Ireland: A Social and Cultural History 1922–2001. Dr. Brown Terence

and artistic works whose claims to attention now are often little more than a conventional rustic charm. It is good, therefore, to reflect for a moment on the achievements of these artists in stained glass who, without compromising high standards, managed both a measure of popular esteem and international reputation before we consider in the following chapter the defeats and distresses endured by those social groups and individuals who in the 1920s and early 1930s found the social and cultural character of newly independent Ireland less than inspiring.

       CHAPTER 4

       The Fate of the Irish Left and of the Protestant Minority

      It might have been expected that the Catholic nationalist conservatism which dominated Irish society in the first decade of the Irish Free State’s history would have met with some significant political opposition from two sources – from the forces of organized labour and from the ranks of the Protestant minority in the state. The former had, as their intellectual inheritance, the internationally minded writings of the socialist, syndicalist, and revolutionary James Connolly, executed after the Rising of 1916, and experience of the bitter class conflicts of 1913 in Dublin, to generate commitment to a view of Irish society which would emphasize class interests and divisions, rather than a nationalist vision of social and cultural unity transcending class. And Protestant Ireland, culturally and emotionally involved with the English-speaking world and recently represented in Westminster by the Unionist party, was naturally antagonistic to those definitions of Irish nationality current in the new state which emphasized the centrality of either Catholicism or the Irish language and the Gaelic past. The fact is, however, that neither organized labour nor the Protestant community was able to mount any effective political opposition to the dominant political, ideological, and cultural consensus of the early years of independence. The reasons for this require analysis.

      In 1922 Irish Labour politics were expressed through the trade union movement and the Irish Labour Party. The Labour Party, with admirable if naive political idealism, had chosen not to contest the elections of 1918 and 1921, believing that such restraint would allow the electorate to express itself unambiguously on the national question. So, despite the incorporation of aspects of Labour policy in the Democratic Programme adopted by the First Dáil in January 1919, a number of years were to elapse before the popularity of socialist policies of however diluted a kind could be tested at the polls. As a result, the Labour Party stood on the sidelines of Irish politics throughout the crucial years of the War of Independence until 1922. As the Free State began reconstruction it found itself unable to make much electoral headway. Furthermore, the trade union movement in the 1920s was ill prepared to mount a sustained attack on the conservative basis of the social order, even if it had wished to do so, nor was it able to provide the industrial muscle for a militant labour programme. The movement was split by inter-union struggles, and in the widespread depression, bred of disunity, trade union membership declined steeply. Furthermore, many categories of workers had no union organizations to represent their interests. By the end of the decade, with the Labour Party’s role as a responsible parliamentary opposition rendered almost nugatory by the entry of Fianna Fáil to the Dáil in 1927 and with the trade union movement at odds with itself and largely ignored by the government and the civil service as the worldwide economic depression began to make itself felt in Ireland, the likelihood that a consistent, energetic, politically powerful, socialist critique might be developed to challenge the prevailing economic and social orthodoxy was dim indeed. At the end of the first decade of independence, organized labour in Ireland could take comfort only from the fact that the Irish Labour Party was still in existence and that the inspirational force of James Larkin (the labour leader who had played a crucial role in Dublin in 1913), to the fore in the Workers’ Union of Ireland, had kept alive the fitful flames of a revolutionary working-class consciousness in Dublin, which had flared almost two decades earlier. In years when the dominant nationalism often combined, in the wake of the Bolshevik successes in the Soviet Union, with outright antagonism to socialist ideas of politics, that even this little was achieved is a testament to the dedication and will of those few individuals who were prepared to plant socialist seeds for a later harvesting.

      The policies and approach adopted by the Labour Party in the 1920s reflected the fact that the social panorama scarcely admitted of revolutionary perspectives. The party, under the leadership of Thomas Johnson, who was concurrently secretary of the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, abandoned the revolutionary syndicalism of James Connolly while continuing to venerate his memory, preferring a cautious use of parliamentary tactics to advance the workers’ cause. “I have,” Johnson wrote in 1925, “advocated the use by the workers of political means and parliamentary institutions to further their cause. I have opposed the proposition that the workers should rely solely on their economic power to attain their ends. I have acted in the belief that a democratic government would preserve the fundamental rights which have been won and would not lightly cast aside those social obligations which they had inherited from their predecessors.”¹ He continued in a passage that very fully expresses the position adopted by the great majority of Labour Party and trade union members in Ireland, throughout the twentieth century:

      Shall the aim be honestly to remove poverty…or are we to agitate and organize with the object of waging the “class war” more relentlessly, and use “the unemployed” and the “poverty of the workers” as propagandist cries to justify our actions…I do not think this view of the mission of the Labour Movement has any promise of ultimate usefulness in Ireland.²

      Johnson knew his electorate and suspected how precarious was Labour’s hold on Irish life in the Free State. For, lacking a solid base in a large industrial proletariat (only about 13 percent of the workforce was employed in industry of any kind – the island’s only real industrial centre was north of the border in Belfast), and, after 1926, in competition in rural areas with the popular reformism of Fianna Fáil, Labour had a difficult enough task in mere survival, without espousing what Johnson feared were ideas “in direct conflict with the religious faith of our people.”³

      The cultural effects of this socialist eclipse in twentieth-century Ireland are not far to seek. The socialist ideas and preoccupations of much of modern Europe had curiously little currency in a country where ideology meant protracted, repetitive debates on the national question with little attention directed, until the 1960s, to class issues and social conditions. Indeed, one of the obvious weaknesses of Irish intellectual life in much of the period was the absence of a coherent, scientific study of society of the kind that in many European countries had its roots in a socialist concern to comprehend the ills of a manifestly unjust social order. For decades, indeed, such issues as the decline of the Irish language were most frequently discussed in terms of culture and nationality, without any serious effort to challenge an economic order which allowed the haemorrhage of emigration from Irish-speaking districts to flow unabated for forty years. Where other Europeans engaged in a conflict about the very nature of man and society, Irish men and women, writers, artists, politicians, workers committed themselves to a vision of national destiny which often meant a turning away from much uncomfortable social reality to conceptions of the nation as a spiritual entity that could compensate for a diminished experience. The counterpoint that a powerful socialist party and working-class movement might have represented in the intellectual and cultural life of the country in the first decades of independence is a possibility we find sounding only fitfully early in the century and suffering an almost complete extinction in the 1920s. There were, in fact, until recently, very few novels and plays of Irish working-class life in twentieth-century writing. Only in the plays of O’Casey was the world of the urban proletariat employed as the material of a committed art. There were no Irish disciples of Brecht, no efforts, apart from O’Casey’s later plays written in exile, to produce a literature engagé on behalf of socialism; indeed, only in a very few historical studies did the socialist ideas that absorbed so many European minds in the twentieth century find any large-scale Irish expression.

      If the left in Ireland was unwilling or unable to pose