political, military, and social accelerated, the position of Sinn
Fin was unclear and its influence was marginal. Suffering under
the strain of having to operate as, from November 1919, a banned
organisation, party structures found it increasingly difficult to
operate. In turn, as the First Dil began to establish its own administration at a central and local level, Sinn Fin, its structures and
activists, simply became the government, with the consequence
of draining the party of both its functions and activists. That the
party was only able to manage one Ard Fheis between 1917 and
1921 underlines Feeneys judgement:
An illegal organisation, its meetings disrupted, its leaders hunted and
concentrating on an intensifying guerrilla war, politics pushed to the side,
Sinn Fin went underground, then became a redundant organisation. By
August 1921 W.T. Cosgrave talked of the almost complete disappearance
of the Sinn Fin organisation.35
Sinn Fin After the AngloIrish Treaty

At the height of the War of Independence, Britain had 40,000
troops and 10,000 armed police stationed in Ireland.36 Public
opinion in Britain was growing concerned at the nature and
extent of the engagement. The British government was also keenly
aware of the international consequences of the war, particularly
on official opinion in the USA. For their part, the Irish Volunteers
were finding it increasingly difficult to regain the military initiative
in the face of such a large British military and police presence.
Throughout 1920 various attempts to open peace negotiations
came to nothing. However a truce was declared in the summer
of 1921 and lengthy negotiations took place in London between
the British government team headed by Prime Minister Lloyd
George and the Irish delegation led by Arthur Griffith and
Michael Collins.
Signed in December 1921, the AngloIrish Treaty outlined the
terms for the ending of the War of Independence. The Treaty did
not contain the core demand of Sinn Fin, for an Irish republic.
190
Indeed its contents fell far short of the principal demands of

the various organisations that had pursued the war. It proposed
the partition of Ireland, giving the north and south separate
parliaments, the north remaining within the United Kingdom
and the south becoming a self-governing dominion within the
British Commonwealth. Members of both parliaments would
have to take an oath of allegiance to the British monarch. The
British Army would retain control of key strategic ports along
the Irish coast and Ireland would have to pay part of the British
war debt.
The Irish delegation, having accepted the deal, returned home
to a storm of controversy, with de Valera, then President of Dil
ireann, rejecting it outright. A lengthy Dil debate in December
exposed the deep divisions amongst Sinn Fin TDs. However, in
January 1922 the Treaty was ratified. The closeness of the vote, 64
TDs in favour and 57 against, was a clear indication of the broader
divisions across the country. De Valera resigned as president to
be replaced by Arthur Griffith, who also became president of
the new Provisional Government of Ireland as stipulated by the
terms of the Treaty. An election was called for June of that year
which for all intents and purposes would act as a referendum in
the new 26-County state on the Treaty itself.
As the country began to come to terms with the consequences
of the Treaty, deep divisions and great confusion were evident.
Sinn Fin, the Irish Volunteers, and in turn each of the social,
political and labour organisations who constituted the broadbased independence movement, all experienced divisions and
splits. Two versions of each organisation came into being, two
Sinn Fins, two guerrilla armies and two parliaments, the Second
and Third Dil, the former mandated by the 1921 general election
and the second mandated by the AngloIrish Treaty.
That the unity of the independence movement was to disintegrate
in this way was hardly surprising. As the 1917 Sinn Fin Ard
Fheis had clearly demonstrated, the party, and in turn the broader
republican movement, contained diverse aspirations, ideologies
and political and strategic interests. It would be a mistake to
characterise the primary division as being simply between
191
conservatives and radicals, as there were social conservatives in

equal measure supporting and opposing the Treaty. However there
is no doubt that, whether they were motivated by ideological or
pragmatic considerations, those who favoured the Treaty were
willing to settle for a level of compromise that more radical
republicans simply could not countenance. The anti-Treaty side
was to be made up of doctrinaire Fenians such as Rory OConnor
or Mary McSweeney, social radicals such as Peadar ODonnell
and Hanna Sheehy Skeffington, and pragmatic conservatives such
as de Valera. Each had different conceptions of the content of the
republic and the best means of achieving it, but they were united
in the realisation that the AngloIrish Treaty would not advance
any of their aspirations. Once again republicanism was to be
united by what it opposed rather than what it supported, albeit
in smaller form than in 1917.
In the debate that followed leading up to the June election, the
British governments threat of a return to war was ever present in
the minds of the public. A Sinn Fin Ard Fheis in February 1922,
attended by over 3,000 delegates, ended inconclusively, without
a formal vote on the Treaty or a split in the party. Rather both
pro- and anti-Treaty factions campaigned separately under the one
party banner for the forthcoming elections. The outcome of the
election gave the pro-Treaty section of Sinn Fin led by Griffith
a clear majority of 58 seats. De Valeras Sinn Fin took 36 seats,
and Labour 17, the Farmers Party securing 7, and 10 going to
various independents.
As with the outbreak of the War of Independence, events in
the arena of party politics were quickly overtaken by the actions
of the Irish Volunteers, who split at a convention in March.
Outbreaks of anti-Treaty violence soon followed, with occupation
of the Four Courts in central Dublin and the assassination of the
British military advisor to the newly established government in the
north of Ireland, Sir Henry Wilson. The deep political divisions
that existed within the independence movement, coupled with
the anti-Treaty belief that both the Treaty and the context in
which the 1922 election took place were undemocratic, made
civil war inevitable. While historians are unclear as to the total
192
number of fatalities, with earlier estimates of 4,000 deaths being

questioned by contemporary writers, Ferriter suggests that more
recent research ... gives the number of national army deaths at
about 800 and a republican list of about 400. According to the
registrar Generals tabulation, there were about 1,150 homicides,
executions and deaths as a result of gunshot in 1922 and 1923.37
There were approximately 13,000 anti-Treaty republican prisoners
at the wars end. The intensity, disruption and scale of death in
the Civil War was a measure of the depth of political division
within the country.
The primary political victim of the war was de Valeras united
1917 Sinn Fin, who, according to Michael Laffan, having suffered
the loss of many of its most able leaders during the war, died,
quietly and almost unnoticed.38 De Valera and the anti-Treaty
republicans suffered the heaviest losses, emerging from the Civil
War greatly weakened both politically and militarily. The proTreaty faction, renamed Cumann na nGaedhael and led by W.T.
Cosgrave, went about the business of implementing the terms of
the AngloIrish Treaty and establishing the Free State.
The outcome of the Civil War, and the formal departure of the
pro-Treaty faction from Sinn Fin, was a mixed blessing. The
end of the war and the stabilisation of 26-County political life
ensured that republicans dissatisfied with the new state would
require a political vehicle to mount a challenge to the legitimacy
of that state. As he had done in 1917 de Valera moved quickly
to ensure control of the party. However, clear divisions between
how post-Treaty Sinn Fin should proceed were evident from
the outset. Liam Mellows leftward turn, outlined in Chapter
3, was clearly at odds with de Valera, who had no wish to see
the emergence of a new republican political party whose policies
or rhetoric would further alienate the dominant conservative
elements in Irish society.39 However, that such left-republican
impulses were coming from a minority faction within the IRA
rather than Sinn Fin meant that there was no challenge to de
Valera. The re-established Sinn Fin party, formed at a meeting
in Dublins Mansion House in June 1923, elected an organising
committee to coordinate the upcoming general election campaign.
193
The partys platform included a refusal to recognise the legitimacy

of the Third Dil and new government, and promised to adopt an
abstentionist position in relation to the parliament. Despite serious
organisational difficulties caused by the continued imprisonment
of large numbers of anti-Treaty republicans, Sinn Fin secured
27 per cent of the vote and 44 TDs. However, despite this strong
political support, the party had no effective means of impacting
on the new political order. A widespread desire amongst the
public for stability, after more than a decade of conflict, ensured
that the Cumann na nGaedhael government would continue to
secure a majority of public support. Sinn Fins refusal to enter
parliament, take its seats and challenge the government, meant
it was effectively outside the mainstream. Organisational and
electoral difficulties, coupled with growing tensions with more
traditionalist members of the party such as Mary McSweeney,
Austin Stack and Fr Michael OFlanagan, suggested that it was
only a matter of time before some kind of split took place.
Following the defeat of a proposal that Sinn Fin TDs enter
the Dil subject to the removal of the Oath of Allegiance at the
1926 Ard Fheis, de Valera resigned as president and formed a new
party, Fianna Fil. He took with him many of the most energetic
and able of anti-Treaty political activists. Laffan argues that Sinn
Fin never recovered from the defection of de Valera ... A mere
200 delegates attended its Ard Fheis later in the year.40 Of equal
significance, a large number of anti-Treaty republicans who did
not join the Fianna Fil party, particularly those who remained
in the IRA, also abandoned any idea that Sinn Fin could provide
a viable political platform to advance their views. They either
focused their energies on trying to shift Fianna Fil in a more
republican or leftward direction, or established new organisations
such as Saor ire (1931) and the Republican Congress (1934). The
effective abandonment of the Sinn Fin name and organisation,
first by Cumann na nGaedhael, then by Fianna Fil and finally
by the IRA, demonstrated that the party was never more than a
platform for competing political interests. Once these interests
could no longer secure any utility from the party, they abandoned
it and created something new. There was no question of organisa-
194
tional loyalty, or strategic fidelity. For those who secured control of

Sinn Fin, whether in 1917 or 1922, Sinn Fin was a means to an
end, rather then something more substantial in itself. However, for
those who remained after the creation of Fianna Fil, commitment
to the party was ideologically rooted. For de Valeras successors
at the helm of Sinn Fin OKelly, OHiggins, and OFlanagan
Sinn Fin was not simply a means to an end, it was an end in
itself, to be promoted and preserved no matter what the changes
occurring in the world around it.
Sinn Fin on the Margins

In the 1927 general election Sinn Fin put forward 15 candidates,
winning only five seats and just over 40,000 votes. Fianna Fil
took 44, narrowing the gap with Cumann na nGaedhael to three.
Although still refusing to enter the Dil until the Oath of Allegiance
was removed, Fianna Fil had clearly secured a majority of antiTreaty support across the country. The Electoral Amendment Act
prevented Sinn Fin contesting the second general election in the
same year. However, more significant than the loss of an electoral
platform was the increasingly strained relationship between the
party and the IRA. An Phoblacht, the IRAs newspaper, then
edited by Frank Ryan, was increasingly critical of the party,
arguing that not much can come out of Sinn Fin.41 Indeed,
the party played no part in the land annuities campaign, which
was to absorb so much of the political energy of the IRA at the
time. Sinn Fin also boycotted the annual commemoration of
Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown. The party did not contest the 1933
general election.
At the centre of Sinn Fins political programme during this
period was the belief that they alone could claim to be the
government of Ireland, the legitimate heirs to the Second Dil.
However, the party did not have a strategy for asserting this
clearly symbolic authority nor for advancing the objective of
securing a republic. Neither the IRA nor, from 1933, its womens
organisation Cumann na mBan, could support such an abstract
position. Thus, the majority of anti-Treaty energy was focused
195
on Fianna Fil. Even those inside the IRA whether on its leftwing such as ODonnell and Gilmore or its centre such as chief
of staff Moss Twomey believed that a critical engagement with
Fianna Fil held out more opportunities for political progress
than the splendid isolation of Sinn Fin. It is hard not to agree
with Michael Laffans conclusion that during the 1930s Sinn Fin
retreated into a republican ghetto where its members were free to
act in a self-righteous, self-indulgent and self-destructive manner
... it became little more than a society of ageing and quarrelsome
idealists.42 On three separate occasions during the 1930s the IRA
or former members launched new political organisations in an
attempt to give expression to a republican alternative to Fianna
Fil. Saor ire in 1931 was an attempt by the republican left of
the IRA to build a political movement. Its collapse and the lefts
loss of influence inside the IRA resulted in the formation of the
Republican Congress. Again in 1936 the IRA launched a new
party, Cumann Poblachta na hireann, further undermining the
political and organisational strength of Sinn Fin. However, as
with its predecessors the initiative came to nothing. In 1938 the
remaining anti-Treaty members of the Second Dil handed over
power to the Army Council of the IRA. Sinn Fin were not
informed in advance.
As Sinn Fins influence within the broader republican movement
waned, so too did its organisational fortunes. Feeney estimates
that the numbers attending party Ard Feiseanna from 1926 to
1930 dropped from 200 activists to around 40.43 Long-standing
republican and member of the Irish Women Workers Union,
Margaret Buckley, was elected president in 1937, a position she
held until 1950. The first woman leader of an Irish political party,
she came to exemplify Sinn Fin during its period of greatest marginalisation. Rigidly refusing to accept the legitimacy of the state,
even a decade after Fianna Fil had dropped its abstentionism and
taken over the reigns of power from Cumann na nGaedhael, Sinn
Fin receded into political obscurity, arguing over issues such as
the legitimacy of its members taking state pensions. In effect Sinn
Fin ceased to be a functioning political party and had become a
small association of like-minded people, disconnected from the cut
196
and thrust of politics whether mainstream or marginal. The most

apt description came from the newly formed United Irishman
newspaper in 1949, which observed that for years Sinn Fin had
been content to pursue its way quietly and unobtrusively, relying
on a small band of loyal stalwarts who have kept the organisation
going, in good times and bad.44
Sinn Fin Reorganises

As detailed in the previous chapter, the 1940s witnessed a
growing disillusionment with Fianna Fil, particularly among
republicans. The dramatic electoral success of Clann na Poblachta
was an indication of the existence of a considerable reservoir of
republican and radical support, available to any party willing to
challenge de Valera. However the republican challenge was not
to come from Sinn Fin or the IRA, but from former members of
both under the leadership of Sen MacBride. Meanwhile the IRAs
concerns were elsewhere. Under the leadership of a new chief of
staff, Sean Russell, they declared war on Britain and embarked
on a bombing campaign in 1939. The campaign was shortlived, ineffectual and served only to demonstrate the weakness
of the organisation and its distance from the centre of political
concerns in the Free State. The onset of the Second World War
provided de Valera with a pretext to pass an Offences Against the
State Act and Unlawful Organisations Order. IRA members were
relentlessly harassed, detained and imprisoned. Feeney estimates
that during the war years twenty-six IRA men died one way or
another in England and Ireland. Over 500 were interned in the
Curragh ... and 600 were jailed ... In December 1944, Charlie
Kerins, the IRA chief of staff, was hanged ... By that time there
was no GHQ staff or Army Council.45 The IRAs dalliance with
Nazi Germany during the Second World War ensured that the
use of emergency powers north and south caused little public
outcry. As a consequence, when the war came to an end in 1945
the IRA had virtually ceased to exist as an organised force. While
struggles continued around the treatment of political prisoners
and the hunger strikes of its volunteers in Mountjoy prison, it
197
was Clann na Poblachta who secured the political benefits of

such activity rather than Sinn Fin.
The end of the war also saw the release of republican internees,
who quickly set about reorganising the movement. Toms
MacCurtin, Pdraig MacLgan and Tony Mangan were to
become the key driving forces in a revitalised IRA. In addition to
rebuilding the moribund organisation, they took the decision to
reclaim what was left of Sinn Fin, bringing the party under firm
IRA control and providing it with a new wave of members, many
who were also members of the IRA. Nineteen-forty-eight saw
the launch of a new monthly publication, the United Irishman.
In 1950 Margaret Buckley stood down as president of Sinn Fin
to be replaced by MacLgan. A new constitution was agreed
reaffirming the partys objectives as: The complete overthrow
of English rule in Ireland ... to bring the Proclamation of the
Republic, Easter 1916, into effective operation and to maintain
and consolidate the Government of the Republic, representative
of the people of all Ireland.46 While the text of the constitution
did not suggest any significant changes in the partys outlook,
it signalled a renewed emphasis on organising, both militarily
and politically. IRA activity increased, primarily in the form of
raids on army weapons stores, and Sinn Fin started to contest
elections again.
The new leadership of Sinn Fin and the IRA were devout
Catholics and deeply influenced by the social teaching of the
Catholic Church. A Social and Economic Programme was drawn
up shortly after the new constitution was passed. Feeney highlights
the influence of late nineteenth-century Catholic encyclicals on the
document, and its focus on the moral consequences of industrialisation and modern economic life. Feeney concluded that the
men leading Sinn Fin in the 1950s opposed the Welfare State and
believed, along with the Catholic Hierarchy, that a proposal like
the Mother and Child Scheme promoted by Noel Browne in 1951
... weakened moral resolve and induced a dependency culture.47
The party unsuccessfully contested two seats in the 1954
southern general election, taking less than 3 per cent of the vote
in Clare and Louth. The electoral platform advocated national
198
unity and independence articulated as complete freedom for

the Irish people to work out the life of the nation in all its
political, economic, social and cultural and other aspects without
interference from any foreign power.48 It was a narrowly defined
political and constitutional nationalism, taking no positions on
social and economic issues, and through explicit support for
the IRA, indicating that independence could only be achieved
through force of arms. Standing in the Six County Westminster
elections in 1955, Sinn Fin secured 152,310 votes winning two
seats. Two years later in 1957 Sinn Fin secured 65,640 votes
(5 per cent) in the southern general election, electing four TDs,
including 25-year-old Ruar Brdaigh, a future president
of the party. While continuing to avoid any direct ideological
commitment beyond political nationalism, the 1957 election
campaign saw the party criticise Fianna Fil and the Fine Gael
led coalition for mismanaging the economy. High emigration,
high unemployment and declining standards of living created a
large constituency of discontent. The disintegration of Clann na
Poblachta and the involvement of Labour in the second interparty coalition ensured that Sinn Fin would benefit from the
discontent, despite its failure to propose policy solutions to the
countrys economic problems.
However, for the new generation of leaders of the IRA and Sinn
Fin, harnessing that discontent was not, in the first instance,
about mobilising for social or economic change. Rather, their
political and electoral engagement was in the first instance about
mobilising popular support for the more important stage of their
reorganisation, an armed assault against the northern state.
December 1956 saw the beginning of Operation Harvest. Over
the next six years, the IRA would launch 600 military operations
inside the Six Counties, as a result of which twelve republicans
lost their lives, as did six RUC men. Internment was introduced
resulting in the imprisonment without trial of 200 republican
activists and supporters. Two hundred political prisoners were
eventually jailed. In total Feeney estimates that the campaign
cost the northern state almost 1 million with an additional
2 million in security costs.49 While the IRA in the 1920s and
199
1930s had focused their activity mainly on the emerging Free State
forces, and from the end of the thirties on Britain, this was the first
serious armed incursion into the northern state. The IRA hoped
that their raids on RUC barracks and other installations, mainly
conducted from the southern border region, would provoke a
popular uprising. However, not only did the popular rising fail to
materialise, but the initial increase in Sinn Fin electoral support
quickly evaporated. In the 1959 Westminster election Sinn Fins
vote dropped by almost 50 per cent to 73,415. A general election
in the south in 1961 witnessed a similar result, securing only
36,393 votes and leading to the loss of both Sinn Fins TDs. While
harassment, internment, banning and censorship undoubtedly
played a part, the electoral results can only be seen as a clear
rejection of Operation Harvest by what was in the mid 1950s an
emerging republican electorate. The IRA admitted as much when,
in 1961, it formally ended its campaign stating that foremost
among the factors motivating this course of action [ending the
campaign] has been the attitude of the general public whose minds
have been deliberately distracted from the supreme issue facing
the Irish people the unity and freedom of Ireland.50
The statement exposed an organisation out of touch with the
political realities of the time. While a potential base of political
support indeed existed, as evidenced in the 1955 and 1957
elections, that support was for a republican political alternative
to the failed policies and governments, north and south, not for
an armed insurrection. Indeed it was a similar base of support to
that won by Clann na Poblachta only a decade earlier. Feeney is
correct in commenting that the decision of the IRA to take control
of Sinn Fin at the end of the 1940 undoubtedly saved it from
oblivion.51 However the new leadership of the movement, wedded
to ideological and strategic priorities that had no grounding in
the political reality of the moment, misunderstood the growth
in electoral support. Equally they misread the mood of northern
nationalists, launching a military campaign that was neither
welcome nor understood. The result was a process of rebuilding
both the IRA and Sinn Fin only to undermine the gains of the
200
mid 1950s by a rigid adherence to an abstentionist and militarist

strategy whose time had clearly passed.
Sinn Fin in the 1960s

The limited IRA and Sinn Fin reorganisation from 1948 onwards
established a new relationship between the political and military
expressions of Irish republicanism. Politically the IRA was in
control, determining the programme, strategy and personnel that
were to dominate the movement for the coming decade. Following
the collapse of Operation Harvest, the IRA and in turn Sinn Fin
initiated the most sustained period of internal self-examination
and ideological reorientation in its history. The internment of
IRA leaders during the armed campaign brought new figures
into prominence, such as Ruar Brdaigh, Sean MacStiofin,
Sean Garland, Toms MacGiolla and Cathal Goulding, who were
younger and less conditioned by the conservative social values
of IRA leaders of the 1940s and 1950s. They also understood
the failure of the movements strategy as pursued since the late
forties primarily in political terms. Goulding and MacStiofin
were both exposed to new political and military ideas during their
time in jail in England for their part in Operation Harvest. Ideas
from German and Cypriot political prisoners such as soviet spy
Klaus Fusch and EOKA leader Socrates Loisides exposed them to
developing trends in Marxism and National Liberation.
In 1962 a short but decisive struggle ensued for control of both
sections of the movement. In his detailed study of republicanism
during this period, Sean Swan argues that in 1962 the old
leadership of the Republican movement, the Curragh Group,
had lost control of the IRA and had subsequently attempted to gain
control of the Sinn Fin.52 An initial dispute over the ending of the
armed campaign brought tensions to the surface, with MacLgan
wanting Sinn Fin to issue a statement stating that it had nothing
to do with the ending of Operation Harvest. Ruar Brdaigh,
one of the younger generation of emerging leaders and then IRA
chief of staff, objected. The dispute was resolved in the IRAs
favour resulting in the resignations of Mangan and MacLgan
201
from Sinn Fin. Later in the same year Cathal Goulding became
the IRAs new chief of staff while Toms MacGiolla became the
new president of Sinn Fin.
Goulding immediately initiated a review of the state of the
IRA. Its conclusions identified two key issues to be addressed.
Republicans had no solid political base among the people ...
[and] no clear-cut ideology which could define for the people
what the struggle was all about.53 In response Goulding decided
to open up both Sinn Fin and the IRA to new influences. The
bicentenary of the birth of eighteenth-century republican leader
Wolfe Tone was to provide an important opportunity: Goulding
initiating the Wolfe Tone Societies as a think tank that would be
of an educational and agitational nature.54 Bringing together leftwing republicans from inside and outside the movement, including
Republican Congress veteran George Gilmore, Jack Bennett of
the Communist Party of Northern Ireland, and Roy Johnston and
Anthony Coughlan, formerly of the British Communist Partyinspired Connolly Association, the Wolfe Tone Society created a
space for the discussion and cross fertilisation of ideas. Goulding
wanted to bring left-wing ideas to bear on the reorganisation of
the republican movement, and steer both Sinn Fin and the IRA
on a more explicitly socialist course.
This new departure was a far cry from the socially conservative,
narrowly defined political nationalism of the IRA and Sinn
Fin just a decade earlier. After a brief struggle for control of
the leadership of Sinn Fin in 1962, Mangan and MacLgan
departed, the latter committing suicide two years later. However,
much of the Sinn Fin membership, particularly in the rural south
and west of the country, continued to articulate a definition of the
movements aims closer to that of the recently departed leadership
of the 1950s.
While the emergence of this new generation of leaders clearly
created a division between older political nationalists and a
new generation of modernisers, this was not the only line of
demarcation. Within the modernisers there were differences of
opinion that were to become more pronounced as the decade
moved on. Central to this was a difference of emphasis between
202
Marxism versus Christian socialism, and between those who

continued to believe in the utility of armed struggle and those who
believed it no longer served any valuable strategic purpose.
Key figures such as Brdaigh and Conaill, while embracing
Gouldings turn to the left, were deeply critical of Communist
Party influence, and had a very different interpretation of where
the critical assessment should take both Sinn Fin and the IRA.
While in the early 1960s it is hard to discern any clearly formed
tendencies, a series of issues emerged which formed and reformed
opinions during a period of ideological uncertainty and organisational change. By the decades end a new alliance of older
political nationalists and younger anti-Goulding modernisers
had coalesced.
The balance of forces between these different tendencies was
evenly spread. Goulding and MacGiolla were clearly in control of
the IRA, the Wolfe Tone Societies and the United Irishman paper,
while those critical of the new departure, or aspects of it, were
dominant within the membership if not the Ard Comhairle of
Sinn Fin. However, while figures such as Sean MacStiofin were
ideologically closer to the departed leaders, both Brdaigh and
Conaill were modernisers, if of a different sort to Goulding, while
others such as Seamus Costello straddled both camps. However,
much of the base of Sinn Fin was ideologically closer to that of
MacStiofin and Brdaigh than Goulding or MacGiolla.
A series of minor debates raged within Sinn Fin during the
period focusing on the partys relationship to the 26-County
state. While the key issue was whether or not the party should
abandon its traditional position of abstaining from taking seats
in the Dublin and Belfast parliaments, much of the early debate
focused on more minor levels of engagement, such as relations
with courts and the police.
Following the introduction by Fianna Fil Justice Minister
Charles Haughey of a Street Collection Bill in 1962, groups
wishing to hold street collections would have to apply for permits.
Failure to do so would result in prosecution, fines and in cases
of non-payment, imprisonment. Republicans initially refused to
apply for permits or to pay the fines, resulting in imprisonment,
203
and in one case a protracted hunger strike. The issue was carried
over into discussions of legal requirements to register for parades
and registration of Sinn Fin as a political party in order to contest
elections. A growing number of activists were moving to a position
of de facto recognition of the state, if only for reasons of political
pragmatism. A controversial editorial in the United Irishman in
March 1965, urging a more pragmatic approach to the Dublin
parliament, provoked a long and acrimonious debate in its letters
pages, as party members grappled with what had become the
political foundation stone for some, millstone of the party,
namely electoral abstentionism.
Only months earlier, at the 1964 Sinn Fin Ard Fheis, a motion
calling for the party to examine the issue of taking seats when
elected to Leinster House, Stormont or Westminster was passed.
The same Ard Fheis heard, during an IRA statement to conference,
that a conference of Republicans would be held in 1965 ... to
discuss political tactics, policy and internal organisation and
make recommendations for the future.55 The party also adopted
a new Social and Economic Programme with an emphasis on
cooperatives, signalling a shift to the left. Local branches were
encouraged to start playing an active part in social and economic
campaigns, including opposition to the AngloIrish Free Trade
Agreement and foreign ownership of Irish business.
However, for Goulding, advancing this new campaigning leftwing agenda would require a significant shift in the attitude of
the party towards the institutions of the state, including electoral
and institutional engagement. The newly elected Ard Comhairle
prepared a detailed series of proposals to bring to the following
years Special Ard Fheis, the aim of which was to advance
the agenda of the pro-Goulding modernisers. The proposals
included establishing a single leadership for Sinn Fin and the
IRA; reorganising the partys political and educational strategies;
recognising courts and complying with legal requirements for
collections and parades; mounting legal challenges to the Offences
Against the State Act; the calling of a broad conference on the
National question; and registration as a political party. A long
204
discussion at the Ard Comhairle meeting on a proposal for

dropping abstentionism resulted in its defeat.
The Special Ard Fheis took place in June, and saw the majority
of proposals being rejected by the membership. It was a serious
blow both to the Ard Comhairle and the Goulding project
overall, leading to a number of high-profile resignations. It also
created significant tensions between the IRA and Sinn Fin. The
pro-Goulding modernisers continued on regardless, as revealed
in an internal document seized by the Garda after the arrest
of Sean Garland in the spring of 1966. The document talked
about transforming the movement into a political and socialrevolutionary organisation with a focus on trade union activity
and a radical social and economic programme. The document
also talked about replacing military training with political and
economic education and ensuring that the IRA structure remained
a tight control over all aspects of party activity. The plan, which
the IRA later described as a discussion document, reflected the
desire of Goulding and others to transform the IRA and Sinn
Fin from an underground armed resistance movement into a
mass revolutionary socialist party, actively working with the
trade union movement and other progressive political forces in
pursuance of both national and social revolution.
Speaking at the annual Bodenstown Wolfe Tone commemoration
in 1966, Seamus Costello emphasised the new direction of the
party. He called for Sinn Fin to spearhead the organisation of a
virile co-operative movement among the farming community [and]
to use your influence as trade unionists to organise a militant trade
union movement with a national consciousness. Costello also
outlined policies on land ownership, nationalisation of industries
and banks, and progressive taxation, concluding:
history shows us that in the nal analysis the robber baron must be disestablished by the same methods he used to enrich himself and retain his
ill-gotten gains, namely, by force of arms. To this end we must organise,
train and maintain a disciplined armed force which will always be able to
strike at the opportune moment.56
205
While Costellos remarks clearly indicate the new left-wing direction

of the movement, they also highlight a difference of opinion over
the issue of armed struggle. Although Costello clearly believed in
its future political importance, Goulding and those close to him
believed the time for armed struggle had passed. That Costellos
speech contained such a strong commitment to the maintenance
of the IRA was as much a function of Gouldings desire for unity
than an indication of support for Costellos position.
Some within the IRA felt that Sinn Fin was clearly not up
to playing its role in this revolutionary socialist movement. At
the IRA Convention in 1966 a proposal calling on the IRA to
abandon Sinn Fin and transform the Wolfe Tone Societies into
a new left-republican political party, unless Sinn Fin carries
out Army policy, was defeated.57 At the heart of the dispute
was both the extent of engagement with the institutions of the
state required to advance the new agenda of the movement and
the form and content of that new socialist agenda. The dispute
carried over to the Sinn Fin Ard Fheis of the same year with
little resolution. The Ard Comhairle returned with a number of
the previous years resolutions on engaging with the courts, this
time with a little more success. However, a motion calling for the
Ard Comhairle to establish a committee to examine the issue of
electoral abstentionism was not even able to secure a seconder,
and thus fell.
The dispute found yet another expression following a letter
by Goulding ally Roy Johnston in the United Irishman later in
the same year, calling for an end to the saying of the rosary at
republican commemorations in Catholic cemeteries. The ensuing
dispute led to Sean MacStiofins suspension from the IRA for
several months for actively blocking the circulation and sale of
the United Irishman in objection to the letter. While Johnston, the
committed Marxist, and MacStiofin, the committed Catholic,
represented the very opposite ends of the republican movements
political spectrum, the dispute was indicative of the broader
tensions that existed.
By 1967 there was no sign of the divisions being healed,
despite the fact that that years Ard Fheis formally adopted the
206
establishment of a workers republic as the partys primary aim.

While the movement was increasingly becoming more socialist
in its rhetoric, in practice, whether in terms of agitation, building
alliances or developing electoral engagement, in many parts of the
country very little had actually changed. Indeed in parts of the
north, particularly Belfast, Gouldings new departure had led to
a significant number of resignations of leading republicans, such
as Joe Cahill. An increasingly frustrated Goulding, speaking at
the following years Wolfe Tone commemoration at Bodenstown,
said republicanism is only a small group in our society. In many
areas the movement exists simply as a tradition and sentiment
bound body ... by its inactivity [it] blocks the path of revolution
and side-tracks those who would serve the needed revolution.58
Gouldings remarks were aimed directly at those elements in
Sinn Fin who were resisting the ideological and organisational
project, as proposed by the Ard Comhairle and the leadership
of the IRA.
Abstentionism was once again on the agenda at the 1968 Ard
Fheis. While a motion calling for the dropping of abstentionism was
rejected, an Ard Comhairle amendment proposing a commission
to examine the issue and bring forward recommendations to the
following years conference was successful. Feeney comments that
there were high hopes among the pro Goulding modernisers
that when the Commission submitted a positive report, as it
was confidently expected to do, it would be endorsed by the
movement.59 The motion led to the establishment of the Garland
Commission, which Swan describes as less than equal to the task
assigned to it.60 The Commission set about drafting a detailed
document dealing with the context of Irish politics and a series of
recommendations on the form of political organisation and struggle
most appropriate to the specific historical moment. Goulding ally
Roy Johnston was given the task of drafting the initial document,
and the commission itself was heavily weighted in Gouldings
favour. For Johnston, the primary issue was not abstentionism
but acceptance or otherwise of Irish Marxism.61 In his document
he outlined three strategies available to the republican movement,
one radical, one reformist and one utopian. The first sought to
207
replicate the model first used by the Republican Congress in the

1930s, building a broad-based front of progressive, republican
and left organisations. The second was based on the experience of
Clann na Poblachta, avoiding association with the radical left, and
working to secure a reformist LabourRepublican government.
The third option was what Johnston called the militarist utopia
which was a return to the strategy that underpinned the failed
Operation Harvest.
The Garland Commission published its findings in March
1969 under the title Ireland Today. The document proposed
two primary options, a national liberation front and the reformist
Clann road option, with a stated preference for the former. It also
proposed a transformation of the IRA from an armed organisation
to a special cadre of political activists, whose primary aim would
be to give political direction and organisational coherence to the
movement, and for the IRA and Sinn Fin to be integrated into
a single political organisation. The document also proposed
removing all embargos on political participation and leaving
all questions of electoral tactics to the leadership.62 Twenty-two
regional meetings were held throughout the country to canvass
opinions and reactions to the document, during which the obvious
divisions and disagreements emerged.
In July of that year the Sinn Fin Ard Comhairle discussed the
document, making a number of amendments and again displaying
deep divisions. An IRA army convention in October and a special
convention in December saw a similar result. As the December/
January Sinn Fin Ard Fheis approached, it was clear that while
a majority of both the IRA and Sinn Fin supported the recommendations, the Ard Fheis requirement of a 75 per cent majority
to amend the party constitution was unlikely to be met. While
those who opposed Ireland Today were a minority within the
movement, they were a significant minority. The omens for unity
and cohesion were not good. Swans assessment that the contents
of Ireland Today communism, the subordination of the IRA,
and the dropping of abstentionism must have made a split seem
not only possible but inevitable is without doubt correct.63
208
The 1970 Ard Fheis took place on January 11 and 12 at the

Inter-Continental Hotel, Dublin. After lengthy debates the 257
delegates voted. The constitutional amendment on abstentionism
required 172 votes to pass, however only 153 supported it, 19
short. The Ard Fheis saw Toms MacGiolla, a Goulding ally,
challenged for the presidency of the party by Eamon MacTomis,
a leading opponent of Ireland Today. While MacGiolla won,
MacTomis secured 93 votes, indicating significant support. Amid
some confusion and much acrimony, a pro-Goulding delegate
proposed a motion of confidence in the IRA leadership, who only
weeks before had supported the Ireland Today recommendations.
The motion was carried and MacStiofin, who had opposed the
proposals at the Army Council, called on delegates to support
the creation of an alternative Provisional Army Council, and then
walked from the hall, taking up to 100 supporters with him.
Provisional Sinn Fin and the Provisional IRA were born.
Unionist Hegemony and State Crisis

While the energy and passion of internal republican debate during
the 1960s may have appeared of enormous significance to its
protagonists, it was of little consequence for the world outside.
Sinn Fin and the IRA were small organisations, with little
political support or impact. Indeed, as Ireland Today admitted, in
Dublin Sinn Fin was no bigger than the tiny Irish Workers Party,
and sales of the United Irishman were similar to the communist
Irish Socialist paper.64 The theoretical and strategic discussions
about national liberation fronts, electoral participation and armed
struggle would have remained a marginal and inconsequential
affair were it not for events in the north of Ireland, which from
1966 was to dramatically alter both the context in which Irish
republicanism was operating and its relevance to a growing
section of the population.
While the north of Ireland remained a focal point for the
energies of Sinn Fin and the IRA during the 1950s and 1960s,
Operation Harvest demonstrated the great distance that existed
between ordinary nationalists in the north and the republican
209
movement. It also highlighted the lack of understanding among

political leaders based in and primarily preoccupied with
the politics of the south. Gouldings reassessment, while farreaching and profound in many respects, failed to narrow this
gap in understanding. Indeed it simply replaced one set of naive
assumptions about the political dynamics and aspirations of
northern nationalists and working-class unionists with another.
Thus, as Ireland Today demonstrated, while Goulding and his
supporters displayed a degree of ideological and theoretical
sophistication in terms of the positioning of Sinn Fin in the
south, it had no conception of the nature of the northern state
and the crisis that was fast engulfing it.
Part of the difficulty was that the northern state was in many
respects an exception. Despite having the formal characteristics of
a liberal democracy, its conception, structure, dynamics and limits
were of a different nature to that of the south, Britain or indeed the
continental European norm. At the heart of the northern state was
the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP), who dominated its government
from 1922 through to its collapse in 1972. The UUP was a
broad-based coalition of working-class, middle-class and landed
unionism, spanning social and regional boundaries. Its hegemony
rested on its ability to maintain this cross-class alliance. Its
primary tools were discrimination and sectarianism, the exclusion
of nationalists from political and economic power and social and
cultural equality, and the promotion of a culture of superiority and
separation. However, unlike formally undemocratic, authoritarian
or apartheid states of the time, such as Spain, Portugal, or South
Africa, the operation of unionist discrimination and sectarianism
was more informal and localised, giving the appearance of liberal
democratic normality, while producing many of the effects of an
authoritarian or apartheid state. Discrimination was primarily a
function of informal practices at local government level or within
the private sector, encouraged if not formally legislated for by the
Unionist administration at Stormont. Culturally and socially such
practices were ideologically reinforced by a culture of sectarianism
mediated through the Loyal Orders, trade unions and the Ulster
Unionist Labour Association.
210
Since the 1970s there has been a significant volume of analysis

of the relationship between the form of unionist hegemony and
the character of the northern state. Bew et al. have challenged the
traditional Marxist and nationalist readings of this relationship.
In particular their focus on the relationship between the divisions
within the unionist camp and the form of the state is important,
demonstrating that unionism and the northern state should not
be viewed as unchanging monoliths. Likewise Gibbon provides us
with a more sophisticated reading of the loyalist working classes
and their complex and conditional support for the Unionist Party
and its middle-class leadership. However, none of these revisionist
readings have adequately addressed the importance of sectarianism
as the organising dynamic of institutionalised discrimination and
as the cement of cross-class unionist hegemony.
Bew et al., while right in rejecting the traditional Marxist and
nationalist reading of the role and motivation of the British state
in the formation of the northern state, commit an equally serious
mistake of disregarding the interests, motivations and effects of
the British state on the form and development of the northern
state. As detailed in previous chapters, the creation of the northern
state was as much a consequence of the actions and non-actions
of political elites in Westminster as it was a consequence of the
internal dynamics and interplay of Irish nationalism and unionism.
While the formal and institutional role of the British state in the
affairs of the north of Ireland began to recede during the 1930s,
the limits of the northern state were always circumscribed by the
interests and attitudes of political elites in Westminster. The most
physical display of this fact was the arming of the Royal Ulster
Constabulary and its semi-paramilitary special constabulary
during the 1920s.65 The strict enforcement of the Westminster
Convention, which forbade the discussion of matters within the
competence of Stormont from being discussed in Westminster,
had a similar if less obvious effect. And crucially the financial
underwriting of the northern state by the British exchequer, while
often contested, was never seriously challenged.
Unionist hegemony, and in turn the stability of the northern
state, required both the external support of the British state
211
and the internal operation of institutional discrimination and

informal sectarianism. This hegemony was formally facilitated
and informally supported by the policies and non-policies of
successive British governments. Managing the tensions that
always existed between the different elements of the unionist
bloc required different strategies at different times. The overt
sectarianism of the norths first prime minister, Sir James Craig,
and the reforming liberalism of Terence ONeill, can thus be
seen, not as different political projects, but rather as the same
project utilising different strategic options, in different political
and economic circumstances, to achieve the same political end,
namely the continued hegemony of the Ulster Unionist Party
through the maintenance of a cross-class unionist bloc.
Bew et al. also have much to offer in term of understanding
the crisis of the unionist state that emerged during the 1950s and
1960s. The initial focus for Ulster Unionism was the rise of the
Northern Ireland Labour Party. ONeills unionist administration,
attempting to secure its position, responded with a modernising
economic programme backed up by appeals to unionist unity and
warnings of labour, republican and communist conspiracies to
destroy the northern state itself. However, the fact that in the 1960s
nationalist expectations were also rising, meant that ONeills
strategy of on the one hand mobilising Keynesian planning and
sectarianism distribution of resources to counteract the rise of
labourism among the loyalist working class while simultaneously
mobilising Keynesian planning and the promise of civil rights
reform in response to the demands of working- and middle-class
nationalists, was unsustainable. At some point these two different
tactics would clash. Sectarianism and discrimination were not
only the foundations upon which the northern state rested, but,
in a different context, were to prove the Achilles heel from which
it would eventually collapse. The problem and ultimate cause of
failure for ONeill was that he came up against the limits of his
own political and ideological project, namely the inseparability
of sectarianism, discrimination and unionist hegemony.
However it is important not to view the crisis of the northern
state as an exceptional or isolated affair. While its dynamics and
212
forms were at times region specific, the crisis itself was part of
a more general crisis of the post-Second World War settlements
in Britain and Europe. In their path-breaking analysis of this
crisis, Stuart Hall and Martin Jacques et al. have argued that
the foundations of postwar British society rested on a number
of settlements around which the competing interests of the prewar social order were temporarily resolved. The experience of the
great Depression and war, the emergence of popular democracy
and the rise of organised labour, led to a series of compromises
that underpinned the economic and political stability and growth
of Western Europe in the 1950s and 1960s. A social democratic
consensus emerged producing a modernising capitalism and a
labour and democratic movement intent on social and economic
reform.66 Hall et al. argue that this settlement created a framework
to meet both companies demands for profitable markets and
popular desires for rising living standards.67 Although contradictions and conflicts continued to exist, the nature of the settlement
ensured that they were contained within manageable limits.68
While the primary axis of this social democratic settlement was
industrial and economic, supported by a broad political consensus
at Westminster, there were a series of additional settlements along
lines of gender, race and nationality, which, while subordinating
the needs of women, ethnic minorities and Britains regions,
ensured a degree of political stability through economic expansion
and limited social inclusion. Hall et al. acknowledge that the
situation in Northern Ireland ... constituted the most intractable
problem facing all British governments, making the maintenance
of this particular national settlement less stable than the others.69
However the bipartisan approach adopted by both Labour and
the Conservatives, and their rigid adherence to the Westminster
Convention and to financial underpinning of the Unionist
government at Stormont ensured that Ireland would not disrupt
the broader consensus.
However, by the end of the 1960s the economic and industrial
axis of the social democratic settlement was under increasing
strain. Hall et al. argue that rising unemployment and inflation,
falling productivity and profitability, threw into doubt the ability
213
of Keynesian economic policies to keep the economy at full

employment.70 This economic uncertainty arrived at a time of
rising expectations from a generation that did not experience the
Depression or the war and expected the promise of the 1960s
to be delivered. It also ran alongside the growing demands for
independence from European colonial interests in Africa and
Asia. The oil shocks of the early 1970s and the subsequent global
recession created a profound crisis of the state, not only in Britain
but also across Europe. The economic crisis was accompanied
by a political crisis, as political parties and trade unions seemed
unable to respond. Culturally, the collapse of the last remnants of
Empire and the emergence of racial tensions within the metropolis
compounded the economic and political crisis with a profound
cultural crisis. The social democratic settlements began to break
apart, provoking a tumultuous economic, social and political crisis
at the end of the decade.71
As the more traditional political and social formations appeared
unable to respond effectively to the emerging politics of gender,
race, culture and rights, new forms of politics, ideological and
organisational, emerged to challenge the hegemony of trade unions,
and social democratic or nationalist parties, for leadership of those
constituencies seeking change. These new forms included citizens
movements in Germany, student movements in France and the
USA, national liberation movements in Algeria and Vietnam, and
in civil rights movements in the USA and Ireland.
It is impossible to understand the crisis of the northern state
and the conflict that followed outside this more general crisis of
the postwar British and European state. Like Britain, the north
of Ireland experienced both internal and external pressures for
change from the start of the 1960s. These pressures included
rising expectations from both the unionist working classes and
the nationalist middle classes, changing international economic
circumstances, new policy influences at Westminster following
the arrival of Wilsons Labour government, a more pragmatic
Fianna Fil government in Dublin, and, importantly, the arrival
of television leading to a greater public awareness of events in
the wider world. All of these changes combined to put Ulster
214
unionisms sectarian and discriminatory state under severe

pressure. Embracing Keynesianism, albeit at a slower pace and
with less enthusiasm than its counterparts in Westminster, meant
that Stormont had less of an economic dividend on which to build
the social and national settlements. More crucially, sectarianism
and institutionalised discrimination stood in the way of the degree
of compromise required to meet both unionist working-class
and nationalist middle-class aspirations. By the middle of the
1960s unionism had a clear choice to make: reform the state to
meet middle-class nationalist demands while risking the basis
of Ulster Unionist hegemony, or maintain the cross-class basis
of political control irrespective of the cost to the state itself.
ONeills resignation in 1969 represented the victory of unionist
hegemony over state reform, and sectarianism and discrimination
over equality and democracy.
From 1970 onwards, Britain and other European states
established the parameters of a new series of settlements, referred
to by Hall et al. as regressive modernisation, on which state
stability would be re-founded. However, in the north of Ireland
the complete collapse of the state rather than its reconstruction
led to a protracted period of instability and armed conflict.
Civil Rights and Conict

Why was the northern state unable to restructure in the manner
of its European neighbours? Was the collapse of the state and
descent into crisis inevitable? Once again the norths exceptionalism explains its radically different course of development.
From the 1970s onwards other Western state projects were in a
process of dissolution and reconstruction, replacing the postwar
social democratic consensus with a new-right neo-liberal project.
Even Europes non-democratic states, such as Spain, underwent a
significant period of state restructuring during the 1970s, leading
eventually to democratisation in the 1980s. What marked the
northern state as different from the more general crisis was the
refusal of the state, and its political elite, to reform. In Europes
democratic and non-democratic states alike, reform ensured that
215
the state itself was never called into question. The question was
always one of the specific modalities of its operation, its forms
of governance, its distribution of resources and its relationship
with civic society. The refusal of unionism to produce any viable
process of state restructuring, despite the broad base of support
for the introduction of basic liberal democratic norms, meant
that the state itself became fatally de-legitimised. That the British
government was unwilling to take the necessary institutional
action to force such reform, until it was already too late, meant
that when conflict emerged its dynamics were of a different
order from the protest movements in Britain, France, Germany
or the USA.
The brief history of the civil rights movement is in essence
a history of a moderate demand for state reform becoming
transformed into a radical demand for state overthrow, as
a consequence of the states refusal to offer any meaningful
resolution of the legitimate demands of those seeking reform. That
the northern state was characterised by systematic discrimination
in the distribution of political and economic power and allocation
of public office, public service provision and employment is well
documented.72 The institutionalised abuse of civil liberties and
liberal democratic norms in order to maintain such discrimination is also well documented. The collapse of the civil rights
movement by 1970 and its rapid deterioration into an armed
conflict was not a consequence of the unleashing of historic ethnic
or communal divisions between nationalists and unionists. Those
who, like Simon Prince and Paul Dixon, argue that the actions of
the radical wing of the civil rights movement actively undermined
the reforming project of Terence ONeill and unwittingly created
communal polarisation and ethnic conflict misunderstand the
nature of the northern state itself, the inability of unionism to
countenance meaningful reform, and the impact of unionist and
British state violence on the civil rights movement.73 Rather, the
mobilisation of formal and informal violence by the state, both in
Stormont and Westminster from 1968 onwards, in response to the
non-violent strategies of the civil rights movement, undermined
the central claim of the civil rights movement, that the state
216
could be reformed. Police violence during peaceful civil rights

mobilisations in 1968 and 69, loyalist counter-demonstrations
and violence during the same period, the Falls Curfew in 1970,
the Ballymurphy massacre of 1971, the introduction of internment
in 1971, and Bloody Sunday in 1972 all combined to radicalise
a significant section of the movement, pushing it in the direction
of violent confrontation.
Understanding the IRA and Sinn Fin in the 1970s and 1980s,
and the rapidly growing constituency of support that emerged
out of the collapse of the civil rights movement, requires a closer
examination of the Sinn Fin that helped create that movement,
and how its divisions and subsequent development were shaped by
the growth and collapse of the movement through the response of
the British government and Unionist administration in Belfast.
Formally inaugurated in January 1967, the Northern Ireland
Civil Rights Association (NICRA) was a broad-based coalition
of communists, nationalists, republicans and liberals with diverse
aims, strategies and intentions, both on the issue of civil rights as
well as on broader economic and political matters. The dramatic
rise of the movement, mobilising numbers far in excess of the
support of any of its constituent parts, was a consequence both
of the rising expectations of the nationalist community and of
the impact of movements for change in other parts of the world.
That this mobilisation was based on an organisational model
and a political discourse substantially different from any of its
constituent parts was an indication of the failure of the ideologies
and organisations of traditional nationalism, republicanism and
labourism in the preceding decades. These three political tendencies,
while remaining crucial elements of the broader movement, were
by themselves unable to respond to the experiences or aspirations
of their constituencies in the rapidly changing context of the late
1950s and early 1960s. In turn, their individual failures brought
to the surface tensions and disagreements within each element of
the civil rights movement, ensuring that its divisions were not only
between each part of the broader movement, but within each of
the constituent elements themselves.
217
The divisions within Sinn Fin and the IRA discussed

above were matched by conflicts between the old guard of the
Nationalist Party led by Eddie McAteer and a younger generation
of emerging leaders such as Ivan Cooper, John Hume and Austin
Currie. Likewise within the broader labour movement there were
competing tendencies between British and Irish communists, and
the left and centre of the Labour movement, broadly defined.
Running through each of these divisions was a conflict between
aims, means and strategies, the apex of which was the level and
form of change required from, and the degree of confrontation
with, the northern state itself. At different moments the balance of
forces between any one faction or coalition of factions was fluid,
meaning that NICRA and the broader civil rights movement were
never under the control of any one organisation or ideology. And
while republicans and communists were instrumental in founding
NICRA, their influence waned as its numbers grew.
Even in the best of circumstances, such a diverse coalition
would prove difficult to control and brittle under pressure. But
in the pressure-cooker environment that was the north of Ireland
in 1968 and 1969, the fact that the Association lasted as long as
it did is in itself remarkable.
Sinn Fins role in the establishment of NICRA, and in turn the
impact of the civil rights movement on the divisions and ultimate
split within republicanism in 1969, is of crucial importance in
understanding both the split that occurred at the partys 1970 Ard
Fheis and the separate development of what became known as the
Official and Provisional republican movements. A key element of
the Goulding project was an attempt to rebuild the unity of the
eighteenth-century United Irish movement through a campaign
for the reform of the northern state as a first step in a process that
would lead to uniting the working-class north and south which
in turn would lead to the economic and political reunification of
Ireland. It was Gouldings hope that the Wolfe Tone Society in
the north would attract radicals from within the broader unionist
community into common cause with their republican and socialist
counterparts, driving a wedge between the unionist middle and
218
working classes, thus disrupting the foundation of Ulster Unionist

Party hegemony.
A convention of Wolfe Tone Society local branches met in
Maghera, County Derry in the summer of 1966 to discuss a
detailed paper prepared by Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston
on the issue of civil rights. The core of the paper was an argument
for the creation of a campaign for civil rights in the north, bringing
together trade unionists, republicans, nationalists, communists
and liberal unionists. The meeting agreed to host a seminar on
the issue of civil rights, to which all prospective allies were to be
invited. The seminar was to become the inaugural meeting of
NICRA in January 1967.
While the event that brought together the formal civil rights
movement emerged from within Sinn Fin and the IRA, the
existence of a large number of campaigns and organisations
dealing with the issues of civil rights including the Westminsterbased Campaign for Democracy in Ulster, Con and Majella
McCloskeys Campaign for Social Justice based in Dungannon,
the new nationalist expressions such as the National Democratic
Party, the various left and Labour groups centred in Derry and
Belfast, and individuals such as Gerry Fitt and John Hume
meant that an informal movement on the issue of civil rights
was already coming into existence. In this sense, the movement
can be said to legitimately have had a broad-based and popular
character, rather than existing as a front for any one group or
set of interests. The subsequent history of that movement is well
documented elsewhere by Farrell, Purdie, Dochartaigh and
Prince. What was clear from the outset, however, was that notwithstanding the support of some liberal unionists and unionist
working-class elements of the Communist Party, NICRA was
unable to connect with or mobilise even a minority element
within the unionist working classes. The fact that the trade
unions and the Northern Ireland Labour Party played no part was
indicative of this failure. That Betty Sinclair and the Communist
Party were always uncomfortable participants, simply served to
demonstrate the point.
219
For Sinn Fin there were a number of important consequences,

both of the analysis of Goulding, Coughlan and Johnston, and
of the development of NICRA itself. First, the politics of civil
rights represented a dramatic departure from earlier republican
analyses and strategies. It replaced the approach of working for
a nationalist alliance that had dominated republican thinking and
action for a century with an attempt to build a radical alliance
of republican, labour and communist parties. More significantly,
it sought to use such an alliance as a means of building unity
between the nationalist and unionist working classes. While the
ultimate objective of the new strategy was to undermine partition
and reunify the country in a democratic socialist republic, the
method was no longer armed confrontation with the northern
state securing its collapse from without, but building political
alliances and mobilising popular opinion in order to secure its
erosion and collapse from within. At an ideological level, while
the discourse continued to be anti-imperialist, it was shifting
from the form of a nationalist popular front to a Marxist classbased front, with people power rather than armed struggle at its
cutting edge.
The republican Marxist discourse of Goulding and Coughlan
sat easily alongside the more moderate wings of the civil rights
movement, whether that of Betty Sinclair and the Communist
Party, or the nationalist middle-class representatives of Hume and
Cooper, in that it advocated unity, restraint and non-violence.
However as the civil rights movement gathered momentum, and
state violence, whether loyalist, unionist or British government,
became more widespread, the Marxist discourse jarred with
republicans unconvinced by the possibility of class unity and
concerned with how best to defend nationalist communities.
The emergence of local defence committees in response to the
violence of the state saw leading 1950s republicans such as Joe
Cahill, Billy McKee and John Kelly return to the political stage,
creating additional resistance to the Goulding approach to civil
rights. The dominant civil rights strategy also jarred with the more
radical left elements of the movement, such as those led by Eamon
McCann, Bernadette Devlin or Michael Farrell, who wanted a
220
more provocative approach in order to force the pace of change

irrespective of the consequence for social order or state stability.
The central weakness of the Goulding strategy lay in its inability
to understand the depth and strength of unionist working-class
attachment to the northern state, and the strength of the cross-class
alliance that underpinned unionist hegemony. Patterson is right
when he comments that the serious commitment [of Goulding and
Coughlan] to winning Protestants through a process of political
reform, and the stated opposition to Catholic sectarianism and
any resort to violence, could not compensate for the unreconstructed assumptions that survived from the traditional nationalist
project.74 The assumption that working-class unionists were the
victims of their middle-class political masters, whose mobilisation
of cultural sectarianism concealed the fact that the state could never
act in their real class interests, underestimated both the material
economic and cultural benefits which the state conferred on
working-class unionists, and their historic and contemporary role
as protagonists in the creation and maintenance of that state. That
the unionist working class would mobilise in force to protect the
northern state was both rational and logical.
Goulding and Coughlans strategy also had another fundamental
flaw. Their belief that the British state would, under pressure from
Irish, British and international opinion sympathetic to the civil
rights movement, exert pressure on the unionist administration
in Stormont to implement serious reforms, proved unfounded.
The minimalist approach of Harold Wilsons Labour government,
demonstrated by his acceptance of the 1968 reform proposals
emerging from ONeills cabinet, demonstrated that, despite
significant warnings of the impending collapse from the Campaign
for Democracy in Ulster, the Nationalist Party and Gerry Fitt MP,
among others, Londons unwillingness to intervene was always
stronger than its support for reform.
Stripped of two of the central points of their civil rights strategy,
and keen to avoid an escalation into violence, Gouldings civil
rights strategy came unstuck on the rocks of unionist hegemony
and its support in Westminster. As state violence accelerated
during 1969, and the legitimacy of the state was increasingly
221
brought into question, Sinn Fin, the IRA and indeed the broader
civil rights movement were faced with two options: accept the
minimalist proposals of ONeill and demobilise the civil rights
movement, or, maintain political pressure on the streets and meet
violence with violence to destroy the state itself. The formation
of the Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) and the
emergence of Provisional Republicanism, both in 1970, marked
the effective end of the civil rights movement, as it split along
the divergent paths offered by these two options. The other
constituent parts of the civil rights movement communists,
Trotskyites, human rights activists, etc. either receded from the
political landscape, or in one form or another aligned themselves
with these two formations.
The SDLP believed that while ONeills proposed reforms were
insufficient, the threat to social order must be averted, and opted
for demobilisation and entry into the institutions of the state in an
attempt to continue their pursuit of state reform. The Provisionals
rejected both the civil rights strategy of Goulding and the Official
Republican Movement, and the position of the SDLP. Instead, a
coalition of republican political nationalists such as MacStiofin,
1950s Belfast republicans such as Joe Cahill and Billy McKee,
southern modernisers such as Conaill and Brdaigh, and
crucially a new and radicalised generation of republicans such as
Brian Keenan, Martin McGuinness and Gerry Adams, sought to
combine the traditional belief in the utility of armed struggle with
the radical left-wing politics of the civil rights movement, in what
was to become a new republicanism, whose appeal was much
broader than the IRA or Sinn Fin only a few years earlier.
Provisional Sinn Fin

In the months preceding the Sinn Fin split the political situation
in the north of Ireland had deteriorated considerably. A series
of loyalist bombings destabilised ONeills limited reform plan,
leading to his resignation in April 1969 and the deployment of
British troops on the streets of Belfast and Derry that August. Civil
rights demonstrations were rapidly being replaced by street con-
222
frontations. As the violence accelerated, more than 1,800 families,

1,500 of them nationalists, were forced to flee their homes. One
source estimates that 30 per cent of Belfasts nationalist population
was displaced. Working-class nationalist communities were the
victim of the majority of the violence, whether at the hands of
the RUC, unionist paramilitaries or the British Army. While
the violence of the state and its paramilitary allies was neither
coordinated nor systematic, it served to undermine the support
for reform within the nationalist working class and pushed them
into seeking a more radical solution to the situation in which
they found themselves. If the republicans in 1968 and 1969 were
unprepared organisationally or ideologically to provide any
meaningful response, the emergence of the Provisionals provided
a new source of political leadership for a rapidly growing section
of the nationalist working class.
Although the British Army enjoyed a honeymoon period in the
north during the initial months, the situation soon changed as
confrontations with nationalists and republicans became more
commonplace. The Falls Curfew in July 1970, the introduction of
internment and the Ballymurphy Massacre in August 1971, and
Bloody Sunday in 1972 laid bare the function of the British Army,
namely to support the unionist state. The impact of these events
on the consciousness of the broader nationalist community was
profound. Within the space of six months the political situation
was shifting from civil conflict over state reform to low-intensity
war. Michael Farrell in his history of the period argues that:
A subtle political change had taken place ... Up to this, mass support in
the Northern Catholic population had been for civil rights and for reform
within the northern state, with Irish unity following gradually. Now most
Northern Catholics felt that the Northern State was unreformable, and
that they would only get civil rights in a united Ireland. Their objective was
no longer to reform Northern Ireland but to destroy it.75
This was the context in which the newly formed Provisional IRA
and Sinn Fin were to find themselves.
Immediately after the 1969 Ard Fheis split, the Provisional Army
Council of the IRA met to formulate their political and military
223
response to the enveloping crisis. While the most pressing concern

was the defence of nationalist areas from unionist violence, key
leaders such as Sean MacStiofin believed that the deployment of
British troops provided republicans with an opportunity to move
from a defensive position to a political and military offensive,
which would demonstrate the imperialist character of British
rule in Ireland. The approach of the Provisional Army Council
was to resource and reorganise the IRA, particularly within the
most conflict-ridden areas of the north, Belfast and Derry, to
provide defence for nationalist communities where required, and
when appropriate to launch an offensive against British military,
political and economic interests across the north. By making the
state ungovernable through an intensive armed campaign, the IRA
hoped to militarily force the British state out of Ireland.
IRA activity and membership, which had been initially limited,
expanded rapidly after the introduction of internment. Farrell
comments that by the end of August there had been a total of
100 explosions in the month, and 35 people had been killed; one
more than in the previous months altogether.76 The two forces
that dominated the political context for the preceding decade,
namely the Unionist government and the civil rights movement,
were replaced by the British government and the IRA.
In the new context of a developing low-intensity war, Sinn
Fin was clearly relegated to a secondary role within the broader
republican movement. The fact that the party was illegal further
hampered its development. Initially much of the partys work was
reactive, acting as a campaigning and publicity vehicle for the IRA.
As the party began to develop its own organisational structure it
engaged in campaigns against British Army and RUC violence and
in support of the growing number of political prisoners. The party
was also responsible for formulating press and policy responses to
the developing situation and the distribution of the movements
two newspapers, An Phoblacht in the south and Republican News
in the north, for which they claimed sales of 15,000 per month
by June 1970. The party also rigidly adhered to the position of
opposition to any form of electoral participation.
224
In February 1970 An Phoblacht ran a detailed analysis of

the nature of the December 1969 split and an outline of the
political and economic programme of the party. The article
listed five key reasons which underlay the split: the Goulding
leaderships recognition of Westminster, Stormont and Leinster
House; their support for extreme Socialism and totalitarian
dictatorship; the IRAs failure to protect northern nationalists in
August 1969; the Goulding leaderships support for the retention
of Stormont and opposition to direct rule from Westminster;
and the deployment of undemocratic methods throughout the
1960s within the republican movement against opponents of the
new departure. The article went on to say that Sinn Fin will
continue to play our part in the struggle for civil rights in the
Six Counties and that the party would build an alternative 32County State structure which will draw support from the existing
British-imposed partition system. The article rejected the claim
that the Provisionals were militarists and traditionalists and
advocated a Socialism based on the native tradition of Comhar
na gComarsan which is founded on the right of worker-ownership
and on our Irish and Christian values.77
The following month an An Phoblacht editorial outlined the
partys aims: to end foreign rule in Ireland, to establish a 32County Democratic Socialist republic based on the Proclamation
of 1916, to restore the Irish language and culture to a position
of strength and to promote a social order based on justice and
Christian principles which will give everyone a just share of the
nations wealth.78 The editorial argued that our movement must
be based on the common working people of Ireland, North and
South, Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter, and asserted that
to achieve a broadly based movement it will be necessary to wage a struggle
not just at the national level but at the local level also. This involves
organising people in their own interests and in defence of their rights.
Demands for civil rights, better housing, division of large estates, restoration
of shing rights, setting up of credit unions and worker-owner co-operatives
... are all elements in the building of a movement of the people.79
225
The finer print of Sinn Fins democratic socialism was detailed in

a series of lengthier articles over the following months on issues
such as land redistribution, agricultural cooperatives, banking,
industrial development and forestry. These articles argued for a
nationally planned economy in which the
economic organisation of the country would be vertically built in pyramid
fashion on the cooperative units large and small. In each region, industrial
councils composed of representatives of the various industries would iron
out difculties between them ... A central economic council would, on the
national level, co-ordinate the whole economic structure.80
In his presidential address to the first post-split Ard Fheis, Ruar

Brdaigh sought to combine a number of themes that would
become central to Sinn Fins political discourse in the coming
years: support for nationalist civil rights and the dismantling of
Stormont, criticism of southern Irish political leaders for betraying
the north and selling Irish sovereignty to the EEC. Brdaigh
commended the great re-awakening in British occupied Ireland
and criticised political parties in the south for allowing the foreign
take over of Irish land, industry and distributive trade via the
AngloIrish Free Trade agreement. In conclusion he argued:
After fifty years ... the settlement of 1921 is breaking up and the
realisation is growing that the Government of Ireland Act which
set up both Stormont and Leinster House must be dismantled.
While Stormont totters, the EEC threatens our very existence.81
Sinn Fins alternative was outlined in two sets of proposals
released in 1971. ire Nua was the most detailed articulation
of the political proposals and strategy that underlay the new
Sinn Fin. The 56-page document outlined the partys alternative
economic and political proposals to the partitionist settlement
contained in the 1921 Government of Ireland Act. In addition
to outlining proposals for a bill of rights and a new social and
economic programme, in line with the ideas developed in the pages
of An Phoblacht in the preceding months, it also proposed the
replacement of Leinster House and Stormont parliaments with
four provincial parliaments under the control of a single federal
all-Ireland parliament. It also included proposals for increased
226
local government powers. While ire Nua was subsequently

criticised for being abstract or aspirational, for its authors it
provided a practical series of positions and proposals around
which Sinn Fin hoped to undermine partition and build a new
all-Ireland political framework.
Sinn Fin also released a five-point programme of interim
proposals detailing the measures thought necessary by the party
to bring immediate peace. The proposals included an immediate
British cessation, the abolition of Stormont, an election to establish
a nine-county parliament, the release of all political prisoners, and
a guarantee of compensation for all those affected by British state
violence.
On 9 November 1972, 147 delegates met in County Monaghan
to begin the implementation of ire Nua, by formally adopting
the constitution of a new 9-County Ulster Parliament. While the
event was in effect a symbolic gesture by republicans, the detail
of the constitution adopted was practical. It agreed governmental
structures with ministries and departmental responsibilities
covering all areas of government including economic affairs,
welfare and relief, education and community justice.
Speaking at the 1971 Ard Fheis, Brdaigh claimed that since
its release ire Nua had been selling 1,000 copies per month. In
his presidential address he argued that in seeking the abolition
of Stormont, it is not sufficient to create a political vacuum.82
Rejecting any internal 6-County settlement, he argued that the
newly established Ulster parliament will build an administration
among people on the ground level, which will in time and with
hard work ... grow into a full deliberative assembly of Ulster.83
Brdaigh argued that the actions of Stormont prime minister
Chichester-Clarke and Taoiseach Jack Lynch had resulted in an
erosion of confidence in the institutions of government ... both
North and South.84 While the focus in the south of Ireland was
to be engagement in campaigns against EEC membership, and
economic resistance to the impact of the 1965 AngloIrish Free
Trade Agreement, the partys strategic focus in the north was
more detailed. Brdaigh stated that:
227
With regard to the North the approach must be three-pronged: physical

defence of the people is the responsibility of the Irish Republican Army;
we must continue to give leadership at ground level in the civil resistance
campaign, civil disobedience and non-cooperation which strengthens the
peoples will and eats away at the very foundations of Stormont and British
rule: we must work to build the alternative structure both administrations
and assembly in the form of Dil Uladh.85
Sinn Fins strategy was thus threefold. To defend nationalist

communities from state violence; to undermine Stormont through
a widespread campaign of non-cooperation and civil disobedience;
and to put in place its replacement through the active building of
new republican state institutions, such as Dil Uladh.
However, in reality the republican objective of bringing down
Stormont by making the area ungovernable was in the first
instance going to be achieved through an offensive military
campaign that went well beyond the defence of nationalist
communities. IRA chief of staff Sean MacStiofin, addressing
the 1971 Ard Fheis, made this clear when he told the assembled
Sinn Fin delegates: On the military front, our campaign has
changed from a defensive role to defence and retaliation and then
eventually to an offensive campaign of resistance in all parts of the
occupied area. While MacStiofin stressed the need for a strong
Republican civil and political wing ... to organise mass support,
the reality on the ground was that the armed campaign was the
priority both in organisational and strategic terms.86
Feeney is wrong when he says that it was to be some years
before Provisional Sinn Fin developed any political thinking.
During the height of the violence, from 1971 to 1973, the party
appeared to be simply a notice board for the IRA, and that the
party had no distinct Sinn Fin message.87 Sinn Fin had both
a clear political message, distinct from its Official Sinn Fin
counterpart, or that of the SDLP and Fianna Fil. Equally the
establishment of Dil Uladh and the promotion of ire Nua
indicate that the party was serious in its endeavours. However,
what is also clear is that within the broader republican movement,
both among the IRA leaders setting the pace of developments on
228
the streets in Belfast or Derry, and among the younger generation

of activists joining the IRA post-internment and Bloody Sunday,
the message and work of Sinn Fin was either less important or
irrelevant to what were viewed as the more pressing day-to-day
concerns of the armed struggle.
When former IRA volunteer and senior Sinn Fin member Jim
Gibney retrospectively described the left-wing political grouping,
Peoples Democracy, as dominating the scene politically from
1970 to about 1975 and as the political leadership of what
we loosely called the anti-imperialist movement in Belfast, he
was admitting not the absence of a distinct Sinn Fin message
or programme of activity, but rather at best the absence and at
worst the irrelevance of that message from the centres of conflict
in the North.88 Gibneys comments also highlight a political gap,
between the 1960s generation of Brdaigh, Conaill and
MacStiofin and the younger generation of republicans emerging
from within the civil rights movement, of which Gibney was one.
Christian socialism, federalism and the building of alternative
state institutions had less purchase for those seeking to play an
active part in the activity of the IRA, or for those more attuned
to the radical political message of Peoples Democracy.
The suspension of Stormont in March 1972 and its abolition in
1973 was seen by Sinn Fin and the IRA as both a major victory
and a vindication of their political and military strategy. The Ard
Feiseanna of those years were characterised by a belief that the
course of events was going in the republican movements favour.
The military objective of securing a British withdrawal and the
political objective of building alternative state institutions were
repeated. In their 1972 Ard Fheis statement the IRA emphasised
that the Army Council wishes to reiterate that we have no desire
for an armed confrontation with our protestant fellow country
men, we hope that even yet the leaders of the UDA/UVF will
realise that there is nothing to be gained from a civil war between
nationalist and unionist.89 A motion passed from the floor of the
Ard Fheis from Jack McCabe Cumann, Dublin, inviting members
of the loyalist organisations to discussions on the subject of how
229
best we can both serve Ireland and the Irish people, echoed the
position of the IRA.90
That An Phoblacht announced Victory Ours For Taking in
October 1973 and Ever Closer To Victory in October 1974
highlighted a level of optimism and certainty that was not borne
out by the facts on the ground. In the five years since the formation
of the Provisional Sinn Fin and IRA, the number of casualties in
the conflict had risen dramatically. Nineteen-sixty-nine saw a total
of 19 conflict-related deaths, two at the hands of the IRA, while
1970 saw these figures increase to 29 and 18 respectively. However
from 1971 to 1974, 1,244 people were killed, of which the IRA
was responsible for 576. While the IRA campaign continued
to focus attention on the British Army, increasing attacks on
commercial and economic targets brought with it a significant
rise in civilian casualties.
Politically Sinn Fin was coming under increasing strain from
state repression north and south. However, more significantly,
the twin strategies of building alternative state institutions as
envisioned in ire Nua while engaging with the unionist and
loyalist community was clearly failing. Sinn Fin opposed the
attempts by Ulster Unionist leader Brian Faulkner and British
Secretary of State Merlyn Rees to secure a return to devolution
during the Sunningdale talks in 1974, and read the collapse of the
tentative agreement as yet another sign of the states weakness.
However, the strength of unionist opposition to the limited
power sharing and all-Ireland dimensions of the agreement,
as evidenced in the Ulster Workers Council Strike, and the
unwillingness of Harold Wilsons government to face down the
strikers, highlighted two fatal flaws in Sinn Fins analysis. The
party failed to understand working-class unionist investments in
and attachments to the northern state and the extent to which
they would mobilise politically and militarily in its support.
Equally the party misunderstood the extent to which the British
government, would, in the last instance, support unionism and
provide it, however grudgingly, with the political and military
backing it required to secure the maintenance of the northern state.
Alongside these two central strategic problems ran the inability of
230
republicans to understand the impact of their armed campaign on

the broad unionist community and their misinterpretation of the
economic recession affecting Britain at the time as some kind of
indication of the beginnings of an economic disengagement, to be
followed by a possible political and military withdrawal.
Following the legalisation of Sinn Fin by the British government
in 1974, and a series of secret meetings between party officials
and NIO civil servants, the IRA called a suspension of military
activities in February 1975. This was the second such ceasefire
since the descent into conflict, the first being in 1972. Additional
meetings between senior republicans and British government
officials took place, but nothing of substance emerged. If Sinn
Fin and IRA leaders believed that the British government was
preparing to withdraw, according to historian Richard English it
seems that Britain used the 1975 ceasefire to improve intelligence
and to try to split the movement through drawing some of its
members into constitutional politics.91 By the summer of 1975
violence was increasing, and by September the ceasefire had clearly
collapsed. In October the IRA indicated that they would not meet
with the British government unless the purpose of the meeting
would be to devise structures of disengagement from Ireland.92
Speaking at the 1976 Ard Fheis Brdaigh told delegates that
talks between the representatives of Her Majestys government
and of the republican movement continued into early 1976. He
also insisted that even though the truce had broken down, We are
prepared to meet them.93 However the lack of political progress,
escalating loyalist and state violence and the death of republican
political prisoner Frank Stagg while on hunger strike in Wakefield
Prison, England, ensured that within the republican movement
the focus was once again on the war effort. A position replicated
within the British government, who were clearly not interested
in seeking a political accommodation.
The collapse of the 1975 ceasefire had a number of important
consequences, both for the British government and for Sinn Fin
and the IRA. Announced by Merlyn Rees at the end of 1975,
the government started to introduce a new strategy from 1976,
mobilising what became known as Ulsterisation and criminalisa-
231
tion. Ulsterisation would see the government reduce the level of

direct military engagement by the British Army, and foreground the
local Royal Ulster Constabulary and the Ulster Defence Regiment.
In Feeneys words, this would remove the appearance of a colonial
problem with British troops patrolling large parts of the North of
Ireland. It would also reduce casualties among expensively trained
troops, minimising the political impact in Britain.94 Ulsterisation
had the added benefit of refocusing the conflict away from a
republicanBritish state confrontation, to an internal conflict
between republicans and unionists, no longer a political issue,
but rather a communal one. Criminalisation, as a strategy, was
to complement Ulsterisation by further transforming the conflict
from a political issue into one of criminality and law and order.
From March 1976 newly sentenced combatants were to be denied
political status, and treated in the same manner as social prisoners.
In parallel the British government would initiate a new discourse
describing Sinn Fin and the IRA as terrorists, godfathers and
criminals in an attempt to de-legitimise the republican struggle,
internationally, throughout Ireland, and within nationalist and
republican communities in the north.
Alongside the introduction of the governments new strategy,
profound changes were taking place within the republican
movement. The collapse of the 1975 ceasefire led an emerging
cadre of activists to question not only the existing leadership of
Sinn Fin and the IRA, but more importantly the credibility of
the movements strategy. From within the internment camps of
Long Kesh, younger republican leaders such as Gerry Adams,
and a number of activists working in Republican News and
the Republican Publicity Bureau, such as Danny Morrison and
Tom Hartley, questioned the movements reading of the British
government, and its alleged intentions to withdraw. Their view,
vindicated by subsequent events, was that the British government
was intent on remaining involved in the north indefinitely and
shoring up unionist political control in one form or another. In
addition, the younger generation was critical of the secondary role
being given to Sinn Fin and the community and campaigning
dimension of the movements strategy. They also had concerns
232
with the politics of ire Nua. Influenced more by the radicalism of

the civil rights movement and the socialism of Peoples Democracy,
this group were seeking both a more long-term military strategy
combined with a more community focused and socially radical
political strategy. Through the pages of Republican News, Adams,
Morrison and others began to develop an alternative to the
strategy of then IRA chief of staff Seamus Twomey and Sinn Fin
president Ruar Brdaigh. This new emerging leadership were
returning to the writings and activism of left-wing republicans
such as Liam Mellows and James Connolly as well as theories of
decolonisation associated with Franz Fanon and the politics of
the 1970s New Left.
The growing influence of this emerging leadership was
demonstrated when republican veteran Jimmy Drumm delivered
a keynote speech written by Adams and Morrison at the annual
Wolfe Tone Commemoration in 1976. In addition to emphasising
the need to become involved in economic issues and on every day
struggles of the people, Drumm outlined what was to become
the cornerstone of a key shift in republican strategy:
The British government is not withdrawing from the Six Counties and the
substantial pull out and closing down of factories in 1975 and 1976 were due
to world economic recession though mistakenly attributed to symptoms
of withdrawal. Indeed the British government is committed to establishing
the Six Counties and is pouring in vast sums of money to improve the
area and to assure loyalists, and secure from loyalists, support for a long
haul against the Irish Republican Army. So sectarianism is maintained and
increased repression of the Nationalist population with the aid and backing
of the Free State administration are what lie ahead.95
Drumms speech was an indication of the increasing influence of

the younger activists, a shift towards a more long-term military
strategy and an increasing emphasis on party political activity.
The arrest of Seamus Twomey in Dublin the same year revealed
an internal republican report outlining the IRAs intention to
invest more personnel and resources into the party. While these
shifts were not evident in the pages of An Phoblacht during
1977 and 1978 or Brdaighs presidential addresses at the
233
annual Ard Feiseanna, it is clear that both the position of the

first generation of post-split leaders and their political strategy
was slowly being challenged and replaced. The election of Gerry
Adams as vice president of Sinn Fin at the 1978 Ard Fheis, and
the amalgamation of the Belfast-based Republican News and
the Dublin based An Phoblacht, were clear signs of the shifting
balance of power.
Gerry Adams speech to the 1979 Wolfe Tone Commemoration
marked a clear, if subtle shift in both the political position and
future direction of the party. Indicating a clear need to reassess
the movements strategy and tactics ten years on from its
foundation, Adams said: we need to be continually analysing our
weaknesses and building upon our strong points. Our movement
needs constructive and thoughtful self-criticism.96 Of particular
concern to the Sinn Fin vice president was our failure to develop
revolutionary politics and to build a strong political alternative ...
No amount of rhetoric can hide that fact nor the fact that such
a development will come only through a serious commitment to
our objectives, strong discipline and the proper application of
correct policies.97 Adams criticisms were thus not only of the
failure of Sinn Fin to build a substantial political base, but also,
more fundamentally, of the partys not having adequate policies
with which to engage potential support bases.
Significantly, Adams was clearly challenging the predominant
military thinking of the older generation of IRA leaders such
as Twomey and MacStiofin when he argued that the reestablishment of the Republic we seek needs more than a military
alternative to the establishment.98
The 1979 speech was also significant because of the shift in
ideological orientation, with a stronger and more radical socialist
articulation than that of the Christian socialism of the older
generation of republican leaders. Adams talked about securing the
means of production, distribution and exchange and the need for
the building of an agitational struggle in the twenty-six counties,
an economic resistance movement, linking up republicans with
other sections of the working class.99 In an important section of
234
the speech, Adams departed from the language more characteristic

of Brdaigh, arguing:
As Republicans we stand with the Have-nots against the Haves. We stand
with the under-privileged, the young, the unemployed, the workers the
people of no property. We are for the ownership of Ireland by the people
of Ireland and we believe that national freedom entails economic and
cultural independence and that one without the other is useless ... We
stand opposed to all forms of imperialism and capitalism. We stand for an
Ireland free, united, socialist and Gaelic.100
This new language marked a departure from co-operativist

socialism in favour of a clearly anti-capitalist discourse. Equally
significantly it appealed not only to the Irish people as a whole, but
recognised the different social and economic interests that defined
peoples experience and position in society. The Irish people were
no longer viewed as a single constituency of interest, but rather
as having divergent economic and social interests. At a strategic
level this required developing new approaches to engaging and
mobilising these sections of society. Adams made a specific appeal to
encourage the independent mobilisation of workers emphasising
that we must ensure that the cause of Ireland becomes the cause
of labour, a task neglected since Connollys time.101
Thus Adams speech clearly indicates three key shifts around
which future changes within Sinn Fin would emerge. First an
invitation to reassess and self-criticise, clearly implying that there
was a need and a cause for change; second a criticism of the failure
of Sinn Fin to act on its previously declared social radicalism and
commitment to community engagement; and third the articulation
of a more nuanced and radical socialism, with specific appeals to
workers, trade unions and other social constituencies to educate,
agitate and organise ... North and South [to] mobilise our people
on all fronts against the establishment.102
Commentators, then and subsequently, were quick to suggest
that the new approach articulated by Adams represented some
form of leftright split within the movement, or some challenge
to traditionalist or militarist thinking within the leadership. There
is little evidence to support either of these characterisations. The
shift, while significant, is clearly an evolution of Sinn Fins
235
socialism, an attempt to find more effective ways of activating the

partys stated political programme, and an attempt to rebalance
the political and military elements of the overall republican
struggle. Adams was quick to dismiss any notion of a leftright
division within the broader republican movement. In an interview
with Hibernia Magazine in November 1979, Adams rejected such
claims as complete nonsense.103 However while playing down
any ideological divisions within the movement, arguing that the
partys commitment to republican socialism had been consistent
during the previous decade, Adams was clearly outlining the real
nature of the internal disagreements within the movement when
he said We have always had these policies but what is happening
now is the realisation that its not enough just to have policies.
He went on to say that when Sinn Fin emerged from the split
in 1969, key leaders were cagey about getting involved in social
issues because previously the movement had got totally immersed
in social issues and had neglected national issues.104
The interview was also notable for Adams response to a
question regarding his support for ire Nua, the cornerstone of
Sinn Fins political and economic strategy. The Sinn Fin vice
president studiously avoided either supporting or rejecting the
document, saying any revision was purely a matter for the Ard
Comhairle. However he went on to say: ire Nua has been on
the market for seven years and the situation has changed in seven
years and over the last eighteen months [a] review has been going
on. If the review is finished in time [its conclusions] will go before
the Ard Fheis to decide. But there will be no change to basic
republican principles.105 Clearly ire Nuas days were numbered,
and its replacement would become the key battleground upon
which the emerging political leadership of Adams, Morrison and
Derry republican Martin McGuinness would challenge the older
generation of Brdaigh and Conaill.
Political Expansion
While Sinn Fin was refining and evolving its political strategy and
policy profile, events on the ground were to provide both obstacles
236
and opportunities for the approach advocated by Adams. The

removal of political status from newly sentenced republican
prisoners in 1976 saw the emergence of a new political front in
the broader conflict centring on the rights of political prisoners to
be recognised as such. Until 1976 Sinn Fin campaigned against
the arrest and torture of IRA volunteers, but such campaigns
were often reactive and focused on specific incidents. However,
by making political prisoners the key battleground for their criminalisation policy, the British government unintentionally created a
new focus for republican political mobilisation. Inside the newly
built H-Blocks of Long Kesh, republican prisoners refused to
conform to the new prison regime. They refused to wear prison
uniforms or undertake prison work. Thus, the blanket protest
began, and a growing number of prisoners were confined to their
cells 24 hours a day, with only a blanket to wear and a bible to
read. Between 1976 and 1978 the confrontation between the
prisoners and the prison regime escalated as prisoners were denied
access to toilet facilities. Prisoners responded by launching the
no-wash protest. At its height the blanket and no-wash protest
involved more than 400 prisoners.
Outside the jail, Sinn Fin was attempting to put Adams
new political strategy into operation. In 1979 two major party
conferences set about the task of reorganising and refocusing
the party. In October a Sinn Fin conference on organisation in
Athlone provided activists with the opportunity for a serious
self-examination during which a frank and forceful discussion
... involving many aspects of the partys work took place.106 The
following month, a less successful womens conference was held in
an attempt to give greater emphasis to womens issues and women
activists within the party.107 However, the rapidly deteriorating
situation in Long Kesh, and in the womens prison in Armagh,
ensured that the focus of party work from 1978 onwards would
be the struggle for the reintroduction of political status. While
this singular focus would make the broadening of Sinn Fins
agitational politics difficult, in terms of addressing social and
economic issues, the development of a broad-based political
campaign in support of the prisoners gave Sinn Fin both the
237
space and the motivation to put the basic principles of Adams

new strategic approach into action.
A National H Block-Armagh Campaign was established, with
Sinn Fin and the prisoners relatives, mobilised into Relatives
Action Committees, driving the campaign. However it also
involved a broad range of radical left-wing organisations and
individuals and sections of the trade union movement. This was
Sinn Fins first experience of building broad-based political action
since the collapse of the civil rights movement a decade earlier.
Knowing that a broad-based movement could not be centred on
the demand for IRA prisoners to be formally accorded political
status, the campaign focused instead on what became known
as the five demands: the right not to wear a prison uniform or
do prison work; the right of prisoners to free association and to
organise their own educational and recreational facilities; and
the right to one visit, one letter and one parcel per week. By
1980, despite a level of political engagement and organisation not
seen since the end of the 1960s, the campaign was making little
headway in terms of securing its demands, while the situation
inside the jails, and in particular the morale of prisoners, on
protest now for four years, was declining. Despite widespread
opposition from both Sinn Fin and the IRA leadership outside
the jails, the prisoners embarked on two hunger strikes, in 1980
and 1981, in an attempt to resolve the question of status.
The history of the hunger strikes is well documented elsewhere,
particularly by David Beresford (1987) and Campbell and
McKeown et al. (2006). For Sinn Fin, the impact of the years
from 1979 to the ending of the 1981 hunger strike in November,
following the death of Bobby Sands and nine other republicans, was
profound. As the campaign for political status was transformed
into a campaign in support of the hunger strikers during 1980 and
1981, the level of political mobilisation was intense. So too was
the level of political outreach in an attempt to secure the support
of a broader section of public opinion. The decision by civil rights
campaigner Bernadette McAliskey to contest the 1979 European
election on a political status ticket, despite strong opposition from
the IRA and Sinn Fin, and her credible result of 40,000 votes,
238
reopened the question of electoral participation, even for purely

symbolic political ends, in the republican movement. The death
of independent nationalist MP Frank McGuire in March 1981,
only days after the start of the second hunger strike, forced the
question of prisoner candidates onto the republican movements
agenda. Bobby Sands was eventually selected to stand for the
FermanaghSouth Tyrone by-election, and with 30,492 votes and
51 per cent of the vote, beat his Unionist rival, Harry West. The
British government immediately moved to have the prisoners
campaign stripped of this important political victory, introducing
legislation denying convicted felons, including political prisoners,
from standing in elections. The subsequent by-election took
place after Sands had died following 66 days on hunger strike.
Sands election agent, Sinn Fin member Eoghan Carron, secured
31,278 votes and held the seat. Political status for prisoners was
reintroduced in the period after the formal ending of the hunger
strike in October 1981.
Most commentators have focused on the impact of the hunger
strike on Sinn Fins attitude to electoralism. However, the impact
of the political status campaign from 1978 through to 1981 was
much more significant than this. These years saw a dramatic
expansion of Sinn Fins political activity. The party mobilised
an increasing number of supporters from within its own core
support base, while at the same time politicising a new generation
of republicans north and south. The campaign also brought
republican re-engagement with political forces and constituencies
beyond its own core support. All of this experience significantly
developed the organisational, campaign and communication skills
of Sinn Fin activists at both a grassroots and leadership level.
The hunger strike also enabled Sinn Fin to internationalise the
partys solidarity network beyond the contacts built up among
European stateless nations, such as Basques and Bretons, which
had already been established during the 1970s. The success of
Sands and Carron, and Paddy Agnew and Kieran Doherty, in the
26-County general election later the same year demonstrated the
utility of contesting elections, if not participation in the political
institutions themselves, and opened the door for a more substantial
239
electoral engagement in the years ahead. All of this provided the

emerging Adams-led leadership group with the political context
and practical experience to advance their own strategic agenda
within Sinn Fin.
However, one of the key lessons of this period, which became
apparent only some years later, was the shift in the strategic
approach to achieving change. Prior to the ending of the hunger
strike, the approach of the republican movement both inside
and outside the jail was one of head-on confrontation with the
state, refusal to recognise its legitimacy, and the utilisation of
every means available to smash the state apparatus. However,
both during and immediately after the hunger strike, republicans
within the jail began to develop more sophisticated strategies,
mixing confrontation with the prison administration with entry
into its regimes in order to secure additional changes from within,
complementing the more general campaign outside, as documented
in McKeown (2001). This new mixture of external confrontation
and internal reform was not only vital to the securing of political
status by 1983, but taught the emerging leadership of Sinn Fin
and the IRA a series of important political lessons which they
would bring to bear on the overall strategy of the movement in
later years.
During this period, the battle for control of Sinn Fin continued
to be played out. While there were no clear signs of division
or internal struggle, there was nonetheless a clear attempt to
continue the shift in political strategy and focus first articulated in
both Jimmy Drumms 1977 and Gerry Adams 1979 Bodenstown
speeches. At the centre of the developing contest between the
section of the party represented by Brdaigh and that of Adams
was the issue of ire Nua. The policy had been the focus of
an internal review from 1978, and the Ard Comhairle brought
forward to the 1980 Ard Fheis what An Phoblacht/Republican
News called a radical update of the document. Alongside the
leadership proposal were motions from local Cumann in support
of the standing policy and calling for its complete revision.108
While there was little noticeable difference in the content of
Brdaighs presidential address, the debate on ire Nua revealed
240
a different picture. Although an Ard Comhairle motion calling

for ire Nua to be promoted and publicised in the coming year
was passed, federalism was described by one Belfast delegate
as a sop to loyalism that was perhaps over hastily adopted
to fill a gap when there was a lack of policy.109 However, the
substantive debate was on the Ard Comhairle document, ire
Nua: The Social Dimension. Both Brdaigh and Adams spoke
in favour, the former stating that its proposals were unashamedly
democratic and socialist in character, with Adams stressing its
radical republican character.110 Indeed, it contained the most
radical series of proposals on social and economic policy to be
brought forward to an Ard Fheis since the 1960s. In addition
to supporting the public control and democratic administration
of all the means of production, distribution and exchange, the
document advocated widespread public ownership of the countys
land, resources and industry.111 It declared that private enterprise
will have no place in key industries and State incentives will favour
co-operative projects as the most socially desirable ... Small local
business will be permissible provided no exploitation occurs ...
[and] There would be an upper limit to the size of any private
enterprise.112 The Social Dimension also promised universal
access to health, education, housing and the protection of civil
rights for all. In addition to measures aimed at promoting the
Irish language the document also opposed Irish membership of
NATO, the EEC and the Warsaw Pact, calling instead for an
independent foreign policy.
Much of the debate from the floor of the Ard Fheis focused
on the definition of socialism, with a proposed amendment
seeking to insert a more Christian socialist vocabulary into the
document being defeated, on the basis of the need to develop a
secular socialism advocating the full separation of church and
state. Other delegates attempted to have the sections dealing with
farming cooperatives removed for fear of alienating family farms,
however this was also defeated. Indeed one delegate from County
Meath, supporting the proposed deletion of the sections on land
and industry, described The Social Dimension as the thin end
of a trend in left-wing socialism that will alienate us from the
241
people.113 However, despite such reservations the document was

agreed by a substantial majority of delegates.
The remainder of the Ard Fheis dealt with discussions on
electoral strategy, with a motion calling for the party to contest
local elections in the north being referred to the incoming Ard
Comhairle. A debate on womens rights mandated the incoming
Ard Comhairle to develop a new policy on gender equality to be
brought forward to the 1981 Ard Fheis. There was also significant
international representation with delegations from revolutionary
movements in Portugal, the Basque Country, France, Germany,
Spain, Denmark and Brittany. International solidarity greetings
were also received from SWAPO in Namibia, the FSLN in
Nicaragua, FRETELIN in East Timor, the Chilean Socialist Party
and a number of European socialist and progressive nationalist
political parties.
While the 1980 Ard Fheis brought significant changes both in
the definition and detail of the partys socialism and economic
programme, the 1981 Ard Fheis, described by An Phoblacht/
Republican News as the liveliest, if not the most controversial
in years, brought even more far-reaching changes.114 Following a
two-hour debate calling for the removal of the proposed federal
governmental structures from ire Nua, delegates voted to drop
what had been a key element in the partys political strategy for
over a decade. Proposing the deletion Gerry Adams told delegates:
The Ulster provincial structure was offered as an olive branch
to unionists it is essentially a sop to unionism, loyalism and
Orangism.115 Both Brdaigh and Daithi Conaill argued
against the motion, highlighting the absence of an alternative from
Adams. The vote saw 190 of the total 294 delegates support the
Adams proposal. While a second amendment seeking to remove
references to federalism from the partys constitution failed to get
the two-thirds majority required, it was clear that federalism no
longer held any place in Sinn Fins political project.
Of equal significance was the decision to leave future decisions
on participation in 6-County local elections to the incoming
Ard Comhairle. Up to this point Sinn Fin only contested local
government elections in the south of Ireland, continuing to reject
242
the legitimacy of the 6-County local government system, and both

parliaments in Dublin and London. However as declared on the
front page of An Phoblacht/Republican News in its post-Ard Fheis
decision: The clear position of Sinn Fin is that it will in future
contest local government seats in the North.116
An indication of the partys attempts to broaden its organisational and ideological base was evident in the reports from the
various departments and proposed policy documents including
a draft trade union policy on the republican attitude to work
in the unions which was debated and amended. International
participation was once again high on the agenda with more than
40 delegations, including from the PLO, the Sandinistas and the
Eritrean Peoples Liberation Front, the Argentinean Workers
Revolutionary Party and EIA from the Basque Country. Solidarity
greetings were also sent from Italian MEP Mario Capanna, and
from radical parties in Germany, Holland, Denmark and solidarity
groups in Britain, Quebec, Canada and the USA.
The tone of the Ard Fheis was concisely summed up when
the key Adams ally, Danny Morrison, director of publicity and
editor of An Phoblacht/Republican News, famously declared,
Who here really believes we can win the war through the ballot
box? But will anyone here object if, with the ballot paper in one
hand and the Armalite in the other, we take power in Ireland? A
fundamental shift had taken place, not just in policy terms, but
also in the balance of power within the party, the repercussions
of which were to be demonstrated internally and externally in
the years that followed.117
The following years Ard Fheis signalled the consolidation of
power over Sinn Fin by the new generation of leaders. Coming
in the immediate aftermath of the northern Assembly elections
it brought to a conclusion debates on federalism and electoral
participation that had been running since the start of the decade.
Delegates agreed the abolition of the constitutional reference to
federalism and the strengthening of the radical left-wing social
and economic agenda. The party also placed greater focus on the
development of the Womens Department and emerging youth
participation. Delegates also agreed a detailed agricultural policy,
243
based on the principles outlined in The Social Dimension. The

international section of the conference saw debates on Palestine
and Poland, with the Ard Fheis expressing its strong support
for Solidarity.
From 1982 Sinn Fin contested a series of elections north and
south investing a level of political and material resources not seen
in decades. The results of the polls in the north were to strengthen
the hand of the new generation of leaders and, more crucially,
destabilise the criminalisation strategy of the British government
and their allies in Fianna Fil and Fine Gael. In October 1982
elections were held to a proposed Assembly in Belfast as part of
British Secretary of State Jim Priors attempt to restore devolution
in the north. Sinn Fin secured 64,000 votes electing Adams,
Morrison, Carron, and Jim Allister in South Armagh, and Martin
McGuinness in Derry. The result was significant in a number
of respects. With 10 per cent of the electorate, 2 per cent more
than during the hunger strikers, it demonstrated that Sinn Fin
could mobilise significant electoral support outside the emotive
context of the hunger strike. That 10 per cent of the electorate, or
40 per cent of the nationalist electorate, voted for Sinn Fin, not
only damaged the British governments argument that republicans
were criminals with no public support, but in doing so fatally
undermined their overall strategy in the north. It also created
significant difficulties for both the SDLP and the Irish government.
Interestingly, while the SDLP lost seats from the previous Assembly
election, its total vote actually increased, indicating that Sinn
Fins success was not strictly at the larger nationalist partys loss.
Feeneys assessment that the biggest constituency of support [for
Sinn Fin] was among urban working-class, particularly first-time
voters and young men in working-class areas, a category of people
who normally do not vote in similar constituencies elsewhere in
the western world, was undoubtedly correct.118
This initial electoral success was repeated in both the British
general election of June 1983 and the northern local government
elections in 1985. The general election saw the partys vote increase
to 102,000 votes or 13.4 per cent, with Gerry Adams taking the
West Belfast seat from Gerry Fitt, and Danny Morrison coming
244
within 78 votes of taking Mid Ulster. In the local elections Sinn

Fin predicted taking 40 seats, and secured 59 seats with 75,000
votes and 11 per cent of the vote. While Sinn Fin refused to
take its seats either in Westminster or the Assembly, its electoral
strength and its presence across the norths local authorities
created a political crisis of significant proportions.
Sinn Fins electoral fortunes in the south, however, were of
a different order, demonstrating the underdevelopment if not
irrelevance of the party to the southern electorate. In the February
1982 Leinster House election, Sinn Fin secured only half the vote
of the hunger strike candidates of the previous year, and when a
snap election was called in November of the same year the party
chose not to contest any seats.
The combined effect of the dropping of federalism, the
engagement with electoralism, the strengthening of the partys
broad-based radical policy and organisational programme, and
the electoral advance in 1983 brought the formal end to Ruar
Brdaigh and Daithi Conaills leadership of Sinn Fin. Both men,
key figures in the formation and development of Sinn Fin from the
early 1960s, and particularly after the 1970 split, did not contest
their respective positions of president and joint vice president.
For Brdaigh, the defeat of policies which I wholeheartedly
believed in and had publicly espoused over a long period made his
position untenable.119 For Conaill the dropping of abstentionism
was a mistake, and that while the office of Vice-President was
regarded by some as one of a titular nature, he was not a titular
head, figurehead or yes-man.120 Both men knew that their role
and the positions they espoused were increasingly marginalised,
and that the changing political circumstances and growth of the
organisation had fatally undermined their positions. In his final
presidential speech Brdaigh was graceful in defeat, telling
delegates that we hand over the great Sinn Fin organisation to
a new generation, more vigorous and more successful at the polls
than any time since 1918.121 However, he also warned against the
dangers of Sinn Fins slipping into constitutional politics.
The election of Gerry Adams as the new president of Sinn Fin,
and of his key allies Phil Flynn and John Joe McGirl, representing
245
two different generations of southern republicans, as joint vice

presidents, brought to an end a period of transition within the
party that began with the collapse of the 1975 ceasefire. Adams
first Ard Fheis presidential address laid out a number of key themes
that would dominate party thinking and activity for the remainder
of the decade. While clearly stating that he had no intention
of advocating a change to the partys abstentionist position in
relation to Leinster House, he emphasised that for many reasons
... anti-imperialist politics and the struggle for Irish independence
had become, to a large extent, isolated and restricted to its activist
base.122 Warning of the danger of people unconsciously slipping
into spectator politics as a consequence of manifestations of
mass struggle [being] pushed to the sidelines, the newly elected
Sinn Fin president was making a clear call for a return to both
street and electoral politics in order to secure increased political
strength. He argued that as Sinn Fin developed alternatives to
the social, political economic and cultural aspects of British rule
in the six counties, the party benefited both in terms of our
electoral successes over the past year and in the high morale of
our supporters. Adams also made an appeal to the Protestant
working class, stating that
as a democrat and a separatist, I am opposed to the so-called unionist
veto, but there is a clear distinction between the alleged right of Northern
loyalists to the union with Britain and the right, with the rest of us, to shape
the new society which would replace the partitionist statelets into which
this island is unjustiably and forcibly divided at present.123
The speech also argued that

Sinn Fin has, to a great extent, been isolated in the 26 counties, and
because of our almost exclusive concentration on the national question, we
have failed to develop the social and economic momentum which our party
began during the 1960s. Other parties who have abandoned the central
question of partition [namely Sinn Fin: The Workers Party] have been able
to make political capital on those issues.124
The fact that the southern electorate had accepted the institutions
of the 26 Counties while Sinn Fin maintained an abstentionist
246
position was identified by Adams as a problem, as was the failure

of the party to bring its policies to the people to explain them
and gain support for them.125 With this problem in mind Adams
dealt at some length with industrial, agricultural and womens
rights issues.
The speech concluded with both a reaffirmation of the partys
support for the legitimacy of armed struggle as a necessary and
morally correct form of resistance in the six counties against
a government whose presence is rejected by the vast majority
of the Irish people and of the partys democratic socialism and
the need for republicans, socialists and progressive nationalists
to find unity on democratic republican demands.126 However,
Adams concluded by cautioning delegates that while our struggle
has a major social and economic content the securing of Irish
independence is a pre-requisite for the advance to a socialist
republican society.127
As Sinn Fin was emerging as a serious political force posthunger strikes, with increasing organisational and electoral
strength, its ideological and strategic orientation was clear:
commitment to an equally balanced political and military struggle,
in support of prioritised national democratic goals, while building
for the ultimate goal of democratic socialism; a recognition of the
need to challenge the SDLP in the north while building support
in the south on the basis of radical social and economic policies
as well as the issue of partition and national independence; and a
clear engagement with Irish society plurally defined, as workers,
farmers, women or young people, rather than just the Irish people
as a whole. And while Adams appeal to working-class unionists
was superficial and couched in more traditional republican
thinking, it indicated the beginning of a process of realising that
republican objectives could not be achieved without some form
of engagement with political and social unionism.
Changing Dynamics
From the onset of the conflict in 1970 and 1971 the dynamics at
play were primarily military. The escalating confrontation between
247
the IRA and the British government and its unionist allies, while
always containing a political dimension, was dominated by the
belief in the utility of violence and the possibility of military defeat.
All three key political protagonists shared this view. From the mid
1970s the dominance of militarism was beginning to give way to
strategies, on both the British and republican side, that sought
to augment military confrontation with political confrontation.
The battle over political status, and in particular the hunger
strikes of 1980 and 1981 saw both the British government and
Irish republicans adapt their respective strategies to complement
militarism with political strategies aimed at mobilising public
opinion and popular support. While the British Army and Royal
Ulster Constabulary could argue that by 1982 they had started to
contain IRA violence, they would soon admit first privately, then
publicly that defeat of the IRA was not ultimately possible. For
republicans the logic of the Long War the idea of a protracted
military and political struggle indicated a similar frame of
mind. The granting of political status in the aftermath of the
1981 hunger strike and Sinn Fins electoral successes in the north
from 1982 onwards dealt a fatal blow to the British governments
strategy of criminalisation. Whether consciously or not, by the
mid 1980s both the British state and republicans were shifting
the focus of their strategies away from military confrontation
supplemented by political mobilisation, and towards a primarily
political confrontation. For the British state the logic of marginalisation through the building of political alliances with both the
SDLP and the Irish government came to dominate though not
replace criminalisation. In turn republicans increasingly sought
to build and demonstrate political support and strength, both to
counter British government attempts to marginalise republicans
and, as the decade progressed, to force the British government
into a negotiated settlement to the conflict.
The collapse of the Sunningdale negotiations in 1974 left a
political vacuum in its wake. It was not until 1979 that the newly
elected Conservative government, through its secretary of State
Humphrey Atkins, attempted to reopen talks with the SDLP
and Ulster Unionist Party in an attempt to secure some form of
248
political agreement. However, the failure of the Atkins talks to

reach agreement on power sharing and devolution led Thatcher
to engage directly with the Fianna Fil government of Charles
Haughey in Dublin. Despite an up-beat start, Thatchers lack of
flexibility, Haugheys political opportunism, and the 1981 hunger
strikes blocked any advancement of the British governments
plans. Thatchers second Secretary of State Jim Prior launched
a new initiative in 1982, in which he offered a process of rolling
devolution whereby powers would be gradually returned to
Stormont if it could demonstrate its ability to secure unionist
and nationalist support. However, rather than isolate Sinn Fin,
the Assembly elections incorporated in Priors plans provided
republicans with the opportunity to demonstrate a credible level
of political support. Once again Thatchers ideological support
for unionism led to a weakening of the all-Ireland dimension of
the Prior proposals. Under increasing electoral threat from Sinn
Fin, the SDLP joined republicans in a boycott of the Assembly
effectively ending the initiative.
Thatchers re-election in 1983 was complemented by a new
Fine GaelLabour coalition in Dublin led by Garret FitzGerald.
The Irish government was seriously concerned by the potential
impact of the growth of Sinn Fin on the stability of the southern
state. The FitzGerald government launched its own political
initiative, the New Ireland Forum, in an attempt to secure
consensus amongst nationalist Ireland on its future relationship
with the north. Sinn Fin was excluded and Haugheys Fianna
Fil, in opposition, rejected any shift from its rhetorical support
for reunification, while Thatcher rejected all of the proposed
solutions, including reunification, a federal state and joint
authority. Once again it appeared that the political initiatives of
both governments were floundering.
However, ongoing contacts between officials from both the
Irish and British governments led, in November 1985, to the
AngloIrish Agreement. Patterson describes the Agreement as a
major shift in policy which would radically change the political
context.128 The core elements of the Agreement were the formation
of a BritishIrish Intergovernmental Conference, within which
249
the Irish government would have a consultative role on northern

affairs, notionally to represent northern nationalist interests.
The Conference would also address issues such as cross-border
security as well as economic, social and cultural cooperation
between both governments. The Agreement held out the promise
of devolution and created an International Fund for Ireland to
provide financial support for economic development. For the Irish
government, the value of the Agreement was primarily political,
assisting it in its task of bolstering support for the SDLP and
marginalising Sinn Fin. For the British government this political
agenda was complemented by a desire for greater assistance from
the Irish government in counter-insurgency measures against the
IRA, particularly in terms of extradition, police cooperation and
border security.
After a decade of failed political initiatives by the British
government, the AngloIrish Agreement was perceived as a
significant breakthrough. The purpose of the Agreement was not
to resolve the causes of the conflict, but rather to contribute to the
political and military defeat of Sinn Fin and the IRA. The political
dimension of the Agreement was complemented by renewed
judicial and military measures, including the intensification of
the use of no-jury Diplock Courts and supergrass informers, and
a concerted campaign of assassinations of IRA volunteers by the
SAS, and of Sinn Fin activists by loyalist paramilitaries working
in collusion with the British military intelligence. The high-profile
assassinations of IRA volunteers in Loughall Co. Tyrone in 1987
and Gibraltar in 1988, and of Sinn Fin councillor Sean Davey
in 1989, were all key markers of this shift in British military
strategy. To this end the British Intelligence agency MI5 oversaw
the illegal importation and distribution to unionist paramilitaries
of a substantial shipment of arms from the Apartheid regime in
South Africa. In addition to weapons, MI5 and the RUC provided
loyalist paramilitaries with information and logistical assistance
as part of their campaign against Sinn Fin personnel. More than
300 people were killed as a result of collusion, including Sinn Fin
activists and elected representatives, IRA volunteers, human rights
lawyers and civilians, between 1989 and 1997.
250
While the British governments pursuance of a covert campaign

of state killings created tensions with both the SDLP and the
Irish government, the opposition of all shades of unionism to the
Agreement deepened the levels of political instability and witnessed
a significant escalation of UDA and UVF violence beyond that
desired by M15 and the RUC. Up to 200,000 unionists mobilised
against the Agreement in Belfast during November 1985 and again
on its first anniversary in 1986. Conflict between unionism and the
state, whether through boycotts of British government ministers or
street confrontations with the Army and police became a feature
of life until the end of the decade. Meanwhile the number and
frequency of loyalist killings increased dramatically.
The AngloIrish Agreement, while clearly blocking Sinn Fins
electoral advance, was not having as dramatic an impact as its
authors hoped. The 1987 Westminster election saw a drop in the
partys vote, from 102,000 to 83,000 votes, but still retaining
more than the initial 10 per cent secured in 1983. While the
SDLPs vote in the same election increased 3 per cent, it could
hardly have been interpreted as a victory by either the British or
Irish governments when placed alongside the depth of unionist
reaction and the rapidly deteriorating security situation.
Sinn Fin was acutely aware of the evolving political context
in the years surrounding the Agreement. The organisational,
ideological and electoral development of the party from 1984 to
1987 continued to focus on building and expanding the partys
support base and alternative agenda. However this agenda
was continually constrained by Sinn Fins attempts to counter
the British and Irish governments strategy of marginalisation
and isolation. The 1984 Ard Fheis saw a further expansion of
the partys policy profile with support for the 35-hour week,
opposition to the slavish adherence of the monetarist policies of
the Fine GaelLabour coalition in Dublin, and additional positions
on landownership and agricultural, drugs and social welfare
reform.129 There was also a lively debate on a resolution which
argued that Sinn Fin had singularly failed to come to terms with
youth issues.130 A debate on whether the party should develop a
251
National Youth Committee or fully-fledged Youth Department

ensued, with the former proposal becoming policy.
The Ard Fheis also adopted a revised version of the 1980
Women in Ireland policy document. The detailed position paper
argued that there is now a consciousness in Sinn Fin that the
liberation of women is not just desirable but vitally necessary if
true freedom is to be realised.131 The radical socialist-feminist
document outlined issues of economic discrimination, physical
and sexual violence against women, the right to contraception,
divorce and childcare, and committed Sinn Fin to fight to defend
the rights that women have won so far and to play an active role
in ongoing and future struggles for womens equality. However,
on the subject of abortion, delegates overwhelming adopted an
anti-choice position. A modest proposal supporting a womans
right to choose terminations under certain medical circumstances
was rejected in favour of a motion that declared we are opposed
to abortion as a form of birth control.132
Adams presidential speech was important in a number of
respects. Much of the content was given over to issues of womens
rights and participation in political life, social and economic
policy and international issues, particularly concerning Africa,
Ethiopia and Central America. Adams told delegates that the
Dublin Forum was established only because the establishment
parties realised, mostly through the promptings of John Hume,
that by their failure to do anything about the national question
they had surrendered the high ground of Irish nationalism to Sinn
Fin.133 What emerged, said Adams, commenting of the Forums
deliberations, was not a blue-print for a united, independent and
peaceful Irish society but an Irish establishment alternative to the
policies of Sinn Fin.
The presidential speech also dealt with the issue of the EEC
and the European parliamentary elections of that year. Sinn Fins
combined vote north and south was 146,148. Campaigning on a
manifesto calling for Ireland to withdraw from the EEC, Sinn Fin
argued for the negotiation of trading Agreements with [the EEC]
and an alternative based on a radical socialist programme.
252
Adams returned to all of these themes at the following years

Ard Fheis. Support for the anti-Apartheid struggle in South Africa
opened his address, as he called on the ANC to fight on. Adams
was also unsurprisingly critical of the ongoing talks between the
British and Irish governments. The dangers of the present talks,
he told delegates, lie not in the conclusions that they may or
may not reach ... but in their intention of putting a diplomatic
veneer on British rule and injecting a credibility to constitutional
nationalism so that British rule and its interests can be stabilised
in the long term. Amid stinging attacks against the SDLP for
its failure to provide adequate representation for the northern
nationalist community, Adams argued that the talks and any
subsequent agreement are about creating a political climate in
which this party can be isolated through a mixture of repression
and appeasement.134
The Ard Fheis itself continued to deal with similar themes
to the year previous, with workers rights, youth participation
and womens equality generating considerable debate. Alan
Curran, chair of the new Sinn Fin National Youth Committee,
criticised the partys failure to address youth concerns adequately.
Of particular note was the heated debate on abortion, and the
decision by delegates to adopt two pro-choice motions, one from
the Ard Comhairle that accepted the need for abortion where
a womans life is at risk or in grave danger and another from
the floor that simply stated, we recognise that women have the
right to choose.135
However the most contentious debate was in the section
on electoral strategy. A motion from Dublin Sinn Fin, while
supporting the current position with regard to Leinster House,
proposed that such abstentionism be viewed as a tactic and not a
principle. The motion was clearly the opening salvo in an attempt
by sections of the party, including the Adams leadership, to pave
the way to participation in Leinster House. It also struck at one
of the fundamental issues that had provoked the 196970 split,
and was the last remaining policy difference between the older
generation of activists and those that had emerged during the
seventies and eighties. The motion was defeated by 20 votes,
253
despite support from Danny Morrison and others close to Adams.

An Phoblacht/Republican News coverage of the debate clearly
indicated that this particular battle was not over, stating that
closing the session, delegates agreed that the incoming Ard
Comhairle should investigate the implications for Sinn Fin
registering as a political party and should circulate the information
to cummain prior to the next Ard Fheis.136 Nineteen-eighty-six
was clearly going to be a decisive year for the development of
Sinn Fins electoral strategy.
Historian Brian Feeney has argued that the Sinn Fin leaderships
had been working towards an end to abstentionism since 1982.
While the defeat of the Dublin Sinn Fin motion at the 1985 Ard
Fheis indicated that the time had not yet come, one year later the
prospects for change were greater. The IRA, at an Army Convention
in September 1986, dropped its own support for abstentionism,
while An Phoblacht/Republican News had been the focus of a 12month-long political debate. Five hours had been allocated on the
Ard Fheis agenda to discuss motion 162 containing three specific
constitutional amendments. Success would require a two-thirds
majority of delegates. In all, 54 speakers took part in the debate,
with an even number on each side. Senior republican leaders such
as John Joe McGirl and Joe Cahill of the older generation, and
Gerry Adams, Martin McGuinness and Pat Doherty, all argued that
the millstone and handicap of abstentionism had to be dropped.
All of the speakers supporting the Ard Comhairle proposal called
for unity and for all sides to respect the democratic decision of
the Ard Fheis. Former president Ruar Brdaigh received a
standing ovation, and appealed to delegates not to enmesh Sinn
Fin in constitutionalism. Instead, he urged delegates to support
motion 184, which called for the convening of a new all-Ireland
parliament when the party was strong enough. In the end 429 of
the 638 delegates present supported the Ard Comhairle motion,
providing the majority required. Brdaigh led a walk out with
a small group of delegates and supporters to form the breakaway
Republican Sinn Fin.137
The significance of the abstentionist debate was evident in the
fact that Adams devoted almost his entire presidential address to
254
this single issue. While acknowledging the deep and justifiably

strong feelings of delegates, Adams appealed for unity, not a
conditional unity or a qualified unity but a total commitment
to unified acceptance of the democratic mandate of this Ard
Fheis.138 Describing the possibility of entering Leinster House
as opening up another front, he argued that as the political
conditions change so must republican strategy change. Therefore
present political conditions continue to be the dominant factor
in producing a republican response to those conditions ... we
are often successful when we have a flexible approach. We
are at our weakest when we are forced into a static political
position.139 Indeed, the requirements of interpreting and applying
republicanism to changing and changed political conditions was
a feature of a speech the focus of which was the development of
strategies which can succeed.140
The 1986 Ard Fheis also witnessed the reversal of the previous
years pro-choice position, with the adoption of an Ard Comhairle
motion stating that Sinn Fin was opposed to the attitudes and
forces in society which compel women to have abortions. We are
opposed to abortion as a means of birth control but we accept the
need for abortion where a womans life is at risk or in grave danger,
for example entopic pregnancy and all forms of cancer.141
In the immediate aftermath of the historic 1986 Ard Fheis,
Sinn Fin contested two elections, the Leinster House elections in
February 1987 and Westminster in June of that year. Despite the
dropping of abstentionism and fielding candidates in 29 of the
states 41 constituencies the party secured only 1.6 per cent of the
vote and lost 20 deposits. The Westminster poll witnessed a drop
of 2 per cent from 102,000 in 1983 to 83,000. With the exception
of a slight vote increase for Gerry Adams in West Belfast, the
party experienced no other vote increases. Alongside the stalling
of Sinn Fins electoral advance, the IRA was experiencing a
series of significant organisational and political setbacks. The SAS
assassination of eight key IRA volunteers in Loughall in May, and
the interception of a massive shipment of Libyan arms by French
police in October, were serious blows to its organisations capacity
and morale. The killing of eleven civilians at the Remembrance
255
Day Parade in Enniskillen that November caused widespread

political and public revulsion. RT held a minutes silence on
Irish national television and more than 50,000 people signed
a book of condolence in the Lord Mayors residence in central
Dublin. Feeney quotes a senior IRA activist who commenting
afterwards admitted that 1987 had been the worst year the IRA
had had for five years and that the Enniskillen bombing had
totally devastated republican support beyond its central core.142
The combined effect of the AngloIrish Agreement, the British
governments security offensive against the IRA, the failure to
secure an electoral breakthrough and the impact of the IRAs
armed campaign combined had, in Gerry Adams own words,
dealt a body blow to efforts to build Sinn Fin into a major allIreland political and electoral force.
Adapting to Changing Political Conditions

The political strategy of Gerry Adams and the post- Brdaigh
leadership of Sinn Fin was based on two key propositions. The
first was a belief that the armed campaign of the IRA would
undermine the British governments willingness to remain in
Ireland. The second was that a radical republican socialist political
party, mobilising the most marginalised sections of Irish society
north and south, could build mass support for an agenda of
profound constitutional, political, social and economic change.
Sinn Fins electoral strategy was complemented by attempts
to expand the partys policy platform, widen the organisations
campaigning reach, and build alliances with communities and other
progressive social forces. While based on the radical republican
thinking and activism of Connolly, Mellows and Gilmore, it also
drew inspiration from contemporary left-wing national liberation
movements in Palestine, South Africa, Nicaragua, El Salvador
and East Timor. The success of these international allies of Irish
republicanism rested on their ability to mobilise mass support
through a combination of effective armed resistance with radical
democratic socialist politics. These were national movements with
the support of the majority of their countries citizens. The strategy
256
of organisations such as the ANC or FSLN was aimed at militarily

and politically overthrowing oppressive regimes, and building new
democratic states with popular democratic support.
Sinn Fin, and the context in which the broader republican
movement was operating, was different in a number of important
respects. While the combined effect of the AngloIrish Agreement
and the day-to-day reality of the conflict served to limit Sinn
Fins political and electoral advance, Sinn Fins support base,
particularly in the South, would have been limited to a minority
of the population even without these factors. Additionally, while
the IRA initially believed that it had the military capacity to defeat
the British Army, by the end of the 1980s this proposition was
increasingly untenable, and accepted by key figures both in its own
leadership and that of Sinn Fin. The fact that Sinn Fin sought to
overthrow only one of the two states on the island, while seeking
to reform the other, also posed strategic and political challenges.
Crucially the international context was also shifting. The ending
of the second Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union led
to the retreat of the European and international left, unable to
respond effectively to the collapse of actually existing socialism,
the changing global political and economic context, and the rise
to dominance of neo-liberalism.
These international and regional changes were not only
altering the domestic context, but pushing some of Sinn Fins
key international allies, such as the ANC in South Africa, into
a process of interpreting and applying their own principles to
changing and changed political conditions. The revolutionary
socialist and national liberation discourses, whether in Europe,
Africa, Latin America or the Middle East, were giving way to a
new discourse of dialogue, settlement, compromise and economic
stability. In this changing context, and given the already existing
limitations on Irish republicans political and military strategy,
Sinn Fin would sooner or later be forced to re-evaluate the utility
of their decade-old strategy, which though producing significant
political results, was nonetheless reaching its limits.
While the end of the 1980s were clearly difficult years for Sinn
Fin and the IRA, they provided significant political opportunities
257
as well as offering a repertoire of ideas and political positions to be

adopted and developed from international allies. Henry Patterson
perceptively points out that the failure of the AngloIrish Agreement
... the unlikelihood of any internal accommodation between
constitutional nationalism and Unionism and the increasing allIreland flavour of Fianna FilSDLP discussions provided the Sinn
Fin leadership with hope for political progress.143 The challenge
for Sinn Fin was how best to evolve their strategy, taking into
account the changing domestic and international circumstances
and the opportunities that existed, in order both to counter the
British and Irish governments strategy of marginalisation and
repression while at the same time advancing the partys political
and economic agenda.
The response found expression through a number of party
documents and books authored by Gerry Adams. The Politics of
Irish Freedom was published in 1986 and represented the most
detailed outline of Sinn Fins ideological orientation and strategic
direction to date. The following year Sinn Fin released its first set
of peace proposals in a document entitled A Scenario for Peace,
in an attempt to engage the British and Irish governments, other
political parties and the general public. Five years later Sinn Fin
released a more detailed series of proposals entitled Towards A
Lasting Peace, which represented both the outcome of six years of
internal discussion within the broad republican constituency and
a limited engagement with other, primarily nationalist political
forces, in Ireland.
The Politics of Irish Freedom was Adams first full-length
book and his most comprehensive articulation of contemporary
republican thinking. It represented the accumulation of ten years
of political and strategic development. The book dealt with all
those themes which had become the feature of Adams Ard Fheis
speeches, including the origins of the conflict, the rise of the IRA,
Sinn Fins attitude to armed struggle, unionism and the SDLP.
It also outlined the partys understanding of republicanism and
socialism and the centrality of ending British rule as a prerequisite
for building an independent republic and the advancement of
democratic socialism. Ending British rule and the pro-imperialist
258
policies of the Dublin government required, according to Adams,

the mobilisation of all progressive forces and all of those denied
political, economic, social or cultural freedom, the demand for
British withdrawal and Irish national self-determination.144 The
books conclusion, titled Peace in Ireland?, asserted that by
removing the source of division and bitterness we will ensure
the beginning of the process for the transformation of our
country.145 However, Adams was also clear that this transformation will not be accomplished by establishment or sectarian
party politicians, by establishment figures, by Church leaders, or
by British warlords, clearly indicating that neither the British
nor Irish governments, nor the other political parties, had any
meaningful role in the transformation. Rather, ordinary people
uniting to build a new society in Ireland, presumably with Sinn
Fin as one of its key political leaders, would provide the primary
engine for change.146
Scenario for Peace launched in May 1987 after the significant
electoral setback in the southern elections in February and in
advance of that years Westminster election represented both an
extension of and a departure from the strategy developed by the
party since the early 1980s. The centrepiece of the document was
the demand for the British government to adopt a strategy for
decolonisation as a prerequisite for a Constitutional Conference
in which negotiations between all sections of Irish society would
seek to agree constitutional, economic, social and political
arrangements for an Irish State.147 While this demand was in strict
terms nothing new, it amounted to recognition that military victory
by the IRA was unattainable, and that some form of negotiated
process would be required. For Sinn Fin the difficulty was that
without increased political and electoral support or the prospect
of an IRA military victory, why would the British government
shift its current position of support for the union, and strategy of
seeking to defeat Sinn Fin and the IRA, rather than addressing
the underlying causes of the conflict? Scenario for Peace contained
no answers to these questions. It also exposed the absolute lack
of any understanding or knowledge of unionism, containing
crass proposals for assisting the repatriation to Britain of those
259
unionists unhappy with a post-partition settlement. Whatever the

limitations of Scenario for Peace, at the time of its publication
in the aftermath of a poor Westminster election, and following
the public reaction to the Enniskillen bombing and the falling
morale within republican circles after the Libyan arms find and
Loughall the strategic status quo within Sinn Fin clearly could
not be maintained.
The SAS assassination of three senior IRA volunteers in
Gibraltar in March 1988 started a month-long spiral of violence.
UDA member and British agent Michael Stone attacked one of the
Gibraltar funerals, killing three mourners. At the funeral of one
of Stones victims two British Army corporals were killed. In the
immediate aftermath, the republican community of West Belfast,
where the funerals had taken place and to which Adams was
elected MP, was subjected to a campaign of media vilification and
demonisation. For Feeney, the horrendous catalogue of events in
the first three weeks of March 1988 ... marked for many people
the lowest point of the Troubles.148 The events of that month were
to become, particularly for republicans, a key turning point whose
significance was only understood years later. It was during this
period that the SDLP finally agreed to meet Sinn Fin to discuss
a longer, revised version of Scenario for Peace.
The meetings, the first of their kind, provided Sinn Fin and
the SDLP with an opportunity to discuss their respective analyses
of the conflict and proposals for its resolution. Sinn Fin had
initiated the talks in an attempt to explore whether there could
be agreement on an overall nationalist political strategy for justice
and peace.149 The SDLP were presented with the revised version
of Scenario, entitled Towards a Strategy for Peace. The talks
ended six months later, in September 1988, without agreement.
Gerry Adams in his final communication with SDLP leader John
Hume said that it remains obvious that the SDLP remains to be
persuaded that it is the British occupation which is the central
problem and the first hurdle to be overcome.150 Adams also
outlined three key issues the role of the British government,
the unionist veto, and improvements in the social and economic
conditions of northern nationalists which needed to be addressed
260
if agreement with the SDLP could be reached. Despite the fact that
no concrete outcome emerged from the talks, they were to prove
an important development in the further refinement of what was
becoming Sinn Fins peace strategy.
The Sinn Fin statement released after the conclusion of the
talks witnessed a shift not only in language, but also in Sinn Fins
strategic approach both to the SDLP and the Irish government.
While restating the partys position regarding both the British
government and Irish unionism, the statement argued that achieving
national self-determination required the securing of maximum
political unity in Ireland, the launching of a concerted campaign
internationally, using Dublin government diplomatic resources to
win international support for Irish demands, and the mobilising
of support in Britain itself which would create conditions in
which the right to self-determination can be exercised.151 Gone
was Adams reliance on a peoples movement as outlined in The
Politics of Irish Freedom, replaced now by the building of a
nationalist alliance with the SDLP and Irish government, and
the mobilisation of political forces not only in Ireland, but via
diplomatic resources in Britain and internationally.
This shift was the subject of one of the key debates at the 1989
Ard Fheis. An Ard Comhairle proposal for the building of an all
Ireland anti-imperialist alliance was the subject of heated debate.
Speaking in favour of the motion Ard Comhairle member Martin
McGuinness told delegates that
we must allow everyone who thinks as we do on the national question
the opportunity to take part in this struggle. A broad anti-imperialist front
offers them the opportunity to so. Participation in such an anti-imperialist
front does not imply total or absolute agreement on all aspects of that
struggle. What is required is a genuine commitment to restore to the Irish
nation the right to national self-determination.152
Dublin activist Ann Speed argued that the popular-front alliance

between progressive nationalists, socialists and liberals in Nicaragua
provided proof of the potential of such a strategy.153 However,
some delegates argued that forming alliances with parties such as
Fianna Fil or the SDLP would dilute the partys socialism and
261
result in Sinn Fin being submerged in establishment politics.154

The motion was carried with an overwhelming majority.
Adams presidential address to the Ard Fheis marked a significant
shift from earlier speeches. While support for the IRAs armed
campaign was unequivocal, he spent a considerable amount of
time calling on the IRA to continuously address their tactics
and strategies telling them that IRA mistakes are welcomed
by the British establishment.155 Likewise, while asserting that
the ruling clique in Ireland uphold above all else the interests
of the British and multi-national capitalism in Ireland, the
alternative was described not as a nationally planned economy
or democratic socialism but as a system of liberty, equality and
fraternity.156 Adams also devoted significant space to the issue
of republicans attitude to unionists and northern Protestants,
and again, while the fundamental republican position had not
changed, he called on delegates to understand the perceptions and
fears of this section of our citizens saying that their views of Sinn
Fin were sincere and that we have to see ourselves from their
point of view.157 Crucially, Adams concluded by stating that an
alternative has yet to emerge to the establishment politics north
and south, and with a clear reference to the decision to build an
anti-imperialist alliance around the issue of self-determination he
said that Sinn Fin has a crucial role in helping to bring these
different democratic forces together.158
These four themes modifying the nature of the armed struggle;
building alliances on the issue of self-determination; engaging
with the northern unionist and Protestant community; developing
a new articulation of republican socialism were to become
the key points around which the Sinn Fin leadership sought to
adapt and apply republican principles to changing and changed
political conditions.
Towards a Lasting Peace

The national anti-imperialist movement that Sinn Fin set about
initiating in 1989 was to elude them, as was a broad-based British
campaign in support of Irish self-determination. The partys
262
electoral fortunes also remained static into the early 1990s.

The partys poor performance in the 1989 European election
was followed by equally weak showings in the 1992 Leinster
House and northern local government election, which despite
the refinement of the partys political discourse failed to produce
any advance. However, the April 1992 Westminster election
provided an even bigger setback, as the partys percentage share
and total vote dropped, with party president Gerry Adams losing
his West Belfast seat. While republicans sought to blame unionist
tactical voting for the devastating blow in West Belfast, the overall
electoral picture clearly indicated a more fundamental set of
problems. Increasingly the IRAs armed campaign was seen as the
key impediment to Sinn Fins political development, and while
censorship and harassment north and south, and the ongoing
exclusion of Sinn Fin from the political process, were also part
of the problem, Sinn Fins appeal to the electorate, particularly in
the south, would always be severely held back while the conflict
continued. Patterson was correct when he argued that
the difculty of building broader alliances as long as IRA violence continues
is obvious. The northern editor of the Irish Times had commented on an
earlier call by Adams for a national consensus that, The logic of his
demand for a broad nationalist front, including most political parties in
the Republic, is the abandonment of violence by the IRA.159
However, the 1990s were to bring significant political

developments from another source. Secret discussions between
republicans and the British government, the Irish government and
the SDLP laid the groundwork for political progress, culminating in
the IRAs 1994 ceasefire. The first indication of these developments
came in November 1989 when the then Secretary of State Peter
Brooke indicated that if terrorists were to decide that the moment
had come to withdraw from their activities, then I think the
government would need to be imaginative.160 The following year
Brooke once again caused controversy when he said that the
British government had no selfish strategic or economic interest
in Northern Ireland: our role is to help, enable and encourage.
Britains purpose is not to occupy, oppress or exploit, but to
263
ensure democratic debate and free decision.161 Clearly aimed at

republicans, these statements demonstrate that in the aftermath of
the failure of the AngloIrish Agreement to secure the political and
military defeat of Sinn Fin and the IRA, the British government
was searching for a new approach to the conflict. Significantly they
held out the possibility, at least rhetorically, that in the context of
negotiations all options, including self-determination and national
reunification, could be on the table.
While Brooke had launched a new series of political talks in
1991, excluding Sinn Fin, the real political engagement was
happening behind the scenes, with Hume, Fianna Fil Taoiseach
Charles Haughey and the British government engaging in a series
of discussions. Sinn Fin launched a substantially revised set of
proposals in February 1992 called Towards A Lasting Peace in
Ireland. Feeney argues that the new document marked in black
and white the huge sea change that had taken place in republican
thinking.162 It argued that peace required a British government
which makes the ending of partition its political objective, a
Dublin government which has the same end, and cooperation
between the British and Irish governments to bring about in
the shortest possible time the reunification of the country. The
document also acknowledged that reunification could only be
achieved in consultation with the representatives of the Irish
minority the Northern Unionists as well as with the representatives of the Northern Nationalists. It effects a process of national
reconciliation.163 Feeney quotes senior Sinn Fin strategist Jim
Gibney, who speaking at the 1992 Wolfe Tone Commemoration
said: We know and accept that the British governments departure
must be preceded by a sustained period of peace and will arise out
of negotiations involving the different shades of Irish nationalism
and unionism.164 Patterson, who described the appearance of a
new fluidity in republican thinking quotes another key party
strategist, Richard McAuley, who told journalists: Were not
going to realise our full potential as long as the war is going on
in the North and as long as Sinn Fin is presented the way it is
with regard to armed struggle and violence.165
264
While both Feeney and Patterson are right in recognising the

shifts taking place within Sinn Fins approach to armed struggle,
the issue for republicans was much broader than the limits of IRA
activity on the partys electoral development. Nineteen-ninety
marked 20 years of the IRAs campaign. During the same period
Sinn Fin had undergone three significant shifts in 1975, 1983
and 1988 in strategy and policy. Yet in the opening years of the
conflicts third decade, neither a sustained IRA campaign, nor a
decade of intensive party building, had brought republicans closer
to achieving their medium or long-term objectives. While both
Sinn Fin and the IRA had held in check all attempts to defeat
the republican project and stabilise the northern state, advancing
the republican movements aims of national independence and
democratic socialism was going to require something more
than just survival. The four key themes in Gerry Adams 1989
Ard Fheis speech modifying the nature of the armed struggle;
building alliances on the issue of self-determination; engaging with
the northern unionist and Protestant community; developing a
new articulation of republican socialism were going to require
profound change if republicanism was to have greater purchase
on and impact in the final decade of the century.
Throughout the first years of the 1990s a clear shift in Sinn
Fins political focus was taking place. Ard Feiseanna from 1990
to 1993 continued ongoing policy debates on issues of workers
and womens rights, anti-nationalist discrimination in the north
of Ireland, opposition to government repression and censorship,
support for the growing number of political prisoners (numbering
between 700 and 800), revival of the Irish language and a
strong international dimension, increasingly focusing on both
South Africa and the Basque Country. However Gerry Adams
presidential addresses, while continuing to engage in the need for
a radical social and economic alternative to the failed right-wing
policies in Dublin and London, was increasingly foregrounding
issues of dialogue, political settlement and peace. Responding to
Peter Brookes remarks that there could be no military defeat of
the IRA, Adams told delegates attending the 1990 Ard Fheis that
this is a pressing and compelling reason for them [the British
265
government] to stop fighting now in order that the conditions for

justice and peace in Ireland can be agreed ... Serious observers of
the conflict in Ireland, including the British government, know
that talks with Sinn Fin are inevitable.166 The following year
he used the occasion of moves towards peace and democracy in
South Africa and Eastern Europe, and criticism of the Gulf War,
to declare: There should be no war in the Gulf. There should be
no war in Ireland. There should be a political settlement.167
Responding to media speculation regarding the possibility of a
peace initiative, Adams told delegates that Sinn Fin is interested
and Sinn Fin will continue to be interested and involved in seeking
ways and means to bring peace out of the chaos and division
created by British occupation ... That is one of the central reasons
for our existence.168 The Sinn Fin president again called on Peter
Brooke to abandon his governments undemocratic practice of
refusing to recognise the rights of our electorate and to end its
refusal to meet Sinn Fin.169
Following the release of Towards A Lasting Peace at the 1992
Ard Fheis, Adams told delegates: It is time for a new initiative,
a new realism.170 Calling for a democratic resolution to the
conflict, he argued that as a first step, a peace process with
inclusive dialogue is required and that Sinn Fin is prepared
to talk to anyone without preconditions.171 In response to
the British governments public position of refusing to engage
with republicans, Adams reminded delegates that the British
government has talked to republicans in the past. It will do so, it
is my confident belief, again. The only thing in question is when
and under what circumstances such dialogue will take place.172
Adams also responded to those who argued that Sinn Fins call
for peace was contradicted by the IRAs ongoing armed campaign.
While reaffirming the Irish peoples right to use armed struggle in
the context of seeking Irish independence and in the conditions of
British occupation in the six counties, he argued that Sinn Fin
does not advocate violence. Our party is committed to dealing
with the central issues, to challenging the causes of conflict in
Ireland and by doing so to create the real conditions in which
real and lasting peace can be achieved.173
266
Adams returned to the same themes again at the February

1993 Ard Fheis, telling delegates that there can be no solution
that denies the existence of any protagonist to the conflict.
Dialogue will require courage, perhaps a leap of faith, certainly
an imaginative empathy so sadly lacking in AngloIrish affairs
and undoubtedly also, democratic compromise. Crucially, he
told the Ard Fheis that a peace process, if it is to be meaningful
and genuine, must address the political problem which has been
a part of our history for generations [i.e. partition]. Such a policy
shift by the British would meet with a positive response from
republicans and usher in a new era.174
Such a positive response could only mean a cessation of the
IRAs armed campaign. However the IRA killing of two children
in Warrington a month after the 1993 Ard Fheis provoked a
massive political backlash against Sinn Fin. Twenty-thousand
people marched in Dublin, officially for peace, but in reality for
an end to IRA violence. The march, which had the support of all
the main southern political parties, was the site of ugly scenes as
stewards prevented the participation of a delegation of families
whose relatives had been killed by the British Army, RUC and
unionist paramilitaries. The death of nine civilians on Belfasts
Shankill Road in October 1993, following an IRA bomb targeting
a UDA meeting in the floor above, further consolidated public
opinion north and south, in opposition to Sinn Fins call for
dialogue. However, John Hume resumed his contact with Gerry
Adams in April 1993, and following a period of secret dialogue,
the HumeAdams initiative was launched. In a joint statement
that June the two leaders stated that:
Everyone has a solemn duty to change the political climate away from
conflict and towards a process of national reconciliation which sees
the peaceful accommodation of the differences between the people of
Britain and Ireland and the Irish peoples themselves ... we accept that an
internal settlement is not a solution ... we accept that the Irish people as
a whole have a right to national self-determination ... The exercise of selfdetermination is a matter for agreement between the people of Ireland.
267
It is the search for that agreement and the means of achieving it on which
we will be concentrating.175
The HumeAdams dialogue also involved the Irish government,

through intermediaries representing both sides. In November Sinn
Fin released a list of the contacts that had taken place between
republicans and the British government since 1990. The Sinn
Fin document said:
In the early part of 1993, the British government proposed a series of
meetings with Sinn Fin, arguing that an intensive round of such meetings
would result in Irish republicans being convinced that armed struggle
was no longer necessary. They requested a two to three week undeclared
suspension of operations by the Irish Republican Army to facilitate this.
Sinn Fin sought and gained such a commitment from the IRA. This was
communicated to the British government on 10 May 1993. There was no
positive response.176
However, political progress was being made behind the scenes,

with the circulation of a text between the Irish and British
governments, and Sinn Fin and the SDLP. The announcement
of the Downing Street Declaration, by Irish Taoiseach Albert
Reynolds and Conservative Prime Minister John Major, in
December 1993, proved to be an important turning point. Key
issues in the document, including a British recognition of Irish selfdetermination subject to agreement from northern unionists and
the possibility of the Irish government weakening its constitutional
claim to the north of Ireland, caused substantial concerns within
republican ranks. However the Declaration also held out the
prospect of dialogue involving all political parties in the context
of ceasefires being called. Sinn Fin called for clarification and
after some months accepted the document as a starting point for
progress despite serious reservations about its content. The scene
was set for the announcement in August 1994 of a complete
cessation of military operations by the IRA. The armed group
called for inclusive negotiations and for everyone to approach
this new situation with energy, determination and patience.177
268
Between 1986 and 1994 Sinn Fins political strategy had

undergone substantial revision. The party remained committed
to a 32-County democratic socialist republic; in both its rhetoric
and organisational activity it worked hard to implement its agreed
broad-front approach, combining national democratic objectives
British withdrawal and reunification with a radical social and
economic agenda. It also continued to attack the SDLP and the
southern political parties for their political and economic failures.
However, increasingly, the focus of the party, and particularly
of its leadership, was the initiation of a peace process. While
from Scenario for Peace through to 1990 the partys approach
was one of securing a declaration of intent from the British
government to withdraw from Ireland, followed by negotiations
between Irish political parties, by 1994 the party had recognised
that in fact negotiations and agreement would be followed by a
period of political stability and peace from within which issues
of withdrawal and reunification could be addressed. The party
had also come to the view that armed struggle would have to end
before such talks took place.
The new approach would cause significant strains within both
Sinn Fin and the broader republican constituency. Whether the
party fully understood it or not, the logic of an inclusive peace
process, involving reconciliation, compromise and agreement,
would draw Sinn Fin closer to those conservative nationalist forces
that it had campaigned against for two decades, namely Fianna
Fil and the SDLP. It would also require the party to seriously
engage with the northern unionist and Protestant communities,
in order to both understand and eventually reach accommodation
with them. Importantly, it would also mean that the partys radical
social and economic agenda would increasingly recede, as the
requirements of the peace process would take precedence. And
of course it would mean an end to the IRAs armed campaign,
without securing its primary strategic objective, namely a date
for the British states withdrawal from Ireland. These changes, in
strategy and emphasis, would mean that Sinn Fin would have to
manage significant concerns and disagreements within both the
party and the wider republican community.
269
The Peace Process

Gerry Adams 1994 Ard Fheis speech, delivered five months before
the IRA ceasefire, dealt entirely with the emerging peace process.
For the first time in his presidential address he commented directly
on victims of IRA violence, indicating Sinn Fins disapproval
of IRA operations such as those at Warrington and the Shankill
Road. The speech also contained a lengthy section appealing
to unionism. Strongly critical of the failure of unionist political
leaders to respond positively to the changing political context,
Adams said: It is time that the Protestant people heard the voice
of reason and sanity from their leaders. They need a de Klerk to
lead them and us into the next century.178 In a further reference
to South Africa, Adams called on republicans and nationalists
to develop an Irish Freedom Charter, modelled on the ANCs
Freedom Charter. The purpose of the document would be to
provide a political focus around which nationalists, republicans,
grassroots members of Fianna Fil and Labour could advance
the basic national demands in the new conditions and possibilities
opening up.179 Adams proposed that the first article of the ANCs
charter should be appropriated into its Irish counterpart, reading,
Ireland belongs to all who live in it.180
The call for a Freedom Charter was a public manifestation
of Sinn Fins evolving peace strategy. In the context of an IRA
cessation of military activity, Sinn Fin believed that a process of
all-party talks could lead to a political settlement. The question
for republicans was how to maximise their strength in such a
process in order to secure the optimal outcome. Drawing heavily
on their knowledge of the ANCs experience in the preceding
years, Sinn Fins strategy revolved around a number of key
strategic objectives. The first was to build the maximum degree
of nationalist unity, both at grassroots and leadership level.
A Freedom Charter was seen as an essential tool for securing
widespread popular support for a minimum position in any
negotiations. Such grassroots support would also solidify the
nationalist consensus emerging from the ongoing talks with Gerry
Adams, John Hume and Fianna Fil Taoiseach Albert Reynolds.
270
There would also need to be significant international support for

these demands, which required Sinn Fin to significantly expand
its international activity, and supplement its solidarity work with
other movements in struggle, with a new diplomatic engagement
in London, Washington and Brussels. Sinn Fin would have to
increase their focus on political prisoners, to ensure that any
future negotiation would include an agreement on their release.
There would also need to be a much more serious engagement
with unionism. While successive Ard Feiseanna involved debates
on or presidential speech references to the unionist community,
the party would need to move beyond rhetoric, and develop a
strategy for engaging directly with all sections of the unionist and
Protestant communities.
In light of these requirements Sinn Fin began to adapt its
organisational structure and campaigning focus to ensure the party
would have the capacity to meet the challenges of the forthcoming
negotiations. All of this implied a serious reallocation of resources
and political focus, in what republicans would increasingly term
a new phase of struggle. Gerry Adams acknowledged the impact
that such changes would have on the membership of Sinn Fin
and the wider republican base, describing it as unsettling, difficult
and traumatic.181
However, despite the 1994 IRA cessation, John Majors
Conservative government appeared unwilling to respond
positively. Despite a Sinn Fin expectation that all-party talks
would commence in early 1995, there was little sign of movement
from the British government. By February 1996 with John
Major dependent on Unionist MPs in Westminster to maintain
his parliamentary majority, a hostile Fine Gael-led coalition in
government in Dublin, unionist political parties refusing to meet
Sinn Fin, and no sign of negotiations republican patience
ran out. The IRA ended their cessation with a massive 1,000lb
bomb attack in Londons Canary Wharf, killing two workers and
causing over 85 million worth of damage. The breakdown of the
ceasefire was followed by elections to a Belfast-based Forum and
a significant breakthrough for Sinn Fin, with the party receiving
15.5 per cent of the total poll, its highest vote to date.
271
Sinn Fins increasing political profile and the positive results

of the Forum elections appeared to vindicate the partys strategy.
South African MP Ian Phillips, speaking at the 1996 Ard Fheis,
told delegates that the South African experience showed the vital
need to overcome the ability of some players to believe that
unilaterally they can determine the agenda for change.182 The
Ard Fheis also saw the British Labour Party represented for the
first time when MP John Austin Walker addressed conference
stating that there can be no justification for excluding Sinn Fin
or any other party that has a mandate from all party talks.183
While delegates overwhelmingly endorsed two Ard Comhairle
emergency motions, reaffirming the partys peace strategy and
committing Sinn Fin to continued dialogue with the unionist
community, there was clearly unease among some delegates.
Aengus Snodaigh, representing the Dublin organisation,
told the Ard Fheis that the strategy had pushed the Movement
forward but at the cost of its basic demands of Brits Out and a
united Ireland.184
While the remainder of 1996 was marked by political impasse,
widespread frustration and a deteriorating situation on the ground,
particularly during the Orange marching season, 1997 was to
provide two key breakthroughs that led to the reinstatement of
the IRA ceasefire and the opening of inclusive negotiations. In the
Westminster election Sinn Fins vote increased again, securing
126,921 votes, 16 per cent of the vote and two MPs, Gerry Adams
and Martin McGuinness, while in London Tony Blairs Labour
landslide removed the block on negotiations. The following month
Sinn Fin secured its first significant breakthrough in the southern
general elections securing its first TD, Caoimhn Caolain in
Cavan/Monaghan. Crucially John Brutons Fine Gael-led coalition
also fell at the polls, bringing Fianna Fil back into government
under its new leader Bertie Ahern. The IRA formally declared
a second ceasefire on 20 July and the new Labour Secretary of
State Mo Mowlam announced the commencement of all-party
negotiations for September.
The opening of all-party talks at Stormont Castle in September
1997 was clearly a vindication of both the HumeAdams Peace
272
Initiative and the Sinn Fin peace strategy. While Ian Paisleys
Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) refused to participate in the
negotiations, the fact that the British and Irish governments, along
with David Trimbles Ulster Unionist Party, Humes SDLP, and
a number of smaller parties including the Progressive Unionist
Party representing the paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force, were
sitting down with Sinn Fin to discuss the underlying causes
of conflict and to put together a blueprint for resolving those
causes, was truly historic. However, with all-party talks came
the potential of agreement and with it compromise. Thus, while
Sinn Fin had experienced a difficult number of years since 1994,
particularly in terms of maintaining the internal cohesion of the
party and broader constituency, the years ahead were to prove
even more challenging.
Agreement
The Agreement that emerged from the 199798 negotiations did
not represent the end of the conflict, but rather the beginning of
the process of conflict resolution. In addition to proposing new
institutions of governance a power-sharing Assembly for the
north, an all-Ireland ministerial council linking the executives
north and south, and a council of the isles bringing together the
parliaments of London, Dublin, Belfast, Edinburgh and Cardiff
it also included Commissions on Human Rights and Equality,
an agreement on the release of political prisoners, mechanisms
for the demilitarisation of the army, police and illegal armed
groups, and commitments on equality and economic development.
The Agreement, known both as the Belfast and Good Friday
Agreement, was endorsed in May 1988 by simultaneous referenda
north and south, with 676,966 or 71 per cent supporting it in
the north and 1,442,583 or 94 per cent supporting it in the
south. However, despite these clear democratic mandates, the fact
that the DUP remained outside the Agreement process and an
estimated 50 per cent of unionists voted against it in the northern
referendum ensured that difficulties would remain both inside
and outside the process. Equally, Sinn Fins concessions on the
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amendment of Articles 2 and 3 of the southern Irish constitution,

participation in the Stormont Assembly, and the tacit acceptance
of the idea of unionist consent, would make the Belfast Agreement
a step too far for a small but significant number of Sinn Fin and
IRA activists.
It was to take a decade before the process of implementation
of the Agreement was finally underway. Substantial political
deadlocks over IRA weapons, police reform and the functioning
of the new political institutions were to dog the process from the
outset. There were also significant concerns over the operation of
the Human Rights and Equality Commissions. Political violence
from loyalists, republicans and the state was also to take its
toll at various junctures, as did external political events such as
the ongoing Orange Order protests at Drumcree, the unionist
blockade of Holy Cross Catholic girls school in 2001, British
government collusion with loyalist paramilitaries, the killing of
Robert McCartney in 2004, the trial and imprisonment of three
republicans in Colombia, and the Northern Bank robbery in 2005.
The decade between 1998 and 2008 was to see successive rounds
of negotiations at Stormont Castle (1999), Weston Park (2001),
Leeds Castle (2004), and St Andrews (2007), in an attempt to
secure a stable basis for implementation of all aspects of the
Agreement. The Belfast-based Assembly and power-sharing
executive was established three separate times, collapsing under
the strain of the process in 1999, twice in 2001, and again in
2002, the last time for four and a half years. Finally, in October
2007, the British and Irish governments launched the St Andrews
Agreement, following detailed negotiations involving Sinn Fin
and the DUP. The power-sharing executive was established in
May 2008, and at the time of writing the institutions are up and
running with participation from all political parties.
For Sinn Fin the nature of the Agreement, and indeed the
peace process as a whole, was fundamentally different than for
the other protagonists. In some senses two distinct models of
conflict resolution were at play simultaneously. For Irish unionists
and the British government the peace process was essentially a
process of stabilisation. If the conflict was primarily a problem
274
of terrorism and paramilitary violence, then ending the conflict

was conceived in terms of bringing an end to violence. The
British governments strategy from Sunningdale in 1974 to the
AngloIrish Agreement in 1985 was predicated on the logic of
counter-insurgency, aimed at politically and militarily defeating
republicans. The failure of the AngloIrish Agreement provoked
a strategic shift away from exclusion and marginalisation and
towards accommodation and ultimately neutralisation. For the
British government, and in turn Irish unionists, the equation to be
solved post AngloIrish Agreement was how to give the minimum
level of reform in return for the maximum degree of stability,
while always holding out the possibility for further change from
within the political process. Unionism eventually bought into
this proposition, albeit slowly and begrudgingly. For Sinn Fin,
and to a lesser extent the SDLP, conflict resolution was about
change, identifying the social, economic, political and cultural
causes of conflict and, through collective agreement and action,
resolving these causes. The Irish government shifted between
both of these models, depending on the specific moment and its
particular strategic and electoral interests.
Thus the Belfast Agreement was viewed in different ways by
its key signatories. For the British government and unionism
it was a process of weaning terrorists off violence, teaching
republicans how to be democrats, bringing the men of violence
in from the margins. For Sinn Fin and again to a lesser extent
the SDLP, the process required an acknowledgement from all
sides of their specific political responsibility in the conflict, and
a commitment to work together as equals to resolve the causes
of violence. Nationalists and republicans sought the maximum
degree of change while Irish unionists and the British government
sought to minimise and at times actively resist change. That said,
Sinn Fin was in direct electoral competition with both the SDLP
and Fianna Fil in the south, as was the DUP with the UUP. Such
electoral competition always ran the danger of interfering with the
smooth implementation of the Agreement, as parties jostling for
political space and public support would place individual electoral
needs above the broader requirements of the peace process.
275
Sinn Fin also had to manage this process of change internally.

And while the ten years from 1998 to 2008 were to bring significant
political and electoral gains, they also stretched party activists and
supporters to their limits, and brought challenges and risks in
equal measure to the opportunities and benefits. Before signing up
to the Belfast Agreement, Sinn Fin held two extraordinary Ard
Feiseanna in April and May 1998, at which delegates debated,
in full view of the media, their respective views on the substance
of the Agreement. Sinn Fin was the only party to allow its
membership to decide the partys position on the Agreement. At
the heart of the debate at the two Ard Feiseanna was whether the
Agreement would block the realisation of Sinn Fins objectives of
Irish unity and democratic socialism, or whether it would enable
the opponents of republicanism to block meaningful political
progress and neutralise republicans through participation in the
political and constitutional status quo.
Newly elected TD Caoimhn Caolain outlined the key
issues for consideration at the April Ard Fheis. He told delegates
that Sinn Fin does not regard the Good Friday document as a
settlement. But we do believe that the new political scenario can
provide a basis for advancement.185 He went on to highlight
issues such as disbandment of the RUC and the need for a new
police service, the release of all political prisoners, the withdrawal
of the British army, the ending of sectarian discrimination in
employment, the repeal of repressive legislation and full and equal
status for the Irish language as the key republicans concerns,
which any Agreement must address.186 Caolain expressed the
concerns of many activists with the proposed amending of Articles
2 and 3 of the southern Irish constitution, however he also told
delegates that the government of Ireland act has been repealed
and it can be argued that the overall effect of the [Agreement] is
to weaken the union.187 On the crucial issue of reunification, the
Cavan/Monaghan TD argued that partition remains but the all
Ireland structures have the potential to build a new reality.188
The debate that followed demonstrated a deep level of disquiet
among activists from across the country. The possibility of Sinn
Fin entering a northern Assembly at Stormont, one of the
Agreements key provisions, evoked memories of the pre-1972
276
unionist parliament. That Sinn Fin had campaigned under the

slogan no return to Stormont rule during the negotiations made
the compromise all the more difficult. Likewise with Articles 2
and 3, which many republicans believed to provide a legal basis
for the territorial integrity of the nation, the defence of which had
been the focus of party activity during 1996 and 1997. Speaking
to the Ard Fheis, Dublin delegate John Murtagh described the
Agreement as pretty bad, saying that it does not hold out any
hope for those seeking to tackle the root causes of the conflict.189
James McBarron from Cork was more strident in his opposition,
urging delegates not to become associated with a deal that is
bound to fail.190 Belfast delegate and Ard Comhairle member
Martina McIlkenny argued that going into Stormont would be
one step forward and two steps back, and that if the all-Ireland
dimension had been stronger, it would have made her assess the
document more positively.191
However a significant number of delegates urged the Ard Fheis
to approach the Agreement with an open mind. Glen Brady from
Dublin argued that for unionists this is as good as it gets, for
nationalists its just a start.192 Sinn Fin vice president Pat Doherty
argued that although there were manifest dangers within it,
there were also significant gains.193 One of the most important
contributions came from Belfast activist, and one of the key figures
involved in the formation of the Provisional IRA, Joe Cahill.
Cahill told delegates not to be afraid of change ... Whatever
changes may come in the future I guarantee they will not cause
us any problems.194
One of the most important keynote contributions to the
Ard Fheis was the speech given by ANC General Secretary and
former Umkhonto we Sizwe (MK) commander Thenjiwe Mtintso.
Mtintso had been a commander of more than 10,000 MK soldiers
when, following talks with the white South African regime, the
ANC decided to abandon their plans for an armed insurrection
against the apartheid regime in favour of a negotiated settlement.
She told delegates:
Our leadership inside the country in South Africa had decided to go to
negotiations and we cadres in Umkhonto we Sizwe ... were saying that we
277
should have the insurrection that we had been working on for all these years
... we thought our leadership had sold out ... And then two years down the
line I was also part of the negotiating team ... and at that time many of our
comrades thought MK had sold out.195
She told delegates how she adapted her military training to the
new arena of struggle that was negotiations:
we talked about liberated zones. You liberate one zone and it is yours and
from that zone you advance. You prepare your forces to advance and at
some stage you retreat but you have safe zones to retreat to. Negotiation
is about one territory that we could surge forward from. ... the fact that
they [the South African government] allowed us into the country, they
allowed our prisoners out, they legalised the ANC, they talked to us that
was a liberated territory.196
When the Ard Fheis reconvened in May the Ard Comhairle

proposals of endorsing the Belfast Agreement and removing the
partys constitutional ban on entering the Stormont Assembly
were overwhelming passed. Speaking after the vote, Adams urged
delegates to reinforce the partys negotiators and elected representatives with a
strategy wedded to mobilisations, street activism and the international
dimension ... the struggle has to be where the activists are at and it has to be
social and economic as well as political. It has to be about ending poverty,
about building an economic democracy, about treating all the children of
the nation equally, as well as about ending British rule.197
Adams concluded his speech telling delegates: Today is an

important day for us ... [but] it is not as important as tomorrow,
or the next day, or the day after that, with all the challenges they
will bring. Today we cleared the way for the future. Tomorrow
we start to build the future.198
Building the Future

Sinn Fins endorsement of the Belfast Agreement was to have
profound implications both for the partys political future and for
278
its evolving political strategy. In addition to providing the party with

significant opportunities for political and electoral advancement,
efforts to secure its full implementation would absorb the vast
majority of the partys resources for a decade, often restricting
Sinn Fin ability to develop other areas of struggle. In particular
the overwhelming dominance of peace process negotiations, while
unavoidable, was to shape much of the partys political profile and
discourse. The Agreement and the political battles surrounding its
implementation would also condition Sinn Fins relations with
Fianna Fil, the SDLP and unionism in new, unexpected and often
contradictory ways. However, the partys success both in terms of
electoral advancement and furthering left-republican objectives
was considerable.
The decade brought considerable electoral expansion for
Sinn Fin with increases in votes and percentages in every single
election from 1997 to 2007. In the 1997 Leinster House election
Sinn Fins share of the poll was 2.5 per cent. However, in the
Cavan/Monaghan constituency the party secured 20 per cent of
the vote and its first TD Caoimhn Caolain. In Kerry North,
Martin Ferris narrowly missed a seat despite taking 16 per cent of
the vote. After decades of stagnation Sinn Fins electoral fortunes
in the south were changing. The following year brought elections
to the new Stormont Assembly, the European Parliament and
26-County local government. In all three Sinn Fin secured its
highest votes to date, with 17 per cent in Assembly and 6-County
European Constituency, and 3 per cent in the local government
and 6 per cent in the European elections in the south. In 2001
the party surged forward in the Westminster elections taking 21.7
per cent of the vote and overtaking the SDLP in votes and seats
for the first time. This success was replicated in the 6-County
local government elections of the same year. At the 2002 Leinster
House election Sinn Fin doubled its 1997 performance taking
6.5 per cent and five seats, with Aengus Snodaigh and Sean
Crowe in Dublin, Ferris in Kerry, and Caolain topping the
poll in Cavan/Monaghan. The following year the second election
to the northern Assembly saw Sinn Fin extend its lead on the
SDLP by taking 23.5 per cent to their 17 per cent. The southern
279
local government elections in 2004, held on the same day as the

European parliamentary elections, brought the partys southern
vote to 8 per cent and 11 per cent respectively, with Mary Lou
McDonald taking the partys first MEP seat in the south. Bairbre de
Brn replicated the victory in the north taking 26.3 per cent of the
poll and the SDLPs seat in Brussels. Sinn Fin held its advantage
over its main northern rival in the 2005 Westminster election with
24.5 per cent, two points up from 2001. Once again Sinn Fin
consolidated its position as the largest nationalist party in the
north in the 2007 Assembly elections, held in the aftermath of the
St Andrews Agreement, securing 26 per cent and 24 seats to the
SDLPs 15 per cent and 18 seats. However in the southern general
elections of the same year, and amid widespread speculation that
Sinn Fin would double both its vote and seat numbers, and
possibly enter government, the partys vote stagnated at 6 per
cent, resulting in the loss of one of the partys TDs. The loss of
Sean Crow in Dublin was somewhat counterbalanced with the
election of Donegal-based Pearse Doherty to the Senate.
Sinn Fins dramatic electoral success from 1997 onwards was
based on a number of aspects of the partys evolving strategy.
Despite reservations amongst some activists, the partys peace
strategy was seen to pay real dividends, not only in terms of
concrete gains, such as the release of prisoners, demilitarisation
and eventually police reform, but also in opening up avenues
for advancing longer-term concerns such as human rights and
equality issues and crucially all-Ireland integration through the allIreland ministerial council and implementation bodies contained
in the Belfast Agreement. Alongside this macro process, Sinn
Fins assertive advocacy on behalf of its electorate the most
economically marginalised in both states combined with an active
commitment to community-based organisation and empowerment,
meant that the party was embedded in and an essential part of the
community it represented. Sinn Fin, particularly in the north, was
seen as both responsive to the needs of those who elected it and as
successfully delivering real political and social gains. The partys
left republicanism combined democratic socialist communitarian
practices with a radical democratic egalitarian politics focused on
280
both the local and the national, winning it a growing electorate

of working- and lower-middle-class voters as well as a significant
youth vote. However, the partys inability to attract significant
number of women voters would continue to provoke internal
debate and external criticism, particularly in the south.
That Sinn Fins strategy provided for greater political
advancement in the north owed much to the fact that the strategy
itself emerged from within the north and in response to its very
specific conditions. However the party believed that taking the
same approach in the south should reap similar dividends, and
on the basis of the 2002 general elections and 2004 local and
European elections, such a view appeared justified. But the 2007
electoral setback highlighted a fundamental problem, which while
more apparent in the south, would have a relevance for the north,
if not as immediately visible.
The conclusion of the Belfast Agreement effectively brought
to an end a phase of political life in the North that had opened
up at the end of the 1960s and offered up the prospect of a
post-conflict politics. The decade-long delay in the implementation of the Agreement meant that 2007 rather than 1998 would
be the date marking the opening of this new period. While it is
far too early to provide any balanced assessment of this new
period and Sinn Fins place in it, at a strategic level the partys
approach was to become dominated by two intertwined logics
around which the partys day-to-day political work was organised.
On the one hand the party needed to build a solid and permanent
working relationship with unionism, and particularly the DUP.
The function of this relationship was not only to ensure the
stability of the Stormont Assembly, but also to begin the process
of working unionism towards greater all-Ireland cooperation,
integration and eventual reunification. At the same time the
party was committed to a radical if at times vaguely defined
social, economic and political programme, seeking to address
inequality, discrimination, poverty and underdevelopment.
National reunification and the equality agenda were the slogans
through which the party articulated these two logics. While scope
clearly existed for these two imperatives to progress in parallel,
281
they nonetheless contained a contradiction which would require

at crucial moments the prioritising of one logic over the other,
with inevitable consequences. Securing significant movement on
equality issues would always run the risk of jeopardising the
stability of the executive, as evidenced in the rows over issues such
as the Irish Language Act and the reform of education. That the
DUPs broader policy agenda was socially regressive and fiscally
conservative added to this contradiction. For Sinn Fin, getting
the balance right between institutional stability and delivery of
change would be the most demanding of tasks in the post-St
Andrews context.
But for the overwhelming majority of people in the north,
republican or otherwise, the stability of the new Assembly and
Executive would be the political priority in the short term. The
electorates willingness to postpone expectations on broader socioeconomic issues until after the new administration was clearly
bedded down would give all parties, and especially Sinn Fin, a
breathing space from within which to manage if not resolve the
potential contradictions.
For the partys broader reunification strategy to work Sinn Fin
not only needed to be in government in the north but also in the
south. Participation as a smaller partner in coalition provided
the only possible route in the short to medium term. Thus for
different reasons, but with the same effect, Sinn Fin in the
south was seeking a potential coalition relationship with Fianna
Fil while at the same time advocating a social and economic
manifesto considerably to Fianna Fils left. As the potential
moment of coalition approached, during the 2007 Leinster House
election, the inevitable contradiction emerged remain wedded
to a radical left-republican social and economic programme and
forego the possibility of coalition in the short term or move to
the centre in the hope of securing a place in government, from
which to accelerate all-Ireland integration through the all-Ireland
Ministerial Council. The second option would require the party
to forego, even temporarily, its commitment to meaningful social
and economic change, as a necessary sacrifice to secure a seat at
the government table.
282
While the 2007 election involved many other problems for Sinn
Fin organisational as well as political failure to articulate
a credible alternative economic policy to that of Fianna Fil or
Fine Gael meant that the party was relegated, along with Labour
and the Greens, to the minor contest of potential junior coalition
partners. Despite starting the campaign with a solid critique of
the outgoing governments failure to address growing inequalities
and their unwillingness to invest in quality public services, a last
minute U-turn on fiscal policy left many voters wondering how
Sinn Fin would pay for the public services it promoted. For
other voters the absence of any meaningful job creation or public
finance policies raised a more fundamental doubt about Sinn
Fins economic competence. In an attempt to allay such concerns,
while keeping open the possibility of participation in a Fianna
Fil-led coalition, Sinn Fin abandoned long-standing redistributive tax policies a week before polling day. In the end the move
alienated left-wing voters concerned that Sinn Fin was moving
to the centre at the same time as unnerving unaligned voters
unsure of what the party stood for and what it would do if and
when in government. Voters in the north may be willing to take
a more wait and see approach to the macroeconomic policy of
the Assembly, but in the south, failure on the economy leads to
failure at the polls.
Writing in An Phoblacht in the aftermath of the 2007 election
I argued that:
The centre ground is a crowded political place. Sinn Fin does not belong
there and should not be in the business of trading fundamental redistributive policies in the hope of short-term electoral gain. Thats a kind of politics
that we should leave to Fianna Fil.
If we want to build an Ireland of equals, we need to be able and willing
to explain to the electorate exactly how much this will cost and where the
money will come from, including those instances when increased taxes are
the most appropriate course of action...
To those activists who thought that a shift to the centre would benet us
in this election, I would say that you were proved wrong. Avoiding and then
abandoning sound policies in the mouth of an election is bad politics.
283
Sinn Fin should continue to develop and defend our platform as a

radical, left-wing republican party, building Irish unity and an Ireland of
equals. Fianna Fils success in this election was made in spite of growing
public discontent at the quality of public services. The absence of a clear
and meaningful alternative was Fine Gael and Labours weakness. That
is the space where Sinn Fin belongs and where our future growth is to
be found.199
The electoral setback provoked a brief period of introspection

and debate. Explanations for the poor election result were varied.
However the outcome of an internal review left many of the more
fundamental issues ideological and strategic unaddressed.
The partys post-election relaunch in September 2007, under
the heading Engaging Modern Ireland, contained a mixture of
commonsense and political spin, but again avoided engagement
with the more substantive issues that lay behind the electoral
disappointment.
The Lisbon Treaty referendum campaign in the first half of
2008 provided the party with an opportunity to demonstrate
whether it had learned the lessons of the previous years election.
Writing in advance of the referendum campaign I argued that
Sinn Fin needed to
provide intelligent, informed and honest leadership about where the EU is
heading, what this means for Ireland and what other paths are available.
In doing so we can redene Sinn Fin as both the credible and radical
alternative to the failed politics and policies of Fianna Fil and Fine Gael.
We can utilise the campaign to build a southern layer of party leadership,
competent, uent and sharp in public debate and able to take on anything
the other parties have to offer. We can also use the campaign to energise our
activists and supporters while at the same time engaging that progressive
section of the electorate who continue to choose Fianna Fil, Labour and
Greens despite the failure of those parties to provide meaningful solutions
to so many of Irelands social and economic problems.200
The referendum campaign provided Sinn Fin with an opportunity

to clearly differentiate itself from the establishment parties
providing the freedom to take a more radical position. The
284
consequences were not only to be seen in the overall referendum

result 53 per cent voting against but in a stabilisation of Sinn
Fins opinion-poll rating back to the pre-2007 high point of 10
per cent. Again writing in An Phoblacht, in the aftermath of the
No campaign victory I argued that:
The lessons for Sinn Fin are clear. A large section of the voting base of
both Fianna Fil and Labour chose not to follow their usual voting patterns
in the referendum. These same people are those most vulnerable from
the economic downturn. Rising unemployment, rising costs of living and
pending public spending cuts have opened up a clear space for a credible
and radical left alternative to the status quo.
Many of those Fianna Fil and Labour voters who rejected the Lisbon
Treaty have taken one step closer to Sinn Fin. Now we must turn them
into Sinn Fin supporters. If we can convince them that a better deal is
possible in Europe then we can do the same at home.
As with our Lisbon campaign we need to offer a distinct, radical and
credible alternative, and convince an increasing number of people that a
better deal is possible. One that promotes sustainable economic growth,
workers rights, public services and greater equality for all.201
Adopting such an approach in the context of European parliament

or local government elections both due in 2009 would
undoubtedly provide a sound basis for political and electoral
advancement. However, integrating this approach into the partys
longer-term Assembly, Leinster House and all-Ireland strategies
would require a more fundamental rethink of key elements of the
partys overall ideology, strategy and policy. While such a rethink
may be difficult, serious political and electoral advancement will
not be possible without it.
Of course building the future will require more than a renewal
of electoral growth for Sinn Fin. It will require the tangible
delivery of the partys core strategic objectives, namely national
reunification and democratic socialism. The last decade has
seen significant advancement towards these objectives. Indeed
left republicanism in the form of Sinn Fin is stronger and more
successful than at any other time in its history. Central to this
success has been the ability of the party to adapt to changing
285
circumstances with flexibility and imagination. The emerging postconflict political space while still constrained by the unresolved
residue of Belfast Agreement issues such as the devolution of
policing and justice powers is once again challenging Sinn Fin
to develop new and creative strategic approaches. That this new
phase of struggle contains both risks and opportunities is not in
doubt. The question is whether Sinn Fin will rise to the challenge
and take the decisions required to build on the progress made to
date. It is too early to tell how this question will be answered,
leaving the future of Sinn Fin and its left-republican politics
very much open.
Conclusion
The history of Sinn Fin from 1905 can be divided into twelve
distinct periods. Griffiths Sinn Fin from 1905; de Valeras two
Sinn Fins in 1917 and 1922; Flanagan and Buckleys Sinn Fin
from 1926; MacLgans Sinn Fin from 1950; Goulding and
MacGiollas Sinn Fin from 1962, Brdaighs Sinn Fin from
1970; a transition between Brdaigh and Adams from 1975 to
1983, and four distinct periods of Sinn Fin under Gerry Adams
leadership, from 1983 to 1986, from 1987 to 1994, from 1994
to 1998, and from 1999 to the present. During these periods,
the ideology, strategies, policies, form and impact of the party
have been at times radically different. These differences are party
explained by the radically shifting contexts of the revolutionary
period post-1916, the separate periods of state formation north
and south from 1922, the conflict in the north from 1968, and the
peace process and Celtic Tiger since the early 1990s. In turn the
future of the party will be shaped by the post-conflict, post-Celtic
Tiger context in which it now finds itself. Of course Sinn Fins
development during all of this period was equally determined by
the conscious agency of its leadership, activists and supporters, and
how they understood and engaged with these shifting contexts.
In ideological terms Sinn Fin can be said to have had four
distinct periods. From its foundation through to the formation of
Fianna Fil the party served as a vehicle for advanced nationalist
286
and then political republican goals. While strategic and policy

differences existed between Griffith and de Valera, the underlying
objectives were similar. Indeed, part of the difficulty for Sinn
Fin from 1926 through to 1950 was that it adhered to the same
programme, style and strategy as that developed in very different
circumstances. Sinn Fins second ideological period is marked by
the reorganisation from the 1950s onwards, and characterised by
social conservatism and a narrowly defined political nationalism.
The failure of Operation Harvest demonstrated the inescapable
fact that such an approach, both in political and military terms,
had little meaning or purchase among the general population
north and south. The rise of modernisers such as Goulding,
Brdaigh and others in the 1960s represents the third distinct
phase, in which Sinn Fin attempted to reinvent itself through a
re-engagement with radical agitational politics. Gouldings move
to the Marxist left, abandonment of armed struggle and desire
to engage with the institutions of the state was to provoke a
split within the broader republican movement. The formation of
Provisional Sinn Fin in 1970 saw the combination of republicanisms traditional goal ending partition and the reunification
of Ireland with a series of attempts to redefine the meaning and
content of the partys socialism, from Christian to Democratic to
Egalitarian. Indeed while the party today remains committed to
these twin goals reunification and democratic socialism the
process of reassessment and redefinition continues.
The form of Sinn Fin has also changed dramatically during
its century of struggle, from Griffiths campaigning think tank, to
de Valeras nationalist umbrella movement, to the marginalised
association of like-minded individuals in the 1930s and 1940s, to
adjutant to the IRA in the 1950s, and political party in its own
right, albeit with a changing relationship to the IRA, from the
1960s to the present. However, the party has never seen itself as
a party in the classical sense, but rather as part of a movement,
not only including the IRA, but also communities and other social
forces such as trade unions, campaign groups and NGOs. That
the reality of this movement has always been less significant than
Sinn Fin desires, outside of republican strongholds such as West
287
Belfast and Derry, does not belie the fact that Sinn Fin does not
consider itself a traditional political party. Decades of adherence
to institutional and electoral abstentionism are part of the reason.
But more important, and particularly since the 1960s and 1970s,
is the belief that politics should not be reduced to the institutions
of representative democracy. Contemporary Sinn Fin views
politics as a popular process of engagement, empowerment and
participation, of which the formal party structure is only a part.
That Sinn Fin continues to refuse the privileging of elected representatives over non-elected activists is one manifestation of this.
Through the century the themes of class, gender and nation have
troubled republicans. For Griffith nationalist unity came before all
else, including support for labour. For de Valera the imperative of
nationalist unity was paramount, to the ultimate detriment of both
gender equality and social and economic justice. Much of his social
conservatism continued to influence Sinn Fin right through to the
1960s. However in different ways the three phases of post-1950s
leadership represented by Goulding, Brdaigh and Adams have
attempted to grapple with these issues, with varying responses and
degrees of success. For Goulding Marxism provided the basis for
addressing all three. For Brdaigh, federalism and Christian
socialism provided the foundation. Since the 1980s Sinn Fin has
evolved increasingly sophisticated discourses and mechanisms
to address each in turn, although with less success that it clearly
desired, to which I will return in the conclusion.
Finally, in terms of impact, Sinn Fin is arguably the most
important political organisation in modern Irish political history.
The two major southern political parties, Fianna Fil and Fine
Gael, trace their origins to Griffiths Sinn Fin, and the first
30 years of the southern state were based in large part on the
political and economic policies of Griffith and de Valera. In
the north, while Sinn Fin has only recently displaced the more
conservative nationalism of the Irish Nationalist Party and the
Social Democratic and Labour Party, it still had a profound impact
on the nature of the state from its foundation, though not always
in ways that reflected the reality of the partys position or strength.
As Sinn Fins importance and impact on southern politics started
288
to wane its influence in the north increased. Today Sinn Fin is

the third largest political party on the island. While the balance
of influence is still weighed overwhelmingly in the north, the
scope for expansion in the south is enormous, particularly in
the context of the changing economic and social circumstances,
post-Celtic Tiger. Whatever the assessment of others, Sinn Fin
clearly believes that its political and electoral growth has not yet
peaked. Closing his presidential address to the 2008 Ard Fheis,
Gerry Adams told delegates that if we are disciplined and hard
working, if we promote intelligent policies, if we are dedicated to
our vision for Ireland, then the women and men of Sinn Fin can
meet the challenges ahead and make the big changes. We have
come a long way and there is still a road to go.202
CONCLUSION
The History Lesson

Robert Ballaghs 1989 painting entitled The History Lesson is
a self-portrait of the artist sitting between two of the towering
figures of modern Irish politics, Pdraig Pearse and James
Connolly. Painted at the height of the revisionist controversy
and two years before the 75th anniversary of the 1916 rising,
it represents Ballaghs ongoing conversation with the founding
moment of modern Ireland and two of its key protagonists.
Pearse the cultural nationalist, language activist and poet of
the 1916 rebellion, represents the spirit of Irish cultural and
political nationalism, rooted in the romantic traditions of the
nineteenth-century Young Ireland movement. Connolly, the
Marxist, trade unionist, self-taught political theorist and leader of
Europes first workers militia, the Irish Citizens Army, represents
the participation of the working class in Irelands struggle for
independence, and more significantly the attempt to combine
political nationalism with democratic socialism. The artist, the
third point in the triangle, his head shifting restlessly between both
men, represents the contemporary left republican, attempting to
make sense of the overlapping ideological and political legacies
of two of the founding figures of both twentieth-century Ireland
and modern republicanism.
Ballagh, one of Irelands most important contemporary artists,
has been involved in radical left-republican politics for more than
four decades, and continues to play an active role in campaigns
against the war in Iraq and in Euro-critical organisations such
as The Peoples Movement. For Ballagh, The History Lesson is
an attempt to capture his own engagement with Irish political
history. However, the painting also encapsulates an ideological
and strategic dilemma that has been the subject of a century-long
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290
conversation among those of us whose political project straddles

two of the great political aspirations of our time: for full national
independence and for a society founded on principles of equality
and solidarity.
At the heart of this conversation has been an attempt to
reconcile the competing ideological, organisational and strategic
requirements of nationalism and socialism. Successive generations
of left republicans have argued that these two aspects of our
political project represent two sides of the same coin. For
James Connolly this meant that: The cause of Labour is the
cause of Ireland. The cause of Ireland is the cause of Labour.1
Half a century later, Gerry Adams argued that: If you want to
talk about socialism in the Irish context you cannot divorce the
socialist aspiration from the aspiration of national independence.2
However, in reality, from Connolly through to Adams this
relationship has been problematic and often a source of tension,
as activists are faced with competing ideological, strategic and
tactical choices, depending on which side of the coin they opt for
at any given moment.
Nationalism traditionally prioritises the nation as the primary
subject of political change and seeks to unify the different and
almost always antagonistic social classes that exist in the actual
nation. Socialism historically seeks to mobilise the working
classes in opposition to the powers of capital at a national and
international level, actively eschewing national unity in favour
of class unity. If articulated in this rigid way, nationalism and
socialism are ideologically and strategically incompatible.
However, nationalism, like all political ideologies, does not
consist of a single articulation. There are different nationalisms,
in different historical contexts, with different political and
strategic investments and consequences. Classical imperial forms
of nationalism, rooted in the traditions of eighteenth-century
German romanticism, rest on the mobilisation of cultural or
biological exclusivity, superiority or racism. Antagonisms such
as class, gender or cultural difference are not only denied, but
are presented as foreign to the essence of the nation itself, the
discussion of which demonstrates disloyalty. This articulation
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291
of nationalism formed the ideological foundation of Empires,

dictatorships and genocides.
Anti-imperial nationalisms mobilising the Enlightenment
traditions of the French Revolution rest on fundamentally different
foundations. Here the nation is conceived, not in essentialist
cultural terms, but as a civic democratic space in which liberty,
equality and solidarity are the organising principles around which
the nation constitutes itself. The republic, rather than denying
antagonism and difference, seeks to resolve them through an
appeal to a universalistic discourse of citizens rights. Unlike its
imperial counterpart, national unity is never essential, but always
tactical, a requirement at specific moments in the struggle for
political independence, delaying but never negating the possibility
of social and economic emancipation. Anti-imperialist nationalism
is, at its best, republican, but the extent of the social and economic
emancipation it can offer is not contained within its republicanism.
Rather, civic republicanism must always be supplemented with
something else to provide the social and economic content to what
is primarily a political and procedural ideological resource.
Ireland may have been the first region in the world to witness
the emergence of an anti-imperial nationalism, combining civic
republicanism with democratic socialism. Connollys Irish Socialist
Republican Party combined the civic republicanism of the United
Irish movement, the cultural nationalism of Young Ireland, the
agrarian radicalism of Lalor and Davitt, and the democratic
socialism of the Second International. In doing so it provided a
powerful ideological and strategic resource. However, as this book
has attempted to demonstrate, the failure of left republicanism
to become the dominant hegemonic force within the broader
nationalist movement from Connollys time through to the present
represents a history of failure that we ignore at our peril.
In his history of socialist republicanism in the 1920s and 1930s,
historian Richard English argues that the republican socialist
argument was fundamentally incoherent. The contradictory,
and intellectually inadequate analysis which characterized the
republican left during these years explains their political failure.3
English concludes by arguing that left republicans understanding
292
of history, of the relation between class and nation, of the

mechanisms of political power, of land, of religion, of political
violence, and of Irish unionism have all reflected their incapacity
to deal successfully with actual Irish experience.4 At the core of
Englishs argument, and that of revisionist writers such as Bew et
al. (1979), Morgan (1988) and Patterson (1997), is a belief in the
ideological incompatibility of nationalism and socialism, which,
from Connolly (Morgan) to the Republican Congress (English)
and contemporary Sinn Fin (Patterson), always undermines the
possibility of building and sustaining a coherent political and
economic project.
In one sense, this revisionist critique of left republicanism is
correct. Our history is one of failure. We have failed to achieve
our political objectives, failed to become the dominant force in
Irish politics, and failed to become the hegemonic force within
the broader nationalist movement. But the revisionists are wrong
to argue that this history of failure is the consequence of an
ideological incompatibility between nationalism and socialism.
Ideological articulations are never fixed or closed, but, subject
to the forces of history and the influences of human agency, are
always open to revision.
However, we should not dismiss the revisionist critique
completely, as has been the response of left republicans to date.
They pose important questions and reveal uncomfortable truths
about our own history that demand a response. Indeed we
should use their critique of our history as a starting point, and
ask ourselves; why has our history been marked by failure? Why
have we never secured political power? What is it about the way
in which our predecessors articulated and implemented their left
republicanism that led to these failures?
George Gilmore, one of the less well-known figures of
twentieth-century left republicanism, reflecting on the failure of
the Republican Congress, offered a glimpse of how we might
answer the revisionists questions, in a way that strengthens left
republicanism rather than forcing us to cede to the revisionists
conclusions. In his pamphlet, The Irish Republican Congress,
Gilmore argued that although the struggle against national
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subjection and social oppression in a subject nation were integral,

the failure to make the essential oneness a basis for political
action has been the great weakness in the republican movements
of the nineteenth century and right down to our own day.5 And
here is the kernel of the dilemma, the two central, and interrelated
questions we must ask ourselves. First, how have left republicans
articulated this essential oneness? How have we combined the
republican and socialist dimensions of our struggle? This is an
ideological question. Second, how have we implemented that
ideological formulation? What are the ways, means and modalities
through which we have sought to build support for our critique
of contemporary Irish society, our agenda for change, and our
vision for the future? This is a question of strategy. Taking our
cue from Gilmore, it could be argued that the past failures of
left republicanism have been essentially ideological and strategic
failures. At an ideological level, we have failed to articulate a
coherent and durable left republicanism. In turn, at the strategic
level, this ideological incoherence has prevented us from building
a sustainable basis for political action.
For Connolly the ideological limitations were twofold. First,
his Marxism was not only ill-suited to specific Irish social and
economic realities, such as rural Ireland and the unionist working
class, but, like social democracy across Europe, was also unable
to make a meaningful intervention into the politics of Empire or
war. The immediate realities of the demand for Home Rule at the
end of the nineteenth century, or the demand for a republic in the
lead up to 1916, left Connollys socialist republicanism on the
margins of the periods key political fault line. At an ideological
level, his role in the politics of the republican rising was limited to
that of a supporter of the advanced nationalism of the IRB. This
is not to deny the ideological consequences of his involvement,
demonstrated by the radical content of the 1916 Proclamation,
nor the valuable legacy that his involvement represents for
subsequent generations of left republicans. Rather, it is an
acknowledgement of the political reality of the day. Strategically,
Connolly had few options. The failure of the ISRP at the end of
the nineteenth century, the defeat of the workers in the 1913 lock-
294
out, the dominance of both political nationalism and unionism

among the Irish working class, and the collapse of the Second
International after 1914, meant that his only option was to join
the IRB rebellion, if only to ensure that it would have a socialist
republican component. This decision was not, as the revisionists
claim, an abandonment of his socialism to the politics of bourgeois
nationalism. Rather it was an admission of his failure to build
an alternative left-republican project with any credible level of
political or electoral support.
However, despite subsequent generations of left republicans
locating their ideological and strategic projects with reference
to the ideas and activism of James Connolly, the reality is that
their actual foundations lay elsewhere, namely in the 1916
Proclamation, the Democratic Programme of the First Dil, and,
crucially, Liam Mellows prison writings.
Mellows, IRA volunteer, anti-Treaty leader, and author of
the hugely influential Jail Notes, published shortly before his
execution in 1922, is in many respects a far more important figure
in the history of twentieth-century left republicanism than is often
understood. Mellows political writings were to have a profound
influence on the left of the IRA into the 1930s, before ODonnell,
Gilmore and Price split to form the Republican Congress. While
this generation of left republicans claimed continuity between
Connolly and Mellows, the reality is somewhat different.
Connolly, as a Marxist, was committed to socialist revolution.
Operating in the context of a British colony, Connolly understood
the interrelationship between imperialism and capitalism, and
thus the coincidence, in an Irish context, of the struggles for
national independence and social democracy. However, national
independence was a means to an end, namely socialist revolution.
He was, in the first and final instance, a Marxist.
Mellows on the other hand was in the first instance a republican,
who had endorsed the broad-front strategy of de Valera post1917. His radicalisation did not come from an understanding of
the relationship between capitalism and Empire, from readings
of socialist literature or involvement in working-class struggles,
but from the disappointment at the outcome of the AngloIrish
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295
Treaty. What became clear to Mellows, while in jail, was that

when the independence movement split, it split as much on class
lines as on anything else. His response was to encourage the
mobilisation of the countrys dispossessed to the cause of the
republic. For Mellows, socialism was a means to an end, namely
nationalist revolution. That this was a tactical shift, rather than an
ideological one, is of crucial importance in understanding not only
the difference between Connolly and Mellows, but the subsequent
development of left republicanism to the present day.
Connolly tried and failed to articulate a coherent socialist
republican political discourse, and in turn was unable to build a
successful socialist republican political project. Mellows, however,
was neither interested in nor capable of succeeding where Connolly
failed. His was a completely different proposition. Rather than seek
a project that integrated republicanism and socialism Gilmores
essential oneness Mellows sought to put the social and economic
struggle in the service of the national democratic struggle. At
an ideological level this meant subordinating the socialist or
left component of the project to its republican objectives, and
articulating the social and economic content in what Patterson
terms an ambiguous populist egalitarianism.6 That Mellows was
to provide a potent resource for those who sought to rework
republicanism is clearly correct.7 The Republican Congress,
Clann na Poblachta and post-1962 Sinn Fin all in different
ways sought to mobilise the dispossessed and marginalised to
the cause of the republic, with different but equally fruitless
consequences. Congress failure to agree on this crucial question
forced a split. Clanns intuitive recourse to the prioritising of the
national over the social, albeit in order to maintain government
unity, led to implosion. Gouldings new departure was a conscious
attempt to work through the limitations of the social conservatism
and militarism of the 1940s and 1950s, but also, though less
consciously, the limitations of Mellows legacy, again leading to
a split and the eventual abandonment of republicanism in favour
of Marxist Leninism.
The politics of contemporary Sinn Fin, and particularly
the Gerry Adams generation of leaders, are in large part based
296
on a return to the writings of Mellows, mediated through the

writings of Peadar ODonnell and British communist Desmond
Greaves. Crucially, Greaves, in his biographies of both Mellows
and Connolly, reinforced, albeit for different reasons to Mellows,
the prioritisation of the national over the social when articulating
his stages theory of political change in Ireland, which argued that
completing the national revolution was an a priori requirement of
any social and economic revolution. The power of Greaves and
ODonnells ideological formulations for the post-1970s generation
of republicans was that they coincided with the political needs of
the moment, as dictated by the conflict in the north. Equally, as
republicans, Mellows and ODonnell offered a more accessible
point of entry into the world of social and economic radicalism
than did Connolly and Marx.
Much of Sinn Fins political development from the end of the
1970s onwards is rooted in the ideological underpinnings and
strategic implications of Mellows formulations in the Jail Notes.
Following the failure of the initial political and military strategy
of post-split Sinn Fin and the IRA, Adams and others sought to
mobilise those excluded from the social and economic status quo,
linking their disenchantment with the conservative establishment
of both partitionist states in an attempt to secure the republic and
then to build a democratic socialist state. The solution to poverty,
inequality and exclusion was to be found in a new all-Ireland,
democratic socialist republic. The national struggle was defined
as Sinn Fins primary objective, with democratic socialism
relegated to the status of an ultimate objective. While none of this
precluded campaigns to secure specific reforms in the short term,
the priority of the national over the social was always embedded in
the partys ideology and strategy. As Adams argued in The Politics
of Irish Freedom, Real national independence is the pre-requisite
of socialism ... You cannot have socialism in a British colony, such
as exists in the 6 counties or in a neo-colony such as exists in the
26 counties. You must have your own national government with
the power to institute the political and economic changes which
constitute socialism.8 As a consequence, the depth of Sinn Fins
socialism, relegated to a future point in the struggle, would always
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297
be underdeveloped, as the more immediate needs of the national

struggle took precedence.
In turn, Sinn Fins socialism during the 1980s was rhetorical
and declaratory rather than based on a serious critique of Irish,
European or global capitalism. In turn, the economic alternatives
proposed were poorly understood and only loosely connected
to the actual lived experience of the people Sinn Fin sought to
mobilise. By the end of the 1980s it was increasingly clear that
the domestic and international context was unconducive to Sinn
Fins assertive democratic socialism. The failure of Sinn Fin to
mobilise the working classes, particularly in the south, combined
with the global retreat of the left post-1989, undermined much
of what constituted the partys economic policy, namely, centrally
planned statism, limitations on private property, and industrial
and agricultural collectivism. The onset of the peace process, with
its requirement for nationalist unity and unionist engagement,
meant that at a strategic level the party had little time, space or
inclination to engage in the broader global debate on the failures
and futures of the left. As the requirements of the peace process
increased, so did Sinn Fins distance from the international left
as did its awareness of the shifting nature of left-wing political
and economic discourse at a European or global level. That all
this occurred at the high point of neo-liberal political and electoral
hegemony in Europe, and at a time of rising economic prosperity
in the south of Ireland, meant that there was little motivation for
re-engaging with the left in any serious way.
This is the context in which Sinn Fin moved away from the
more strident and statist democratic socialist demands of the
1980s. However, unlike the social democratic left across Europe,
Sinn Fin did not buy into the ideology of neo-liberalism. Rather,
the party turned to its own historical and experiential resources
in an attempt to articulate its socialist commitment, in what
were changing political and economic circumstances. In the two
decades that followed the party developed a more communitarian
socialism, promoting community empowerment, redistribution of
wealth and defence of public services in an egalitarian republican
labour discourse. At a European and international level the party
298
focused on issues of poverty, inequality and unfair distribution

of wealth, rather than on developing a critique of and alternative
to neo-liberalism. However, while the articulation of the partys
democratic socialism clearly changed, the priority of the national
continued, with the demands of the peace process replacing the
demands of the conflict. Thus, as Sinn Fins socialism of the
1980s was underdeveloped, so it remained in the 1990s. That
the party experienced an unprecedented period of political and
electoral growth from the mid 1990s onwards meant that there
was little reason to question the ideological or strategic basis of
the project. Indeed, for the first time in Irish history, a political
party articulating a radical left-republican political discourse
was building a significant left-republican constituency of support
and impacting on the centre of political developments across
the island.
From the beginning of the twenty-first century, as detailed
in Chapter 4, Sinn Fin was clearly devoting more time and
energy to developing, articulating and campaigning on the
social and economic dimensions of the struggle. As the party
grew in the south, the electoral and political dividends of that
growth provided it with the necessary resources and motivation
to expand on what kind of society it wanted to develop and
how that society might be built. However, this renewed focus
on the partys alternative social and economic agenda continued
to be subject to Mellows proposition, as the handling of the
2007 general election, particularly on issues such as taxation and
coalition with Fianna Fil, clearly indicate. The post-St Andrews
imperative of stabilising a working relationship with the DUP
at Stormont, and the partys strategic desire to participate in a
coalition government in Leinster House, have the potential to once
again eclipse the partys radical social and economic dimension in
favour of the strategic requirements of the national.
The onset of the new century has brought about a series of
changes, at the global, regional and national levels, which are
both challenging the prioritising of the nation over the social
dimension of the republican struggle, and forcing Sinn Fin
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299
intuitively if not consciously to re-examine the ideological and

strategic utility of Mellows.
At a global level the hegemony of neo-liberal globalisation
has entered a period of crisis. How long, how deep and with
what consequences are not yet clear. However, the onset of global
recession, the ever increasing pressures on national economies
to increase competitiveness at the cost of social cohesion and
environmental sustainability, and the growing first-world debt
crisis, have provoked a crisis of legitimacy in the neo-liberal
economic project. At the level of the EU, the dramatic shift to
the right, in policy and electoral terms, since 1999, has produced
widespread political dissatisfaction, which culminated in the
French and Dutch rejections of the EU Constitution in 2005 and
the Irish rejection of the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. That the social
democratic parties and trade unions at an EU level have accepted
the fundamentals of the neo-liberal project is without doubt. But
the inability of political forces to the left of social democracy
whether green, democratic socialist or progressive nationalist
to articulate a credible economic and political alternative has
meant that the configuration of parliamentary politics remains,
as yet, unchanged by the growing crisis of legitimacy.
In Ireland, this crisis manifests itself in a number of ways.
In the south, public dissatisfaction with the inequalities and
mismanagement of the Celtic Tiger, particularly with respect to
the inadequate provision of public services such as health care,
education, child care, housing and public transport, is generating
a large potential constituency for change. The dramatic onset
of recession in the latter half of 2008 has undermined peoples
confidence, not only in Fianna Fils economic credibility, but in
the Celtic Tiger model of economic development itself. Before the
arrival of recession most public and opposition attention focused
not on the model itself but on the local political management of
that model. Until very recently all the states main political parties
bought into a political discourse that saw the Celtic Tiger as in
itself a good thing, attributing its inequalities to bad political
and economic management. There was a widespread belief that a
recalibration of the model would be sufficient to address primarily
300
middle-class concerns over public services and other quality and

cost of life issues.
Despite widespread public concern at the legal and illegal
corruption endemic within the Fianna Fil party, and their
disastrous record on public service and cost of living issues, the
absence of any clear political or electoral alternative led voters, in
the 2007 general election, to vote defensively in order to maintain
their economic gains of the last decade, rather than for change.
The key determinant was the absence of any credible alternative,
particularly in the context of parties to the left such as Sinn
Fin, Labour and the Greens accepting, explicitly or implicitly,
that their role was as junior coalition partners in Fianna Fil or
Fine Gael led coalitions. Faced with a choice between Fianna Fil
or Fine Gael, the electorate chose the devil they knew, despite
widespread reservations.
However, the dramatic deterioration of the economy since that
election has created a new space in southern Irish society. It is now
possible to advance and secure support for a radical critique of
the Celtic Tiger, not on the basis of mitigating its inequalities with
better management, but by seeking to replace it with a new model
of economic development that would seek to address its structural
inequalities, vulnerabilities and unsustainable consequences.
In the north, a decade of political crisis, which focused
primarily on the macro issues of conflict such as violence,
victims/survivors, demilitarisation, human rights and governance
has finally given way to the implementation of the 1998 Belfast
Agreement. Public opinion supports the Agreement and the
new power-sharing Assembly in Belfast, and wants the crises of
the previous decade to be replaced with good governance and
social and economic progress. Questions of social and economic
policy are only now seriously entering mainstream political and
public discourse, on their own terms, rather than as secondary
contestations of the primary political issues of the war and conflict
resolution. While potential disagreements over the implementation of the Agreement such as the transfer of policing and
justice powers from Westminster to Stormont, or the Bill of
Rights, or conflicts over issues such as an Irish Language Act or
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301
development proposals for the former prison at Long Kesh have

the potential to significantly disrupt progress, it appears at the
time of writing that the institutions will survive. Thus, as political
stability evolves, albeit tentatively, public expectations will rise,
and political parties will be expected to deliver on issues such as
economic growth, job creation and provision of public services.
Proximity to the Celtic Tiger has meant that, to date, the
primary focus of economic policy from all the political parties in
the Assembly, including Sinn Fin, has been on the harmonisation
of corporation tax with the south in order to attract greater levels
of inward investment. How the benefits of the projected economic
growth are to be distributed is where the parties diverge, with Sinn
Fin focusing on issues of poverty, inequality and disadvantage,
but crucially within the same economic consensus on generating
growth as the other parties. However, the ability of such a
strategy to succeed, in the context of the global recession, is
clearly questionable.
Thus, as the economic prospects for the north of Ireland are in
some respects worse than those of the south, the emergence of a
constituency for change on social and economic issues, in addition
to the already existing republican constituency for change, is
significant. The success of the peace process and the changing
economic circumstances create both enormous opportunities and
challenges for Sinn Fin. The social and economic benefits of allIreland economic integration, and the post-conflict opportunities
for increasing popular support for reunification, north and
south, are significant. Equally, the crisis of legitimacy facing neoliberalism, the local crisis of southern political elites, the obvious
need for a different strategy for economic and social progress in
the north, and the changing economic circumstances and social
priorities of the population north and south, have the potential
to create a significant body of support, both working class and
middle class, for an alternative political and economic project.
Sinn Fin is well placed both to initiate this alternative project,
and to build the necessary social and political alliances for its
advancement. However in order to do so we need to make a simple
choice. Do we continue to base our future political development on
302
the prioritisation of the national over the social, or do we for the

first time in left-republican history depart from our ideological and
strategic roots, and articulate a left republicanism that integrates
as equals the two key aspects of our project, building a leftrepublican project capable of overcoming both the limitations of
our own history and the present political and economic moment?
Prioritisation of the national demands a relegation of the radical
social and economic policies that both our political project and
the present economic moment requires. It also closes us off from
a broad range of constituencies who want and need meaningful
social and economic change.
If we fail to address this question, or if we opt for continuity
with our past rather than change, we will be forced to repeat
that past. However, if we embrace the path of change, a path
already opened up by the developments in our party during its
most successful years in a century, then, despite not promising any
guarantees, it at least holds out the possibility of success. It is time
for left republicans to depart from Mellows tactical engagement
with the social and embrace Gilmores essential oneness, and in
doing so develop a new ideological and strategic foundation upon
which to advance the next phase of our struggle.
The following eight theses on the future of Sinn Fin are my
tentative responses to the central question: If we are to abandon
Mellows prioritisation of the national over the social, with
what can we replace it? What must we discard from our present
ideological and strategic repertoire? What must we strengthen,
what must we add?
Eight Theses on the Future of Sinn Fin

Thesis One: Context
One of contemporary Sinn Fins great strengths has been our
ability to adapt to the changing political context within which
we find ourselves. Unlike previous generations of republicans or
much of the European left, the partys ability to reflect critically
on the limitations of current policies and strategies and to develop
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303
new and innovative responses has ensured that the party has been
able to develop and grow, irrespective of the obstacles presented
by the specific political context or the strategies of our opponents.
Some critics have argued that this strategic flexibility amounts to
a surrender of republican principles. Others suggest that despite
its merits it has led to a process of neutralisation and institutionalisation. Such arguments have neither intellectual merit nor
empirical support.
The context in which we are operating is once again changing.
Equally, our understandable focus on the demands of the peace
process over the last decade has led us to be at times disconnected
from the broader European and Global context in which we
are operating. The crises of legitimacy facing neo-liberalism
domestically, in the EU and globally must be analysed,
understood and responded to.
Political apathy and cynicism are more often than not the
response of those disenfranchised by the status quo. However this
status quo is increasingly fragile and open to new opportunities
for change beyond the immediately apparent limits of the neoliberal consensus. Some of these trends are more long term, and
inevitably, focused as we are on the short-term requirements of
elections and negotiations, we often loose sight of these longerterm developments.
Sinn Fin needs to develop a deeper and more critical
understanding of the domestic, European and global context in
which we find ourselves, in order to better develop our longterm strategies and avail ourselves of the opportunities which
will emerge in the short to medium term.
Thesis Two: Ideology

Sinn Fin needs to abandon the key ideological formulation
that has underpinned left republicanism since Mellows. We
need to end the hierarchy of objectives implied in the partys
ideology, policy and strategy, and develop a new articulation of
left republicanism that fully integrates the national and socioeconomic aspects of our struggle. Failure to do so will ensure that
304
our commitment to social and economic change will also take

second place and function as a subordinate strategic imperative
to that of political and constitutional change. The proposition
that national reunification is a prerequisite for the advancement
of democratic socialism is not only mistaken but falsely holds
out the hope of advancement of the national agenda in the short
term. In recent years an intuitive shift has started to take place
within Sinn Fin towards integrating both aspects of our struggle,
however the prioritisation remains, particularly when these two
elements come into conflict. The potential for the political to
eclipse the social dimensions of our struggle is the single biggest
danger facing the left-republican project today.
Thesis Three: Organisation

Sinn Fins ideological and organisational history, and the
experience of 70 years of state repression and 30 years of armed
conflict have all combined to create an organisation which is
both highly centralised in its distribution of power and vertical
in its structure of command. Discipline and loyalty are often
more highly valued than critical debate and internal democracy.
While many of these characteristics are shared with other political
parties of the left, the particular combination of circumstances
that make up our specific history exacerbate this reality. The
advent of the peace process has created a degree of flexibility
within the party. However, if we are to continue to expand
and respond effectively to the changing political circumstances
in which we find ourselves, we need to strive towards a more
decentralised and horizontal party structure. We need to equip
activists with the ability and space for ongoing constructive
critical reflection, and to give real and meaningful ownership of
the key political and strategic decisions to the activist base. Sinn
Fin is too small to carry out the tasks we have set ourselves,
and as an organisation we need to grow, in terms of activists,
supporters and voters. This growth can only take place if we
loosen our structures and decision-making procedures, ensuring
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305
that Sinn Fin is truly a democratic, collective organisation of

empowered activists working together for change.
Thesis Four: Strategy

Sinn Fins strategies have always been of a hybrid nature,
combining radical republican and socialist conceptions alongside
more traditional liberal and social democratic models. The
intermingling of revolutionary and reformist strategies has marked
republicanism since the eighteenth century. The dominance in the
1970s of a revolutionary model for the overthrow of the state was
a consequence of the logics of both militarism and revolutionary
socialism. However, the prison struggles of the late 1970s and
early 1980s once again introduced hybrid models of change into
our political thinking and practice.
Much of Sinn Fins strategic thinking in the past two decades
has been orientated towards building a peace process and in
turn towards the logics of reform, eschewing earlier logics of
confrontation. The success of this process is in large measure
attributable to our partys ability to overcome obstacles, build
political strength and respond to the needs of our emerging partners
in the process. Our strategic relationships to the Irish government,
the SDLP, unionism and indeed the international community have
all been shaped by the requirements of the peace process. However,
as the political institutions of the Belfast Agreement stabilise and
the detail of the Agreement is implemented, Sinn Fin and Irish
society more generally is entering a new phase in our history. It
is not clear whether Sinn Fin has a strategy for engaging with
this new reality, north or south. How can we deliver real and
meaningful social and economic change while working in coalition
with the DUP, whose policy agenda is significantly to the right
of ours? How will we manage the inevitable tensions between
participation in government in Stormont and an empowered and
mobilised community base? How will we overcome the electoral
impasse experienced in 2007? What kind of relationships do we
want to build with Fianna Fil, Labour and the other political
and social forces in the south? To what extent does the strategic
306
logic of reform need to be supplemented by a new approach to

that of confrontation, revolution and transformation.
These are key strategic challenges that we need to address,
in the context of a better understanding of the contextual and
ideological changes and challenges discussed above.
Thesis Five: Alliances

At the centre of these challenges is the question of securing state
power. Sinn Fins political strategy rests on securing power in
both parliaments on the island of Ireland, in conjunction with
popular movements for social, economic and political change,
in order to deliver a far-reaching transformation of the social,
economic, political and cultural status quo. In the north, limited
state power has been secured, and under the terms of the
Agreement, a voluntary coalition with the DUP, SDLP and UUP
forms the basis of the partys engagement with government. In
the south, however, the options are both more open and more
complex. At present Sinn Fin, like all the smaller parties in the
state, and all progressive republican parties before it, does not
advocate any pre-electoral pact or political or social coalition,
but rather campaigns on the basis of its own manifesto. However,
as the party does not expect to secure an overall majority in the
future, the only option for entering government is via coalition.
Since the foundation of the state such coalitions have been led
primarily by Fianna Fil and, less frequently, by Fine Gael. In turn,
smaller parties, whether on the left or right, attempt to tip the
balance of power in order to secure involvement in government
and inclusion of key policies in any programme for government.
Without exception, the experience of smaller parties in such
coalitions since the 1940s has been negative, both in terms of
impact on government and subsequent electoral performances.
As a consequence both Fianna Fil and Fine Gael continue to
monopolise state power, while all other parties are relegated to
the status of secondary players.
Sinn Fins current position that it will negotiate with any
interested partner after a general election on the basis of its
CONCLUSION
307
election manifesto commitments is the same as that adopted

by Clann na Poblachta, the Workers Party and the Labour Party.
In real terms, this can only mean a future alliance with Fianna
Fil, in a centre-right coalition. Such a coalition may allow Sinn
Fin to advance aspects of the all-Ireland agenda through the
All Ireland Ministerial Council, and may even enable Sinn Fin
to drive the Fianna Fil party into more focused action in this
regard. However it would be at the expense both of the partys
democratic socialism and the partys electoral fortunes.
An alternative does exist, admittedly tentative and untried.
The combined electoral strength of Sinn Fin, Labour and the
Greens can be as much as 30 per cent of the electorate. If these
three parties were to build a social and electoral coalition, with
trade unions, non-governmental organisations, human rights
and trade-justice groups, it could energise a growing section
of the population around a real agenda for change, displacing
Fianna Fil and Fine Gael and opening the way for serious social,
economic and political transformation. Such a strategy would be
risky, without any guarantee of success, but by taking the lead
in advocating a progress agenda for change, Sinn Fin would
be placing itself in the lead of what could be a truly historical
realignment in Irish politics.
Thesis Six: Irish Unity

Sinn Fins strategy for reunification is based on a parallel
process of mobilising the institutions of governance north and
south, and the All Ireland Ministerial Council, in conjunction
with building popular support for reunification in communities,
sectoral organisations and local government. The logic is to build
communities for reunification on the basis of the real social and
economic benefits that would follow. Sinn Fin in government in
the north, and at a future date in the south, would place the party in
key positions of institutional power from which to drive the agenda
for reunification. Sinn Fin also believes that elements of the EU
integration project could assist in this regard. The establishment
of the partys All Ireland Unit in 2004 was an attempt to drive this
308
process forward. However, the disbandment of the Unit in 2007

and its subsequent replacement with a high-level party task force
in 2008, the aim of which is to give this arena of struggle a greater
focus, is an indication that, good rhetoric notwithstanding, the
party has yet to develop a clear and practical strategy upon which
activists can build reunification from the ground up. The newly
established task force needs to critically examine the failure of the
All Ireland Unit as an instrument, as a first step in bringing forward
a new approach based on active engagement at a local, national,
regional and international level, with as broad a constituency as
possible, in order to build effective and committed communities
for reunification. In addition, the partys long-standing engagement
with the broad unionist and Protestant communities across the
island needs to take on a new emphasis and energy if the vision of
the Irish Freedom Charter, that Ireland belongs to all who live in
it, is to have any meaning or force.
Thesis Seven: Democratic Socialism

The harsh reality of Sinn Fins socialism is that it has never
been much more than the rhetorical expression of a demand
for a more equal society. Whether in its early Christian socialist
formulation, in the command economy of the mid 1980s, or in
the communitarian and egalitarian formulations of the 1990s,
the partys socialism has been ambiguous, underdeveloped and at
times contradictory. At present it is based on a strong commitment
to participative democracy and community empowerment, an
equally strong commitment to combating poverty and social
exclusion, and a significantly expanded policy portfolio dealing
primarily with public service provision, including health care,
education and child care. However, in terms of the two key
problems of any economic policy, how to generate wealth and
how to distribute it, Sinn Fin is clearly lacking. While part of
this underdevelopment has been due to the requirements of the
peace process limiting party resources, it is also a consequence of
a reluctance to move beyond general policy statements. The party
does not have a clear and distinct analysis of the Celtic Tiger or
CONCLUSION
309
of neo-liberalism more generally, seeing the growing inequalities

of the late 1990s and 2000s as a consequence of mismanagement
of economic growth rather than a prerequisite of it.
While the weakness of Sinn Fins socialism is shared by much
of the European left, many of whom continue to trade on outdated
Leninist dogmas or equally outdated Keynesian welfareism, the
danger is that without adequate engagement Sinn Fin will drift
towards the centre of the political and economic spectrum, in
much the same way as did the ANC during the 1990s. Sinn Fin
needs to fully enter the global debate about what it means to be
socialist in the twenty-first century, and in turn develop practical
political and policy responses that are grounded in our democratic
socialist ideology while capable of securing significant electoral
support. At the core of this challenge is the need to define a clear,
coherent and practical alternative to the free-market neo-liberal
economic policy consensus which dominates Irish, European and
global affairs. That this economic model is entering a period of
crisis is not in doubt, but the capitalist fundamentals remain, as
ever, unchallenged.
Whether the left has a credible alternative programme to put in
its place is not yet certain, but Sinn Fin needs to be part of the
global movement seeking to develop and define that alternative.
Thesis Eight: Beyond the Nation

While international solidarity with other peoples and movements
in struggle has always been a key element of Sinn Fins worldview,
our engagement with both the European Union and the broader
international community has always been based on pragmatic
and utilitarian considerations. Our key calculation, Ard Fheis
rhetoric not with standing, has always been how the European
or international communities can assist the development of Sinn
Fins domestic political agenda. While this narrow approach is
logical and at times necessary, Sinn Fin needs to move beyond it,
both in order to build our political strength at home and to play a
fuller part in the shaping of both the EU and the ever-globalising
world. In order to do this Sinn Fin needs to further refine and
310
develop its approach to the EU. Like much of the European left
our position has evolved from outright opposition to European
integration in the 1970s and 1980s, to one of critical engagement
in the 1990s and 2000s. However we need to go further, and
define our own radical vision for the future of the EU. While
progress was made in this regard during the 2008 Lisbon Treaty
referendum campaign, much work needs to be done. We remain
too oppositional, and have yet to outline credible proposals
for institutional reform, for an alternative social and economic
agenda, and for a more radical approach to the EUs place in the
wider world. We also need to extend these developments beyond
the EU, and develop our own engagement with issues of global
governance, including more robust critiques of the IMF, the World
Bank and the WTO, and a radical, accessible and supportable
programme for reform of the UN.
In developing this agenda we need to build stronger links
with the emerging political leaders of the radical left such as the
Socialist parties in Finland, Norway and the Netherlands, and
other left-green movements in Scandinavia and the continent. We
need to become a fully fledged part of the emerging new European
left. In turn we also need to become a fully fledged member of
the emerging global left, whether political, social or intellectual,
which is seeking, and in the case of the Latin American left is
implementing, new agendas for social and economic justice and
political and cultural empowerment.
2016: The Prospects and Risks of Success

2016 marks the centenary of the 1916 Rising. This event was not
an isolated Irish affair, but part of a much greater global process
of modernisation and democratisation, of which the Mexican
Revolution of 1910, the World War of 1914 and the Russian
Revolution of 1917 were a part. As we approach the centenary
of this foundational moment of modern Irish republicanism,
we need to do more than simply commemorate it in order to
legitimise our current position. We need to critically assess our
century of struggle in order to learn from the mistakes made by
CONCLUSION
311
our predecessors, and to strengthen our political capacity in the

present and future. We must also always remember that the future,
both of our party and of our struggle, is open.
However, to this writer, it appears that Sinn Fin has two
possible futures in the decade to come. The first is predicated
on the partys current ideological and strategic orientation,
prioritising the national over the social and economic, building
for coalition with Fianna Fil in the south, and attempting to
mobilise two coalitions north and south to build reunification
from above, at the expense of any meaningful social or economic
change. The alternative is to rethink the ideological basis of our
struggle, build a more radical organisation, and develop more
ambitious strategies aimed at implementing more radical policies
in order better to achieve the central objective of our party: an
independent, democratic socialist Ireland, playing a central part
in the ongoing struggles for a more democratic Europe and a
more socially and economically just world. Which of these futures
comes to pass depends on all sorts of factors beyond our control;
however, in the first instance, it depends on the choices we make in
the years ahead. Again, as Gerry Adams said, if we are disciplined
and hard working, if we promote intelligent policies, if we are
dedicated to our vision for Ireland, then the women and men of
Sinn Fin can make the big changes. We have come a long way
and there is still a road to go.
NOTES
Introduction
1. Revisionists refers to a school of historical scholarship that
came to dominate Irish historiography during the 1980s. Roy
Fosters Modern Ireland (1989) was emblematic of this approach
which challenged the tradition nationalist and unionist historical
narratives.
2. Sinn Fin Constitution and Rules, p. 2.
3. Gerry Adams Ard Fheis speech 2004, available at http://sinnfein.
ie/news/detail/3574
4. Star on Sunday, 8 March 2004.
5. Ibid.
6. McGarry (2003), p. 1.
7. Ibid., pp. 2, 3.
8. Ibid., p. 3.
9. Ibid., p. 3.
10. While clearly this is a view also held by some doctrinaire
republicans, such as Ruar Brdaigh, it does not characterise
the mainstream of republican self-definition throughout most of
the twentieth century.
11. OMalley (2006).
12. Both Daniel OConnell and Parnell had a complex and ambivalent
relationship to agrarian and political violence. While always
condemning it and never implicated in it they nonetheless sought to
capitalise on it and, especially in the case of Parnell, often created
the conditions in which it spread. Their ideological opposition to
armed insurrection or widespread agrarian revolt was based more
on their desire to preserve their own political and social interests
and that of their primary support base, the emerging rural middle
classes, rather than any ethical or principled opposition to violence.
Likewise with the nationalists at the end of the nineteenth century
and the beginning of the twentieth. Redmonds opposition to the
physical-force Fenianism of the emerging separatist movement
and his opposition to the use of violence in Ireland stands in stark
contrast to his role in the creation of the Volunteers and his support
for the British in the First World War, and to his prominent role
in the British Armys recruitment drive
312
NOTES
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
McGarry (2003), p. 9.
Ibid., p. 10.
English (2003), p. xxii.
Patterson (1997), p. 9.
Newsinger (1994), p. 1.
Ibid.
Unger (2004), p. 65.
1 The Origins of Left Republicanism

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
Hobsbawm (2002).
Hill (1989), p. 265.
Ibid., pp. 1614.
Berresford Ellis (1996), p. 54.
Foster (1989), p. 196.
Ibid., p. 207, 215.
Hyam (2002), p. 166.
Foster (1989), p. 231.
Quoted in Jackson (1970), p. 116.
Curtin (1998), p. 24.
Ibid., pp. 245.
Ibid., p. 44.
Quoted in Curtin (1998), p. 45.
Jackson (1970), p. 123.
Curtin (1998), p. 58.
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 89.
Quoted in ibid., p. 89.
Foster (1989), p. 280.
Ibid., p. 281.
Quoted in Metscher (1986), p. 54.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., p. 73.
Ibid., pp. 578.
Curtin (1998), p. 144.
Hobsbawm (2002), p. 83.
Curtin (1998), p. 267.
Ibid., p. 285.
Whelan (1996), p. 63.
See Keogh and Furlong (1998).
Whelan (1996), p. 119.
313
314
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., p. 124.
Curtin (1998), p. 284.
Whelan (1996), p. 128.
Hobsbawm (2001), p. 103.
Hyam (2002), p. 166.
Foster (1989), p. 302.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Foster (1989), p. 309.
OConnor (1992), p. 26.
Ibid., p. 25.
Hobsbawm (2002), p. 164.
Ibid., p. 165.
Quoted in Jackson (1991), p. 247.
Sloan (1997), p. 116.
Foster (1989), p. 324.
Jackson (1992), p. 235.
OConnor (1992), p. 27.
Ibid., p. 28.
Lyons (1975), p. 107.
Jackson (1991), p. 262.
Lee (1989), p. 55.
Foster (1989), p. 384.
Lee (1989), p. 54.
Ibid., p. 55.
Ibid., pp. 578.
Metscher (1986), p. 95.
Davis (1987), Chapter 8.
Ibid., pp. 20211 and Metscher (1986), p. 104.
Quoted in Luddy (1995), p. 232.
Luddy in Hayes ed. (2001), p. 31
Ibid.
Davis (1987), p. 216.
As in the case of Foster (1989), pp. 31112.
Lane (1997), p. 22.
Jackson (1991), p. 293.
Hobsbawm (2001), p. 115.
Hobsbawm (2001), p. 114.
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., p. 116.
NOTES
77.
78.
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
315

Ibid., p. 36.
Elliot (2001), pp. 2912.
Luddy in Hayes ed. (2001), p. 31.
Ibid.
Hobsbawm (2002), pp. 2456.
OConnor (1992), p. 2.
Ibid., p. 4.
Wood (1982), p. 70.
Ibid., p. 11.
OConnor (1992), p. 21.
Ibid., p. 24.
Ibid., p. 28.
Ibid., p. 38.
Ibid., pp. 378.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 44.
Wood (1982), pp. 3634.
OConnor (1992), p. 55.
Lane (1997), p. 3.
Ibid., pp. 12731.
Ibid., p. 150.
Ibid., p. 151.
Lee (1989), pp. 979.
Lane (1997), p. 206.
2 The Arrival of Left Republicanism

1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
Hyam (2002), p. 202.

Sloan (1997), p. 121.
Hyam (2002), p. 201.
Various sources, quoted in Hyam (2002), p. 191.
See Langan and Schwarz (1985) for a broader discussion of the
issues involved, and Wilsons essay in the same volume for a
specific treatment of Ireland.
Wood (1982), p. 363.
Ibid.
Hyam (2002), p. 191.
Wilson in Langan and Schwarz (1985), p. 152.
Lane (1997), p. 3.
Workers Republic, August 1898.
316
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
46.
47.
48.
49.
Lane (1997), p. 216.

Lynch (2005), pp. 8791.
Quoted in Lynch, p. 120.
Lane (1997), p. 223.
OConnor (1992), p. 67.
Lee (1989), pp. 1523.
Ibid., p. 154.
Ibid., p. 155.
Greaves (1986), p. 425.
Morgan (1988), p. 199.
For a more detailed discussion of this see Allen (1990),
pp. xixii.
Lane (1997), p. 44.
Quoted in Lane (1997), p. 57.
Sassoon (1997), p. xxii.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 6.
Lee (1989), p. 151.
Morgan (1988), p. 198.
See Metscher (2002), p. 4
Allen (1990), p. 34.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 32.
The Harp, 1908.
Ibid.
Workers Republic, 8 April 1916.
Lane (1997), p. 227.
See Bew et al. (1979), pp. 211.
Walker (1985), p. 18.
Forward, 10 June 1911.
See Metscher (2002), p. 115.
Anderson (1994), p. 16.
As quoted in Metscher (2002), p. 156.
Connolly (1972), p. 45.
Ibid., p. 41.
As quoted in Anderson (1994), p. 19.
Left-Republican Interventions
1. Hyam (2002), p. 333.
2. Langan and Schwarz (1985), p. 9.
3. Ibid.
NOTES
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
14.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
24.
25.
26.
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
32.
33.
34.
35.
36.
37.
38.
39.
40.
41.
42.
43.
44.
45.
317
Wilson, in Langan and Schwarz (1985), p. 152.

Kostick (1996); Ward (1995).
Kostick (1996).
See Ward (1995), Chapters 1 to 4.
Ibid., p. 251.
Quoted in Hopkinson (2004), p. 46.
Ibid.
As quoted in Greaves (2004), p. 364.
Ibid., p. 358.
Ibid., p. 265.
Ibid., p. 369.
Patterson (1997), pp. 36, 37.
Grda (1997), p. 4.
Foster (1989), p. 519.
Bew et al. (1989), p. 26.
Dunphy (1995), p. 8.
English (1994), p. 90.
Ibid., p. 91.
Dunphy (1995), p. 97.
Ibid., p. 97.
Ibid., p. 99.
Ibid., p. 109.
Ibid., p. 138.
Dunphy (1995), p. 320.
For more detail see Allen (1997), pp. 3642, and Bew et al. (1989),
Chapter 2.
Bew et al. (1989), p. 77.
Ibid.
Allen (1997), p. 48.
Ibid.
English (1994), p. 181.
Patterson (1997) p62.
Allen (1997), p. 50.
Quoted in English (1994), p. 188.
Ibid., p. 193.
Ibid., p. 194.
Ibid., p. 195.
Allen (1997), p. 50.
English (1994), p. 218.
318
46.
47.
48.
49.
50.
51.
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
Grda (1997), p. 22
Ibid., p. 29.
Keogh (1994), p. 164.
Allen (1997), p. 92.
Keane (2006), p. 18.
MacDermott (1998), p. 49.
Ibid.
McCullagh (1998), p. 11.
Keogh (1994), p. 175.
Quoted in MacDermott (1998), p. 63.
Cowan was expelled from Clann in 1948 following a public
disagreement during a Dil debate with party leader Sen
MacBride over the details of the Marshall Plan accepted by the
government.
MacDermott (1998), p. 164.
See Grda (1997), p. 29, for a brief discussion of the different
explanations for the economic recovery.
Ibid., p. 162.
New Left Review 64 (1970), p. 52.
Quoted in Patterson (1997), p. 106.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 51.
Sinn Fin: The Workers Party (1977), p. ii.
Workers Party (1992), p. 23.
4 A Century of Struggle
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
Feeney (2002), p. 22.

Ibid., p. 26.
Ferriter (2005), pp. 30, 31.
Ibid., p. 31.
MacDonncha (2005), p. 12.
Ibid.
Quoted in Feeney (2002), p. 29.
Ibid., p. 31.
Ibid., p. 33.
Ferriter (2005), p. 81.
NOTES
319
11. Feeney (2002), p. 31.

12. Ibid.
13. Feeney notes that it was translated into several languages including
some Indian languages (Feeney [2002] p. 39).
14. Ibid., p. 38.
15. Ibid., p. 43.
16. OHegarty (1998), p. 4.
17. Quoted in MacDonncha (2005), pp. 21, 22.
18. Ibid., p. 61.
19. Rafter (2005), p. 49.
20. Quoted in Laffan (1999), p. 100.
21. Ibid., p. 118.
22. Ibid., p. 119.
23. Ibid., p. 121.
24. Feeney (2002), p. 112.
25. Laffan (1999), p. 256.
26. All quoted from the Democratic Programme taken from
MacDonncha (2005), pp. 71, 72.
27. Feeney (2002), p. 117.
28. Laffan (1999), p. 259.
29. Ibid.
30. Kostick (1996), p. 47.
31. Rafter (2005), p. 59.
32. Kostick (1996), pp. 12035.
33. Feeney (2002), p. 130.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid., p. 124.
36. Ferriter (2005), p. 235.
37. Ibid., p. 258.
38. Laffan (1999), p. 417.
39. Ibid., p. 423.
40. Ibid., p. 334.
41. Quoted in Hanley (2002), p. 93.
42. Laffan (1999), p. 444.
43. Feeney (2002), p. 171.
44. Quoted in Rafter (2005), p. 77.
45. Feeney (2002), p. 188.
46. Ibid., p. 82.
47. Ibid., pp. 215, 216.
48. MacDonncha (2005), p. 110.
49. Feeney (2002), p. 208.
50. Quoted in MacDonncha (2005), p. 118.
51. Feeney (2002), p. 208.
320
52.
53.
54.
55.
56.
57.
58.
59.
60.
61.
62.
63.
64.
65.
66.
67.
68.
69.
70.
71.
72.
73.
74.
75.
76.
77.
78.
Swan (2007), p. 81.

Ibid., p. 105.
Ibid., p. 135.
Ibid., pp. 110, 111.
Quoted in Swan (2007), pp. 192, 193.
Feeney (2002), p. 244.
Swan (2007), p. 224.
Ibid., p. 225.
Ibid., p. 242.
Ibid., p. 227.
Quoted in Patterson (1997), p. 118.
For a detailed account of this see Farrell (1980).
Hall et al. (1989), p. 25.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 30.
See Farrell (1980) for details of discrimination in allocation of
public services and resources, public office and electoral representation
Prince (2007), pp. 21017. Prince is the latest in a series of
commentators who have sought to explain the descent of conflict
in the north of Ireland as a consequence of the impact of the
radical right of unionism and the radical left of the civil rights
movement undermining the reform project of Terence ONeill. In
particular the continuing demands and mobilisations of the civil
rights movement in the aftermath of ONeills Crossroads speech
were seen as provocative, unleashing the communal tensions which
underlay the foundations of northern society. Once unleashed these
almost primordial forces were uncontrollable and saw the rise to
prominence of political and military irredentist nationalist (Sinn
Fin and the IRA) and unionist (DUP and UVF/UDA) fundamentalism. What followed, according to these authors, was an irrational
ethnic conflict being fought over abstract ideas of territory and
identity.
Farrell (1980), p. 284.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht, February 1970, p. 5.
An Phoblacht, March 1970, p. 8.
NOTES
79.
80.
81.
82.
83.
84.
85.
86.
87.
88.
89.
90.
91.
92.
93.
94.
95.
96.
97.
98.
99.
100.
101.
102.
103.
104.
105.
106.
107.
108.
109.
110.
111.
112.
113.
114.
115.
116.
117.
118.
321
Ibid.
An Phoblacht, August 1970, p. 5.
An Phoblacht, November 1970, p. 7
An Phoblacht, November 1971, Our Duty and Privilege, Ard
Fheis address by Ruar Brdaigh.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
MacStiofin (1975), p. 1.
Feeney (2002), pp. 272, 273.
Gibney quoted in Feeney (2002), p. 273.
An Phoblacht, 12 November 1972, p. 5.
Ibid., p. 4.
English (2003), p. 179.
White (2006), p. 245.
Ibid.
Feeney (2002), p. 278.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 23 June 1981, p. 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 6
Ibid., p. 7
Ibid., p. 6
Ibid., p. 7
Ibid.
Hibernia Interview, reprinted in An Phoblacht/Republican News,
3 November 1970, pp. 1011.
Ibid.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 20 October 1979, p. 9.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 17 November 1979, p. 10.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, Ard Fheis Supplement, February
1980.
Ibid., p. ii.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. iv.
Ibid.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 29 October 1981, p. 10.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 312.
322
119.
120.
121.
122.
123.
124.
125.
126.
127.
128.
129.
130.
131.
132.
133.
134.
135.
136.
137.
138.
139.
140.
141.
142.
143.
144.
145.
146.
147.

Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 8 November 1984, pp. 57.
Ibid., p. 6.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 9.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, November 1985, p. 9.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 6 November 1986, pp. 12, 13.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 12.
Feeney (2002), pp. 413, 414.
Adams (1986), p. 168.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Scenario for Peace, quoted in MacDonncha (2005), pp. 196,
197.
Feeney (2002), p. 353.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 22 September 1988, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 10.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 2 February 1989, p. 6.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
148.
149.
150.
151.
152.
153.
154.
155.
156.
157.
158.
159.
160.
NOTES
161.
162.
163.
164.
165.
166.
167.
168.
169.
170.
171.
172.
173.
174.
175.
176.
177.
178.
179.
180.
181.
182.
183.
184.
185.
186.
187.
188.
189.
190.
191.
192.
193.
194.
195.
196.
197.
198.
199.
200.
201.
202.
Ibid., p. 373.
Ibid., p. 378.
Sinn Fin (1992).
Feeney (2002), p. 379.
Patterson (1997), p. 239
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Quoted in MacDonncha (2005), p. 216.
Ibid., p. 218.
Ibid., p. 220.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, March 1994, p. 7.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 2 March 1995, p. 2.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 28 March 1996, p. 8.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
An Phoblacht, 23 April 1998, p. 6.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 23 April 1998, p. 8.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid., p. 8.
Ibid., p. 9.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 10.
Ibid., p. 11.
An Phoblacht/Republican News, 14 May 1998.
Ibid.
An Phoblacht, 7 June 2008.
An Phoblacht, 23 August 2007.
An Phoblacht, 20 June 2008.
See http://www.ardfheis.com/news/7421
323
324
Conclusion
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
Quoted in Berresford Ellis (1996), p. 226.

Adams (1986), p. 128.
English (1994), preface.
Ibid., p. 275.
Gilmore (1974), p. 9.
Ibid.
Adams (1986), p. 128.
APPENDIX 1
Sinn Fin Election Results 19822007

Year
Body
Votes
1982 Feb Leinster House
Percentage
Seats
>1%
1982
Assembly
64,191
10%
1983
Westminster
102,701
13%
1984
European
Parliament
6 Co 91,476
6 Co 13%
26 Co 54,672 26 Co 5%
1985
26-County local
government
N/A
N/A
10
1985
6-County local
government
75,686
12%
59
1987
Leinster House
32,366
2%
1987
Westminster
83,389
11%
1989
Leinster House
19,998
1%
1989
European
Parliament
6 Co 48,914
6 Co 9%
26 Co 34,226 26 Co 2.3%
1989
6-County local
government
69,032
11%
43
1991
26-County local
government
N/A
N/A
1992
Leinster House
27,396
2%
1992
Westminster
78,291
10%
1993
6-County local
government
77,600
12%
51
1994
European
Parliament
6 Co 55,215
6 Co 10%
26 Co 33,823 26 Co 3%
1996
Forum
116,377
15%
1997
Leinster House
45,614
2.5%
0
0
0
0
0
0
17
1
continued
325
326
Year
Body
Votes
Percentage
1997
Westminster
126,921
16%
Seats
2
1997
6-County local
government
106,934
17%
74
1998
Assembly Elections 142,858
18%
18
1999
26-County local
government
N/A
3.5%
21
1999
European
Parliament
6 Co 117,643 6 Co 17%
26 Co 88,165 26 Co 6.3%
2001
Westminster
175,392
22%
2001
6-County local
government
163,269
21%
108
2002
Leinster House
121,000
6.5%
2003
Assembly
162,758
24%
24
2004
26-County local
government
146,901
8%
54
2004
European
Parliament
6 Co 144,541 6 Co 26%
26 Co 197,715 26 Co 11%
2005
6-County local
government
163,205
23%
126
2005
Westminster
174,530
24%
2007
Assembly
180,573
26%
28
2007
Leinster House
142,000
6.9%
0
0
1
1
Sources: MacDonncha (2005): http://www.ark.ac.uk, http://www.electionsireland.org; http://

www.irishtimes.ie, http://www.anphoblacht.com
APPENDIX 2
Sinn Fin Policy Documents

Economic Policy Documents
Putting People First 1998

Building a Just Economy 2002
No Right Turn 2003
PublicPrivate Partnership and Private Finance Initiative 2003
Submission to the Consultation on the Reform of Water and
Sewerage Services 2003
Eliminating Poverty: A 21st Century Goal 2004
A Strong Economy for an Ireland of Equals All-Ireland Enterprise
and Job Creation Policy 2006
A Strong Economy Sustainable into the Future 2007
Workers Rights in an Ireland of Equals 2007
Education Policy Documents

Educate That You May Be Free 2003
Education and Childcare: Reaching Our Full Potential 2007
Environment Policy Documents

The Way Forward (Waste Management) 2001
Towards Zero Waste 2004
Equality Policy Documents

Moving On (LGBT Policy) 1996
Many Voices, One Country: Cherishing all the Children of the
Nation Equally (Anti-Racism Policy) 2001
Women in an Ireland of Equals 2002, 2004, 2007 editions
A Charter for Senior Citizens 2002, 2004 editions
Campaigning for Full Equality 2004
Submission to the Oireachtas All-Party Committee on the
Constitution on the Family and Childrens Rights 2005
Submission to the Oireachtas Committee on Child Protection:
Cherishing Childhood 2006
327
328
Health Policy Documents
Health for All 2001

Statement of Drugs Policy Principles 2005
Healthcare in an Ireland of Equals 2006
Healthcare is a Right (mini-manifesto) 2007
Housing Policy Documents

Housing for All: A Basic Right 2001
Constitution on Private Property and Housing 2003
Housing is a Right 2007
International/EU Affairs Policy Documents

Sinn Fin and the European Union 2003
For an Independent Ireland in a Europe of Equals: Summary of
Sinn Fin Concerns on Draft EU Constitution and Recommendations for Treaty Negotiation Outcomes 2003
Prioritising Global Social Justice: 15 Recommendations for a
Positive Irish EU Presidency 2004
Positive Neutrality in Action 2004
Where Now for the EU Constitution? 2005
Paper on Peace III Programme 2006
EU Support for Irish Reunification 2006
Putting Democracy at the Heart of the European Union 2006
Irish Language and Culture Policy Documents

Arts, Culture and Leisure: A Policy Review Paper 2001
Ag cur Gaeilge ar ais i mbheal an phobail 2007
Irish Language Manifesto 2007
Irish Unity Policy Documents

National Self Determination 1997
Constitution: Six County Representation in the Oireachtas
1998
Reunification through Planned Integration 2003
Truth: A Sinn Fin Discussion Document 2003
APPENDIX 2
329
Rights for All 2004

Green Paper on Irish Unity 2005
Charter for Unionist Engagement 2007
Justice Policy Documents

Empowering Communities: A Sinn Fin Response to the Drugs
Epidemic 1996
A Policing Service for a New Future: Submission to the Commission
on Policing 1998
Template for Interface Intervention 2004
Policing for the People: Garda Reform Policy 2004
All-Ireland Justice Policy Principles 2006
Justice, Community Safety and Drugs Platform 2007
Policing with the Community in 2008
Governance Policy Documents

Local Power: A National Right 1999
Proposals for an Inclusive Seanad 2003
Rural Policy Documents

Breaking the Cycle: Securing a Future for Farming and Rural
Ireland 2001
Submission on CAP Reform 2003
Campaigning for Farming and Fishing Communities 2004
The Case for Keeping an Irish Sugar Industry 2006
Equality for Rural Communities 2007
Election Manifestos
Assembly
Programme for Government 1999
Agenda for Government 2003
Delivering for Irelands Future 2007
Leinster House
Building an Ireland of Equals 2002
Others Promise, We Deliver 2007
330
Local Government
Delivering Real Change 2004
Building Peace, Building Unity 2005
European Union
Peace in Ireland: A European Issue 1994
Peace and Independence in Europe 1999
An Ireland of Equals in a Europe of Equals 2004
RECOMMENDED READING
The following brief list contains the authors recommendations for further
reading on the areas indicated. Full details of all publications are included
in Bibliography.
Eighteenth Century
United Irishmen: The three best books on this period are by Kevin
Whelan, Nancy J. Curtin and Dire Keogh and Nicholas Furlong (eds.).
Curtin offers the most detailed archival account. Her revisionism is
compensated for in Whelans more analytical study, while Keogh and
Furlong attempt to return womens participation in the movement to
its proper place.
Nineteenth Century
Young Ireland: Very little has been published on the Young Ireland
movement. Richard Davis account, while poor from an analytical point
of view, is the only full-length chronology of the movement.
Fenians: John Newsingers and Owen McGees accounts of the Fenian
Movement are excellent from both an analytical and chronological point
of view.
Early socialism: A good body of detailed archival histories of early
Irish socialism has been published in recent years including works by
Boyle, Lane and OConnor. Donald Sassoons authoritative history
of western European socialism is a good accompaniment to the Irishfocused books.
Twentieth Century
Connolly: There are a large number of books in print about Connolly,
but the best place to start (and end) is with Connollys own two-volume
Collected Works, published by New Books in Dublin.
331
332
Revolutionary era: Michael Hopkinsons two-volume history of the Irish

War of Independence and Civil War remains the best historical account
of the period.
Post-revolutionary era: There continues to be a dearth of good studies of
the period from 1930 through to the 1960s. However, Richard Dunphys
history of Fianna Fil during this period is exceptional. Other valuable
books include MacDermotts history of Clann na Poblachta and Niamh
Puirsils history of the Irish Labour Party.
Post-1958: Again there continues to be a low volume of research and
publication on this period. Bew, Patterson and Hazelkorns The Dynamics
of Irish Politics still has value, as do the later chapters of both Ferriter
and Lee (1989).
Northern Conflict: The large number of works on the conflict can make
it difficult to choose. Farrells Northern Ireland: The Orange State and
Bew et al.s The State in Northern Ireland remain classics worthy of
close attention. More recent works of value include those by Niall
Dochartaigh and Peter Rose.
Republicanism: Works by Patterson, Foley, English, Hanley, MacDermott
and Swan provide a good chronology of the different moments of
twentieth-century Irish republicanism.
Sinn Fin: While there has been a significant increase in books focusing
on Sinn Fin in recent years, only Feeney and Maillot are worth reading.
Feeneys book is better for the history of Sinn Fin through to the 1950s,
while Maillots account of Sinn Fin since the 1980s contains many
valuable insights and critical reflections.
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Pluto.
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Academic Press.
Augusteijn, Joost (2002), The Irish Revolution, 19131923. Palgrave
Macmillan.
Bean, Kevin (2007), The New Politics of Sinn Fin. Liverpool University
Press.
Beresford, David (1987), Ten Men Dead. Grafton.
Berresford Ellis, Peter (1996), A History of the Irish Working Class.
Pluto.
Bew, Paul (2007), The Making and Remaking of the Good Friday
Agreement. Liffey Press.
Bew, Paul and Henry Patterson (1982), Sean Lemas and the Making of
Modern Ireland. Gill and Macmillan.
Bew, Paul and Henry Patterson (1985), The British State and the Ulster
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index
Abstensionism 5, 143, 152, 153,

166, 179, 181, 195, 204,
2058, 244, 2524, 287
Adams, Gerry 6, 9, 96, 174, 221,
231, 233, 239, 241, 243, 244,
2535, 257, 259, 262, 264,
269, 270, 271, 285, 288, 290,
295, 311
African National Congress 252,
256, 269, 276, 277, 309
Ahern, Bertie 271
Aiken, Frank 130
An Claidheamh Soluis 176
An Phoblacht 135, 223, 224,
225, 229, 232, 282
AngloIrish Agreement 248, 249,
250, 255, 256, 257, 263, 266,
274
AngloIrish Free Trade
Agreement 203, 225, 226
Asquith, Herbert Henry 179, 180
Belfast Agreement 273, 274, 275,
277, 279, 280, 285, 305
Berresford Ellis, Peter 12, 13, 20,
28, 33, 39, 56, 95, 164
Bew, Paul 95, 105, 106, 129,
132, 136, 210, 211, 292, 316,
317
Blair, Tony 271
British Army 182, 183, 188, 190,
222, 223, 229, 231, 256, 259,
266
Browne, Noel 144, 145, 146,
158, 166, 197
Cahil, Joe 206, 221, 253, 276
Catholic Church 45, 50, 51, 52,

137, 146, 197
Catholic Committee 24, 27, 77
Chamberlain, Joseph 83, 116
Chartists 42, 43, 47, 49, 54, 57,
59, 60, 65
Chichester-Clarke, James 226
Clann na Poblachta 3, 14050,
156, 161, 163, 166, 16871,
196, 197, 199, 207, 295, 307
Clann na Talmhan 141, 144
Collins, Michael 182, 189
Connolly, James 3, 9, 18, 28,
6972, 85, 112, 181, 232,
289, 290, 294
Conservative Party 83, 116
Communitarian 116, 279, 297,
308
Cosgrave, W.T. 1269, 183, 189,
192
Craig, James 126, 127, 211
Cultural Nationalism 31, 42, 75,
105, 107, 175, 176, 291
Cumann na mBan 118, 194
Cumann Poblachta na hireann,
195
Davitt, Michael 46, 62, 65, 68,
102, 291
Davis, Thomas 48, 49
Defenders 25, 34, 77, 96, 112
Democratic Left 148, 159, 160,
297
Democratic Unionist Party
2724, 280, 281, 298, 305,
306
De Rossa, Proinsias 15760
340
index 341
De Valera, Eamon 116, 120, 123,

129, 130, 132, 136, 138, 141,
143, 144, 147, 148, 163, 168,
183, 184, 1906, 2857, 294
Devoy, John 50
Downing Street Declaration 267
Drumm, Jimmy 232, 239
Dungannon Clubs 179
Easter Rising 11, 13, 46, 92 101,
104, 113, 115, 119, 181, 182,
289, 310
Eire Nua 2257, 229, 232, 235,
239, 240, 241
English, Richard 10, 291, 230
European Union, 309
Fanon, Franz 232
Fianna Fil 3, 116, 123, 12650,
153, 157, 1613, 168, 169,
1936, 198, 202, 213, 227,
243, 248, 257, 260, 263, 269,
271, 274, 278, 2815, 287,
298, 299, 300, 305, 307, 311
Fine Gael, 14450, 153, 157, 161,
169, 198, 243, 248, 250, 270,
271, 282, 283, 300, 306, 307
FitzGerald, Garret 157, 248
French Revolution 21, 23, 36,
43, 60, 291
Gaelic Athletic Association 46,
175
Gaelic League 175
Garland, Sean 200, 204, 206,
207
Gibney, Jim 228, 263, 321
Gilmore, George 1379, 195,
201, 255, 2925
Gladstone, William 53, 81, 83,
116
Goulding, Cathal 1514, 157,
2009, 21924, 2857, 295
Griffith, Arthur 176, 177, 180, 189

Harris, Eoghan 157
Hartley, Tom 231
Haughey, Charles 157, 202, 248,
263
Hobsbawm, Eric 18, 30, 357,
41, 505, 57
Home Rule 46, 53, 54, 6073,
78, 80106, 11317, 174,
17883, 293
Hume, John 21719, 251, 259,
263, 266, 267, 269, 271, 272
Hunger Strike 11, 188, 196, 203,
230, 2379, 243, 244, 246, 247
Inghinidhe na hireann 118
Irish Independent 176, 183
Irish Republican Army 6, 10,
118, 123, 126, 13074, 182,
185, 190, 191, 193211, 214,
21618, 22140, 247, 249,
251, 25373, 276, 286, 289,
290, 294, 296
Irish Republican Brotherhood 44,
46, 49, 52, 62, 757, 88, 904,
102, 176, 178, 17984, 186,
293, 294
Irish National Liberation Army
155, 158, 310
Irish Parliamentary Party 83, 90,
176, 177, 181
Irish Socialist Republican Party 3,
13, 18, 72, 85108, 124, 166,
293
Irish Times 141, 262
Irish Transport and General
Workers Union 90, 178, 186
Irish Volunteers 46, 91, 92, 115,
180, 182, 186, 18891
Johnston, Roy 154, 201, 205,
205, 218
342 sinn fin and the politics of left republicanism
Kelly, John 219

Kelly, Mary Eva 48
Keynesian 149, 211, 213, 214,
232, 276, 309
Lalor, James Fintan 13, 42, 47,
86, 1014, 291
Labour Party (Belfast) 67
Labour Party (Independent) 65,
89, 109
Labour Party (Irish) 96, 119,
128, 133, 134, 167
Land League 46, 50, 71, 101
Larkin, Jim 71, 89, 90, 92, 118
Lemass, Sean 116, 130, 132, 133,
14850
Lloyd George, David 189
Loyalist 153, 154, 210, 211, 216,
219, 221, 22832, 245, 249,
250, 273
MacBride, Sen 3, 9, 141, 146,
166, 196
MacCurtin, Toms 197
MacLgan, Pdraig 197, 200,
201, 285
MacStiofin, Sen 200, 202, 205,
208, 221, 223, 227, 228, 233
MacTomis, Eamon 208
McAteer, Eddie 217
McAuley, Richard 263
McGuinness, Martin 221, 235,
243, 253, 260, 271
McKee, Billy 219, 221
Major, John 267, 270
Markievicz, Constance 95, 178
Marxism 97, 100, 104, 105, 111,
200, 202, 206, 287, 293
Mazzini, Giuseppe 50, 51
Mellows, Liam 121, 1246, 130,
161, 165, 192, 232, 2946,
298, 299, 302, 303
Midgley, Harry 106
Morrison, Danny 164, 231, 232,

235, 242, 243, 253
Murphy, Martin 138, 178
Nationalism 31, 368, 4655,
6175, 78, 84, 88107,
11019, 121, 122, 126,
12830, 133, 135, 150, 1635,
172, 1759, 181, 184, 198,
201, 210, 216, 251, 252, 257,
263, 28694
National Liberation Front 151,
207, 208
New Ireland Forum 248
Northern Ireland Civil Rights
Association 21619
Northern Ireland Labour Party
211, 218
Brdaigh, Ruar 198, 200,
202, 221, 2258, 230, 232,
234, 235, 239, 240, 241, 244,
253, 255, 285, 287
Caolain, Caoimhn 271, 275,
278
Conaill, Daithi 202, 221, 228,
235, 241, 244
OConnell, Daniel 3941, 47, 48,
60, 62, 68, 102, 168
Faolin, Sean 121, 164, 172,
188
OMalley, Ernie 130
ONeill, Terence 154, 211, 214,
215, 220, 221
Orange Order 33, 35, 53, 105,
273
Paine, Tom 22, 23, 32, 77
Paisley, Ian 272
Parnell, Charles Stewart 46, 60,
62, 68, 75, 78, 83, 168, 174
index 343
Peace Process, 7, 8, 2659, 273,

274, 278, 285, 297, 298, 301,
304, 305, 308
Pearse, Padraig 176, 279, 289
Peoples Democracy 228, 232
Progressive Democrats 7
Redmond, John 83, 91, 92, 113,
168, 174, 179, 182, 183
Republican News 223, 231, 232,
233
Republican Clubs 158
Republican Congress 3, 135,
137, 140, 161, 163, 165, 171,
193, 195, 201, 207, 292, 294,
295
Republican Sinn Fin 253
Reynolds, Albert 267, 269
Russell, Sean 196
Saor ire 130, 136, 137, 193,
195
St Andrews Agreement 273, 279,
298
Sands, Bobby 237, 238
Scenario for Peace 2579, 268
SDLP 157, 221, 227, 243,
24650, 252, 257, 25962,
267, 268, 272, 274, 278, 279,
305, 306
Sheehy Skeffington, Hanna 121,
172, 191
Socialism 2, 27, 31, 37, 56,
6670, 74, 759, 89, 93,
95105, 109, 111, 112, 120,
125, 126, 135, 138, 150, 157,
162, 164, 165, 167, 173, 202,
224, 225, 228, 2325, 240,
241, 246, 257, 260, 261, 264,

275, 284, 286, 287, 28998,
3049
Sunningdale Agreement 229,
247, 274
Thatcher, Margaret 248
Thompson, William 78
Towards a Lasting Peace 261,
263, 265
Trimble, David 272
Twomey, Moss 130, 137, 195
Twomey, Seamus 232, 233
UDA, 228, 250, 259, 266
Ulster Unionist Party 83, 91, 105,
113, 116, 119, 123, 1268,
162, 186, 209, 211, 214, 218,
247, 272
United Irishmen 13, 19, 22, 23,
25, 2835, 4951, 54, 55, 59,
76, 87, 161, 171, 217
UVF 228, 250
Walker, William 62, 64, 67, 69,
90, 93, 101, 107
Wolfe Tone, Theobald 13, 23, 24,
27, 30, 53, 81, 83, 86, 116,
125, 172, 194, 217, 218, 232,
233, 235, 242, 253, 259, 263
Wolfe Tone Societies 201, 202,
205
Workers Party 3, 96, 155,
15761, 1635, 16872, 245,
307
Young Ireland 4060, 72, 73, 75,
77, 102, 175, 289, 291

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Sinn Fin and the Politics of Left Republicanism

Sinn Fin and the Politics

First published 2009 by Pluto Press

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by

Dedicated to Ihintz Oliden ... for everything

1 The Origins of Left Republicanism

2 The Arrival of Left Republicanism

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

This book is not a history of but rather a critical engagement with

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

lives. These structural inequalities along lines of class, gender,

to include left republicans concerned less with a traditional

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

is a dangerous and at times traumatic undertaking, from which

the mistakes and miscalculations of the past and build a stronger

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

This self image contrasts sharply with the views offered by

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

the twentieth century, as fitting McGarrys mould, whether one

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

Irish republicanism possible? Which of these views is closest to

Unfortunately much of this literature focuses on biography

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

human one, during which we individually and collectively draw

AngloIrish power relations. The divisions within the Irish nation,

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

British imperial interests and deceiving the Irish working class.

Instead he suggests that we assess republicanism as a series of

the contingent and specific contexts from which republicanism

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

broadest sense of the term. What do left republicans have to say

To understand society deeply, argues Brazilian social theorist

Left republicanism is a twentieth-century political phenomena.

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

triumph was to shape the continent throughout the course of the

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

order, thereby blocking the erosion of the social fabric threatened

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

ensured that a significant level of grievance among the propertied

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

create a space whereby the political and economic programme

The United Irishmen

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

group there were significant divisions as to who exactly should

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

become its founding principles. Three resolutions were passed

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

Differences of opinion notwithstanding, the government moved

In turn the republicans responded by launching a concerted drive

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

commitment to the rebellion concentrated in particular parts of

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

integral element of the radical pole of the movement. In Tones

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

in favour of universal manhood suffrage, arguing that every male aged

Such sentiments were shared among the leadership of the Catholic

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

describing the manifesto as international, democratic and of

The notion of the greatest happiness to the greatest number was

SINN FIN AND THE POLITICS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM

While Hobsbawm was speaking about the revolutions that swept

THE ORIGINS OF LEFT REPUBLICANISM