Crisis Part Five Dead End of Nationalism

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In a contribution to the debate on the national question at the Second Conpress of the Communist Intermational, a Jewish delegate from the Bolshevik Party, Mereshin, said:

The transfer of power from the hands of the big bourgeoisie into the hands of petty bourgeois groups forming democratic republican states, does not reduce national tensions but on the contrary sharpens them in the extreme.

Minutes of the Second Congress. Vol 1 p.163 New Park Ed.

The events in Ireland immediately following the 1921 ceasefire with the British are graphic confir(mation of Mereshin's statement.

Dominion

The. Treaty proposed by Loyd George mn 1921, giving the southern, predominantly Catholic, twenty six counties o: Ireland dominion status within the Commonwealth, while retaining control of the Ex North Eastern counties, mas accepted by the Dublinbased Dail by 64 votes to 57 0n January 4 1922.

That vote was a reflection o: the conflicting class forces zhich had fought alongside each other in the National Liberation Movement of the preceding year.

The 64 pro Treatyites-led Ey Arthur Griffiths, Michael Collins and Liam Cosgraverepresented the bigger farmers and businessmen who Lad thrown in their lot with Sinn Fein in the 1919-1921 Ferod.

Fearful

Having secured as much political independence as they needed, and fearful lest a movement of the working class go too far and drive them out as well as the British, they decided to aicept the terms of the Treaty in an effort to stabilize the situation.

The anti-Treatyites, led by Eamon De Valera, were more representative of the interests small farmers and small capital.

For them the Treaty was initially too much to tomach: they reacted mad aminet the nranaced partition of the country, as well as against the clauses in the treaty which stipulated they would have to take an oath of allegiance to George V even after independence was granted.

The pro and anti-Treatyites were ultimately bound together by their desire to establish an independent capitalist Ireland. (De Valera himself found no great trouble in accepting the provisions of the Treaty later on).

But at the start of 1922 they differed on how that was to be achieved. The Griffith's faction wanted open access to British markets; De Valera was tot protectionism which would allow some accumulation of native capital.

By April 1922 sporadic attacks of shootings had taken place between the L.R.A. and the Free State Forces, as the pro-Treatyites were known.

By June, those shootings had escalated into all-out civil war with the Free States using British artillery to bomb Dublin's Four Courtsthe I.R.A. Headquarters at the time.

Tensions

The tensions within Ireland were not to be lessened by the establishment of a 26 county state; as Mereshin foresaw, those tensions were to be sharpened 'in the extreme' in the years which followed, as the Free State Government prosecuted the war against the I.R.A. with greater determination and ferocity than the British had ever shown.

Ambush

On August 15 1922 Michael Collins was shot in an ambush in Tipperary, and his death stung the government into greater repression.

Military courts were setup by the Minister of Justice, Kevin O'Higgins-Ireland's Mussolini-to try 4. arrested I.R.A. men.

In the three weeks from November 17 to December 8 1922 nine volunteers were executed on the orders of this court-among them well-known I.R.A. leaders such as Erskine Childers, Liam Mellows and Joe Mckelvey.

Internment camps were thrown onen At the start of July 1923, after the Civil War had ended, there were 11,316 prisoners in jail.

Faced with such and with dwindling support from the war-weary population, the I.R.A. conceded defeat and on May 24 1923 De Valera gave the order to dump arms.

Determined

The ceasefire did not lesson the tensions, for the Cumann na nGaedheal party which formed the government were determined to wipe out the I.R.A. for good. It wasn't until early 1924 (after a mass hunger strike by prisoners during October 1923) that I.R.A. men began to be released from jail.

Even after being released they were systematically harassed. On April 3 1925, the Dail passed the Treasonable Offences Act-popularly known as O'Higgins' Murder Bill-making any attempt to take up arms against the state punishable by death.

O'Higgins, who signed the death warrants of 77 republicans, was later shot in an I.R.A. ambush in July 1927.

In December 1925 the Free State Government officially recognised the border, and thereby sanctioned the existence of the Northern Ireland state-a further slap in the face for the die-hard republicans.

Defeat in the Civil War and the ensuing governmental measures told heavily on the I.R.A. and Sinn Fein. In March 1926, a motion by De Valera to the Sinn Fein Conference proposing that Sinn Fein should take their seats in the Dail if the oath of alliegiance was removed, was nartowly defeated.

Warriors

Shortly afterwards, De Valera split off from Sinn Fein to form his own party Fianna Fail ('Warriors of Destiny'), weakening the orthodox republican movement even further.

The new party won 44 seats in the June 1927 elections, against 47 for the governing Cumman na nGaedheal party, and on August 12 1927, they took their place in the Dail as the opposition party, following a proposal to remove the oath of allegiance.

In a snap election held that September Fianna Fail won 57 seats, while the government took 62. The demise of Sinn Fein was almost complete. In the September elections it failed to stand a single candidate. Four years previousiy 44 of its members were elected on abstentionists, anti-Treaty tickets.

With the right wing of the anti-Treaty movement now organised in Fianna Fail and ensconced in the 26 county turn to the left. In November 1927, the I.R.A. Army Convention decided to support the ten-year-old Soviet Union in the event of an Anglo-Russian war.Under the leadership of Peadar O'Donnell various radical republican groups were set up.

In 1927, a league of Republican Workers was established; from 1928-29, O'Donnell attempted to set up the radical Saor Eire group.

In June 1929, a Workers Defence Corps-made up of I.R.A. volunteers and trade unionists-was established.

This body actually held a national conference in July 1927, itself the Irish which rechristened Labour Defence League. On March 13 1930, the Revolutionary Workers Group was established as an avowedly Communist organisation, which published а рарег entitled The Irish : Workers Voice.

A plethora of radical organisations were set upThe Friends of Soviet Russia, the Irish National Unemployed Movement, the Womens' International Farmers' Republican Party etc.- clearly a product of the economic crisis which had set in with the 1929 Wall St.

crash.

For most of this period, though, there was more red smoke than fire. None of the organisations had a programme capable of integrating political and economic demands, of giving a proletarian class solution to the national question.

The left-republication movements never went beyond the limits of a radical nationalism, and were thus organically incapable of utilizing the favourable conditions of the early thirties in a revolutionary way. Just as in the 1916-20 period the national question was separated off from the working class agitation of the time, so in 1929-32 were these two ! movements cut apart.

Whereas in 1916-20 such separation was the conscious policy of the Sinn Fein leadership, in 1929-32 the left Republicans (O'Donnell, George Gilmore, Michael Price) honestly sought to bring the two questions together. That they failed to do so was an expression of the fact that they did not break qualitatively with republicanism and adopt a communist programme for resolving the problems.

The opportunities did exist at this time for the unification of the working class-North and South, Catholic and Protestant-on the basis of an anti-imperialist, socialist programme.

And again it was in Belfast -where sectarian rioting in 1920 had crushed the momentary class unity of 1919-that Protestants and Catholics began to come together to fight for their common class interests.

The issue which • was to bring these workers together was the question of the Outdoor Relief. (O.D.R."

Under the Northern Ireland laws of the time, an Valera with US Irish leaders in 1919 of the patrol 1 unemployed worker was entitled to benefit only if he met a number of stiff requirements; if he had been in work and paying contributions for the preceding two years, if he passed a means test and if 'he was genuinely seeking work' Given the near-permanent state of high unemployment in Northern Ireland during the twenties, very few workers were actually entitled to benefit.

In Britain, those denied benefit usually received outdoor relief-a form of charity doled out by local Poor Law Guardians. In Belfast, ODR was allowed only to a handful of applicants, and was awarded in kind rather than in cash.

A series of demonstrations during 1925-26 won a minor concession whereby all heads of families qualified for ODR.

The rates were at starvation level.

A couple with no children got eight shillings a week; with one child, twelve shillings; with two children, sixteen shillings: with four or more children, a maximum of twenty four shillings. For this the husband had to perSOCIALIST PRESS. Hednesin 30 Norember. 1971938 gave Finna Fail greater majority than before.

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De Valera's successes, the exodus of I.R.A. men to Spain during the 1936-7 and the prospect of a Second World War only served to isolate the I.R.A. further.

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parliament, Sinn Fein and the I.R.A. were forced to

League for Peace and Free- dom, the Irish Workers' and