Ireland & Nationalism:

John Bruton has recently provoked another frenzy of historical debate in the media by claiming that the war of independence was unnecessary. This should remind us, as if it was necessary, that current political questions are very much affected by the attitude we take towards the Rising and the subsequent war. It also shows the need for socialists to have our own view, independent of either sentimental nationalism or conservative revisionism.

Firstly, Bruton’s claim that independence could have been achieved by following the strategy of Redmond and the Home Rulers won’t stand up to scrutiny. By 1914, the Home Rule party had been attempting to win self-rule by working through the structures of the British political system for decades. Despite the years of moderation, there was no faction of the British ruling class willing to support their demands on principle. The Liberals were willing to support Home Rule when they were dependent on the votes of Irish MP s, which was a very different thing. The Conservatives were violently opposed, and quite willing to subvert their own political system in order to defeat the Home Rule bill. Their leader Bonar Law openly encouraged armed resistance by unionists.

Even if the Liberals had had the guts to face down this opposition (including attempts to stage a military coup) and implement Home Rule, which is very unlikely, its continued existence would have been dependent on the vagaries of British political life. If an election had brought the Tories back to power, they would have cancelled Irish autonomy straight away. It took years of conflict before the British establishment was willing to concede the Treaty.

We should also recall that those, like Bruton, who praise John Redmond as a “man of peace”, ignore his active support for the British Empire in the First World War, a bloody imperial slaughter vastly greater than the national revolution of 1916-23. Redmond did not have a problem with all forms of violence, just anti-imperialist violence.

This doesn’t mean that the national revolutionaries don’t deserve criticism. With the exception of James Connolly and the Citizens’ Army, the Rising was launched by romantic nationalists who spent more time on composing heroic speeches than on hard-headed political calculation. Their insurrection could not have been successful; it would have made far more sense to continue with political agitation until they had broader popular support, then launch an armed campaign. Their lack of a social programme was another major weakness. But we should also remember that Connolly, for one, threw himself into the Rising in the hope that it might undermine the war effort and help end the unprecedented slaughter on the battlefields of Europe.

There’s a lot more that could be said about the national revolution (the left should certainly recall the role played by labour militancy in persuading the British to quit Ireland - standard histories keep very quiet about this side of the story). But when all is said and done, attempts to denigrate the armed campaign as a pointless bloodbath that achieved nothing should be firmly rejected. If, as Bruton and his ilk would have preferred, Ireland had slithered quietly out of the British Empire like Canada and Australia, then it would have had very little effect on that Empire’s stability. But by defying the world’s most powerful empire by force, and carving out some autonomy for themselves, the Irish revolutionaries set a powerful example; nationalists from Egypt to India took heed, and the demise of the great empire “where the sun never sets and the blood never dries” was accelerated.

In a world where imperialism is far from historical, it’s not hard to see why John Bruton regards this anti-imperial past as an embarrassment as he takes up his new post as EU ambassador to Washington. The sustained campaign by the Irish elite to integrate Ireland into the western military bloc and bring the Irish people to identify their interests with the main imperial powers was disrupted by the strength of anti-war protests. Our inconvenient history is another irritant they’d rather be without.

Finally, it has once again been claimed by Eoghan Harris and other prominent revisionists that if we condone the violence of 1916, we must also endorse the Provo campaign of 1970-94. This is a phoney argument, but a revealing one. In reality, there were always a powerful case to be made against the “armed struggle”, particularly against the way it was conducted; and nothing obliges us to condone PIRA attacks on civilian targets. But by demanding that republicans accept the bona fides of unionism and the British state, Harris and his allies in the southern establishment played their part in prolonging the war. If they had expended some of the energy they used to denounce the IRA speaking out against state abuses in the North and urging the British government to seek a political solution, the republican leadership might have been quicker to realise that there were alternatives to war, and pointless killings might have been avoided.

Of course we should resist attempts to glorify and whitewash the Provo campaign with the benefit of hindsight; the IRA committed its own atrocities, just as much as the British state, and this shouldn’t be swept under the carpet. But the likes of Harris and Conor Cruise O’Brien deserve no credit for the fact that most republicans came to realise that their campaign was a dead-end; if their advice had been heeded, there would have been no ceasefire.