Out of Step

When was the Irish Revolution? The question was posed again recently at the twentieth Conference of Irish Historians in Britain, held at the University of Liverpool in July 2016, and answers offered by the roundtable participants and the audience ranged from ‘1798’ to ‘never’.¹ In Hesitant Comrades, Geoffrey Bell implies that there was an Irish Revolution and that it began with the 1916 Easter Rising and concluded with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.² Such conservative dating seems odd for a book that takes the labour movement as its subject, especially since James Connolly and – later – Constance Markievicz (first Minister for Labour in Dáil Eíreann) regarded 1913 as the initial contemporary revolutionary moment.³

James Connolly’s militarization of the Irish working class began with the organization of the Irish Citizen Army, founded during the 1913 Dublin Lockout to defend Irish workers from brutality enacted by organized capital and by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, whom the workers perceived as acting in the interests of the capitalist-imperialist state. It is well established that a key contributor to the failure of Irish labour’s ambitions during the Lockout was its fraught relationship with British labour, leading to the Trades Union Congress’s refusal to sanction a sympathetic strike in Britain.⁴ The TUC’s rejection came despite an outpouring of sympathy from the British public and important denunciations of Bloody Sunday (31 August 1913) by prominent figures in the British left, including George Bernard Shaw.⁵ The dissonance between public opinion and the actions taken by labour leaders in Britain is an essential context for interpreting how the broad spectrum of the British left reacted to the Easter Rising and its aftermath.

Early in Hesitant Comrades, Bell describes the political theorist Harold Laski’s reaction to the Rising, which was to declare, ‘the guilt of this massacre is upon Sir Edward Carson’s hands’. (Unionist leader Carson had established the Ulster Volunteers, loyalist paramilitary precursor of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) which was founded in January 1913.) Bell asks, ‘how much did [Laski] and others who sought to pin the blame on the physical force precedent set by the UVF themselves “understand” what lay behind the Rising?’. ‘Pearse, Connolly, and others’, he continues, ‘staged the Rising ...not so much to follow Carson’s example, but to protest at the appeasement of him.’ Bell’s readers are left only marginally more enlightened than Laski regarding the role of the Irish left in 1916. Members of the Irish Citizen Army, inspired by the Ulster Volunteer Force and an important, if small, contingent in Easter Week, were responsible for driving the 1916 Proclamation’s most radical aspects, but the group is almost wholly absent from Bell’s analysis. Yet the 1913 Dublin Lockout is vital to understanding what came after. How did the legacy of the lockout – which occurred just three years prior to the Easter Rising – affect British labour’s attitudes to the Irish insurrection? What role did lingering personal animosities play? Was Connolly tainted by his association with James Larkin in the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union? We are told that J. H. Thomas, Labour MP and General Secretary of the National Union of Railwaymen, ‘had run-ins with James Connolly and his Irish friends before. Most notably in 1913, when he had successfully prevented his trade union members from taking solidarity action’; Thomas was described by Larkin as ‘A double-[d]yed traitor to his class’, but Bell nonetheless writes that ‘Thomas knew his own world well and was a reliable witness when he wrote in May 1916 of the “sorrow and amazement” with which Labour’s leaders reacted to the Rising’.

The analysis of personal animosities is also useful for untangling the knotty relationship between the Communist Party of Ireland and the Communist Party of Great Britain. James Connolly’s son, Roddy, was founder of the CPI, and as one of the delegates at the Comintern he argued that ‘Ireland was...