A ‘Carnival of Reaction’: Partition and the Defeat of Ireland’s Revolutionary Wave Fergal McCluskey & Brian Kelly For more than a generation, estab- tant’s devotion to King and Empire. Above lishment historians and their acolytes in all, the panicked and violent response of the southern media have dominated pub- northern capitalists to the emergence of ten- lic debate about the nature and form of tative class-based unity in Belfast in 1907, the Irish revolution. In their rendering, 1919 and 1932 underscores the extraordinary the Rising constituted an unnecessary skir- measures which the maintenance of parti- mish between a benign, reforming empire tion has required.1 On successive occasions, and ultra-Catholic madmen and militarists. an industrial and political elite tied to the For many ordinary southerners, understand- Orange Order unleashed state violence and ably cynical about the influence welded by fomented sectarian rioting and expulsions the Catholic Church and a corrupt politi- from homes and workplaces. cal establishment since partition, the seeds Partition represented the fall-back policy of conservatism seem apparent from the of an imperial state thrown onto the defen- outset, flowing inevitably from the Rising sive during the revolutionary period. Even and the revolutionary upheaval that fol- prior to the 1801 union, the political and lowed. Since the outbreak of the Trou- military establishment consciously exploited bles in 1969, especially, a persistent and sectarian tensions in Ireland, leaning on the well-resourced effort has been made to show Orange Order to defeat the 1798 Rebellion. that partition reflected immutable differ- Sectarian antipathy originated in colonisa- ences between antagonistic ‘ethno-national’ tion but found new expression in disputes or ‘ethno-religious’ blocs. Despite their between desperate Catholic and Protestant rhetorical nationalism, the Dublin elite, fear- tenants in rural mid-Ulster, taking root in ful that northern political instability might industrialising Belfast as a consequence of spread southwards, went to great lengths rapid urban migration in the nineteenth cen- to block popular sympathy for the northern tury. At first the reactionary element in the struggle. British political elite backed Ulster union- In the face of this concerted campaign ist resistance to scupper home rule for all- of distortion, socialists assert a different un- Ireland, as when Randolph Churchill played derstanding of what was at stake in the divi- the ’Orange card’ in 1886 against Glad- sion of the country. Partition reflected not a stone’s first bill. Partition only emerged as a pragmatic approach to containing sectarian- serious option for securing wider imperial in- ism, but the defeat of Ireland’s revolution- terests and negating Irish independence once ary wave and the consolidation of conserva- some measure of limited self-rule appeared tive regimes north and south in the interests inevitable. Throughout the revolutionary of Irish capitalism and British imperialism. period the Tory establishment offered unwa- None of the main actors tried to assert, be- vering financial and military support to Ul- fore partition, that the ‘six counties’ made ster loyalism, even when this entailed a wide- up some natural ethnic or religious polity. scale and indiscriminate sectarian campaign Instead the northern state has been marked against Belfast’s Catholic minority. by instability from its founding. On four oc- casions between 1914 and 1920, the suppos- edly impregnable Ulster unionist monolith Northern radicalism: anti- nearly came apart in internal wrangling over imperial and non-sectarian the boundaries of the new state, while the April 1918 conscription crisis shone a light The most sophisticated opposition to parti- on the deep ambiguity marking some Protes- tion emerged not from constitutional nation- 1Michael Farrell, The Orange State (Pluto, 1980) 59 alists, or even republicans, but from James publicanism and countering the softening Connolly, whose organising efforts in Belfast of nationalist antipathy to imperialism - a attuned him to its potential dangers. Con- retreat attributed by Clarke to ‘Redmond nolly argued presciently that partition would and his people and their ranting about be- fundamentally undermine labour’s position- ing loyal to the British Empire’.3 When north and south-warning that along with the First World War confirmed Redmond’s perpetuating Orange bigotry and intoler- public support for empire both Clarke and ance in the North, it would consolidate a Connolly, from different perspectives, deter- church-dominated state run by bourgeois na- mined to organise for insurrection before the tionalists in the South. Writing in March end of continental hostilities. 1914, after the constitutional nationalist In the early twentieth century, the leader, John Redmond, had consented to the remnants of Ulster Fenianism espoused a temporary partition of four Ulster counties, markedly anti-imperial and non-sectarian Connolly warned that partition would ‘cre- outlook. By December 1910, McCartan ate a carnival of reaction North and South’ wrote in Irish Freedom, the IRB newspaper and ‘set back the wheels of progress[,] de- that stroy the oncoming unity of the Irish Labour movement and paralyse all advanced move- the English Empire lives on the ments whilst it endured.’ ‘Against it,’ he taxes wrung from the starving argued, ‘Labour in Ulster should fight, even millions of India, and Ireland is to the death, if necessary.’2 asked to become a loyal portion of the Empire. We might per- Connolly’s non-sectarian and progressive haps share in the spoils - we reading resonated with a core of Ulster rad- too might fatten on the Indian - icals in the years preceding 1916. Although the Egyptians and other subject numerically weak, northern republicanism races. Ireland, we are told, now played a key ideological role in the Rising, will be loyal if she gets some con- as its leadership emerged from a group of cession, Home Rule or devolu- young republicans centred on veteran Dun- tion, and will become part of the gannon Fenian Tom Clarke and including Empire of exploitation. There figures such as Seán Mac Diarmada, Bulmer is little danger that Ireland will Hobson, Denis McCullough and Patrick Mc- purchase a partial freedom at Cartan, al of whom had cut their teeth in the such a price. We would rather Dungannon Clubs, a venture in open sepa- remain a nation of political serfs ratist politics based on Griffith’s policy of than become a nation of imperial passive resistance. This non-insurrectionary parasites. Better far for Ireland challenge to constitutional nationalism dis- never to be free than to win free- solved in the face of parliamentary arith- dom by joining in with the pirate metic, when the two general elections in Empire, sharing in the guilt and 1910 handed the balance of power to John the spoils of wholesale massacre Redmond’s Irish Parliamentary Party. The and theft. There are other ways apparent inevitability of home rule precip- of obtaining freedom, and one of itated an IRB take-over by this grouping, them is by joining hands with backed financially by Joseph McGarrity, the our Indian brothers, so that both treasurer of the Clan na Gael who, like they and we may be stronger to McCartan hailed from Carrickmore in Ty- fight against British tyranny.4 rone. Ironically, Ulster unionist resistance prompted republicans to organise the Irish Furthermore, an impressive proportion Volunteers as a means of reinvigorating re- of its rank-and-file leadership-in the IRB and 2Irish Worker, 14 March 1914. 3Tom Clarke to Joe McGarrity, 8 Dec. 1913 1909 in Gerard Mac Atasney, Tom Clarke: Life, Liberty, Revolution (Kildare, 2013), 270. 4Irish Freedom, Dec. 1910. 60 the Dungannon Clubs-came out of the rad- grants, Connolly and Larkin, received a sym- ical Protestant tradition, including labour pathetic hearing among its working-class converts from the Orange Order who had membership. Some of their Belfast members joined Larkin in the 1907 Belfast Dockers’ had been radicalised by the 1907 Dockers’ strike, or had been involved in nascent trade Strike in that city, and in 1913 the RIC re- unions in rural Ulster. Establishment his- ported that the IRB in North Armagh and torians have made much of the republican East Tyrone had sent ‘trifling sums’ to help commitment to an ‘Irish-Ireland’, but in the Jim Larkin during the Lockout.6 In one in- North, at least, this attracted rather than stance, after receiving anti-recruiting litera- alienated radical Protestants, and posed no ture linked to the execution of an Indian na- problems for Connolly either. As early as tionalist, the Ardboe IRB cell diverted some 1906, McCartan claimed that they ‘should of their precious gun money to journalists be tolerant towards their countrymen no for ‘fomenting agitation’ and ‘harassing the matter to what creed or class they belong. British government’ on the sub-continent.7 The Ireland we want is not a Catholic Ire- The Dungannon-Coalisland nexus repre- land nor a Protestant Ireland,’ he insisted, sented the core territory of Mid-Ulster Feni- ‘but an Irish-Ireland.’ This represented anism, which fanned out in a crescent along bourgeois nationalism, to be sure, but it was the south and west shores of Lough Neagh, in no sense sectarian. In 1910 McCartan finding favour among local artisans, labour- railed against ‘the power of the priest...the ers, small farmers and factory workers. The greatest obstacle to nationalism in the coun- Tyrone IRB were involved