An Irish Revolution Without A Revolution

Aidan Beatty

doi:10.5195/jwsr.2016.602

Abstract

There is a conventional view among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between the passing of the Third Home Rule Bill of 1912 and the end of the Civil War in 1923. The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a ‘Revolution.’ Drawing on Gramsci's notion of a “revolution without a revolution”, this paper seeks to understand the events in Ireland of 1912-23, not as a sudden rupture with the past but as the culmination of a much longer period of (often British-backed) capitalist development in post-Famine Ireland. This paper argues that Irish nationalist politics in the decades before 1912 is better understood via categories such as class, gender, capitalism and the pervasive power of the British state. As such, as well as pursuing a reassessment of the project of Irish historical development and state-building, this paper also seeks a reassessment of the project of (an equally statist) Irish historiography.

Highlights

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press
There is something of a consensus among Irish historians that a revolution occurred in that country between 1912 and 1923
The violence of those years, the collapse in support for the Irish Parliamentary Party (IPP), the meteoric rise to power of Sinn Féin, a new sense of meritocracy, a greater sense of democracy and a widespread radicalism; all are seen as elements of a major change in Irish politics and life, a “revolution.” One of the first serious historical works to study the period in these terms was David Fitzpatrick’s Politics and Irish Life, a seminal study of local politics in Clare

Summary

Introduction

This journal is published by the University Library System, University of Pittsburgh as part of its D-Scribe Digital Publishing Program and is cosponsored by the University of Pittsburgh Press. The lack of such an Irish “intermediate social control stratum” was, Allen states, “the central problem of British rule in Ireland for more than two centuries” after the colonizing wave of the sixteenth century (Allen 2012: 70).

Results

Conclusion