The Banshee's Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict in Cork and The

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The Banshee's Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict in Cork and The The Banshee’s Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict in Cork and the All for Ireland League. Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Patrick Joseph Murphy. August 2019 1 The Banshee’s Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict in Cork and the All for Ireland League. ABSTRACT Historians have frequently portrayed constitutional nationalism as being homogeneous - ‘the Home Rule movement’- after the reunification of the Irish parliamentary party in 1900. Yet there were elements of nationalist heterodoxy all over the country, but it was only in Cork where dissent took an organised form in the only formal breakaway from the Irish party when the All for Ireland League (A.F.I.L.) was launched in 1910. The AFIL took eight of the nine parliamentary seats in Cork and gained control of local government in the city and county the following year. Existing historical accounts do not adequately explain why support for the Home Rule movement collapsed in Cork, but also why the AFIL flourished there but failed, despite the aspiration of its name, to expand beyond its regional base. The AFIL is chiefly remembered for its visionary policy of conciliation with unionists following the Damascene conversion of its leader William O’Brien, transformed from the enemy of the landed classes to an apostle of a new kind of bi- confessional politics. This would, he claimed, end the ‘Banshee’s Kiss’, a cycle of conflict in which each new generation attempts to achieve Irish freedom. However, conciliation was a policy which was unpopular with both nationalists and unionists and O’Brien therefore needed to develop an electoral base by other means with more popular policies. He did this primarily by co-opting labour dissent: firstly, in Cork city because of divisions between skilled and unskilled workers; and secondly, harnessing discontent amongst elements of the rural working class which arose following the Wyndham land act of 1903, which excluded small farmers, evicted tenants and farm labourers from the new dispensation. The AFIL ran populist campaigns in which it presented itself as an alternative to the hegemonic grip of the Home Rule movement. However, as this study will demonstrate, there was little to choose on social and economic issues between the O’Brienites and the Home Rule movement and the only policy which fundamentally divided the two parties was conciliation. 2 Disaffection in elements of the working class in Cork, which precipitated the rise of the AFIL, both pre-dated and outlasted its existence. This thesis will, therefore, explore these fault lines over a more extended period from the Parnell split in 1890- 1891 to the party’s launch in 1910 and beyond its demise in 1918 to the revolutionary years when the underlying issue of working class dissent, which the AFIL had co-opted and obfuscated, manifested itself again. The AFIL’s record in both parliamentary and local government is considered during its most active period from 1910 to 1914, through the successive crises of the Parliament act, the Home Rule bill and the outbreak of war. The Easter Rising and the rise of Sinn Féin administered the coup de grâce to the AFIL (as it did to the Home Rule movement), and the narrow ground of compromise and conciliation was lost. 3 Acknowledgments In completing this thesis, I have incurred many debts of gratitude. Primarily to the Institute of Irish Studies at the University Liverpool for accepting me as a PhD student after so many years away from the formal study of history; I am also grateful to the Blair Chair of Irish Studies for support. I especially want to thank my supervisors, Dr Kevin Bean and Professor Diane Urquhart, for their unstinting support, guidance and advice. Thanks also to the archives staff at University College Cork, the National Library of Ireland and the British Library. And, finally to my wife Liz, who encouraged me in this enterprise and has had to bear the consequences ever since. 4 Abbreviations A.F.I.L. All for Ireland League A.O.H. Ancient Order of Hibernians A.W.B. Agricultural Wages Board B.M.H. Bureau of Military History C.C.C.A. Cork City and County Archives C.C.C.L.A. Cork City and County Labour Association C.D.T.L.C. Cork District Trades and Labour Council C.U.T.L.C. Cork United Trades and Labour Council D.O.R.A. Defence of the Realm Act G.A.A. Gaelic Athletic Association I.D.L. Irish Dominion league I.L.L.A. Irish Land and Labour Association I.T.G.W.U Irish Transport and General Workers Union I.R.A. Irish Republican Army I.R.B. Irish Republican Brotherhood L.L.A. Land and Labour Association N.L.I. National Library of Ireland R.D.C. Rural District Council R.I.C. Royal Irish Constabulary U.V.F. Ulster Volunteer Force U.C.C. University College Cork U.C.D. University College Dublin U.D.C. Urban District Council U.I.L. United Irish League U.T.A. United Trades Association 5 Contents Introduction 7 - 32 Chapter One ‘Tuppence Halfpenny Looking 33 - 77 Down on Tuppence’: The Origins of the All for Ireland League, 1890-1909. Chapter Two ‘And thence we came forth to see 78 - 119 again the stars’: The Rise of the All for Ireland League, 1909-1910. Chapter Three ‘The Edge of a Volcano’: The All 120 - 136 for Ireland League in Parliament, 1911-1914. Chapter Four ‘God had abandoned the lanes of 137 - 155 Cork, and so had the Corporation': The All for Ireland League in Local Government, 1911-1914. Chapter Five ‘A Future of Black Despair’: War 156 - 178 and insurrection, 1914-1916. Chapter Six ‘I move that a warm note of 179 - 211 thanks be inscribed on our gravestones’: The End of the All for Ireland League, 1916-1918. Chapter Seven The Banshee’s Kiss: The Legacy 212- 243 of the All for Ireland League. Conclusion 244 - 261 Bibliography 262 - 287 6 The Banshee’s Kiss: Conciliation, Class and Conflict in Cork and the All for Ireland League. INTRODUCTION Change pervaded Ireland at the beginning of the twentieth century. The first elections held under the new local government act of 1898 handed power to nationalists all over the country except in the North-East; the Irish parliamentary party, with a powerful new grassroots movement in the United Irish League (U.I.L.), was reunited after the trauma of the Parnell split of the previous decade; Balfour's policy of constructive unionism offered hope that a resolution of the land question was imminent; and there was a belief amongst many nationalists that self- government was coming, even if, as David Fitzpatrick notes, ‘the geography of the Home Rule paradise was not discussed.’1 At the fin de siècle however, most nationalists believed that this paradise would exist within the United Kingdom. There was also a cultural shift amongst Catholic nationalists ‘from deference to resentment which expressed itself in the oscillation between a sense of inferiority and spiritual superiority based on the innocence of the victim.’2 This Irish moral exceptionalism was increasingly reflected in a convergence of nationalism and Catholicism which reflected a suspicion of modernism, a preference for the rural over the urban, the spread of Anglophobia and the ‘rediscovery’ of a largely- imagined Gaelic past. In addition, as Eric Hobsbawm argues, there was in general, a process of mutation within political nationalism which included ‘the growing tendency to assume that “national self-determination” could not be satisfied by any form of autonomy less than full state independence.’3 This tendency was not on popular display in August 1903 when King Edward visited Cork as part of an Irish tour and, apart from a small demonstration by advanced nationalists, he was warmly received by large crowds and given an effusive 1 D. Fitzpatrick, Politics and Irish Life 1913-1921: Provincial Experience of War and Revolution (Cork, 1998). 2' P. O'Mahony and G. Delanty, Rethinking Irish History: Nationalism, Identity and Ideology (New York, 2001), p. 5. 3 E. Hobsbawm, The Age of Empire 1875-1914 (London, 1987), p.144. 7 welcome from the Lord Mayor Edward Fitzgerald.4 The Cork Examiner thought that the city got the balance right: ‘Nationalist Ireland did not grovel before Royalty. It met and recognised a true gentleman and courageous Sovereign, who has spoken well and kindly of the country and of the things and ideals which we cherish […]’5 This occasion, however, hid not only a nascent separatism which would make Cork the fulcrum of the armed struggle for a republic seventeen years later, it also concealed deep social divisions and a fissure in nationalism which, over the next decade, would lead to the sundering of the Home Rule movement in Cork and the rise of the All for Ireland League (A.F.I.L). This claimed to be a political insurgency which, as Patrick Maume argues, ‘produced the most sustained and extensive attempts at unionist-nationalist co-operation in the twentieth century’.6 i This study will explore the AFIL in both a national and local context and seek to answer questions which the existing historiography fails to explain. Firstly, how did the AFIL persuade so many Catholic nationalists to break the bonds of communal solidarity and vote against the Home Rule movement? Secondly, what were the precipitating causes which triggered the rise of the AFIL? Thirdly, why did the AFIL thrive in Cork but not in other parts of the country? Fourthly, what, if any, was the legacy of the AFIL? The rise, fall, and legacy of the AFIL will be explored through two themes: the evisceration of the urban and rural labour movements and the obfuscation of class conflict by conservative nationalism, and the struggle between two contrasting visions of a new self-governing Ireland, of nationalists and unionists sharing power, or an ethnocentric drive for nationalist supremacy.
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