I

‘Liberty’ is a ubiquitous concept in modern European and American history, and has been a core value in most national movements since the revolutions of 1776 and 1789. Perhaps not surprisingly, its meaning and implications are controversial and disputed. Particularly complex is its relationship with nationality and nationalism, to which liberty is both historically and etymologically related (in Latin libertas is what is appropriate to the liberi, or one's children, and natio is linked to natus, the act of being born, the genetic descent of a family or tribe). On the one hand, liberty has universalistic connotations, central to the notions of individual and minority rights and democratic government. On the other, it can be closely identified with the exclusive heritage of a particular group of people, ethnically defined.

This ambiguity is relevant to the debate on one of the most disquieting dimensions of nationalism: the tension between its two souls, civic voluntarism and ethnic supremacism. The former is central to both liberalism and democracy; the latter is their nemesis. Namier interpreted the emerging of such tension in terms of the sudden but inevitable degeneration of a ‘revolution of the intellectuals’ when confronted by the realities of 1848–9.Footnote ¹ Hobsbawm has seen it as growing gradually after 1870, with xenophobic tendencies eventually becoming dominant under the pressure of imperial rivalries, social Darwinism, and ‘scientific’ claims about racial differences.Footnote ² In more recent studies, Tim Blanning and Alberto M. Banti, among others, have identified xenophobia and ethnic supremacism as intrinsic features of nationalism from as early as the seventeenth century.Footnote ³

Indeed, Banti has questioned the civic/voluntarist model to the extent that he has reinterpreted the Italian Risorgimento – once regarded as the epitome of liberal nationalism – in terms of ethnic absolutism, built around quasi-tribal notions of the family and sexual honour.Footnote ⁴ For all his talk about the sisterhood of the peoples, Giuseppe Mazzini himself operated with an idea of the nation which

According to this interpretation ‘Mazzinian discourse, alongside many other versions of nineteenth-century nationalism, conceived of the nation … as a community of combatants, bound by a common sacramental compact and acting in the name of a para-metaphysical entity, the nation or Fatherland.’ Politics became a matter of ‘faith’, finding its fullest expression in the notion of ‘martyrdom, or of a death that bears witness … [which] served to sanctify … political activity, and this conception led to the exploration of figurative and intertextual relationships between the patriotic martyrs and Christ and his holy martyrs’.Footnote ⁶

Mazzini was never directly influential in Ireland,Footnote ⁷ although his Romantic vision was akin to the ideals championed by Thomas Davis and popularized by The Nation. Moreover, the Mazzinian notion of a ‘community of combatants’ evokes parallels with the Fenian Brotherhood (literally, a ‘brotherhood of combatants’, named after the ancient Irish warriors na Fianna). The similarities may be vague, but were sufficient to alarm contemporaries. Archbishop Paul Cullen denounced both Young Ireland and the Fenians as Mazzinian conspiracies. Colin Barr has shown that Cullen was wrong. But it is difficult to deny that he was nevertheless perceptive of the common ground and non-Catholic cultural traditions shared by Mazzini and Davis, including the influence of Thomas Carlyle and secularized liberal Protestantism.Footnote ⁸ Furthermore, Cullen had some reason to fear that the founders of the Fenian Brotherhood, John O'Mahoney and James Stephens, had been directly influenced by the Mazzinians during their stay in Paris, in 1848. He was also alarmed by the anticlericalism of rank-and-file Fenians: even ‘in small towns and villages, they generally played a role similar to that of many republicans in provincial France; namely acting as … rival community leader[s] to the parish priest’.Footnote ⁹ More generally, Cullen was suspicious of Irish notions of ‘liberty’, which were complex, ambiguous, and sometimes inconsistent with Catholic teaching (he spoke of ‘libertà alla Mazzini’).Footnote ¹⁰

What was ‘liberty’ then? Most Irish political movements and parties between 1798 and 1922 proclaimed ‘freedom’ as their ultimate goal. The problem was that Protestants and Catholics, Unionists and nationalists, and indeed different currents of nationalism, each had a different vision of what ‘true’ liberty entailed. The preservation of the Union with Britain, the end of that Union, the terms under which either of such aims might be achieved, and (from 1921) both partition and the end of partition, were each identified with ‘freedom’. Furthermore, the past was as controversial and divisive as both the present and the planning for any future settlement – for ‘history’ was about deciding who was to blame for one or the other of the many tragic developments in Ireland's past. So deep and bitter was the disagreement, that it affected professional historians as much as practising politicians and the general public. Over the past fifty years this has resulted in a long intellectual confrontation between ‘revisionists’ and defenders of traditional nationalist values. The Troubles in Northern Ireland have ensured that academic arguments retain an unhealthy degree of partisanship. Despite the recent historic breakthrough in securing a degree of reconciliation in the Province, the academic community remains bitterly divided – although the debate has become more sophisticated and nuanced.

This trend is well illustrated by the books reviewed in the present essay. Richard English is the author of a number of important works, including an acclaimed history of the IRA,Footnote ¹¹ but Irish freedom is the most ambitious and controversial project he has undertaken so far. His militantly revisionist reading of over a thousand years of Irish history has already attracted vitriolic reviews by nationalist scholars.Footnote ¹² English tries to integrate the empirical, historicist method with the broadly comparative, sociological, and philosophical approach adopted by scholars of nationalism as a global phenomenon. His approach to nationalism is neither ‘modernist’ nor ‘perennialist’, but rather eclectic, and relies on Anderson, Hobsbawm, and Gellner as much as A. D. Smith.Footnote ¹³ Nationalists ‘invented’ nations in the modern period, but they used pre-modern ingredients, which they fished out from the pool of collective memory. His strategy is not always convincing, partly because dealing with a thorny topic over such a long time span is a daunting task for any single scholar. However, the bulk of the book, and its most significant contribution to scholarship, is the part that discusses the modern age. Irish freedom is particularly good and innovative in the way it explores the ‘positive’ ideological components of nationalism, in contrast to its ‘rejectionist’, i.e. xenophobic and anti-British dimension, which dominates most surveys of this topic, including D. George Boyce's magisterial study.Footnote ¹⁴ In this respect, Richard English seems to be swimming against the tide of the new Anglo-Italian readings of nationalism discussed above, but, as I shall argue, he reaches conclusions which are complementary rather than alternative to such interpretations.

One of his main points is about the importance of ideological promiscuity across confessional and national boundaries. Thus modern Irish liberty owes much to the influence of an English Protestant political philosopher, John Locke. Here Richard English follows Elliott and Kelly and argues that the conclusions they have reached about the eighteenth century have wider implications for later periods.Footnote ¹⁵ Particularly important was Locke's emphasis on consent as the only basis for legitimate authority and on the people's right to transform the political order should the existing system become tyrannical. However, who were ‘the people’ whose consent was to be sought? In a pre-democratic age this was not easy to establish, because (quite apart from the sectarian and ethnic complications typical of the Irish situation) there was no simple way of consulting the country. A similar problem was posed by the idea of ‘patriotism’, which, according to George Berkeley's famous definition, consisted in ‘the love of the common good’. The Kilkenny-born Episcopalian cleric operated within a mental world in which the definition of the common good was provided by the (Protestant) elite. Despite the survival of a Jacobite tradition, preserved in Gaelic poetry, and the ambiguous attitude to republicanism among Irish Protestant Dissenters, the Catholic majority and the masses of Presbyterian artisans and farmers were not in a position to challenge such assumption before the 1760s.Footnote ¹⁶

The issue came to a head during the age of the American and French revolutions. Then, under the influence of yet another British political philosopher – Tom Paine, a freethinker of Quaker extraction – an urban elite voicing ‘Patriot’ opinion forged ‘a connection between equality, popular sovereignty and freedom within the context of the nation’ (Irish freedom, p. 20). These impeccably civic values found their nemesis in rural Ireland: here the boundary between liberal and ethnic nationalism was difficult to trace, and English comes to conclusions similar to those reached by Banti, as he describes how patriotic values were adapted to make sense of the realities of community (drawn from locality, descent, or religion), collective struggle (whether for cultural or material benefits, including freedom), and, through communal mobilization, power (including popular sovereignty).

Such were, for Richard English, the intellectual ingredients of the most violent nationalist rebellion ever to take place in Ireland – the 1798 rising. A Donegal memorial to Theobald Wolfe Tone – the rebellion's greatest hero – proclaimed that the United Irishmen had made an attempt ‘[to] abolish the memory of past dissension’ and to establish ‘a civil order governed by the principles of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity’ (p. 1). Both aims proved very difficult to achieve. In the 1790s Protestant revolutionaries had worked under the impression that the French Revolution was a sort of Reformation ‘for slow learners’: it was to enable the Catholics to reject Romish superstitions, dismantle oppression and free themselves from the papal yoke (p. 94). Through the Revolution, ‘reason’ would finally enlighten even Catholic Ireland – a project in which Paine was actively and directly involved. It was not an implausible interpretation at the time. Both in France and Italy, Protestants and Jews had been emancipated, and the Huguenots were in the forefront of the Revolution.Footnote ¹⁷ The pope was himself a prisoner of the French Republic.

Here Richard English relies again on Elliott, as well as on Whelan and Dickson, who have highlighted the British, American, and French parameters of Presbyterian patriot radicalism in the 1790s.Footnote ¹⁸ Moreover, like McBride, English stresses that such radicalism was neither ecumenical nor ‘secular’, but, on the contrary, militantly religious (p. 109).Footnote ¹⁹ The problem was that many Catholic patriots were equally religious, while Defenderism was re-kindling older anti-Protestant politics. English concludes, with Curtin, that the United Irishmen's attempt to overcome sectarianism was from the start divisive and inevitably self-defeating.Footnote ²⁰ However, he is not very explicit about how precisely the rebellion actually degenerated into an open sectarian conflict. For example, although he cites Whelan's post-revisionist essay on Wexford, he does not comment on the latter's view that sectarianism was encouraged and instigated by the state, in order to divide the Irish rebels.Footnote ²¹ He also cites Dunne's account of the massacres of Protestants as evidence of the fundamentally sectarian implications of ‘any challenge to the Protestant Ascendancy and state in late-eighteenth-century Ireland’. But he then qualifies such claim by pointing out that large numbers of Catholics were opposed to the rebellion (p. 92). Granted that this was the case, the question is to what extent their opposition was inspired by material, rather than ideological, considerations, especially among those middle-class Catholics who had reason to fear land redistribution.

Concern for the defence of property, law, and order might have generated wider and longer-lasting support for the 1800 Parliamentary Union, had the latter been accompanied by Emancipation. Instead over the next thirty years, the denial of equal political rights strengthened the old sense of community and oppression among the Catholics as a whole – irrespective of class divides – and inspired communal mobilization around Daniel O'Connell's platform. It awakened the memory of the Penal Laws, as many Catholics felt ‘that law was hostile to their community rather than representative or protective of it’ (p. 123).

That the Penal Laws had been implemented in Ireland between the 1690s and the 1720s is perhaps not surprising, especially given the persistent Jacobite threat and the confessionalism prevalent at the time throughout Europe.Footnote ²² More surprising is that the opportunity to co-opt the Irish Catholics was missed between the 1780s and 1800, when toleration had become almost normal both in western Europe and within the British Empire. In Ireland much could be achieved with modest reforms, as indicated by the success of the Catholic Relief Act of 1782 in appeasing the middle class.Footnote ²³ In North America the British managed to incorporate the Quebec Catholics into the Canadian project by the end of the century. However, as far as Ireland was concerned, they remained unwilling to enact Emancipation, although the latter was widely discussed and recommended by the prime minister, William Pitt. Why? Whelan has pointed out that avoiding a ‘Canadian’ settlement was explicitly one of the aims of Ascendancy propagandists, ‘obsessed by Presbyterian and Catholic attacks on the Established Church’ and ‘at pains to depict Irish Catholicism as sui generis’, incomparably more dangerous than popery elsewhere in Europe or America.Footnote ²⁴ In the process, conservative Episcopalians shifted their emphasis away from the Irish state, towards the empire. For Whelan, in this way they ‘effectively ceded the concept of the nation to Irish Catholics. This explains the curious trajectory of Irish political nationalism in the 1790s, which entered the decade as a Protestant phenomenon but exited it as a Catholic one.’Footnote ²⁵

English does not engage directly with this argument, although he agrees that resistance to Emancipation reflected the persistent British view ‘that Catholic Ireland was a non-assimilable community’ (p. 118). The latter became part of a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the one hand, Irish nationalism continued to borrow from British and European political thought, including liberal and republican notions of liberty and citizenship. On the other, the Emancipation campaign could become a mass movement only because its leaders were prepared to accept some considerable degree of ideological promiscuity with popular Catholic supremacist aspirations. Thus, although O'Connell was inspired by Benthamite utilitarianism and was – to most intents and purposes – a liberal, he led an extra-parliamentary mobilization which ‘was, at root, a communal struggle for power’ (p. 131), and was perceived as such by most Irish Protestants.

Brian Jenkins offers an interesting contrast here. For he accepts only half of Richard English's argument: he agrees that the basic ingredients of Irish nationalism were communal, religious, and messianic, but does not see any real role either for the Protestant input or for the Lockean matrix. In fact he is not very interested in the ideological foundations of nationalism or in the role of the elites, except for the Catholic hierarchy. Although he discusses Thomas Davis's attempt to create a new inclusive Irish identity along the lines of the German Romantic tradition, he does so only in order to highlight the gap between Davis's own vision and the reality of the movement which he inspired (p. 91).

Not only was popular nationalism endemically sectarian and intolerant, but from 1850 the influence of Paul Cullen further strengthened Catholic supremacist and segregationist inclinations. Cullen (first as archbishop of Armagh and then of Dublin) viewed the British administration as a ‘heretical authority’ and rejected his Protestant compatriots' claims to Irishness (p. 106), which he defined in strictly sectarian terms. Like Colin Barr, Jenkins sees Cullen as a nationalist whose burning passion was only restrained by his hatred for revolutionaries and republicans. It was such hatred which put him on a collision course with less inhibited nationalist prelates like MacHale.Footnote ²⁶ Following Desmond Bowen, Jenkins argues that Cullen's nationalism was so narrow and ‘relentless’ that he despised and dismissed even English Catholics, whom he saw ‘as exclusively ornamental if not frivolous’ (p. 109), while ‘[a]mbition served to harden [his] resolve to unify and command the Irish division of a militant Roman Catholic Church’ in a ‘war on heresy’ (pp. 107–8).Footnote ²⁷

Meanwhile, at the local level ‘[s]ectarianism stained many an agrarian confrontation, especially in those counties where Catholics and Protestants were both present in substantial numbers’. This resulted in a large-scale movement of people, a more or less voluntary ‘ethnic cleansing’ in the sense that ‘the desire to escape from violence was second only to the goal of economic independence in explaining why an estimated 500,000 Irish Protestants emigrated during the pre-Famine decades … By 1861 County Longford had, within a generation, lost one third of its Protestant residents’ (p. 135). Partly as a reaction, Orange sectarian violence flared up in the urban centres – not only in the north-east, but also in Dublin. Not surprisingly, ‘the experience of organized illegality’ provided the perfect training for political terrorism.

Jenkins's sobering analysis counterbalances English's emphasis on the liberal roots of nationalism, but more as a reminder of the limits of ideology as a factor shaping popular political behaviour than as a direct challenge to the interpretation put forward in Irish freedom. However, one wonders whether Jenkins has not overstated his case. For example, to what extent was the Protestant exodus of 1845–61 due to the Famine and subsequent mass emigration (which affected both Catholics and Protestants), rather than to sectarian violence? The allusion to the migrants' desire for economic independence is revealing here, but Jenkins ought to have expanded on the economic causes of demographic movements. As for the post-Famine period, his book conveys no impression of the political impact of economic prosperity in the 1850s and 1860s, or the extent to which this created a greater degree of political acquiescence, deference, and localism of allegiances, as Theo Hoppen and others have argued.Footnote ²⁸ Finally, from a rhetorical point of view, Jenkins's onslaught on the policies of the Catholic hierarchy risks backfiring.Footnote ²⁹

The most innovative part of its book is the strong comparative dimension, in particular, with reference to Scotland and Wales and Jenkins's willingness to explore the European ramifications of Irish nationalism (for example, its emotional and military involvement in the Italian Risorgimento on the anti-nationalist side, in defence of the pope and the ‘freedom’ of the church). While Jenkins could have explored the affinities and contrasts between the various national movements in the UK in greater depth – Wales especially offers important parallels with Ireland, which the author hardly mentionsFootnote ³⁰ – Irish nationalism is excellent on the Irish-American aspect of nationalism (pp. 143–254). Here Jenkins adopts the methods of social history to supplement his political analysis of the ways in which the diaspora interacted with the rest of society in Canada and the USA. In British North America a strongly Protestant assimilative culture and the presence of a loyalist Francophone Catholic community acted as restraints on the politics of the recent immigrants, but did not prevent either the growth of Ultramontanism or the spreading of Orange violence. On the other hand, communalism and sectarianism were so strong that the Catholics themselves were internally divided along ethnic lines, with the French and the Irish mistrusting and despising each other (p. 179). In the USA – despite intra-Catholic ethnic tensions (between Irish, Italians, Poles, and Germans) – the situation was different. For one thing, the States had already developed an Anglophobic, anti-monarchist environment to nurture ‘Celtic’ hatred of their ‘Saxon’ oppressors. Moreover, the USA attracted a larger proportion of Irish Catholics, whose ‘concentration within a relatively small number of states … contributed to the growth of Irish political influence and power’, with ‘“enclave consciousness” … [being] fortified by family emigration during the Famine and a strong commitment to endogamy made possible by the availability of young Irish women’. Yet, paradoxically the greatest champion of Irish American Anglophobic republicanism was a Protestant, John Mitchel, to whom Jenkins devotes some attention (pp. 218–23).

Militant nationalism is also the focus of Matthew J. Kelly, whose book is one of the most important studies of Fenianism since the publication of Comerford's classic work.Footnote ³¹ Unlike English and Jenkins, however, Kelly is not concerned with communalism and sectarianism. Instead he stresses the secular outlook of the Fenian elite and the extent to which some of their aims – especially full separation from Britain – appealed to the wider public in Ireland. His central thesis is encapsulated in a quotation from a letter sent to The Times in 1885 by the English radical MP Henry Labouchere: ‘Mr Parnell and his political friends have substituted constitutional agitation for lawless and revolutionary agitation. He has only succeeded in this by persuading his countrymen that his actions will result in success. If he be doomed to failure, the Fenians will once more gain the upper hand in Ireland’ (p. v). Kelly argues that many Irish nationalists backed Home Rule only for pragmatic reasons, because they thought that full separation was not feasible. By the same token, support for the Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) waxed and waned according to the plausibility of alternative strategies.

The IRB was set up in 1858, but Kelly's starting point is the Brotherhood's response to the Phoenix Park murders of 1882. It is indicative of Fenianism's limited revolutionary potential that its members were overwhelmed by horror at the sight of the decapitation of British government in Ireland. Following the shock, the movement then went through a period of ‘reinvention’. In the 1880s the emphasis was on education through the activities of the Young Ireland Societies. These were loosely organized around personal and trade networks, with a ‘hint of the mafia … a complex web of association, allegiance and intrigue’ (p. 20). Although Kelly argues that the movement had the backing of a potentially large part of Irish opinion, those actually engaged in its activities constituted a small elite. According to the Dublin Metropolitan Police, one of the strongest groups within Fenianism, the followers of John Sullivan, comprised nineteen members, ‘ranging in age from 27 to 53, with eight in their forties and seven in their thirties’ (p. 21). The average age is interesting: these would-be revolutionaries were much older than most of the members of the IRB/IRA of 1916–23. It suggests a movement dominated by householders. Their social composition indicated a prevalence of artisan and lower-middle-class people. For example, the above-mentioned ‘Sullivanites’ included ‘a bookseller, a shoemaker, a rope maker, a butcher, a barber, a picture frame maker, a solicitor's clerk, a publican, two labourers, a carpenter, a coffin maker, a serviceman, two tailors, a gas fitter, and the assistant secretary to the public health committee’ (p. 21).

One of the most interesting aspects of this book is the reconstruction of the ideology of the Fenian rank-and-file through the reports and records of the meetings of the Dublin Young Ireland Society. The ideas and values that stand out are commercial protectionism, democracy (qualified by elitism and contempt for the masses), and an interest in Irish history and culture (p. 25). From 1884 the influence of John O'Leary – a monarchist strongly opposed to terrorist activities – further dampened revolutionary zeal. It is easy to see how Parnell could negotiate Fenian support without diluting his party's parliamentary programme and priorities.

Not surprisingly, then, Kelly agrees with Comerford that, in the 1880s even more so than in the previous two decades, the movement was primarily a ‘social’ phenomenon, ‘[fitting] into a materialist paradigm of an insecure rising petite bourgeoisie seeking purpose against a background of rural and provincial tedium’. It was little more than a ‘subversive subculture’, an alternative political environment. Its enduring importance derived from the fact that the hegemony of the Home Rule discourse made them the only proponents of separatism in one form or another, at a time when ‘[i]deologically, Ireland was up for grabs’ (ibid.).

From Kelly's analysis it is not clear whether there was any ideological depth or coherence in Fenian political culture. As for Parnellism, Kelly's conclusion that ‘[it] was first and foremost a political dynamic and not a set of clearly delineated political principles flawlessly melded to a consistent political strategy’ (p. 43) is reminiscent of Henry Pelling's comment about the Victorian TUC being ‘apolitical’: as Alastair Reid has pointed out, the trade unionists could be perceived as ‘apolitical’ only because they had so completely interiorized the contemporary liberal consensus that they felt no need to discuss political principles.Footnote ³² Likewise, Parnellism had no ‘principles’, apart from embodying Anglo-Irish parliamentarianism and the North-Atlantic political tradition, with their distinctive ideas of liberty.

II

That ‘Irish freedom’ was more complex and multi-faceted than simply hatred for Britain is further confirmed by both Victoria's Ireland and Ireland in transition. Both books are particularly strong on the theme of the Irish identity and the interplay between ‘Irishness’ and ‘Britishness’. Such interplay was especially significant in the period before 1921, when the Irish were most actively involved in the running of the Empire, as well as in voicing opposition to imperialism. A number of chapters of Victoria's Ireland address imperial or global issues. In particular, Pandeleimon Hionidis and Carla King challenge the view that Irish nationalists supported other nationalities ‘struggling to be free’ only in order to embarrass Britain as an imperial power.Footnote ³³ This interpretation, variously articulated by Shannon, Howe, and others since 1963, has survived for so long largely because most historians, eager to stress the differences between the British and Irish, have been selectively blind to the common ground between radicals and reformers from the two countries. Very few scholars have taken the trouble to explore whether religious sympathy with fellow Christians oppressed by the Ottomans in Bulgaria and elsewhere could actually contribute to an Anglo-Irish ‘Union of Hearts’, or the extent to which political humanitarianism was as much an integral part of Irish nationalism as of Gladstonian liberalism.Footnote ³⁴ Hionidis shows that in 1866, a decade before the ‘Bulgarian Agitation’, the Ottoman repression of insurrectionary movements in Crete provoked widespread protest in Ireland. It is remarkable that it was the Catholic nationalist press which adopted a quasi-Gladstonian line, while Protestant papers ‘questioned the motives and the intentions of the insurgents and castigated Greece for its involvement in the conflict’ (p. 108). This is the opposite of what we would expect on the basis of Shannon's ‘confessional’ thesis,Footnote ³⁵ according to which Roman Catholics would not have shed many tears over the persecution of ‘heretical’ Eastern Orthodox peasants, in contrast to the Anglicans, who regarded Eastern Christianity as a legitimate branch of the universal apostolic church. Obviously, whatever the Catholic ecclesiastical hierarchy believed and prescribed, the Irish laity, journalists, and nationalist politicians had a mind of their own.

Michael Davitt, who emerges from King's innovative analysis as a consistent anti-imperialist and internationalist, most certainly did.Footnote ³⁶ Widely read, Davitt was influenced by French, British, and Irish Liberal historians and social scientists, including Thiers, Thierry, Guizot, Macaulay, Lecky, Herbert Spencer, Thorold Rogers, Émile de Laveleye, Joseph Kay (about free trade in land), John Stuart Mill, but also J. A. Hobson, the ‘New Liberal’ economist. To Davitt ‘liberty’ came to mean human dignity, a non-negotiable and universal attribute of humanity, universal and therefore distinct from nationalism, but essential to both ‘Irishness’ and ‘Britishness’ properly understood. King throws new light on the question of Irish support for Dadabhai Naoroji, the Indian Parsee patriot who became the first Asian MP in 1892 (when he stood as a Liberal candidate for Finsbury), showing that it went back to 1883. At the time Davitt proposed his adoption as a Nationalist candidate, an idea about which Parnell was initially enthusiastic, but subsequently had to abandon in view of ‘trouble within the party’.Footnote ³⁷

Thus the politics of humanitarianism allowed the emergence of common ground between people belonging not only to different Christian confessions, but even to different religions. In two elegant contributions to Ireland in transition, Margaret O'Callaghan and Nicholas Allen explore, respectively, how such a policy created an imaginative affinity between Roger Casement and the victims of European imperialism in Africa, and George Russell's vision of a future Irish identity based not on ethnicity but on ‘intellect, culture and humanity’. Russell was a true internationalist. His cosmopolitan dream was based on the assumption that ‘[w]e have not only to be good Irishmen, but good citizens of the world’ (p. 133). Both he and Casement were Protestants (although the latter eventually converted to Catholicism). Neither a revolutionary nor a dreamer, T. P. O'Connor, the Nationalist MP for the Scotland Division of Liverpool, was a Catholic and radical who fostered his political vision through the newspaper press, and particularly The Star, his highly successful London daily. In a perceptive essay, Ian Sheehy reconstructs his strategy for broadening the Home Rule campaign and linking it firmly to a New Liberal agenda. Again the politics of humanitarianism – this time applied to domestic issues – was the lynchpin of the whole project, amounting to ‘a union of the two democracies’ (the British Liberals and the Irish Nationalists). T. P. O'Connor had first conceived of such a union as early as 1881, when he identified the landed gentry as the common enemy of ‘the people’ in both countries. Like Davitt, he conceived of ‘liberty’ primarily in material, rather than spiritual, terms. It consisted of a number of political and social rights.

Davitt and O'Connor were leaders and as such in some respects ‘unusual’. But, in contrast to later Sinn Fein, it is striking the extent to which in the 1880s their material approach to liberty was shared by the Irish National League (INL). The League's constitution consisted of six long articles, the first of which concerned Home Rule. The others dealt with land laws, local government, parliamentary and local franchises, and ‘the development and encouragement of the Labour and Industrial Interests of Ireland’.Footnote ³⁸ The land reform clauses – periodically updated in later editions of this document in response to government legislation – included the establishment of ‘an occupying ownership or Peasant Proprietary’ by means of Treasury loans and the compulsory purchase of ‘waste’ lands. Under the heading ‘Local Government’, the INL asked for the creation of elected County Boards with extensive powers over education, public works, police, and local magistrates, together with ‘[t]he transfer to County Boards of the management of union workhouses, lunatic asylums and other institutions supported by local rates’. With regard to the parliamentary franchise, the INL demanded full equality with Britain. As for the defence of ‘Labour and Industrial Interests’, pride of place was given to the erection of dwellings for farm labourers (a demand tentatively addressed by the 1883 Act), and ‘out-door relief for labourers during illness’. Moreover, the League asked for the creation of an Industrial Committee with representatives from all branches of industry, trade, and agriculture, for the purpose of ‘encouraging the use and sale of Irish products’, the organization of industrial exhibitions, and the production of ‘scientific reports of the industrial capacities’ of the various regions around the country. Not much ethnic supremacism here.

This does not mean that Irish nationalists were tame and moderate: after all, democracy and land redistribution were then revolutionary creeds in most European countries. In Ireland the ambiguity between parliamentarianism and agrarian revolution was compounded by the tension between the liberalism of the elite and the communalism of the masses. O'Connell's strategy had depended on his prophetic charisma. It was probably the right approach, because thirty years later Parnell, himself the paradigm of the Weberian leader, managed to achieve an unprecedented degree of control over all the currents of nationalism in the country.Footnote ³⁹

However, even Parnell's ‘democracy’ had its discontents: from as early as 1889, the younger generation grew impatient with the Home Rule party, which was perceived as an essentially agrarian movement staffed by mature or older men, and firmly led by a ‘bourgeois’ elite. The fragmented and multi-layered nature of the Irish working class prevented the rise of a town-based social radical movement and enabled the IRB to establish its influence first within the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) and, after the party split in 1891, within the Parnellite faction. This further compounded the difficulties of those who articulated a social-democratic vision of liberty. In particular, Michael Davitt attracted a considerable amount of Fenian hostility, which in 1891 was to cost him the Cork parliamentary seat when the working-class vote went to John Redmond.Footnote ⁴⁰

Redmond used the Fenians both to retain political credibility vis-à-vis the government and Catholic hierarchy, and to maintain a functioning party machine in the aftermath of the secession of a majority of the INL members to the anti-Parnellite Irish National Federation in the 1890s. Yet Fenian involvement did not change the nature of either faction of the divided Nationalist party, which was eventually re-unified in 1900 on the old parliamentary/agrarian basis. One consequence was that, again, the Fenians were left as the only faction offering an alternative policy. In Nationalism and the Irish party Michael Wheatley studies the life and death of Redmondism in the Irish north-west and midlands – Leitrim, Longford, Roscommon, Sligo, and Westmeath – during the six crucial years which saw the party's triumph before its sudden demise. He corroborates the well-established view that the party was still in robust good health in 1914.Footnote ⁴¹ However, he argues that throughout the period 1910–16 there was a discrepancy between the loyalist, imperialist agenda articulated by Redmond and his close collaborators and the Anglophobic views of the rank-and-file (pp. 77–9). During these years the liberal elite endeavoured to preserve its hegemony over the mass movement, and contain communalism and social jealousy.Footnote ⁴² Such hegemony was successfully imposed for so long partly because of the real or perceived affinities between ‘the democratic forces’ of Britain and Ireland (pp. 85–6), which in 1910–13 contributed to the renewal of the ‘Union of Hearts’. However, the latter came under strain from the summer of 1914: even before the war started, the prospect of partition and the Curragh army ‘mutiny’ triggered a bitter debate.

As Kelly puts it, ‘[m]aking sense of “the North” had always been a problem for Irish nationalists, separatist or otherwise’ (p. 251) and the crisis of the National party did not make the task any easier. The extent to which Arthur Griffith and the other Sinn Fein leaders were unable to grasp the realities of north-east Ulster would be astonishing, were it not for the fact that Parnell himself had fared little better. Both had dreamed of encouraging the development of Irish industry by means of protective tariffs, although the latter were anathema, perhaps worse than popery, to most men and women in Ulster. Basically the nationalists were unable to conceptualize Ireland as a country economically, as much as rhetorically, inclusive of the north-east. However, such lack of political imagination co-existed with a surprising variety of attitudes to the Irish cultural identity. Both Wheatley and Kelly show that in the 1910s nationalists – including Sinn Fein and the IRB – voiced a wide range of views on what an independent Ireland should be like, ranging from Gaelic supremacism to the pluralism of those who championed the equality of all traditions within the island, whether ‘Gael, Dane, Norman, Scot, Cromwellian, [or] Williamite’ (Kelly, p. 209).

III

Thus both Kelly and Wheatley suggest that the relationship between democracy and communalism could turn nationalism into a rather schizophrenic animal, although one which in the end could be brought under control by the constitutionalist ‘doctors’. Thus in the run up to the Easter Rising, Pearse's integralism and Connolly's revolutionary syndicalism – both local manifestations of a wider European cultural reaction against democracyFootnote ⁴³ – were subsumed under the democratic message of the 1916 ‘Declaration of Independence’. For Richard English the 1916 Declaration, with its demand that the country ‘be ruled in accordance with the principles of Liberty, Equality and Justice for all’ ‘reflected the centrality to republican nationalism of our central themes’ – namely, the Lockean and Painite tradition, now enriched by a social-democratic understanding of both liberty and democracy (Irish freedom, p. 286). It all sounded very ‘Mazzinian’. Yet, at a local level and especially in the rural districts, the revolutionaries could be as ‘tyrannical, coercive, [and] priest-dominated’ as the Unionists had anticipated (p. 251): thus Richard English accepts Peter Hart's conclusions about the ethnic cleansing aspects of the war, with IRA units targeting minorities and other ‘undesirables’ (Protestants, gays, ex-crown soldiers, gypsies) and using wartime powers to settle private scores.Footnote ⁴⁴

From 1922 the ‘democratic doctors’ gradually regained control over the schizophrenic patient with the result that its health improved considerably during the following years. The establishment of working representative institutions under the rule of law ‘was certainly very impressive, and it should not be taken for granted’ (p. 325). Here English follows Garvin, but also acknowledges the contribution made by the anti-Treaty forces to the effective rooting of democratic practices (a theme dear to Regan).Footnote ⁴⁵ Remarkably, both before and after 1922 some of the ‘patients’ became ‘doctors’, with Collins, Cosgrave, De Valera, and others smoothly changing from one role to the other. By contrast some of the 1922 ‘doctors’ (Eoin O'Duffy in particular) lost their democratic sense in the 1930s – displaying the fascist symptoms of a political malady then common in Europe.Footnote ⁴⁶ Throughout the analysis of this complex material and related controversial historiography English displays great balance and judgement, admirable powers of synthesis, mastery of detail, and an extraordinary depth of analysis.

Apart from the origins of the Troubles and the development of the philosophy of the Northern IRA/Sinn Fein Richard English does not devote as much attention to the post-1916 period as one might have expected, given his past interests and specialism.Footnote ⁴⁷ There is not much about Arthur Griffith, although he is a good example of the pattern English has highlighted elsewhere in Irish freedom, i.e. the Nationalist tendency to adopt and recycle Protestant models.Footnote ⁴⁸ De Valera's political thought and practice, the difference between the 1937 constitution and the statute it replaced, and the related questions of the interplay between communalism, sectarianism, and liberal democracy might have deserved a longer and more critical treatment in view of their complexity and the existing debate on their actual meaning.Footnote ⁴⁹

Irish freedom includes memorable pages on women and homosexuality, but the gender dimension of the nationalist debate is otherwise almost completely neglected by the authors reviewed in the present article.Footnote ⁵⁰ By contrast the question of class is given serious attention by Campbell in Land and revolution. Focusing on Connacht between the death of Parnell (1891) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921), Campbell examines the social background and motivations of the people involved in agrarian conflict, which, he argues, fed into the politics of rural Sinn Fein and the revolutionary nationalism of 1916–23. In contrast to the emphasis on high politics characterizing previous accounts of land reform, he stresses popular agency:Footnote ⁵¹ for example, it was the farmers' campaign for compulsory land purchase which forced Wyndham to introduce his radical Land Act in 1903, and the Ranch War was a major cause of Birrell's 1909 Bill (pp. 72, 78–83, 121–3). Rank-and-file pressure was also responsible for whatever social radicalism there was in contemporary nationalism, particularly when it became evident that land reform was the price to pay if the parliamentary party wanted to retain its popular following. Yet, both MPs and tenant farmers understood ‘liberty’ in purely material terms: in fact the farmers identified it with the land – a reminder of the extent to which ‘possessive individualism’ is a peasant, as much as a bourgeois, ideology.

In contrast to Paul Bew,Footnote ⁵² Campbell sees the rural unrest at the turn of the century as ultimately directed against the landlords – rather than as a conflict between graziers and smallholders – and argues that the slow operation of the Wyndham Act and the disagreement about the terms of land purchase contributed to perpetuating this dimension of the conflict. Thus, the campaign of the United Irish League (UIL) against the graziers was aimed primarily at the eleven-month leaseholders, very few of whom were UIL members. Finally, Campbell's evidence suggests that there was little or no grazier involvement in Sinn Fein, and that it gradually declined in nationalist politics as a whole between 1879 and 1918. His conclusion is that the struggle for land was part of, and consistent with, the demands of popular nationalism and rural Sinn Fein. In particular, ‘the republican movement in Connacht was not fraught with inter-class tension, as has been suggested by Bew, Fitzpatrick and Laffan’ (pp. 291–2),Footnote ⁵³ while the economic conflicts that mattered saw generational, rather than class, clashes. This culminated with the 1918 election, which Campbell (in contrast to Fitzpatrick and Maume)Footnote ⁵⁴ sees as the ‘high noon’ for the middle-aged elite who had dominated the UIL, and who were now pushed aside by Sinn Fein's younger and poorer activists (p. 237).

Campbell's research is impressive, but his argument does not fully answer the case put forward by the authors he criticizes. In particular, their approach to the question of class conflict is more nuanced than he claims. For example, part of Fitzpatrick's analysis concerns the labourers, about whom Campbell has little to say.Footnote ⁵⁵ Moreover, some of the evidence he offers can be read in ways which are inconsistent with his conclusions. Thus, he insists that while there was a convergence between agrarian and nationalist radicals, their struggle was not necessarily sectarian, for the landowning class was by no means entirely Protestant.Footnote ⁵⁶ By the same token, not all the graziers were Catholics: those on the Clanricarde estate (near Portumna and Woodford) were Protestant (p. 19). But then Campbell's evidence suggests also that, if the land struggle was not necessarily sectarian, neither was it necessarily nationalist: indeed, in rural Ulster the policy of compulsory land purchase was pioneered by T. W. Russell, a Unionist and a ‘bigoted Protestant’ (in William O'Brien's view). For Russell land purchase was a ‘revolutionary’ scheme for the state-sponsored transfer from the landlords to the tenants of all agricultural land in Ireland, except for that directly occupied by the landlords. O'Brien then adopted Russell's plan in his campaign to expand support for the UIL from the ‘congested’ counties of the West to the prosperous tenant farmers in the east (pp. 47–50).

Thus we have here a rather complex scenario, which was further complicated by war and civil unrest in 1919–23. The violence of those years did not amount to a social revolution, but was rather a clash between generations. Such a clash paralleled, to some extent, the economic antagonism between older farmers and their landless children and younger siblings (pp. 162–5). The latter staffed Sinn Fein, at least in Galway. The IRA was similarly composed of even younger men, who were motivated by local agrarian grievances against the graziers, as much as by national aims (pp. 262–8). The post-revisionist tendency of Campbell's interpretation is clear enough, but he is not interested in contesting the revisionist polemic over again. On the contrary, he stresses that, as far as he is concerned, the debate among historians has now moved on: it is based not on ‘new orthodoxies’, but on empirical methods which demand academic scepticism and raise questions, rather than consolidate ‘faith’ and certainty (p. 292).

Where does this leave us with respect to the opening question about liberty and nationalism? Ireland, which one could think of as the ultimate example of the Banti–Blanning model of the xenophobic-supremacist tendencies of nationalism, offers also remarkable illustrations of the extent to which liberal elites were able to control and contain such tendencies. Most of the authors reviewed here convey the impression that Irish nationalism was not only extremely complex and multilayered, but also often ambiguous and sometimes schizophrenic in its attitude to community, sectarianism, and citizenship. Charismatic leadership was for a long time the most effective way to impose ‘bourgeois’ values – law and order – on the various factions comprising popular nationalism. Catholic and peasant respect for the rights of property were a powerful help in this endeavour, but of crucial importance was a dimension neglected in all the works reviewed here – and, for that matter, in most other studies on modern nationalism: namely, a ‘sense of the state’, a commitment to the rule of law among civil servants, police officers, and elected politicians.Footnote ⁵⁷ Eventually, a widely accepted institutional and legal framework prescribing widely accepted liberties and rights secured popular support in both parts of Ireland between 1922 and 2007. Yet, while the Protestant exodus from the South has rendered the Republic more homogeneous, the North continues to be divided into ‘sectarian confessional-political camps’ (English, p. 420): a chilling consideration, which leads to the suspicion that the ambiguity, if not schizophrenia, in the way ‘Irish freedom’ is interpreted, is going to continue.