Appearing exactly thirty years after the first volume of Saothar, and edited by the serving co-editors of the journal, this collection of fourteen essays might have served as a progress report on Irish labour history. That is not the objective of the editors, however, who seek rather ‘to widen the focus of Irish labour history’, which, they argue, has been ‘narrowly focused on trade union, biographical and institutional studies’. By comparison with other European countries, the political role of the Irish working class has received relatively little scholarly attention, they contend, a disparity which is due to the historical weakness of class-based or socialist politics in Ireland. The reasons for this are discussed, in a conventional way, in the ‘Introduction’. If the weakness of class politics is an explanation for the scholarly neglect of the considerable political role of Irish working people, it is not a justification for it, however, and the editorial objectives are validated by the range of new and revisited research themes in this volume.
*
On the front cover, there is a 1913 photograph of twenty-one women, members of the Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU), all of whom served prison sentences for their involvement in trade unionism. The choice of illustration seems to promise that women will feature prominently between the covers, but they are the subject of just one article. There are other tantalising glimpses of the working women – of Kilkenny harvesters imprisoning an overbearing employer in 1858; of meetings of the Brosna Ladies Labour League in 1882 – but such are few enough. Maria Luddy’s article, ‘Working Women, Trade Unionism and Politics in Ireland, 1830-1945’, suggests why this may be so. Paid employment opportunities for women were diminishing during most of the period under review, while it was only in its last decades that women had full formal political rights – necessitating definitions of both work and political engagement that are sufficiently broad as not to completely obscure women’s roles. The author identifies the obstacles to women’s participation in the labour movement, discusses key episodes and organisations, and identifies areas needing further research. These last include the relationship between working class women and the suffrage movement, and the character of women’s participation in land and independence struggles.
Emmet O’Connor’s contribution is another that traces developments over the full period covered by the volume. In it, he elaborates on his argument – familiar from the same author’s influential A labour history of Ireland, 1824-1960 (1992) – that the Irish labour leaders who established the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) in 1894 were ‘mentally colonised’, with important consequences: that it caused them to replicate precisely the modus operandi of the British Trades Union Congress and to adopt its disdainful attitude towards nationalism; that their colonised mindset caused the leaders to exclude organic nationalist-identifying labour associations from their movement, because these did not conform to the approved British model of what constituted a trade union; that this had the effect of unnecessarily marginalising Irish labour during ITUC’s formative years; that the detrimental effects for Labour of insisting on an artificial demarcation between labour and constitutional concerns continued to be felt during the revolutionary period (notably in Labour’s decision not to contest the 1918 election), and even during the following decades.
An ‘implicit’ challenge to O’Connor’s thesis is signalled (p.3) ahead of Fintan Lane’s stimulating survey of rural labourers’ political engagement – that the challenge is not an explicit one is probably due to the fact that Lane’s article ends with the establishment of the Irish Land and Labour Association in 1894, the same year that O’Connor’s ‘awful ITUC’ (p.41) convened for the first time. Lane’s position is that the contact between the scattered organic associations of the rural labourers and nationalist movements was not altogether as positive from the labourers’ perspective as Emmet O’Connor has maintained. The evidence offered here is strong, in particular that bearing on the relationships of rural labour bodies with the Land League and the Irish National League. Both these organisations claimed to speak for rural labourer, and were able to absorb labour bodies by promising to prioritise their concerns, but the primary objective of the nationalist/agrarian leaders, Lane indicates, was to relieve class conflict between farmers and labourers. Arguably, however, substantial fruits from the engagement between nationalism and agricultural labour – cottages with gardens – would be harvested by most labouring families only after the mid-1890s.
Maura Cronin’s article on relationships between the Parnell-dominated nationalism of the 1880s and the workers of the cities of Cork and Limerick is a useful companion to Lane’s survey. Organised workers in both cities, she shows, were firm and prominent in their support for Parnell, having already accepted the argument that home rule would mean economic regeneration and prosperity. But, while all classes in these predominantly Catholic cities could unite under the Parnellite banner, unity was not that deep in practice, with class and other divisions continuing to manifest themselves. Cronin shows, moreover, that Parnellite sponsorship of labour organisation – in small towns, in particular – was not necessarily welcomed by established craft-dominated trade union bodies in the cities. An example of an arguably ‘organic’ labour association that faced opposition from craftsmen in the Cork Trades Council was that of the Fenian-led South of Ireland Labour Union (estd. 1884) which organised several hundred foundry and mill workers.
The focus of Christina Kinealy’s contribution is on the fraught relationship between Irish nationalism and the nascent working-class politics of the 1830s and 1840s represented by Chartism. Daniel O’Connell, a sometime supporter of the People’s Charter itself, became an enemy of the Chartist movement, and used his influence among the Irish in Britain to discourage their participation in its affairs. However, given the high profile of leaders like James Bronterre O’Brien and Feargus O’Connor (who took care to add Repeal to the Chartist platform), it is not surprising that Irish immigrants continued to associate themselves with the British movement. Irish Chartism, in the form of the small Dublin Charter Association (1839) and the self-consciously working-class Irish Universal Suffrage Association (1841) also encountered O’Connellite opposition, opposition which was violent on occasion. Like O’Connell, many of the radicals in the Young Ireland milieu were wary of Chartism, but the Famine and, in particular, the revolutionary events in France in early 1848 pushed the two together (not long before the debacles of Kennington Common and Ballingarry) with Thomas Doheny declaring himself to be ‘an Irish Chartist’ at Oldham, and John Mitchell telling Chartists in Manchester that the ‘revolution of France has made me a democrat’.
*
According to the editors, the ‘core of the Irish industrial working class was in Belfast’, and that city receives appropriate attention in the volume, with a total of four essays devoted chiefly to its affairs. The first of these, Vincent Geoghegan’s essay on Owenite co-operation, is a significant contribution to a topic that has long fascinated those interested in Irish labour history. For most of the period since the publication of James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History (1910), the nodal points of Irish Owenism remained at Ralahine and Glandore, but research of the past decade or so – most notably that of Vincent Geoghegan himself – has revealed a more diffuse picture. For this essay, a systematic trawl through the pages of the Belfast Newsletter provided most of the fresh raw material for an analysis of the reception of Robert Owen’s ideas within an important section of the Irish elite, and for an outline of the activities of a body of largely working class Owenites in Ulster in the early 1830s. The indications are that several of the co-operative societies – consisting in the main of ‘respectable’ and sober Protestant artisans – that were established in Belfast, Armagh, Monaghan, Dungannon, Derry, and Larne, operated successful retail stores for a number of years. These retail stores were not seen as an end in themselves but rather as a means of generating capital for the establishment of producer co-operatives. According to the leading Belfast Owenite and contributor to the Belfast Co-operative Advocate, Henry MacCormac, however, committee members became overwhelmed by business imperative and quickly lost sight of the bigger objectives.
In a combative contribution entitled ‘Politics, Sectarianism, and the Working Class in Nineteenth Century Belfast’, Catherine Hirst argues that ‘there was little chance of anything other than unionism and nationalism being the defining features of working class politics in Belfast (p.62). Those historians that have concluded otherwise have done so in the face of the evidence, she maintains, and the roots of a virulently sectarian politics were present early in the century in the form of vibrant Ribbon and Orange lodges. The unionist/nationalist division was firmly in place long before the Home Rule controversy of the 1880s, having been consolidated during the Repeal agitation of the early 1840s. Hirst argues that the proletarian base of Repeal in the city, and the consequent low level of the Repeal ‘rent’ collected there, has misled historians into concluding that O’Connell’s movement was inconsequential in Belfast. She provides evidence to the contrary, showing how an overtly Catholic constitutionalism overlapped with Ribbonism – and later, indeed, with Fenianism – and how a Unionist (i.e. anti-Repeal) political consciousness was inculcated by evangelical preachers through bodies such as Protestant Operatives Association which was established in 1843. In her examination of Fenianism, the inheritor of Belfast’s Ribbon tradition, Hirst finds no evidence to support for R.V. Comerford’s view that the attraction of the movement was social more than it was political. There was a social dimension to Belfast Fenianism, she allows, as there necessarily is with all political movements, but public participation by members in sporting events was often a cover for revolutionary activity. Overall, Hirst’s treatment of the development of the nationalist/republican tradition is more detailed, and more confident, than her treatment of loyalism/Unionism.
William Walker is best remembered for his opposition to James Connolly’s socialist republicanism in the course of a polemical exchange between the two men in the pages of the Glasgow socialist periodical Forward, a debate that occurred towards the end of the Belfastman’s two decades of prominence in the labour movement. Henry Patterson traces Walker’s career and the circumstances that shaped the views that he defended in 1911, seeking to offer a ‘nuanced view’ of one who has been represented as a ‘rather grey provincial figure’ (p.168). Born in 1871 into the skilled Protestant working class, Walker was a very young carpenter when he became a prominent Belfast socialist, assisting in the recruitment of unskilled male workers into the ‘new unions’ and championing trade unionism among female textile workers, and was still relatively young when he was elected a full-time official of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. As a leading member of the trades council, as a ‘municipal socialist’ city councillor and as a Labour parliamentary candidate – three times in North Belfast and once in the Scottish Leith constituency – he revealed himself as an opponent of Home Rule. Arguably this was a paradoxical position for an advocate of the pro-Home Rule British Labour Party, but Walker believed that it was only the appeal of a United Kingdom-wide labour movement could break the grip of sectarian politics in Belfast and its hinterland.
Harry Midgley, a central figure in Graham Walker’s survey essay on the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), was critical of William Walker in his youth, but became an upholder of the Walker tradition. The party that he would later lead was founded in 1924, on a tide of labourist optimism in the wake of Midgley’s narrow defeat in a West Belfast by-election. Because of nationalist abstentionism, Labour soon found itself in the role of main parliamentary opposition in the Northern Ireland parliament – a situation with a parallel in the 1920s Free State – but its development was hampered by Northern Ireland circumstances. The perception of a labour threat to its hegemony led to governing Unionist Party to continue nurturing its subsidiary Ulster Unionist Labour Association, and was one of the factors that led it to abandon proportional representation in both parliamentary and local elections. In the meantime, with some prominent members identifying with British labourism, and others with Connollyite socialist republicanism, the party equivocated on the national question, but in practice it accepted the legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state. And if the Spanish Civil War allowed Harry Midgley – by then very much the Walkerite – to display his internationalism, his pro-republican position on Spain cost him and his party Catholic votes. Midgely’s unequivocal espousal of the British war effort, and of the connection with Britain itself, contributed to his capturing of a Unionist seat in a 1941 by-election, but it alienated him from many in the NILP, leading to his departure, to his establishment of the Commonwealth Party, and to his acceptance of the position of Minister for Public Security in Basil Brooke’s 1943 government. In the 1945 general election, there was a considerable shift to the left in Northern Ireland, as there was elsewhere in the United Kingdom. With the Midgley split and the growth of the (pro-war) Communist Party, it was a fractured left, however, and the NILP accounted for little over half of its electoral strength.
*
James Connolly cast a long shadow over both labour and republican movements in the decades following his death. Helga Woggan’s examination of the reception of his ideas in the revolutionary years that followed his execution is welcome, not least for making accessible ideas that the same writer has previously presented in the German language. Arguing that Connolly was not exceptional in the way he adapted his socialism to circumstances in a dependent country (‘integrative socialism’), she shows that his thinking was taken seriously by Irish nationalists and republicans after his martyrdom, although frequently filleted. For some – in Irish America, in particular – their engagement meant discarding Connolly’s socialism; for others, it meant diluting it. She cites the 1917 pamphlet by the language activist Seán Mac Giollarnáth (republished, incidentally, with introduction by Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill, in Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society, vol. 58, 2006), in which the author attempted to reconcile Connolly’s ideas with those of Fr Kane, whose anti-socialist discourses had prompted Connolly’s polemical pamphlet, Labour, Nationality, and Religion, in 1910.
In a polemical contribution, Conor Kostick considers the tumultuous events of these same years, when the colonial power was again challenged by militant Irish republicanism. These were also years of labour militancy of an unprecedented character, and it is Kostick’s contention that, insofar as ‘the core administration of the colony was rocked, it was by the intervention of the working class’. To make his point, he discusses five key episodes: the April 1918 anti-conscription strike, the Belfast engineering strike of January-February 1919, the Limerick Soviet of April 1919, the (successful) general strike for the release of republican prisoners of April 1920, and the refusal of railway workers to transport British military and munitions during May-December, 1920. While the contribution of these and other incidents of worker militancy to the separatist cause have been ‘under-appreciated’, he concludes, they might have been better used to advance a radical labourist agenda had James Larkin not been languishing in Sing-Sing prison at the time.
Fearghal McGarry article is also polemical, but, by contrast with Kostick, he brusquely dismisses the suggestion that any kind of ‘Workers’ Republic’ could have emerged from the Irish revolution, and disputes the idea that labour’s role was in any way central to the independence struggle. ‘It was the farmers of Munster’, he contends, ‘who formed the cutting edge of republicanis’ (p.213). From his analysis of ‘Radical Politics in Interwar Ireland, 1923-39’, Labour and Fianna Fail are excluded, with the focus falling instead on the generally marginal socialist republicans who sought guidance in Connolly’s thought. Rather like Kostick and Desmond Greaves before him, McGarry implies, individuals like Peadar O’Donnell and short-lived initiatives like Saor Éire and the Republican Congress began with a distorted understanding of the events of 1916-23, and this led them into adopting strategies which had little chance of winning popular support.
Richard Dunphy considers the early Fianna Fáil in the light of recent writing on populism, and concludes that, yes, it was a populist party, and that the success of such a party, though not entirely inevitable, flowed from the social structure of the Free State – a predominantly rural society of independent smallholders, with a small but largely non-industrial working class. With Fianna Fáil leaders claiming James Connolly as a forerunner, however, and asserting that they represented ‘the masses not the classes’, some leftists of the time were persuaded that the party had socialist, or at least egalitarian, credentials. The author quotes tellingly from Todd Andrews, a founding father (as it were) of Fianna Fáil:
We disapproved of any kind of ostentation. We disapproved of the wearing of formal clothes… We disapproved of horse-racing and
everything and everyone associated with it. We disapproved of any form of gambling. We disapproved of golf and tennis, and the plus-
fours and white flannels that went with them. (p.250).
That attitudes like these, attitudes Dunphy characterises as ‘puritan’, were shared by much of the left, facilitated Labour’s subordination of itself to Fianna Fáil in the years after 1929. The need for an ally against the apparently fascist threat from the Blueshirts a few years later, he argues, provided a reason for continuing Labour/trade union subordination to the now governing party.
Labour’s abortive challenge to Fianna Fáil populism during the ‘Emergency’ period of 1939-45 is the subject of the stimulating final article by Donal Ó Drisceoil. Although neutrality was a popular policy, he shows that there was a strong perception that its economic and social consequences were being borne disproportionately by the working class and the poor. When a suitable vehicle for resistance presented itself in Dublin, therefore, it attracted considerable support. The vehicle was the Council of Action, a body established jointly by the Dublin Labour Party and the Dublin Trades Council so as to fight legislation which it regarded as anti-trade union. That this Council of Action was able to mobilise 20,000 for a June 1941 protest demonstration, however, was due largely to the fact that Fianna Fáil was uncharacteristically ham-fisted in introducing trade union ‘reforms’ – which were discreetly supported by William O’Brien, the Fianna Fáil-leaning leader of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union – at the same time as the unpopular wages standstill order. The Labour Party – radicalised and energised through the enrolment of Larkinists as well as entrist Trotskyists and members of the not-fully-dissolved Communist Party – reaped the political fruits of the agitation in the 1943 general and looked set to overtake Fine Gael. That this did not occur was due, in part, to Fianna Fáil’s skilful re-engagement with the trade unions, and, in larger part, to Labour divisions, with William O’Brien fomenting splits in the Labour Party in 1944 –citing communist influence – and in the ITUC in 1945.
This collection comes closer than most to being comprehensive, with the treatment of Belfast and of the early decades of the southern state being particularly thorough. Inevitably, there are lacunae, and the relatively small amount of space devoted to women in the volume has already been discussed in this regard. Although understandable, this is unfortunate, for, in the personal experience of the reviewer, there is a tremendous thirst for information about the lives of women among students taking labour history at third level. Of at least equal interest to newcomers to labour history is the career of James Larkin, but it features here only in a few scattered references. There is admittedly an affordable biography of Larkin currently in print (E. O’Connor, James Larkin, 2002), but in a book devoted to politics and the Irish working class, there was justification for including an assessment of such an inspirational – if divisive – figure, who was, at different points was an early proponent of labour politics, a labour councillor, a communist Dáil deputy, and a Labour Dáil deputy.
All things considered, however, this is a very useful book, which, but for its excessive price, would meet the need that exists for a third-level labour history text. A paperback edition would be welcomed.
*
On the front cover, there is a 1913 photograph of twenty-one women, members of the Irish Women Workers Union (IWWU), all of whom served prison sentences for their involvement in trade unionism. The choice of illustration seems to promise that women will feature prominently between the covers, but they are the subject of just one article. There are other tantalising glimpses of the working women – of Kilkenny harvesters imprisoning an overbearing employer in 1858; of meetings of the Brosna Ladies Labour League in 1882 – but such are few enough. Maria Luddy’s article, ‘Working Women, Trade Unionism and Politics in Ireland, 1830-1945’, suggests why this may be so. Paid employment opportunities for women were diminishing during most of the period under review, while it was only in its last decades that women had full formal political rights – necessitating definitions of both work and political engagement that are sufficiently broad as not to completely obscure women’s roles. The author identifies the obstacles to women’s participation in the labour movement, discusses key episodes and organisations, and identifies areas needing further research. These last include the relationship between working class women and the suffrage movement, and the character of women’s participation in land and independence struggles.
Emmet O’Connor’s contribution is another that traces developments over the full period covered by the volume. In it, he elaborates on his argument – familiar from the same author’s influential A labour history of Ireland, 1824-1960 (1992) – that the Irish labour leaders who established the Irish Trades Union Congress (ITUC) in 1894 were ‘mentally colonised’, with important consequences: that it caused them to replicate precisely the modus operandi of the British Trades Union Congress and to adopt its disdainful attitude towards nationalism; that their colonised mindset caused the leaders to exclude organic nationalist-identifying labour associations from their movement, because these did not conform to the approved British model of what constituted a trade union; that this had the effect of unnecessarily marginalising Irish labour during ITUC’s formative years; that the detrimental effects for Labour of insisting on an artificial demarcation between labour and constitutional concerns continued to be felt during the revolutionary period (notably in Labour’s decision not to contest the 1918 election), and even during the following decades.
An ‘implicit’ challenge to O’Connor’s thesis is signalled (p.3) ahead of Fintan Lane’s stimulating survey of rural labourers’ political engagement – that the challenge is not an explicit one is probably due to the fact that Lane’s article ends with the establishment of the Irish Land and Labour Association in 1894, the same year that O’Connor’s ‘awful ITUC’ (p.41) convened for the first time. Lane’s position is that the contact between the scattered organic associations of the rural labourers and nationalist movements was not altogether as positive from the labourers’ perspective as Emmet O’Connor has maintained. The evidence offered here is strong, in particular that bearing on the relationships of rural labour bodies with the Land League and the Irish National League. Both these organisations claimed to speak for rural labourer, and were able to absorb labour bodies by promising to prioritise their concerns, but the primary objective of the nationalist/agrarian leaders, Lane indicates, was to relieve class conflict between farmers and labourers. Arguably, however, substantial fruits from the engagement between nationalism and agricultural labour – cottages with gardens – would be harvested by most labouring families only after the mid-1890s.
Maura Cronin’s article on relationships between the Parnell-dominated nationalism of the 1880s and the workers of the cities of Cork and Limerick is a useful companion to Lane’s survey. Organised workers in both cities, she shows, were firm and prominent in their support for Parnell, having already accepted the argument that home rule would mean economic regeneration and prosperity. But, while all classes in these predominantly Catholic cities could unite under the Parnellite banner, unity was not that deep in practice, with class and other divisions continuing to manifest themselves. Cronin shows, moreover, that Parnellite sponsorship of labour organisation – in small towns, in particular – was not necessarily welcomed by established craft-dominated trade union bodies in the cities. An example of an arguably ‘organic’ labour association that faced opposition from craftsmen in the Cork Trades Council was that of the Fenian-led South of Ireland Labour Union (estd. 1884) which organised several hundred foundry and mill workers.
The focus of Christina Kinealy’s contribution is on the fraught relationship between Irish nationalism and the nascent working-class politics of the 1830s and 1840s represented by Chartism. Daniel O’Connell, a sometime supporter of the People’s Charter itself, became an enemy of the Chartist movement, and used his influence among the Irish in Britain to discourage their participation in its affairs. However, given the high profile of leaders like James Bronterre O’Brien and Feargus O’Connor (who took care to add Repeal to the Chartist platform), it is not surprising that Irish immigrants continued to associate themselves with the British movement. Irish Chartism, in the form of the small Dublin Charter Association (1839) and the self-consciously working-class Irish Universal Suffrage Association (1841) also encountered O’Connellite opposition, opposition which was violent on occasion. Like O’Connell, many of the radicals in the Young Ireland milieu were wary of Chartism, but the Famine and, in particular, the revolutionary events in France in early 1848 pushed the two together (not long before the debacles of Kennington Common and Ballingarry) with Thomas Doheny declaring himself to be ‘an Irish Chartist’ at Oldham, and John Mitchell telling Chartists in Manchester that the ‘revolution of France has made me a democrat’.
*
According to the editors, the ‘core of the Irish industrial working class was in Belfast’, and that city receives appropriate attention in the volume, with a total of four essays devoted chiefly to its affairs. The first of these, Vincent Geoghegan’s essay on Owenite co-operation, is a significant contribution to a topic that has long fascinated those interested in Irish labour history. For most of the period since the publication of James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History (1910), the nodal points of Irish Owenism remained at Ralahine and Glandore, but research of the past decade or so – most notably that of Vincent Geoghegan himself – has revealed a more diffuse picture. For this essay, a systematic trawl through the pages of the Belfast Newsletter provided most of the fresh raw material for an analysis of the reception of Robert Owen’s ideas within an important section of the Irish elite, and for an outline of the activities of a body of largely working class Owenites in Ulster in the early 1830s. The indications are that several of the co-operative societies – consisting in the main of ‘respectable’ and sober Protestant artisans – that were established in Belfast, Armagh, Monaghan, Dungannon, Derry, and Larne, operated successful retail stores for a number of years. These retail stores were not seen as an end in themselves but rather as a means of generating capital for the establishment of producer co-operatives. According to the leading Belfast Owenite and contributor to the Belfast Co-operative Advocate, Henry MacCormac, however, committee members became overwhelmed by business imperative and quickly lost sight of the bigger objectives.
In a combative contribution entitled ‘Politics, Sectarianism, and the Working Class in Nineteenth Century Belfast’, Catherine Hirst argues that ‘there was little chance of anything other than unionism and nationalism being the defining features of working class politics in Belfast (p.62). Those historians that have concluded otherwise have done so in the face of the evidence, she maintains, and the roots of a virulently sectarian politics were present early in the century in the form of vibrant Ribbon and Orange lodges. The unionist/nationalist division was firmly in place long before the Home Rule controversy of the 1880s, having been consolidated during the Repeal agitation of the early 1840s. Hirst argues that the proletarian base of Repeal in the city, and the consequent low level of the Repeal ‘rent’ collected there, has misled historians into concluding that O’Connell’s movement was inconsequential in Belfast. She provides evidence to the contrary, showing how an overtly Catholic constitutionalism overlapped with Ribbonism – and later, indeed, with Fenianism – and how a Unionist (i.e. anti-Repeal) political consciousness was inculcated by evangelical preachers through bodies such as Protestant Operatives Association which was established in 1843. In her examination of Fenianism, the inheritor of Belfast’s Ribbon tradition, Hirst finds no evidence to support for R.V. Comerford’s view that the attraction of the movement was social more than it was political. There was a social dimension to Belfast Fenianism, she allows, as there necessarily is with all political movements, but public participation by members in sporting events was often a cover for revolutionary activity. Overall, Hirst’s treatment of the development of the nationalist/republican tradition is more detailed, and more confident, than her treatment of loyalism/Unionism.
William Walker is best remembered for his opposition to James Connolly’s socialist republicanism in the course of a polemical exchange between the two men in the pages of the Glasgow socialist periodical Forward, a debate that occurred towards the end of the Belfastman’s two decades of prominence in the labour movement. Henry Patterson traces Walker’s career and the circumstances that shaped the views that he defended in 1911, seeking to offer a ‘nuanced view’ of one who has been represented as a ‘rather grey provincial figure’ (p.168). Born in 1871 into the skilled Protestant working class, Walker was a very young carpenter when he became a prominent Belfast socialist, assisting in the recruitment of unskilled male workers into the ‘new unions’ and championing trade unionism among female textile workers, and was still relatively young when he was elected a full-time official of the Amalgamated Society of Carpenters and Joiners. As a leading member of the trades council, as a ‘municipal socialist’ city councillor and as a Labour parliamentary candidate – three times in North Belfast and once in the Scottish Leith constituency – he revealed himself as an opponent of Home Rule. Arguably this was a paradoxical position for an advocate of the pro-Home Rule British Labour Party, but Walker believed that it was only the appeal of a United Kingdom-wide labour movement could break the grip of sectarian politics in Belfast and its hinterland.
Harry Midgley, a central figure in Graham Walker’s survey essay on the Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP), was critical of William Walker in his youth, but became an upholder of the Walker tradition. The party that he would later lead was founded in 1924, on a tide of labourist optimism in the wake of Midgley’s narrow defeat in a West Belfast by-election. Because of nationalist abstentionism, Labour soon found itself in the role of main parliamentary opposition in the Northern Ireland parliament – a situation with a parallel in the 1920s Free State – but its development was hampered by Northern Ireland circumstances. The perception of a labour threat to its hegemony led to governing Unionist Party to continue nurturing its subsidiary Ulster Unionist Labour Association, and was one of the factors that led it to abandon proportional representation in both parliamentary and local elections. In the meantime, with some prominent members identifying with British labourism, and others with Connollyite socialist republicanism, the party equivocated on the national question, but in practice it accepted the legitimacy of the Northern Ireland state. And if the Spanish Civil War allowed Harry Midgley – by then very much the Walkerite – to display his internationalism, his pro-republican position on Spain cost him and his party Catholic votes. Midgely’s unequivocal espousal of the British war effort, and of the connection with Britain itself, contributed to his capturing of a Unionist seat in a 1941 by-election, but it alienated him from many in the NILP, leading to his departure, to his establishment of the Commonwealth Party, and to his acceptance of the position of Minister for Public Security in Basil Brooke’s 1943 government. In the 1945 general election, there was a considerable shift to the left in Northern Ireland, as there was elsewhere in the United Kingdom. With the Midgley split and the growth of the (pro-war) Communist Party, it was a fractured left, however, and the NILP accounted for little over half of its electoral strength.
*
James Connolly cast a long shadow over both labour and republican movements in the decades following his death. Helga Woggan’s examination of the reception of his ideas in the revolutionary years that followed his execution is welcome, not least for making accessible ideas that the same writer has previously presented in the German language. Arguing that Connolly was not exceptional in the way he adapted his socialism to circumstances in a dependent country (‘integrative socialism’), she shows that his thinking was taken seriously by Irish nationalists and republicans after his martyrdom, although frequently filleted. For some – in Irish America, in particular – their engagement meant discarding Connolly’s socialism; for others, it meant diluting it. She cites the 1917 pamphlet by the language activist Seán Mac Giollarnáth (republished, incidentally, with introduction by Diarmuid Ó Cearbhaill, in Journal of the Galway Archaeological & Historical Society, vol. 58, 2006), in which the author attempted to reconcile Connolly’s ideas with those of Fr Kane, whose anti-socialist discourses had prompted Connolly’s polemical pamphlet, Labour, Nationality, and Religion, in 1910.
In a polemical contribution, Conor Kostick considers the tumultuous events of these same years, when the colonial power was again challenged by militant Irish republicanism. These were also years of labour militancy of an unprecedented character, and it is Kostick’s contention that, insofar as ‘the core administration of the colony was rocked, it was by the intervention of the working class’. To make his point, he discusses five key episodes: the April 1918 anti-conscription strike, the Belfast engineering strike of January-February 1919, the Limerick Soviet of April 1919, the (successful) general strike for the release of republican prisoners of April 1920, and the refusal of railway workers to transport British military and munitions during May-December, 1920. While the contribution of these and other incidents of worker militancy to the separatist cause have been ‘under-appreciated’, he concludes, they might have been better used to advance a radical labourist agenda had James Larkin not been languishing in Sing-Sing prison at the time.
Fearghal McGarry article is also polemical, but, by contrast with Kostick, he brusquely dismisses the suggestion that any kind of ‘Workers’ Republic’ could have emerged from the Irish revolution, and disputes the idea that labour’s role was in any way central to the independence struggle. ‘It was the farmers of Munster’, he contends, ‘who formed the cutting edge of republicanis’ (p.213). From his analysis of ‘Radical Politics in Interwar Ireland, 1923-39’, Labour and Fianna Fail are excluded, with the focus falling instead on the generally marginal socialist republicans who sought guidance in Connolly’s thought. Rather like Kostick and Desmond Greaves before him, McGarry implies, individuals like Peadar O’Donnell and short-lived initiatives like Saor Éire and the Republican Congress began with a distorted understanding of the events of 1916-23, and this led them into adopting strategies which had little chance of winning popular support.
Richard Dunphy considers the early Fianna Fáil in the light of recent writing on populism, and concludes that, yes, it was a populist party, and that the success of such a party, though not entirely inevitable, flowed from the social structure of the Free State – a predominantly rural society of independent smallholders, with a small but largely non-industrial working class. With Fianna Fáil leaders claiming James Connolly as a forerunner, however, and asserting that they represented ‘the masses not the classes’, some leftists of the time were persuaded that the party had socialist, or at least egalitarian, credentials. The author quotes tellingly from Todd Andrews, a founding father (as it were) of Fianna Fáil:
We disapproved of any kind of ostentation. We disapproved of the wearing of formal clothes… We disapproved of horse-racing and
everything and everyone associated with it. We disapproved of any form of gambling. We disapproved of golf and tennis, and the plus-
fours and white flannels that went with them. (p.250).
That attitudes like these, attitudes Dunphy characterises as ‘puritan’, were shared by much of the left, facilitated Labour’s subordination of itself to Fianna Fáil in the years after 1929. The need for an ally against the apparently fascist threat from the Blueshirts a few years later, he argues, provided a reason for continuing Labour/trade union subordination to the now governing party.
Labour’s abortive challenge to Fianna Fáil populism during the ‘Emergency’ period of 1939-45 is the subject of the stimulating final article by Donal Ó Drisceoil. Although neutrality was a popular policy, he shows that there was a strong perception that its economic and social consequences were being borne disproportionately by the working class and the poor. When a suitable vehicle for resistance presented itself in Dublin, therefore, it attracted considerable support. The vehicle was the Council of Action, a body established jointly by the Dublin Labour Party and the Dublin Trades Council so as to fight legislation which it regarded as anti-trade union. That this Council of Action was able to mobilise 20,000 for a June 1941 protest demonstration, however, was due largely to the fact that Fianna Fáil was uncharacteristically ham-fisted in introducing trade union ‘reforms’ – which were discreetly supported by William O’Brien, the Fianna Fáil-leaning leader of the Irish Transport & General Workers Union – at the same time as the unpopular wages standstill order. The Labour Party – radicalised and energised through the enrolment of Larkinists as well as entrist Trotskyists and members of the not-fully-dissolved Communist Party – reaped the political fruits of the agitation in the 1943 general and looked set to overtake Fine Gael. That this did not occur was due, in part, to Fianna Fáil’s skilful re-engagement with the trade unions, and, in larger part, to Labour divisions, with William O’Brien fomenting splits in the Labour Party in 1944 –citing communist influence – and in the ITUC in 1945.
This collection comes closer than most to being comprehensive, with the treatment of Belfast and of the early decades of the southern state being particularly thorough. Inevitably, there are lacunae, and the relatively small amount of space devoted to women in the volume has already been discussed in this regard. Although understandable, this is unfortunate, for, in the personal experience of the reviewer, there is a tremendous thirst for information about the lives of women among students taking labour history at third level. Of at least equal interest to newcomers to labour history is the career of James Larkin, but it features here only in a few scattered references. There is admittedly an affordable biography of Larkin currently in print (E. O’Connor, James Larkin, 2002), but in a book devoted to politics and the Irish working class, there was justification for including an assessment of such an inspirational – if divisive – figure, who was, at different points was an early proponent of labour politics, a labour councillor, a communist Dáil deputy, and a Labour Dáil deputy.
All things considered, however, this is a very useful book, which, but for its excessive price, would meet the need that exists for a third-level labour history text. A paperback edition would be welcomed.