socialism

socialism, or primitive ‘Celtic communism’, according to James Connolly in Labour in Irish History (1910), existed as ‘the Gaelic principle of common ownership by the people of their sources of food and maintenance’, but was suppressed by the Anglo‐Norman feudal system. Connolly described William Thompson as ‘The First Irish Socialist: A forerunner of Marx’. Other socialist pioneers included John Scott Vandeleur, founder of the Ralahine commune, and James Fintan Lalor and Thomas Devin Reilly, who grafted proto‐socialist ideas onto Young Ireland. There was common ground between the Fenians and Marx and Engels, reflected in the appointment of J. P. MacDonnell as Irish secretary to the first International. Michael Davitt, though in a tiny minority in Ireland, was at one with the Marxists in seeing nationalization as the solution to the land question.

In 1892 the British Independent Labour Party (ILP) came to Ireland. Connolly's Irish Socialist Republican Party in 1896 marked the beginning of an indigenous socialist movement. In 1910 Connolly became organizer of its successor the Socialist Party of Ireland (SPI). The labour‐unionist William Walker, who narrowly failed to become Ireland's first socialist MP, conducted a defining debate with Connolly on socialism and the national question in the Glasgow socialist paper Forward. Connolly's Independent Labour Party of Ireland replaced the SPI in 1912. This was the heroic period of Irish socialism, with Connolly and Larkin on centre stage. Their revolutionary programme aimed at establishing a workers' republic. Their socialism was usually described as syndicalism or Larkinism. In 1913 they persuaded the Irish Trade Union Congress to establish the Irish Labour Party on socialist principles. Their removal from the scene during the First World War left the movement under the labourist or reformist leadership of Tom Johnson and William O'Brien, and from then on this would be the dominant strain in Irish socialism.

Connolly's prophesy that partition would ‘usher in a carnival of reaction north and south’ was fulfilled. The Northern Ireland Labour Party (NILP) gradually dissipated itself trying to avoid offending either community. Revolutionary socialist ideas became confined to far‐left sects. Larkin for a time led an embryonic communist group. In the depressed 1930s the communist revolutionary workers' groups emerged. In the north the RWG played a leading role in the Outdoor Relief Protests of 1932. Left‐wing IRA, socialists, and communists came together in the Republican Congress, which even had supporters in the Protestant Shankill Road and east Belfast. However, ‘red scare’ propaganda from church and state alike helped to marginalize all these groups.

After the Second World War the level of hostility towards even moderate socialist programmes was notoriously manifested in the quashing of Dr Noel Browne's ‘Mother and Child’ scheme. The British Labour government's Welfare State was installed in the north, despite lukewarm Unionist attitudes. For a time, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, the NILP formed a coherent moderate socialist opposition in Stormont.

In the late 1960s and 1970s Irish versions of the ‘New Left’ included the student‐based People's Democracy and the Official Republican Movement, which for a time espoused Marxism. Its contemporary successors, the Workers' Party and Democratic Left, have become social democratic, whereas the tiny Irish Republican Socialist Party maintains extreme ideas in isolation. The Provisional Republican Movement is ostensibly committed to Connolly's goal of a socialist republic. Others on the left have challenged the republican‐socialist synthesis, notably in the two nations thesis. Socialist ideas are also manifested in the programmes of the loyalist Ulster Democratic and Popular Unionist parties. But in the worldwide retreat from socialism in the 1990s, Ireland has had a lot less distance to travel than most countries.

Bibliography

O'Connor, E. , A Labour History of Ireland (1992)

Peter Collins