Irish Republican Brotherhood

Irish Republican Brotherhood, a revolutionary organization that grew out of the Fenian movement of the 1850s. Fenianism originally developed in the absence of a viable constitutional movement, but for much of the period from 1867 to 1916 the IRB had to coexist with a dominant home rule movement and accordingly led a rather submerged existence seeking opportunities to exploit.

Following the failed rising of 1867 the Fenian movement was confused. Lack of opportunity for an effective rising was compounded by internal divisions, especially over the leadership of James Stephens, whose failure to appear in Ireland in 1867 caused continuing controversy and complicated attempts at organizational reconstruction. Division also existed over whether it was best to hit at England in Ireland or Canada, a dispute only resolved after the succession of failed interventions in Canada in 1866, 1867, and 1871. Reorganization began slowly from 1871, with the release from prison of effective leaders such as O'Donovan Rossa and Devoy. Devoy especially was to be at the centre of every leading movement for Irish independence until 1921. By 1873 the IRB had acquired a formal constitution which provided for an elaborate, secret society organized on a democratic basis and governed by a partially elected supreme council. Nevertheless, with the prospects for revolutionary activity poor, many Fenians were attracted to practical action in agrarian agitation, a reality formalized in the New Departure' during the Land War of 1879–82. For the IRB this was a compromise which allowed individual members to become involved in agrarian struggle while the organization formally remained aloof and committed to the revolutionary path: a path pursued chiefly in the 1880s through bombing outrages in England.

Such was the strength of the Parnellite movement at this time, however, that the revolutionary tradition was effectively overshadowed. Many IRB men either were expelled or left the organization while in America splits emerged at leadership level between Devoy, who was reluctant to abandon his arrangement with Parnell until it had clearly proved fruitless, and Rossa, who remained resolutely committed to physical force. Even with the constitutional movement weakened and divided in the 1890s, following the Parnell divorce scandal, the IRB failed to capitalize on the situation. Only at the turn of the century, with a new generation and new organizations such as Sinn Féin, did the revolutionary tradition revive. It found inspiration in 1907 with the arrival in Ireland of Tom Clarke, a committed revolutionary who had spent fifteen years in English jails, and further impetus in 1910 with the launching of Irish Freedom, a militantly separatist newspaper.

The opportunity republicans had been waiting for came in 1914 with the formation of the Irish Volunteers. John Redmond's commitment of this body to the British war effort produced a split, and it was from the ranks of the dissident group which rejected Redmond's lead that the forces which carried out the Easter rising of 1916 would largely come. The rising was organized mainly by the supreme council of the IRB which, led by Patrick Pearse and joined by James Connolly and his tiny Irish Citizen Army, decided that England's engagement in a foreign war gave them the best opportunity they could hope for. As the struggle for independence widened, however, so the scope for conspiratorial action diminished, and the influence of the IRB during the Anglo‐Irish War was due chiefly to the fact that Michael Collins was its president. The organization came to an end with the failed Irish army mutiny of 1924.

Since 1800 Ireland's struggle for independence has tended to oscillate between constitutional, mass movements and usually small, conspiratorial, revolutionary groups. It was the specific contribution of the IRB to persevere doggedly in the most unfavourable circumstances in the ultimately well‐founded belief that, given the right conditions, it could communicate its radical conception of Irish independence beyond its own narrow confines to a mass movement dedicated to its realization.

Bibliography

O'Broin, Leon , The Story of the Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood 1858–1924 (1976).

James Loughlin