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Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922'

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Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922' H-Socialisms Beatty on McNamara, 'Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922' Review published on Sunday, December 22, 2019 Conor McNamara. Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922. Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2019. 200 pp. $24.99 (paper), ISBN 978-1-78855-078-9. Reviewed by Aidan Beatty (University of Pittsburgh) Published on H-Socialisms (December, 2019) Commissioned by Gary Roth (Rutgers University - Newark) Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=54349 Liam Mellows on the Irish Republic Liam Mellows (1892-1922) is an important figure in Ireland but practically unknown in the rest of the world. Influential within nationalist circles, he was "a central figure in the republican movement in both Ireland and the United States from his first involvement with the Fianna Éireann republican boy scouts in 1911, until his execution at the height of the [Irish] Civil War in December 1922" (p. 2). His "Notes from Mountjoy Jail," written immediately prior to his death, have become a key text for Irish left republicanism. Conor McNamara's astutely selected collection of Mellows's writings—culled from various nationalist newspapers and holdings of the National Library of Ireland since "Mellows left no archive of private papers"—provides an effective overview of his ideas and life, accompanied by well- written annotations and introductory essays (pp. 29-30). Mellows was born to an Irish mother and English father, but already at age sixteen he had turned his back on his father's military career, finding work as a bookkeeper instead. He also abandoned his birth name, William, for the more suitably Gaelic "Liam," a standard act for early twentieth-century cultural nationalists seeking to reconnect to their putative Irish essence. His nationalist politics were radical enough that at the start of April 1916, he was deported from Ireland under the Defence of the Realm Act and forced to lodge in the town of Leek in Staffordshire. Within a month he had been smuggled back into Ireland, arriving home to Galway on the West Coast in time for the Easter Rising. He thus acted as a de facto leader for one of the few actions of the 1916 rebellion to take place outside of Dublin. After the rising, he went into hiding before escaping to the US: "His four years in New York was to be the unhappiest of his life, however, and he became a victim of perpetual intrigue between rival factions" within the Irish community (p. 6). Mellows had outsized expectations that Irish Americans would throw their full weight behind Irish demands for self-determination. This crashed against the same Irish American support for the war effort (which was implicitly support for alliance with the British Crown). More generally, American life was at odds with the leftward tilt of Mellows's politics. Reading all this in 2019, some of his observations on the United States are oddly apposite and contemporary: "The trusts and capitalists run politics here. The whole system—commercial, financial, legal and social is built on graft. Honesty is an unknown quantity. The bigger the bluff, the greater the man. The greater the rogue, the more wealthy[,] respected and protected" (p. 151). Citation: H-Net Reviews. Beatty on McNamara, 'Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922'. H- Socialisms. 12-22-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/5606707/beatty-mcnamara-liam-mellows-soldier-irish-republic-selected-writings Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Socialisms Mellows left America in 1921 and certainly seems to have overstayed his welcome; aside from his falling out with the Brahmins of Irish American politics, an attempt to forge a passport had landed him briefly in Sing Sing prison and he was under regular Secret Service surveillance. Back in Ireland, he was elected to the First Dáil, the insurgent Parliament made up of Sinn Féin members of Parliament who refused to take their seats at Westminster. When the Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 proposed partition, dominion status (rather than a full republic), and a required oath to the king for all parliamentarians, Mellows was firmly opposed. He was a pivotal leader in the Four Courts in Dublin when anti-treatyite militants occupied one of the central buildings in the capital and declared it the legitimate government of the Irish Republic. The Four Courts occupation is commonly seen as the opening of the Irish Civil War, fought between anti-treatyites and the newly established Free State. Mellows was arrested as part of the Free State's push against the anti- treatyites; it was during his subsequent incarceration in Mountjoy Jail in Dublin that he surveyed the failures of radical nationalists in his "Notes." He was summarily executed in December 1922. Infamously, Mellows was killed alongside Rory O'Connor, Joe McKelvey, and Richard Barrett; as well as being the leaders of the Four Courts occupation, the four of them represented the four provinces of Ireland. Their executions were intended to symbolize the power, authority, and legitimacy of the Free State government. The chapters of Soldier of the Irish Republic mainly follow this chronology of Mellows's life. In the earliest writings here, Mellows surveys the Fianna (Warriors), a boy scout-like organization that later acted as a feeder into the ranks of the Irish Republican Army (IRA). Originally published in installments in the New York-based Gaelic American between April and August 1917, his "History of the Irish Boy Scouts" provides an eyewitness account of events from 1909 to 1916, though one that is heavily refracted through the lens of Mellows's nationalist politics. McNamara says that the Fianna articles provide "the essence of Mellows' early political philosophy" (p. 34). The masculinist assumptions that undergirded Irish nationalism are certainly on full display here, as are the claims that a lethargic Ireland was being reawoken by a youthful and vigorous militancy. Mellows's account of the Easter Rising—"The True Story of the Galway Insurrection"—is a similar affair; it was a series of articles published in the Gaelic American that mixes nationalist hyperbole with eyewitness details of the rebellion. Written in the third person, it provides an accurate sense of the contemporary nationalist mood after the rising, notwithstanding its romanticized flourishes. His various American speeches, delivered between 1917 and 1920, offer another window in the ideological world of Irish nationalism. They also give a clear indication of why Mellows proved so controversial during his sojourn in the United States. Addressing an audience at the Central Opera House in New York in June 1918, he scolded his host country for not supporting Irish independence: "America has benefited and benefited greatly by the subjection of Ireland, because it drove out to this country the best bone and blood of Ireland. We gather to ask America at this moment to intervene on behalf of Ireland, and on behalf of those that have been deported to England. And we have a right to know in view of all the Irish people have done for America and are doing at the present time. And now that this country has set up this standard with all these altruistic motives written on it, it is high time that it declared where it stands on the question of Irish independence" (p. 101). The wartime context of this made this especially loaded; Mellows's Irish nationalism led logically and directly to a condemnation of the alliance with Great Britain. And his critiques of Woodrow Wilson put him at odds with the established leadership of the Irish American community, who tended to subsume their Irish identity within American patriotism; for Mellows, Irish interests Citation: H-Net Reviews. Beatty on McNamara, 'Liam Mellows, Soldier of the Irish Republic: Selected Writings, 1914-1922'. H- Socialisms. 12-22-2019. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11717/reviews/5606707/beatty-mcnamara-liam-mellows-soldier-irish-republic-selected-writings Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Socialisms were always paramount. By 1921, Mellows had returned to Ireland. His contributions to the debates over the Anglo-Irish Treaty were "classic distillations of Irish republican thought," with a particular emphasis placed on the dangers, in his eyes, of accepting the "will of the people" whenever it contravened the higher ideal of a full republican break from Britain (p. 114). In his anti-treaty speeches, Mellows's evolving radicalism also manifested itself in a clear sense of postcolonial solidarity: "That British Empire is the thing that has crushed this country; yet we are told that we are going into it now with our heads up. We are going into the British Empire now to participate in the Empire's shame even though we do not actually commit the act, to participate in the shame and the crucifixion of India and the degradation of Egypt. Is that what the Irish people fought for freedom for? We are told damn principles. Aye, if Ireland was fighting for nothing only to become as most of the other rich countries of the world have become, this fight should never have been entered upon" (p. 126). Chapter 6 aggregates Mellows's Civil War-era writings. By this point he was publishing in the Workers' Republic, the newspaper of the Communist Party of Ireland, though he denied that he had become a Communist. His later writings from this period did show a desire to forge links with the Irish Labour movement, though his assumption remained that republican (not proletarian) interests would come first; McNamara provides an astute breakdown of this tendency within left republicanism.
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