Peter Costello
Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from below 1917-1923,
John Cunningham and Terry Dunne
(Four Courts Press, €24.95 / £21.95)
The cover of this book is graced by a 1934 watercolour by Harry Kernoff, entitled Liberty Hall, Dublin, night: the street is scattered with a selection of typical working class Dubliners, a social group with which the artist was very familiar and saw himself as one of.
It shows the need for these individuals to unite and work together. Nothing could be a more appropriate depiction of what many radicals and progressives felt in those years between the wars about social justice in Ireland. This is the theme which this book addresses.
The fate of the Left in the Irish revolution is a sad one, as I became aware of when writing a biography of Liam O’Flaherty. During the first days of the Civil War he was one of a small armed radical group, holed up in a Talbot Street hotel.
Across the railway bridge beside it they hung a huge banner supporting the Industrial Workers of the World, the radical group well-known in the USA as ‘The Wobblies’ (with which the writer B. Traven was also connected).
Ill-focused
I have never seen this episode alluded to in any other book of the period, which was an indication to me of how ill-focused much that was written about that period is.
In O’Flaherty’s novel The Informer the ‘Revolutionary Group’ to which the protagonist ‘Gypo’ Nolan belongs is a far-left one. The spring of the action which leads to the shooting by the police of Frankie McPhilip whom Gypo had informed on for a reward, was the shooting down in Waterford of a leader of the strong farmers against the striking farm labourers. This too was a moment in rural life unknown to the larger histories.
The Informer was truth-based fiction. It is these sorts of episodes in real life that the contributors to this book concentrate on, though one chapter by Moira Ledon does deal with the mobilisation of the agricultural labourers in Maugherow in Co. Sligo.
They saw the Church’s role was to defend property, whatever the injustices caused”
The collections of chapters might too easily be seen as a collection of local history items with little bearing on the great things being achieved by those who later became the two parties of the Free State, Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil.
This left both Labour and labourers out in the cold, despite the achievements of the Labour Party under their leader Thomas Johnson.
Dismaying
This was dismaying, of course, for progressive Catholics who were seeking social justice for workers and others in ‘lower depth’ of rural and urban Ireland in the light of the insights of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical of Leo XIII of 1891 on ‘Capital and Labour’.
But by the merchant and business classes in the New Ireland it was largely disregarded. They saw the Church’s role was to defend property, whatever the injustices caused.
Few in the Irish Diaspora who had been happy to buy guns for the war wanted actually to invest in the new state”
The events of 1913 and the continuing social unease through the period up to the middle of the 1950s all too easily fell into the hands of those conservative elements in Irish society who felt ‘the lower orders’ should keep their place.
In the early years of the Free State this was especially true with a government which even chose to reduce the state pension in order to pay off the debts of the country put down to the cost of the revolutionary years.
Beyond the Ford Motor Company perhaps, few in the Irish Diaspora who had been happy to buy guns for the war wanted actually to invest in the new state. Many Nationalists and Republicans identified the labour movements as an enemy akin to Britain, just as later they would speak ominously of ‘secret societies’, meaning Freemasons, and ‘alien elements’ meaning Jews.
Trade unions are in abeyance and many of the most hardworking people in this country, the equivalent of the hod carriers of other times, are without union support”
Little changed in this respect until the end of the 1950s. What had been taught at school, technical college and universities as ‘Commerce’ turned almost overnight, it seemed, into ‘Economics’ and Ireland entered upon a new era.
The trade union movement had a moment or two, but now, as we are all aware, trade unions are in abeyance and many of the most hardworking people in this country, the equivalent of the hod carriers of other times, are without union support.
This book consists, with the chapters and the introduction, in some 14 essays which will be read with great interest by those seeking a clearer view of the past at the micro level and will hopefully encourage similar investigations.
These inquiries are often difficult to do because the personal papers and archives of the very poorest in their own voices simply do not exist.
Explorations of those areas in Irish life and history are passed over, or worse still, glossed over to hide the stark brutality in the last century.
If justice failed to be done in the past to the living, the present owes it to the dead to see it is done now.