Adrian Grant's Irish Socialist Republicanism, 1909–1936 is a useful addition to the literature on the history of Irish socialism and builds on the work of various scholars, including Grant's own mentor, Emmett O'Connor, John Newsinger, and many others. Grant's study is a meticulous—at times laborious—examination of the many crucial intersections of the Labour and working-class movements in Ireland with militant Irish nationalism. Unions and union leaders were central to the struggle for independence; it was through their agency that the cause of Ireland became the cause of the Irish working man. On the eve of the Great War the Irish masses were arguably little or no better off than they had been fifty or even a hundred years earlier.
The roots of Irish socialism ran deep, and the baleful influence of the British working-class movement was ever present. An important theme in Grant's study is the early cleavage between the British and Irish labor movements. In many respects, the British labor movement was characterized by a more orthodox socialism that saw the struggle of the working man in broadly Marxist terms as essentially an international struggle. Grant approvingly quotes Kieran Allen, who had written in 1990 that “[T]he strategic interests of Labour (i.e. in Ireland) lay with self-government. However unsatisfactory that government might be, artisans saw no future for themselves, their societies, or their jobs under London rule” (22). It is hardly surprising therefore that Irish members of the British Trades Union Congress established an Irish Trade Union Congress (ITUC) in 1894. The ITUC was from the start riven with internal conflict, especially since its leadership was dominated by members of the politically conservative Dublin and Belfast Trades Councils. Grant notes perceptively that “[T]he argument that the Irish Labour movement suffered from mental colonization is very convincing when the actions of the ITUC during its first decades are considered” (23).
Despite the fact that he left Ireland in early 1914 only to return in 1923, the impact of James Larkin as a radical labor organizer and republican activist was immense. In fact it was the Belfast and Dublin strikes of 1907 and 1908 that demonstrated clearly the way in which striking workers could exert real political leverage. The syndicalism of Larkin and James Connolly was dedicated to elevating the Irish working classes to their rightful place—as lords of the land.
As the Great War ground to its bitter end a tidal wave of working class optimism unleashed by the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia swept across Europe. In Ireland such broad aspirations blended with the now dominant retrospective view of the 1916 Rising as a heroic assertion of Irish nationhood. In the latter part of April 1919, provocative British military action in Limerick was met with an unexpectedly robust response from the unionized workers of the city and the proclamation of the “Limerick Soviet.” The soviet itself proved short-lived, but the confrontation and the strike were decisive. Grant writes that “[T]he strike was identified as a new system of working-class struggle completely independent of Sinn Fein” (94). The War of Independence had become both a guerilla war against British forces and (in part at least) a working class struggle to secure rights of ownership and representation.
During the 1920s the Irish Labour Party itself became a respectable party, unwilling and perhaps unable to challenge the pro-Anglo-Irish Treaty status quo. Grant asks why the Irish labor movement, “the largest left-wing group in the country during this period” and the one with “the most potential to advance the socialist republican ideal on a mass scale” failed to rise to the challenge (106). Despite the fact that seventeen Labour TDs were returned to the Dáil Éireann in the June 1922 election, only two refused to take the oath of allegiance.
Having acknowledged the very considerable contribution of the socialist republican movement to victory in the War of Independence (1919–1921) through strike action and its broad ability to marshal and enlist the working class in the national cause, Grant turns in chapters 4 through 6 to a consideration of the roles and strategy of the Labour Party and other left-wing groups, including the communists, in the Irish Free State. It remained increasingly true that Irish Socialist Republicanism was hopelessly fragmented as a movement. More radical groupings, however, sought increasingly to challenge this status quo, and work towards a genuinely socialist state from the political margins. The alliance between the radical working class movement and the struggle for national independence had been far from an aberration, merely a marriage of convenience. Nevertheless, during the life of the Free State (and especially during the Cosgrave years when political and economic accommodation with Britain seemed the dominant policy), Irish socialist republicanism moved inexorably to the left. In 1932, when William Norton succeeded T. J. O'Connell as leader on the Irish National Teachers Organization, he “set out to create some distance between Labour and Fianna Fáil” (127).
After 1932, neither the communists nor Saor Éire were able to command the loyalty of the Irish masses. The book thus ends on a wistful note, and Grant is right to insist that his study “has not aimed to show that socialist republicanism could have been a dominant force in an independent Ireland. Rather, it aimed to show that it was a complex movement, based on the practicalities of Irish politics” (228). The illustrations are generally poor in quality and of doubtful value; it is hard to know why there are black-and-white photographs of newspaper articles, letters, and the like, but the patient reader will tend to agree that this study succeeds in its broad objective of shedding light on the many facets of socialist republicanism in Ireland in the first third of the twentieth century.
