republicanism

republicanism, used in relation to the 17th and 18th centuries, refers to a body of political thought, looking back to Machiavelli and beyond him to classical Rome, that emphasized civic virtue and resistance to tyranny. Concerned with citizenship rather than forms of government, republicanism in this sense was compatible with constitutional monarchy, and would include at least some Irish patriot writing, as well as that of the ‘real Whigs’ or commonwealthmen. The original programme of the United Irishmen likewise accepted a constitutional monarch. Their later commitment to an independent republic was no doubt influenced by the new understanding of republicanism, as a principled rejection of monarchy and aristocracy, propagated by the American and French revolutions. But there was also a pragmatic recognition that reform on the scale they demanded could not be achieved within the existing constitutional framework.

Republicanism remained a minority current within 19th‐century Irish nationalism. In 1848 Mitchel explicitly opposed the ideal of a republic to the repeal movement's envisaged return to the pre‐Union constitution of king, lords, and commons. The Fenians defined their aim as an ‘independent, democratic republic’, although both Kickham and O'Leary expressed willingness to retain a symbolic monarchy, and there was uncertainty whether the IRB was a ‘republican’ or a ‘revolutionary’ brotherhood. Following the rising of 1916, insistence that there could be no retreat from the republic then proclaimed as virtually established almost split the new Sinn Féin in 1917, and provided the main basis for rejection of the Anglo‐Irish treaty. Anti‐treaty forces in the Civil War were called ‘republican’, although their opponents differed from them less in commitment to the republic than in their assessment of how it might be achieved. A similar narrowing of the term to denote the more intransigent or potentially violent forms of nationalism is evident in the contemporary Northern Ireland use of ‘republican’ to describe Sinn Féin and the IRA, as distinct from the ‘nationalist’ Social Democratic and Labour Party.