The Fenian Ideal and Irish Nationalism, and: The IRB: The Irish Republican Brotherhood from the Land League to Sinn Féin (review)

The political historiography of late-Victorian and Edwardian Ireland has for long been dominated by the Home Rule movement, and the explanations for this, though varied, are not hard to locate. The Irish Parliamentary Party dominated Irish representation at Westminster from the mid-1870s through to 1918, while its successive national organizations—from the National League through to the United Irish League—secured an ever-deeper hold on Irish society and threw out roots towards Great Britain, its Empire, and North America.

But an array of contingent influences and contemporary concerns also shaped this historiographical predominance. In the context of the "Troubles" after 1969, British and Irish official strategies focused upon bolstering constitutional nationalism in Northern Ireland and brokering a deal between the different constitutional parties, unionist and nationalist, within the North. Irish republicanism, by way of contrast, was sometimes associated with the Provisional Irish Republican Army, and with vengeful and horrific violence. Historians as different as F. S. L. Lyons and Paul Bew turned to the Home Rule tradition, partly in order to provide a model of democratic, conciliatory, and consensual nationalism at a time when the stability of the two Irish polities, North and South, was being threatened by violent insurgency. Aside from influence of the "Troubles" on an older generation of scholars, younger researchers such as Patrick Maume and Senia Paseta have been keen to demonstrate the continuing vitality of constitutional nationalism and the strength of its hold over the Catholic middle and upper-middle classes of Edwardian Ireland.

The two works under review, by Matthew Kelly and Owen McGee, share an argument that the present orthodoxy surrounding Irish national politics in the era has suffered from the emphases of the preceding generation. In their view, the Irish republican tradition, particularly as embodied within the secret, oath-bound Irish Republican (Fenian) Brotherhood of 1858, has been denied its rightful centrality. Both scholars argue that past historians have defined the narrative of Fenianism in terms of the two risings of 1867 and 1916 and have largely neglected the movement between those two dates: Fenianism in the 1880s and after, in their shared assessment, has to be restored within the historiography. Both argue (though with markedly different modulation) that, while interpretations of the Irish revolution should continue to acknowledge the great significance of the First World War, they should also look to the longer-term separatist background. For both McGee and Kelly, Fenianism was a substantial player in Irish politics in the later nineteenth century, exercising influence when Home Rule politics were either in gestation (as in the 1870s) or were apparently stalling (as in the mid-1890s). "Fenianism," Kelly argues, "emerges as the central influence on an Irish national culture that was deeply embedded in the texture of Irish identity" (239).

While Kelly and McGee share an agenda of restoring the Fenian tradition within the political historiography of the period, their scholarly concerns, methodologies, and styles could scarcely be more different. McGee argues that the reputation and content of Irish republicanism in the late nineteenth century has been traduced and oversimplified by its more successful competitors within Ireland, and specifically the Catholic Church—dominating the Home Rule, Irish Ireland, and (eventually) the Sinn Féin movements—and Toryism feeding into Irish and Ulster Unionism. He sees the combination of disasters that struck the Fenian movement in 1883–84 as a critical turning point: successful British penetration of the movement brought arrests and confusion, while its influence within the Home Rule movement was replaced by that of the Catholic Church, as the Land League was superseded by the National League, and priests came to exercise a formal influence upon the...