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 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 who, like they and we may be stronger to McCartan hailed from 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 in nascent trade try’ and insisted that the IRB’s new journal, unionism-activism that continued into the Irish Freedom, should ‘go straight for’ this revolutionary period.8 Indeed, intelligence ‘reactionary power’, which had ‘escaped too reports from the RIC reflected the typical long’. class prejudice of Edwardian Ireland, con- Pockets of liberal Protestant opinion sur- tinually dismissing Tyrone republicans due vived across pre-partition Ulster. Captain to their low social status.9 Dungannon IRB Jack White of the Irish Citizen Army or- members such as John ‘Jack’ McElvogue ganised a meeting of more than four hun- challenged these assumptions, standing suc- dred at Ballymoney on 24 October 1913, cessfully in the urban council’s nationalist where addressed the ‘scat- west ward ‘to explode the old theory that tered Protestants’ who desired ‘friendship it was only men with money, whether they with our Catholic fellow countrymen, based had brains or not, were fit to look after the on an equal recognition of their common affairs of the town’.10 Yet the limitations Irish identity, against which the forces of in- of this position are clear: although working- tolerance and enmity were openly arrayed.’5 class republicans occupied positions of lead- In 1920, predominantly Protestant Money- ership locally, the reality was that ‘every im- more elected the local Sinn Feín arbitration portant position in the party [was] occupied court judge to the county council. In the by men not of the Working Class’.11 period before partition was consolidated, a Protestant republicans like IRB mem- degree of fluidity existed in northern poli- ber Herbert Moore Pim (who later re- tics, suggesting openings for a challenge to verted to unionism and even to open sup- sectarianism that we should not dismiss. port for fascism) were both sober about the Although the leaders of Ulster republi- prospects for unity across the sectarian di- canism were unreceptive, the socialist inter- vide and principled in rejecting the pressures nationalism of first generation Ulster emi- for an all-class unionist alliance. Lament- 5Angus Mitchel, 16 Lives: Roger Casement (Dublin, 2013) 6CI Armagh, Oct. 1913 (TNA, CO 904/91). 7Prećis, 15 Aug. 1909 (TNA, CO 904/119). 8McCluskey, & Ribbonmen, 11-12. 9See CI Tyrone, Jan. 1915 (TNA, CO 904/96). 10DN, 5 Jan. 1899. 11 James Connolly,‘Sinn Feín and Socialism’, The Harp, April 1908.

61 ing that Protestants ‘have been taught that of the South,’ which ‘has enabled the Orange the Catholic is an inferior sort of animal’ leaders to openly flout and antagonise the and that ‘the Orangeman thinks that by ex- Labour movement.’15 Connolly had earlier cluding Catholics from employment of ev- dismissed ‘the strutters and poseurs’ among ery kind, there will be more work for him’, Sinn Feín whose blindness to class inequal- he advanced a class understanding of the ity guaranteed ‘the certainty of friction be- politics of divide-and-rule. The ‘ascendancy tween the Irish Socialist and the adherents of has never benefited the Orange democracy’, Sinn Feín’.16 The failure to promote an ex- Pim insisted, and ‘the only people who plicitly class-based politics-despite the gen- gain anything from this diabolical system uine public and private sympathy of some- of social poisoning are landlords, the linen one like Tom Clarke for the Lockout-exposed sweaters, the place hunters, and the emi- the fundamental weakness in northern radi- gration agents’.12 Indeed, grassroots north- calism prior to the Rising.17 It was only the ern republicans shared Connolly’s analysis of extraordinary context of world war, in fact, loyalism: the weakness of the ‘Orange work- that pushed these differences to the back- ing class’ in confronting their own employ- ground and provided a basis for practical ers, he’d written, were down to their having cooperation between republicanism and so- ‘been reared up among a people whose con- cialism. ditions of servitude were more slavish than their own’. Before 1916, at least, republicans were not prepared to acquiesce to the sectar- The imperial basis for partition ian divisions in northern politics-or to accept A prevalent view exists that Britain repre- them as permanent-and saw no contradic- sented a neutral arbiter in Irish affairs and tion between aspiring to independence and that partition relied on the existence of ‘two opposing loyalism. In this sense, they par- nations’ in Ireland. The idea of British state tially reflected Connolly’s position that ‘no impartiality relies on a very superficial ac- good, but infinite evil, can come of truckling 13 ceptance of the contemporary position, as is to [the Orange influence].’ Ruth Dudley Edwards’s daft assertion that, Nevertheless, the petit-bourgeois repub- as empires went, ‘the British version was the lican leadership failed to apply a class-based most responsible and humane of all.’18 In analysis to their own brand of nationalism. theory you might raise this position with a Seán Mac Diarmada, who with Tom Clarke Palawa or aboriginal inhabitant of Tasma- formed the conspiratorial nucleus of the re- nia, but they were all exterminated.19 bellion, criticised Larkin during the Lockout There is irrefutable evidence for the im- for talking ‘nationalism, but only in so far as perial motivation of partition in Ireland, he thinks it is likely to help along his social- or indeed in Palestine and India after- ist programme’ and lamented the ‘very bad wards, where the British maintained their un-national influence’ of support from En- rule through the exacerbation of existing glish trade unions and the damage done to or emerging ethno-religious tensions, which Irish manufacturing.14 As Connolly sardon- then formed the basis of a geographical di- ically remarked in a contemporary article: vision on the terms of their favoured com- ‘thus Labour is ever encouraged to revolt munity. As Sir Henry Wilson remarked, the against the Orange sweaters of the North, ‘Palestine problem’ was ‘exactly the same as but nothing must be done to encourage any the Irish-two different sets of people living such revolt against the Nationalist sweaters in a small area, each hating the other ‘for 12McCluskey, Fenians & Ribbonmen,p. 109. 13James Connolly,‘North-East Ulster’, in Forward, 2 August 1913. 14Seań Mac Diarmada to Joseph McGarrity, 12 Dec. 1913 (NLI, MS 17,618) 15Forward, 7 June 1913 16James Connolly, ‘Sinn Feín and Socialism’, The Harp, April 1908. 17Irish Freedom, Oct. 1913. 18Ruth Dudley Edwards, ‘Why does Ken Loach loathe his country so much?’ in Daily Mail, 30 May 2006. 19Colin Tatz, With Intent To Destroy: Reflections on Genocide (Verso, 2003), 78-9.

62 the love of God’.20 Sir Ronald Storrs, the position to home rule was certainly expedi- first British military governor of Jerusalem, ent, but it operated within a definite frame- argued revealingly that a new Israeli state work. Milner himself, along with Tory leader ‘would form for England ‘a little loyal Jewish Bonar Law, had attempted to cut a deal Ulster’ in a sea of hostile Arabism.’21 Colo- with ‘the patriot section of the labour party’ nial administrators, statesmen and soldiers in order to stymie the Independent Labour all acknowledged the imperial basis of parti- Party.25 Carson employed a similar tactic in tion; this was an approach shared by Ulster forming the Ulster Unionist Labour Associ- unionists themselves. ation in December 1918. Lloyd George’s coalition (December During the home rule crisis, Milner 1916-October 1922) claimed it had no self- formed the Ulster Union Defence League to ish interest in Ireland, but his govern- rescue ‘the white settler colony of Ulster 26 ment was dominated by the Tories, the from submersion in a sea of inferior Celts’. very same men who challenged parliament’s His chief ally in this venture was Walter sovereignty, openly supported the Curragh Long, the former leader of Irish unionist ‘Mutiny’ and funded the Larne gunrunning MPs at Westminster before Carson’s ap- in 1914.22 Indeed, John St. Loe Strachey, pointment. Long was a frontrunner for the the editor of the reactionary Spectator mag- Tory leadership in 1911, but stood down in azine (how little has changed) and creator favour of Bonar Law’s selection as unity can- of the ‘two nation’s theory’ consoled Car- didate. Carson himself was poised to run, son before the passing of the Government but opted rather to lead Ulster’s resistance of Ireland Act 1920, which introduced six- to home rule. Long’s parliamentary commit- county partition: ‘As you know, I distrust tee drew up the plans for six-county parti- L.G. probably more than you do, but at the tion, which led to the 1920 Government of same time I am terribly afraid of anything Ireland Act, after Ulster unionists informed like splitting the forces opposed to revolu- him they couldn’t control nine. Again, this tion whether in Ireland or here’.23 While in policy revolved on an imperial pivot, which office, the Tories steadfastly reinforced parti- operated globally. Long’s committee had tion, both in legislation and through massive been preceded by one led by Lord Curzon, financial support for the security apparatus who had previously partitioned Bengal in of the new Northern Ireland administration. 1905, and who in May 1917 drafted a scheme for the British cabinet that counties could The rationale was clear: the British po- vote themselves out of a southern parlia- litical eĺite supported Ulster unionists in or- ment on a fifty-five per cent majority ‘for der to subvert home rule and, failing that, the transparent purpose of enabling a mi- would partition the country, handicapping nority in Tyrone and Fermanagh to decide any independent Irish state to the extent the issue’.27 that it remained a virtual British possession. During the Buckingham Palace Conference of 1914, Lord Milner, the British ‘race pa- Ulster’s stand for empire triot’ and arch-imperialist, advised Carson to ‘stick out for the six counties as a mini- Ulster unionists themselves viewed the six- mum’, although he added, ‘There is no par- county area as ‘an impregnable, Protestant ticular virtue in counties. . . as long as the and Unionist Pale’, which would serve as ‘a excluded area is one solid block.’24 Tory op- bridge head for the re-conquest of Ireland’ in 20Quoted in introduction to Keith Jefferies (eds.), An Irish Empire? Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996), 15. 21Ronald Storrs, The memoirs of Sir Ronald Storrs (London, 2008), 364. 22 Alvin Jackson, Home rule: an Irish history, 1800-2000 (London, 2004), 153-4. 23Strachey to Carson, 13 October 1920 (Carson papers, PRONI, D1507/1) 24Milner to Carson, 21 July 1914 (PRONI, Irish papers, D1507/A/6/40). 25J. O. Stubbs, ‘Lord Milner and Patriotic Labour, 1914 -18’, English Historical review 87, 4, 1972, 717-54. 26Paul Murray, The Irish Boundary Commission and its origins, 1886-1925 (Dublin, 2011), 31. 27Draft for the bill for the Government of Ireland, May 1917 (TNA, CAB 24/89).

63 event of the declaration of a Republic.28 On fears of religious persecution, but on the de- the inauguration of the northern parliament termination of a Tory political eĺite, which in June 1921, Hamar Greenwood congratu- included the Ulster unionist leaders, to pre- lated Craig for ‘making strong the cement of serve imperial interests. Six counties rather Empire.’29 After the Free State bombarded than nine represented the largest area union- the Four Courts with British artillery the ists felt that they could control, in line with following June, Winston Churchill felt confi- the UVF contingency plan of 1914. ‘Self- dent in assuaging Craig’s fears regarding his determination’ for an ‘Ulster nation’ was administration’s security now that ‘Collins meaningless: the enterprise was explicitly had definitely drawn the sword against the designed to subvert self-determination. enemies of the British Empire’.30 In real- In August 1914, James Connolly charac- ity, the distinction between Ulster unionist terised Ulster loyalism as an inherently re- and British conservative leaders is a false actionary and colonial ideology. one, and the massive security apparatus and funding which enabled Craig to consoli- The Carsonites say that their fa- date his fledging regime totally depended on thers were planted in this coun- British largesse. try to assist in keeping the na- tives down in subjection that Partition was not inevitable; it relied on this country might be held for human agency and the actions of a British England[.] Therefore, say the state intent on securing its interests. In re- Carsonites, we have kept our side cent years Irish historiography seems deter- of the bargain[,] and rather than mined to legitimise partition as the logical admit that these Catholics...are consequence of the fact that two distinct ‘na- our equals, we will fight, in the tions’ inhabit the island. But this ‘two na- hope that our fighting will cause tions’ approach does not in any way reflect the English people to revolt the historical record. Hugh de Fellenberg against their government and re- Montgomery, the Ulster unionist representa- establish us in our historic Posi- tive at the abortive Irish Convention of 1917- tion as an English colony in Ire- 18 wrote that unionists ought not put much land, superior to, and unham- store on the theory, but rather ‘take firmer pered by, the political institu- ground as loyal subjects and Denizens of the tions of the Irish natives.34 British empire’.31 Likewise, Joseph Fisher, the unionist representative on the Boundary Connolly’s evidence came from the lan- Commission32 stated that Ulster unionists guage of Orange politicians themselves. For only employed the two nations theory as a example Andrew Horner, the unionist MP ‘reductio ad absurdum’ (reduction to absur- for South Tyrone, claimed that ‘Ulster’ rep- dity). ‘[R]ecently it has come into the field resented the ‘people of British race’, the of practical politics’, he observed, but ‘[w]e 200,000 men ‘enrolled in the Unionist clubs’ have never asked for it or accepted it for its and the ‘half a million men and women’ who own sake.’33 signed the covenant: a people with ‘the great The partition of Ireland did not rely on traditions of a race that had never known the existence of two nations, or indeed, on defeat, and the sympathy and help of all 28Montgomery to Stronge, 6 Apr. 1920 (PRONI, D627/435/21); Montgomery to Leo Maxse, 7 May 1920 (PRONI, D627/435/75). 29Greenwood to Craig, 10 June 1921 (PRONI, Craigavon papers, T3775/14/2). 30Churchill to Craig, 7 July 1922 (PRONI, CAB 6/75). 31Montgomery to W. M. Jellett, 19 February 1918 (PRONI, D627/432/11). 32The Boundary Commission was established under Article XII of the Treaty and collapsed acrimoniously when Fisher leaked the details to a Tory newspaper in 1925. 33Fisher to Montgomery, 4 March 1918 (PRONI, D627/433/68). 34Irish Worker, 8 August 1914. 35House of Commons Debate, 15 January 1913, Hansard, vol. 46, cc2175–8; Tyrone Courier, 30 January 1913.

64 that was best from every quarter of the Em- leged that the government in Belfast sanc- pire’.35 In February 1913, he claimed that tioned and excused such conduct.38 Fur- ‘the only ascendancy he knew in Ireland was thermore, the British government provided the ascendancy of industry over sloth, of £6 million (approximately £280 million in intelligence over ignorance, and of thrifti- today’s money) for the campaign in Ulster ness over thriftlessness [sic], and no act of even though Lloyd George was fully aware Parliament could change those characteris- of the nature of the USC, describing it as an tics of the race that inhabited this island’.36 Irish version of Mussolini’s Fascisti.39 De- These assumptions echoed elite sentiment: spite full knowledge of the facts, the British both British political parties contained en- government funded sectarianism in Ireland thusiastic supporters of eugenics and social because it suited its objectives. Darwinism, and it was not difficult to ap- Our understanding of the Irish revolu- ply these to enforcing inequality in Ireland. tion should encompass a wider appreciation Viewed from the perspective of the British of British strategic interests and imperial eĺite and Ulster unionists themselves, parti- ideology. These factors ensured that Ul- tion relied on a racist conception of identity ster unionists enjoyed the decisive support of in Ireland, with religion viewed as a racial in- the British Conservative elite-in parliament, dicator. Northern Ireland emerged from an the army and the Palace-at critical moments imperialist and racist/sectarian definition of throughout the revolutionary decade. Nev- the Irish nation, with the current political ertheless, the nature of the Sinn Feín move- institutions at Stormont built on the logic ment which emerged after the Easter Ris- of early twentieth-century British imperial- ing also contributed to the defeat of the ism. Irish revolution. My own research on Ty- rone suggests that while scope existed for a class-based challenge to the two bourgeois- The failure to challenge parti- led confessional blocks, the social conser- tion vatism of the revolutionary elite and, ulti- mately, the terms of the Treaty settlement Recent controversy about Peter Hart’s anal- strangled attempts to promote class-based ysis of IRA operations in Cork has meant politics, particularly among members of the that for nearly twenty years the only se- republican movement. rious discussion of sectarian violence dur- Sinn Feín represented a nationalist, ing the revolutionary period has focused on bourgeois revolution-not dissimilar to nu- the southwest. By contrast the irrefutable merous independence struggles that took and exponentially greater resort to sectari- place across the globe over the course of anism in the northeast is almost completely twentieth century. Its ideology, as under- ignored. Violence in Ulster between 1920 stood in its founding document, the 1916 and 1922 emerged primarily from the cam- Proclamation, was both non-sectarian and paign of the Ulster Special Constabulary republican. Sinn Feín spoke of social equal- (USC), a state force recruited directly out ity and laid the blame for sectarian schism of the paramilitary UVF, which pursued a at the door of British imperialism. Nev- strategy of reprisal killings mirroring British ertheless, many who sheltered under the military policy throughout Ireland during post-Rising Sinn Feín umbrella were socially the Anglo-Irish war.37 Indeed, there is pri- conservative and lukewarm on the republic, mary evidence from senior USC comman- including Arthur Griffith himself. Signifi- ders who criticised the force’s sectarianism cantly, the first attempt to implement the and its deliberate killing of civilians and al- Sinn Feín policy ended in acrimony before 36Tyrone Courier, 20 March 1913. 37Fergal McCluskey,‘The “Tan War” in Tyrone, a comparative analysis of IRA and crown force violence, 1920-21’ Irish Sword 27 (Autumn, 2010), 109 . 38Report of Gen. Ricardo, June 1922 (TNA, CO 906/27). 39Michael Farrell, Arming the Protestants: the formation of the Ulster Special Constabulary, 1920-27 (London, 1983), 153; 283.

65 the 1910 elections, when the young northern mon de Valera’s trouncing at the hands of cohort in the IRB criticized Griffith’s monar- Joe Devlin in the Belfast Falls constituency chism and his attempted rapprochement in 1918. Devlin’s position rested on the with the Healyite All-for-Ireland League, the rhetoric and symbolism of democracy and party of Catholic conservatism and political even labour, but the reality of conserva- pet of William Martin Murphy.40 tive, Catholic nationalism and acquiescence Griffith’s opposition to Larkin and the in empire. It was not until the midst of the Dublin working class throughout the Lock- 1920 pogroms that the nationalist commu- out and his open anti-semitism did not pre- nity in Belfast shifted its allegiance to Sinn vent his appointment as vice president to the Feín. When we speak of the Sinn Feín elite second Sinn Feín in 1917. The Anglo-Irish that eventually came to terms with empire Treaty constituted the foundation document and partition through the Treaty, we are de- of the Irish counterrevolution, for it consum- scribing an established class within Irish so- mated the alliance between the Healyites ciety that had few qualms about empire and and the Sinn Feín conservatives led by Grif- which accepted the racist and colonial def- fith. The Healyites eventually dominated inition of nationalism underpinning British the new Free State, after the purge of ‘rev- policy. olutionaries, Irish-Irelanders and most es- There is no doubt that the unionist lead- pecially the militarist-republicans’ from the ership in the North feared the labour move- government.41 This eĺite singularly failed to ment much more than they worried about challenge partition and, while consolidating Sinn Feín. Carson’s incendiary speech at Fi- the Free State (or the birth of Irish democ- naghy on 12 July 1920, which contributed racy, as revisionists would have it) carried to the shipyard expulsions, had as much to out a proxy war on behalf of the British state do with labour’s emergence (winning twelve against militant republicans and working- seats in that January’s Belfast municipal class radicals. elections) as it had to do with the advance In Ulster itself, Sinn Feín was built to of Sinn Feín in Ulster. Indeed, a social- defeat constitutional nationalism and not ist viewpoint - articulated mainly through to convert Ulster unionists. Its northern the ITGWU or the Belfast-based Work- policy involved co-opting middle-class for- ers’ Union, whose leading lights had not mer constitutionalists-often with little in- yet accepted partition-had gained the sup- terest in a genuinely popular movement-to port of Catholic and Protestant workers. bolster electoral prospects in Ulster. The Superficially, unionist hegemony appeared petit-bourgeois nationalist revolution never impregnable, but mass rallies and Orange gave serious consideration to fulfilling the pageantry masked rancorous disagreements socialist aspects of the Proclamation or to over labour and conscription in both the ru- attracting working-class support. In June ral west and urban east. 1919 Sinn Feín commissioned a report from Ulster Protestant, W. Forbes Patterson, to Labour, the National Question investigate new avenues for republicanism in Ulster. Patterson suggested that Sinn and the Role of Sectarianism Feín emphasize the Dáil’s ‘progressive’ and Two labour struggles-Belfast’s famous 1919 ‘radical’ Democratic Programme in order ‘to General Strike and a series of less well known weld labour interests and Irish nationalism industrial struggles in Tyrone the previous together’,42 but his suggestions were virtu- year-sharply convey the dynamics of class ally ignored. politics and sectarianism in Belfast and ru- Sinn Feín’s conservatism not only failed ral mid-Ulster. Tyrone saw considerable to appeal to working-class Protestants, but trade union activity in late 1917 and 1918. facilitated, in part, Sinn Feín President Ea- Both Protestant and Catholic workers joined 40McCartan to McGarrity, 7 Apr. 1909 (NLI, McGarrity papers, P8186); Garvin, Evolution, 105–10. 41Regan, Counter-revolution, 259. 42Mitchell, Revolutionary government, 166.

66 the Worker’s Union, organised locally by scription News, suggested that conscription Neal O’Donnell of Coalisland, and provin- exercised ‘the minds of all-Protestant and cially by Dawson Gordon (later Labour Unionist no less than Catholic and Nation- Party representative in Belfast’s Dock ward) alist’ as the readership was ‘surprisingly nu- and Robert ‘Bob’ McClung, both adher- merous and still more surprisingly hetero- ents of Connollyite socialist republicanism geneous.’48 The decisions by the bourgeois at this juncture, as was Sam Kyle, the Sinn Fein leadership to sign the conscrip- WU’s leader in Belfast.43 In March 1918, tion pledge outside Catholic chapels and to 140 Catholic and Protestant workers struck support Cardinal Logue’s pact with Joe De- Brown’s Soapworks in Donaghmore, attack- vlin during the 1918 general election demon- ing ‘blacklegs’ and ‘parad[ing] the village strated that the rhetoric of non-sectarian re- with a red flag,’ while Charles McKeown and publicanism sat uneasily with electoral real- Robert Stewart drove a hijacked company ity. Leading Armagh republican John Mc- lorry through the front gates. The press Coy denounced this ‘stupid blunder’, which reported that Protestant workers taunted saved the IPP from electoral oblivion out- them with Union Jacks ‘supplied by the side Belfast, and insisted that this ‘sectarian factory owner’ before the strike was re- policy’ had knocked ‘the bottom out of all solved through arbitration in favour of the the castles in the air’ that advanced ‘Protes- workers.44 This worrying episode in cross- tant/Presbyterian republicans were building community solidarity anticipated the cre- up’.49 ation of Carson’s Ulster Unionist Labour As- By this stage, unionist employers in par- sociation (UULA) in December 1918.45 ticular had determined to play on sectarian In the midst of an upturn in labour mil- divisions in order to undermine the spread of itancy, Ireland was rocked by the conscrip- local trade unionism. These tactics reached tion crisis, and despite the way the ‘Great their peak in Tyrone in 1919, when 220 War’ is remembered today in unionist cir- workers struck at Fulton’s woollen mill at cles, it is clear that some Protestants shared Caledon.50 There Peadar O’Donnell led their nationalist neighbours’ antipathy to a strike for higher wages and trade union conscription, and that their objections deep- recognition which followed the ITGWU’s ened as the war dragged on. IRA volun- successful campaign during the Monaghan teer Nicholas Smyth claimed that in Dro- asylum ‘soviet’ and prompted the major- more ‘a number of young Ulster Volunteers ity Protestant workforce to seek his assis- came along to us and offered to join the tance.51 The owner, Fulton, was a promi- Irish Volunteers in their determination to nent local businessman, spokesman for the fight conscription.’46 A similar approach was ‘leading residents in the Clogher Valley’ and made in Clanabogan, a majority Protestant an associate of loyalist hardliner and gun- townland near Omagh and, interestingly, the runner Fred Crawford and northern Minis- scene of an ITGWU-organised ‘strike of farm ter of Home Affairs Dawson Bates.52 Craw- labourers’ in August 1918.47 In Omagh ford claimed that Catholics who struck to itself, a short-lived news sheet, The Con- remove the mill’s (Protestant) foreman had 43Tyrone Courier, 4 October 1917; Tyrone Courier, 15 November 1917. 44Report of the Tyrone County Inspector R.I.C., March 1918; for the number of workers see, Report of the Tyrone County Inspector R.I.C., April 1918; Dungannon Democrat, 15 May 1918; Dungannon Democrat, 22 May 1918; for details of the second round of prosecutions regarding the Donaghmore strike, see Tyrone Courier, 25 April 1918. 45Dungannon Democrat, 5 June 1918. 46Nicholas Smyth (BMH WS 721, 3). 47The RIC County Inspector also mentioned a female textile workers’ strike in Omagh (CI, August 1918, NAL, CO904/106) 48O’Shiel (BMH WS 1770/6, p. 771). 49John McCoy (BMH WS 492, p. 42). 50CI Tyrone, Jan. 1919 (TNA, CO 904/108). 51Mary T. McVeigh,‘Lock out? Caledon 1919’ in Duíche Neíll, ix (1990), 98. 52Wickham to S. J. Watt, 30 Mar. 1922 (PRONI, HA/5/905).

67 filled servicemen’s jobs during the war and which attracted audiences of 250 and three alleged that the local Catholic priest, ‘the hundred, sharing a platform with William leader of the Sinn Feiners in the district’, McMullan, Belfast representative of the IT- had organized the strike to persecute Protes- GWU. All the speakers challenged Samuel tants.53 Kelly, who ‘had tried to make the present In reality, Fulton’s intransigence and strike a sectarian issue, for the purpose of 58 poor pay provided the only necessary mo- dividing the working classes’. One local tivation. The local union secretary was an republican described the struggle to a friend Orangeman, but O’Donnell later recollected interned on the Argenta prison ship: ‘The how ‘gradually the Union Jacks gave way strike at the brickworks still continues and and the red flags took their place’.54 Af- looks very blue. We are down and out all 59 ter four weeks, with 130 workers still on through the signing of the f**king Treaty’!’ strike, Fulton introduced UULA ‘blacklegs’ In many respects Belfast replicated the and readmitted strikers on a sectarian ba- rural pattern of revolution and reaction, but sis. When the strike eventually collapsed in the close urban environment acted as a cat- July 1919 Fulton celebrated by holding a fac- alyst for confrontation, and there the fire tory social under a banner that read ‘Cale- burnt much brighter and more intensely. don’s double celebration: overthrow of the The same forces that motivated working- Hun and the Irish Bolshevists’.55 class solidarity in Tyrone found potent ex- As these examples show, Sinn Fein’s so- pression in the Great Belfast Strike: 20,000 cial conservatism did not necessarily per- shipyard and engineering workers downed meate the ranks. There was clearly a left- tools in January 1919, the high-point of wing republican constituency, particularly in working-class militancy in the period. All- East Tyrone in and around Coalisland. Af- in-all nearly 40,000 workers went out and ter partition, local workers clashed with Sir another 20,000 were laid off because of the Samuel Kelly, the Belfast coal magnate, who strike, which lasted four weeks. By 24 bought the local colliery, two spinning mills February 1919, the strike ended in failure, and the brickyard in 1921 and began pro- largely due to procrastination and timidity duction in 1924 with two hundred miners on the part of the politically divided strike from Scotland and the north of England. committee. The Worker’s Union was still active, with In January 1920, the elections to Belfast Neal O’Donnell organising a meeting of 250 Corporation demonstrated that the Ulster in the town addressed by McClung and or- Unionist Party could secure just 35 of the ganising a sympathy strike in nearby An- 60 seats in its own citadel. Nevertheless, nagher.56 The coalmine soon followed suit: both Sinn Feín and the IPP faired rela- the workforce there included a hard core of tively badly, securing only five seats apiece. militants who attempted to create a soviet, Labour represented the second party in precipitating eventual closure.57 Kelly also Belfast City Hall, with twelve seats, and at- expelled the strikers (led by local republi- tracted support across the sectarian divide. can John McMahon) from the brickworks, Sam Kyle of the Worker’s Union-elected on bringing in Protestant ‘scabs’ from Dun- the Shankill-was a Connollyite socialist, but gannon. Although the strike was organised other councillors held a more ambiguous at- by the ITGWU, Dawson Gordon addressed titude to partition. The seeds of this am- the meetings in Coalisland and Dungannon, biguity can be traced back to the Great 53Crawford diary, 28 Sept. 1920 (PRONI, Crawford papers, D640/11/1). 54McVeigh,‘Lock out?’, 98–102. 55ibid. p. 108 56RIC IG to MHA, 27 May 1924 (PRONI, HA5/1307) 57Rosanne Laury to Joseph Quinn, 8 Sept. 1924 (PRONI, HA/5/1837); strike at Tyrone Brick Works, Dungannon, Co. Tyrone, 1924 (PRONI, HA/5/1361); strike at Annagher Colliery, Coalisland, Co. Tyrone (PRONI, HA/5/1349). 58IG RUC to MHA, 8 July 1924 (PRONI, HA/5/1361) 59W. McKenna to Cavanagh, 12 Aug. 1924 (PRONI, HA/5/1556).

68 Strike, which was directed by a committee central role in precipitating violence through that included UULA; those committee mem- the speech he gave to an Orange gathering bers outside the ranks of loyalism attempted at the field in Finaghy on 12 July 1920.61 to hold the ranks together in the face of di- ‘These men who come forward posing as the vision by adopting a strictly apolitical posi- friends of labour care no more about labour tion, concentrating solely on reduced work- than does the man in the moon. Their real ing hours. object ... is that they mislead and bring The Carsonites were not so reticent. The about disunity amongst our own people; and Orange Order issued a manifesto denounc- in the end, before we know where we are, we ing labour radicalism, and were supported find ourselves in the same bondage and slav- by a relentless campaign from the Newslet- ery as is the rest of Ireland in the South and West’. ‘And these are not mere words,’ he ter and the unionist press. Against the back- 62 drop of a revolutionary upheaval elsewhere urged. ‘I am sick of words without action.’ in Ireland and in a city where the nation- One week later the funeral in Banbridge alist minority (then less than a quarter of of Colonel Gerald Smyth, divisional police Belfast’s population) had endured harass- commissioner for Munster who had been ment and discrimination, the UULA shut assassinated by the IRA in Cork, sparked down meetings organised by the Left and widespread loyalist violence. Smyth was one mobilised its striking members to march be- of a substantial number of Ulster unionists hind union jacks. When the Scottish rev- in the officer class of the police and army olutionary and chair of the Clyde Worker’s’ who played a prominent role in directing Committee Willie Gallacher spoke in Belfast British counterinsurgency in the South, and his talk was interrupted by demands to know was an architect of the policy of reprisals. In whether he ‘supported his King’. Gallacher a speech to his men, he assured them that responded, appropriately, that this was a although they ‘may make mistakes occasion- ‘stupid question’. ‘You know I am a rev- ally and innocent persons may be shot...that olutionary and that the only loyalty is to cannot be helped, and you are bound to the working-class.’ It was a principled re- get the right participants sometimes... The sponse, but one that lost him use of the en- more you shoot the better I will like you, and gineers’ hall. Like episodes of working-class I assure you, no policeman will get into trou- unity in Belfast that would follow, the 1919 ble for shooting any man.’ When, after his strike demonstrated both the potential for assassination, southern rail crews refused to worker’s militancy and the folly in trying transport his body north, loyalists initiated to evade the problem of sectarianism. As attacks on Catholic homes in Banbridge and Michael Farrell concluded, ‘there can be few neighbouring Dromore. clearer examples in history of the ephemeral The Banbridge attacks were part of a effect of purely economic militancy. The pattern over the revolutionary period in greatest labour upheaval in Belfast’s history which loyalist mobs, often egged on by left scarcely a ripple on the political con- 60 prominent ‘respectable’ unionists, carried sciousness of the city’s workers.’ out wholesale assaults on innocent Catholics The reaction against the spectre of work- in retaliation for IRA actions against po- ers’ unity in Belfast mirrored the sectari- lice and military figures involved in repres- anism and menace on display in rural Ty- sion elsewhere in Ireland. In August 1920 rone, but on the scale and intensity of an the IRA assassinated DI Oswald Swanzy in urban pogrom. Despite his distaste for Or- Lisburn, who with an RIC gang had mur- ange platform oratory, characterised by him dered Tomas MacCurtaín, the Lord Mayor as ‘the unrolling of a mummy. All old bones of Cork, and in retaliation loyalists un- and rotten rags’, Edward Carson played a leashed a pogrom against the town’s small 60Michael Farrell, ‘The Great Belfast Strike of 1919’, The Northern Star, no.3 (1971). 61Andrew Gailey, ‘King Carson: An Essay on the Invention of Leadership’, in Irish Historical Studies, Vol. 30, No. 117 (May, 1996), 85. 62Farrell, The Orange State, 28

69 Catholic minority, razing much of the na- pression exacerbated the already likely sce- tionalist quarter over three days and send- nario that employment, both private and ing many literally fleeing on foot across the public, would become heavily reliant on loy- mountains to Belfast. A London Times re- alty, with religious affiliation acting as the porter insisted that ‘the war on Catholics is primary indicator followed by political trust- a deliberate and organised attempt...to drive worthiness. The payoff for preferential treat- the Catholic Irish out of north east Ulster.’63 ment in employment, whether a position The most horrific reprisals were carried in the USC, a job in a linen mill or a lo- out in Belfast. As trouble spread some cal government post was that working-class 10,000 Catholics and several hundred ‘rot- Protestantism was ‘stripped of’ its ‘progres- ten’ Protestant trade unionists were ex- sive elements’.68 Labour did not lose its pelled from the city’s shipyards, mills and power to assert itself, as a new round of foundries.64 Over the next two years, 23,000 confrontation during the Depression years people were driven from their homes in would show. But any struggle that remained Belfast, while approximately 50,000 peo- trapped within the boundaries of ‘unionist ple fled the six-county territory because of labour’ was bound to come up short. intimidation.65 The death toll in Belfast Obviously the Sinn Feín movement alone in the same period numbered 500. Of which emerged after 1916 offered little to these almost 60 percent were Catholics in a working-class Protestants, and arguably di- city where they made up only a quarter of luted the pronounced non-sectarianism and the population.66 In effect, as the (union- radicalism of its pre-Rising progenitor, due ist) historian Patrick Buckland has argued, partly to the domination of a counterrevo- ‘Belfast Catholics hemmed in by Protes- lutionary wing led by Griffith but also-after tants had long been held hostage for the the 1920 pogroms-to its new ascendancy in good behaviour of their co-religionists else- nationalist Belfast as ‘defenders’ against Or- where in Ireland.’ He might have added that ange pogroms. Neither were the Protes- much of the retribution was carried out by tant lower class passive victims in their own state forces whose numbers were drawn from exploitation. But it was undoubtedly the the ranks of loyalist paramilitaries.67 One unionist eĺite who were the net beneficiaries historian of Belfast republicanism suggests, locally. reasonably, that it was the 1920 pogroms Imposed by brute force as a means of that marked the shift in Catholics’ alle- undermining the potential for thoroughgo- giance away from Devlin’s IPP and toward ing revolution during a period of remark- Sinn Feín. But the violence that accompa- able upheaval across Ireland, partition con- nied the formation of the Northern Ireland solidated a new arrangement through which state tested the non-sectarian strain present capitalism would continue to dominate Ire- among Ulster republicans and elevated their land north and south. It left intact British role as defenders of the nationalist ghettoes. imperial prerogatives and drew into the fold When confronted with the polarities a conservative emerging ruling class in the of unionism and nationalism, working-class South, while leaving in place a system of Protestants on the whole preferred the devil sectarian supremacy in the North. Nation- they knew, and the revolutionary period alism came up dramatically short in a test suggests that Sinn Feín failed to provide a of whether it could deliver a future of free- political alternative that could destabilize dom for the Irish working class, but the rev- the unionist monolith. Nevertheless, Protes- olutionary period should be remembered as tant support also rested on material con- one in which working people north and south ditions. After partition, the post-war de- played a central role in shaping events. The 63McDermott, Northern Divisions, 47-49. 64Alan F. Parkinson, Belfast’s unholy war (Dublin, 2004), 36-7. 65Phoenix, Northern nationalism, 251. 66Parkinson, Unholy war, 12-13. 67Jimmy McDermott, Northern Divisions, 11. 68Bew et al., NI, 16.

70 ‘carnival of reaction’ foreseen by Connolly tionary period shows the high cost of letting continues to the present day, and will not be opportunities slip, but in the joint struggles ended by vague appeals for ‘respect’ for Ire- of workers across the sectarian divide we can land’s ‘two traditions’: the challenge is not also get a glimpse of the potential for trans- to accept sectarianism as inevitable, but to formation. carve a path toward its demise. The revolu-

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