Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland 1858-1928: Patriots, Priests and the Roots of the Irish Revolution

By Tom Garvin

The present-day Republic of Ireland was created by a revolutionary elite which developed between 1858 and 1914. Here, one of Ireland's most eminent historians, Professor Tom Garvin, considers the social origins of the revolutionary politicians who became the rulers of Ireland after the 1916 Rising and examines their political preconceptions, ideologies and prejudices. In many cases they were not only influenced by old agrarian grievances and memories of the Great Irish Famine, but also, and more immediately, by the contemporary Catholic abhorrence of the Protestant and secular world symbolised by London, England and, to some extent, America.
Drawing on the evidence of private letters and diaries as well as the popular nationalist journalism of the period, Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland makes a hugely original contribution to Irish historiography. Daring and provocative, it reconstructs the private thoughts, hopes and prejudices of the men and women who secured Irish independence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gill Books
• Release date: Sep 13, 2005
• ISBN: 9780717163625

Tom Garvin

Tom Garvin is Emeritus Professor of Politics at University College Dublin and an honorary research fellow at IBIS. His books include Nationalist Revolutionaries in Ireland (1987), 1922: The Birth of Irish Democracy (1996) and Preventing the Future: Why was Ireland so poor for so long? (2004) . He is also the author of many articles and chapters on Irish and comparative politics. He is an alumnus of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Washington D.C., and a Member of the Royal Irish Academy. He has taught at the University of Georgia, Colgate University and Mount Holyoke College. His biography of Seán Lemass, Judging Lemass, was published by the Royal Irish Academy in 2009.

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PREFACE

This book is the result of an awareness of the ideological shapelessness of the separatist tradition that has dominated so much of Irish politics for better or worse for more than a hundred years. Because of this shapelessness, I have not ventured to write an intellectual history of Irish separatist political thought. Instead, I have focused on the period between the fall of Parnell in 1891 and the coming of independence in 1922 as the period in which separatism was most vocal and specific in its aims. This was also the period in which the young people who were to rule independent Ireland experienced their preparation for political life at home, in school and in the secret committees of little political organisations. I have attempted to reconstruct the mentality of this generation rather than its political thought, and to that purpose I have concentrated less on public manifestos, constitutional declarations or formal political treatises than on private letters and diaries and the often more revealing writings of casual journalism. Irish political culture is secretive, and the public and private faces of political actors are often very different. By looking at the social origins, activities and opinions of the revolutionary leaders I have attempted to divine their state of mind, in so far as this can be done.

The organisation of the book is quite simple, and thematic rather than chronological. However, I have permitted a chronological principle to organise the material within each theme.

My intellectual debts are many. A preliminary version of many of the principal arguments of this book was made possible by the generosity of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC, which awarded me a fellowship during the year 1983/4. The Center gave me room, resources and encouragement at a rather trying phase of the project. I have benefited by the comments of colleagues at seminars held at the Wilson Center, at Colgate University, New York, at University College, Dublin and at the annual conferences of the Political Studies Association of Ireland at Magee College in 1985 and in Kilkenny in 1986. The students taking my third-year course in Irish Political Development at University College, Dublin over the past few years have also been of considerable assistance, more than they are perhaps aware.

My personal debts are also many. At the Wilson Center, James H. Billington encouraged me at the very beginning; without him, this book would certainly have been a lot longer getting off the ground. Ann C. Sheffield, Co-ordinator for History, Culture, and Society, gave administrative back-up and supplied the best cup of tea outside Dublin. I was also stimulated by conversations with Prosser Gifford, Samuel Huntington, Michael Lacy, Teodor Shanin and Robert Tucker at the Center. The Center also introduced me to the arcane art of wordprocessing. I am required by contract to say that none of the views expressed in this book in any way reflect those of the Wilson Center or its employees, and that they are my responsibility. In Dublin, I wish to thank the staff of the Department of Politics, University College, Dublin, and in particular Professor John Whyte, who has read my outpourings and overlooked my occasional AWOLs.

I would particularly like to thank my wife, Maire Garvin, who has endured the invasion of the family home by books, filing cabinets and electronic apparatus. I must also acknowledge the forbearance of my children Clíona, Anna and John, who now receive the reward of seeing their names in print.

T.G.

DUBLIN, DECEMBER 1986

REVOLUTION, IRISH NATIONALISTS AND MODERNISATION

The Irish revolution has been a long time dying. This is due in part to its artificial continuance in Northern Ireland and to the survival of its ideas as fossilised slogans guarded by vested interests in the official culture of the democratic regime in the Irish Republic. The generally unresolved nature of the political relationships between the two largest British Isles has contributed to the longevity of the tradition. The main phase of the movement is, however, long over and it has no political or intellectual heirs of any real significance. ¹

In an unpublished paper, J.G.A. Pocock has characterised Ireland’s political experience since the Great Famine of the 1840s as one of revolutionary politics in the paradoxical context of a society which was becoming steadily more stable. The Irish revolutionary movement derived its energies from a series of grievances that were slowly being rectified.² The real enemy of the Irish rebel was not the British soldier or police but the reformer and the continuing steady adjustment of Irish society to commercialised, capitalist, modern civilisation. Emigration also acted as a safety valve to drain off the discontented and unemployed young. A further twist that can be added to this argument is that the rebels themselves sensed its validity and were tempted to preserve those evils in the society that generated discontent and helped their political project to survive.

Ireland has indeed been a modernising society since the Famine of 1845–7, although that modernisation has been slow and has been resisted by many elements. The tragedy of the Famine was itself the occasion of a great, even convulsive, modernising change.³ In some ways, few European societies have travelled as far as Ireland has in the ‘long century’ since 1847. This is so despite a persistent popular and even academic stereotype of the country as unchanging. The highly disciplined and austere Tridentine Catholicism of modern Ireland dates from the mid-nineteenth century. Linguistically, the country was also transformed; the language of the masses changed from Irish to English, and literacy in English replaced the non-literate use of Irish. To change language entailed changing cultural worlds, and millions migrated mentally from the medieval Gaelic world to the modern world of the English language. Few countries have undergone so sudden and complete a linguistic shift; in parts of the island, the exchange of languages appears to have occurred in one generation. Again, the agrarian property system was revolutionised as a consequence of the Land War of the 1880s, as the land was transferred from a mainly Anglo-Irish and Protestant landlord class and became vested in the mainly Catholic and post-Gaelic tenantry. This tenantry in turn evolved into a newly dominant stratum of small-and medium-sized owner-occupier farmers.⁴

The economy was revolutionised. Whereas in 1830 agriculture was mainly subsistence and the island was encumbered with a huge landless rural proletariat, by 1890 commercial agriculture, based mainly on cattle exports to England, had become important. The rural proletariat had largely melted away and the owner-occupier farmer dominated the scene. An important turning point in the life of any underdeveloped country had been reached and passed; Ireland since the 1880s has had many serious problems, but they have been insignificant when compared with the appalling situation of much of the population prior to the Famine. By the end of the century the main outlines of the process were obvious;⁵ one Anglo-Irish observer of that time saw it clearly as a huge social and cultural revolution, one which could not fail to be followed by a political revolution.

In those days the peasants were afraid to thatch their houses lest their rent should be raised . . . nor was there one peasant in our villages or in Tower Hill villages with a ten pound note . . . The landlords have had their day, their day is over. We are a disappearing class, our lands are being confiscated, and our houses are decaying or being pulled down to build cottages for the folk. Dialect, idiom, local customs, and character are disappearing, and in a great hurry . . . In another fifty years we will have lost all the civilisation of the eighteenth century; a swamp of peasants with a priest here and there, the exaltation of the rosary and whiskey her lot. A hundred legislators interested only in protecting monastries and nunneries from secular inquisition.⁶

Pre-Famine culture was ruthlessly dismantled by the people themselves in the decades after the Famine, almost as if there was a hatred for the heritage that had led them to such disaster. Diet, superstitious beliefs, sexual life, ideology, political life, dress and kinship systems were radically remodelled. The cultural revolution of Victorian Ireland prefigured much of what is happening in the underdeveloped world of the later twentieth century, where the efforts of peoples to cope with the invading culture and international economy of the West often bear an uncanny resemblance to the almost desperate attempts of the Victorian Catholic Irish to come to terms with the overwhelming culture and power of imperial England. The long political revolution of the period from the 1850s to the 1920s occurred in the midst of huge cultural changes, economic shifts and social reforms, and was both stimulated and threatened by their unsettling and pacifying effects. The successful conclusion of the Land War seriously weakened the revolutionary impulse.⁷ Once the alliance of English Liberalism, Irish agrarianism and Irish constitutional nationalism had destroyed landlordism, the ‘agrarian motor’, which revolutionary separatists had hoped to use to move their own rather different cause along, slowly began to run out of fuel; it is arguable that had the ‘accident’ of the First World War not intervened, the Irish revolution would have died by the mid-twentieth century without realising its objective of complete separation of Ireland from Britain. Since 1890 there has always been a curious revivalist quality to Irish separatism and republicanism deriving from their ambiguous attitude toward reform, cultural change, capitalist development and modernisation.

Republican separatist ideology was both modernising and nostalgic. Revolutionary imagery in many different societies has portrayed the desirable future in themes culled selectively from a real or imaginary past, combined with an equally selective set of images of the progressive future. The vision of the future depends on the vision of the past; this is obviously true of many of the classic nationalist movements and of various fascisms, but it is also true of revolutionary movements that have cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of socialism.⁸ The sense of a significant past may be weaker in societies which have become thoroughly modernised than it is in those in which the modern and the traditional have been forced to live in uneasy juxtaposition for long periods, as happened in Ireland during the century after the Famine.

Change and reform as well as repression and reaction all came from England, and many nationalists identified capitalist modernisation with England, much as many contemporary radicals in underdeveloped countries see capitalism and Americanisation as identical. Opposition to English rule attracted different people for different reasons, and often for opposing sets of reasons. A reactionary might be attracted to such a stance as a means of defending the noble values of feudalism against English reformers; a pious Catholic would see it as a means of defending the religious convictions of the Irish people from English scepticism, anti-Catholicism and indifference; a nationalist of centrist inclinations might see it as a virtuous attempt to forestall state socialism, big business, trade unions and the malign effects the intrusion of English commerce had on the livelihood of the Irish shopkeeper, farmer or artisan; lastly, a radical might see separatism as an anti-imperialist campaign for a socialist Irish republic. Separatism’s ideological proteanism reflected the wideness of its appeal.

Religion intensified both separatism and anti-separatism. The seventeenth-century conquest had imposed a settlement establishing a propertied Protestant minority over a mainly Catholic unpropertied majority. Religious differences had congealed and evolved into what were essentially ethnic or caste distinctions. The historical alliance between the Protestant cause and the British state continually threatened to delegitimise British rule in the eyes of the majority. This caste-like system still existed in the late nineteenth century, although it was increasingly coming under pressure from both Irish and British reformist forces. Caste-derived resentments, often coupled with religious fundamentalism, were to become important sources of separatist feeling; separatism could ally itself as easily with political primitivism as it could with ideological progressivism. In the wake of the Famine, a radicalised generation of young men, most of them Catholics and of modest social origins, put together an almost open, and certainly very widespread, conspiracy to eliminate British rule in Ireland. Much derided at the time, this conspiracy persisted for over sixty years; some would argue that it still exists. There was nothing spontaneous about the Irish revolution; it was created by the strenuous efforts of many activists over two generations.

In so far as such things can be dated, the Irish revolution started with the founding of the IRB in 1858. There is actually a good deal of vagueness about the original significance of the initials; it was held to signify either the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood or the Irish Republican Brotherhood. The latter title earned a more general acceptance. The Brotherhood’s alternative title, the Fenians, reflects the movement’s intermittent historicist nostalgia; the name evokes a legendary warrior order of pre-Christian Ireland. The Fenians were, however, a rather determinedly modernising movement, despite the fact that much of their support was rooted in reaction against the consequences of social change.

Commercialisation was a major source of change. Commercialisation essentially meant a concentration on the few products in which Ireland had a comparative advantage. Chiefly, these were cattle and other primary products for the British market. Cattle farmers saw advantages in the British connection which others did not and became disliked by both separatist nationalists and their land-hungry neighbours. The artisanal and cottage economy declined in Ireland, much as it had done elsewhere in western Europe with the coming of the factory system and efficient long-distance transportation. A native Irish industrialisation, which might have compensated for the decline in the cottage economy, appeared impossible in the face of overwhelming English industrial superiority without the kinds of tariff barriers that were being experimented with in Germany and the United States.

Many analysts have noted the apparent connection between widespread social change, declining economic sectors and revolutionary fervour.⁹ Such fervour is characterised by nostalgia for an older world, and in particular for an older social contract that is held to have been violated.¹⁰ Calhoun has argued that many revolutionary movements have committed themselves to the defence of traditional cultural values and communal relations rather than to their replacement by new values and relations. They do this because such commitment is a condition of political success. Traditional social culture provides a ready-made framework for resistance to the spread of the market and its disruptive effects on the structure of local society. Thus, in nineteenth-century Europe, revolutionary sentiment was strongest among artisans and some peasantries, people with some status and property, however humble, to lose: the pre-industrial ‘middle classes’.¹¹ Calhoun has proposed more boldly that these ‘reactionary radicals’ have been at the centre of most modern revolutionary movements. Artisans and property-owning peasants were in part tiny capitalists, their capital consisting of their skills, workshop, retail premises, membership of an organised and restrictive trade brotherhood or, in the case of peasants, the traditional and sometimes legally entrenched usufruct right to a piece of land. Traditional culture was not an inherited, unbroken ‘cake of custom’ but rather a praxis rooted in everyday experience and circumstance; whereas Marx emphasised that proletarian political unity arose out of new conditions of social existence, Calhoun suggests that older social bonds, threatened by capitalist change, are commonly the source of mass political solidarity. Cobbett, for example, appealed to traditional rights to justify radical political demands.¹²

Because these bonds are so important, radical political mass movements are typically more powerful at local than at national level, and a chronic tension exists between local and national leaderships. When extended beyond their area of origin, they tend to be taken over by special interests. The movements’ images and ideas tend to echo the popular political culture’s values of stability and fear of change, particularly change which is seen as coming from outside. The possession of this political culture makes this traditional ‘micro-bourgeoisie’ more effective revolutionary material than industrial workers, who are natural reformers rather than revolutionists. This proposition fits in well with the observed decline in the revolutionary élan of the crowd in European history since the end of the eighteenth century.¹³

These ideas also tie in well with Hroch’s research into the geographical and sociological roots of European small-country nationalist movements in the nineteenth century. The zones in which the movements originated tended to be compact, unindustrialised and developmentally intermediate. Substantial small-scale production, geared to the local market, existed. These zones were commonly fertile, and agricultural production had gone well beyond subsistence level but had not yet developed into true large-scale capitalist farming. These core areas were affected by industrial civilisation but were not themselves true participants in it; capitalism had developed enough to generate problems, but not enough to offer solutions. Radical nationalism was a ‘disease of development’, reaching its peak at an intermediate stage of development in time and space. I shall argue that in Ireland the southern province of Munster, centred on the city of Cork, was a classic example of such a zone. This area, in the part of the island furthest from the industrialised province of Ulster, was developmentally intermediate and was the area where agrarian and separatist movements had their most sustained and ultimately most successful expression, culminating in the guerrilla warfare of 1919–23. A disproportionate number of nationalist leaders came from the province of Munster, and much of the ideological basis of the movement in its final phase was devised by Munster writers responding to the social conditions of the southern province.

In Ireland as elsewhere, nationalism’s ideological nostalgia contrasted oddly with the modernity of its political means and of its ultimate goals. Irish nationalists, like Wolf’s ‘middle peasants’ or Hroch’s ‘patriots’, saw themselves as defenders of the community and its values against a process of transformation threatened by alien political, economic and cultural forces, usually perceived as emanating from the imperial government in London. They were, of course, themselves doomed to become agents of modernisation, and the nostalgic programmes which many of them held so dear had no long-term future.¹⁴ What did survive was an image of the Irish as the moral, innocent and potentially corruptible People of God in an amoral, England-dominated world.

THE REVOLUTIONARIES AND THE REVOLUTION

The IRB certainly understood that there was a connection between its prospects of ultimate political success and the persistence of certain traditional attitudes of hostility toward the regime. Revolution in Ireland was seen as dependent on the discontent of certain social groups. Evidently the artisans and other urban middle sectors were important, but the prospects of general popular support for the separatist political project were bound up with the persistence of chronic agrarian discontent in rural society in the decades after the Famine and also with certain values associated with religion.¹⁵ James Stephens, the Fenian leader of the 1860s, believed that by destroying so much of the cultural fabric of old Ireland, the Famine had also destroyed much of the prospect for an Irish separatist revolution. For similar reasons he regarded the emigration of young men to the United States with horror. The fact that post-Famine Ireland was a far more prosperous society and that the pre-Famine state of affairs could scarcely have persisted indefinitely signified little to this remarkably single-minded separatist.

Stephens saw that society was developing in a way that was inimical to the kind of insurrectionism which he favoured. It was therefore the true separatist’s duty not to be discouraged by defeat or by lack of popular support but rather to bear witness to the heroic tradition of revolutionary separatism and to pass on the separatist ideal to the next generation in defiance of social trends: a few men faithful and a deathless dream. Stephens’s implicit theory of political action was voluntarist and romantic rather than determinist. An elitism was also noticeable; since the people were at best only passively sympathetic, it was the Fenian leaders themselves, with their dedication to the attainment of the holy grail of an independent Ireland, who were the core of the Irish nation struggling to be reborn.¹⁶

Patrick Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Rising, echoed these sentiments in a more developed and quasi-mystical form a generation later when the process of capitalist modernisation and Anglicisation had gone much further. Pearse looked much more to the Irish language and the cultural tradition associated with it as the essential vehicle of Irish national consciousness. Were these to die, as seemed likely, the Irish nation would cease to exist. It should be recalled that by 1910 this language was unknown to the vast bulk of the population of the island. Pearse insisted that the student of Irish affairs who did not know ‘Irish literature’ (literature in the Irish or Gaelic language) was ‘ignorant of the awful intensity of the Irish desire for Separation as he is ignorant of one of the chief forces which made Separation inevitable’.¹⁷ Pearse, like Stephens, feared that the nation would die; in Pearse’s case, this death was equated with the

[thegeneral_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Garvin's book is very well written and argued. The author's focus is on the period between the demise of Parnell to the coming of independence in 1922. He attempts to analyse the disparate factors influencing those who would become in his words the "elite" of the revolutionary era. In my personal opinion chapters 5 and 6: assessing the role of the Gaelic League and Irish language and ideological themes and chapter 7: analysing republican opinion post-1922 defeat are the most interesting.