How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"?

Abstract

How Revolutionary Was the "Irish Revolution"? Marc Mulholland (bio) "My Lords, for ten years … it is no exaggeration, it is the literal truth to say that there has been going on in Ireland a great revolution—social partly, political partly."1 So said Sir Charles Russell QC in 1889. He was addressing the special commission sitting in judgment on the Land War and the rise of the radical Parnellite nationalist party since 1879. We are now more likely, however, to think of the ten years between 1912 and 1923 as the "Irish Revolution." This way of thinking is relatively new. It is true that the language of revolution can be found in Irish history, particularly in the ambiguity of the militant separatist tradition. Until reorganization in 1873 there was no formal certainty whether the initials IRB indicated that this Irish brotherhood was "revolutionary" or "republican."2 "Revolutionary" was generally understood to signal a commitment to illegality, and in this regard the distance from "constitutional" nationalism could easily shrink, as episodes such as the 1879–82 Land War had shown.3 But while we can find self-identifying "revolutionaries" in modern Ireland, and revolutionism elided with militancy, can we claim as a revolution the period in which the independent Irish state was founded and Northern Ireland carved out? A couple of instant histories at the time did refer to the period as a revolution. Alison Phillips defined the collapse of British rule in most of Ireland as the local expression of an ongoing international "revolution," a generalized crisis of stable hierarchy and empires. For this reason he called his book The Revolution in Ireland rather than The [End Page 139] Irish Revolution.4 From a nationalist perspective we find a similarly ambiguous categorization of Ireland's experience as "revolution." William O'Brien, in his book The Irish Revolution and How It Came About, described the process in rather unrevolutionary terms: at once a militant backlash against home rule, and as its constitutional consummation.5 These descriptors of "revolution" did not stick in the years after Irish independence and partition. In general, no fixed term came to describe as a totality the series of episodes including the third Home Rule bill and "Ulster Crisis" of 1912–14, the 1913 Lock Out, the 1916 Easter Rising, the 1919–21 Anglo-Irish War, the 1920–22 Ulster Troubles, and the 1922–23 Irish Civil War. For a society that still remembered these episodes with all too sharp clarity, and not yet concerned with how to collectively label them in a "decade of centenaries," these were intertwined paternosters. When a blanket term was felt to be required, that old term "Irish Troubles" was often rolled out.6 Padraic Colum, in his 1959 celebration of Arthur Griffith, the founder of moderate Sinn Féin, argued that the "Irish Revolution affords … an admirable and somewhat neglected case history of a nationalist revolution in our modern Western world."7 He did not find very many willing to take up the term "nationalist revolution," however. In Cold War Ireland the milieu of conservative Fine Gael nationalism was unlikely to enthuse about revolution of any sort. The term used around the fiftieth-anniversary celebrations of 1916, stoutly ignored by Ulster unionists, was "The Irish Uprising" or, more neutrally, in 1969, "The Conflict."8 [End Page 140] Revolution as a descriptor appeared at the end of the 1960s in the context of a wave of national-liberation struggles in the global south. For Oliver MacDonagh, the revolutionary delusions of "halfcrazed millenarians" had to be yoked to the sober constitutionalism of Arthur Griffith's Sinn Féin to win independence.9 F.S.L. Lyons likewise depicted the merging of a separatist underground with moderates to achieve at least a "thwarted revolution."10 In 1971 C. Desmond Greaves used the term "Irish revolution" in his biography of the leftist anti-Treaty leader Liam Mellowes. Greaves characterized the period as an incomplete "national revolution." The political implication of this in the context of the Northern Ireland Troubles, escalating as he wrote, was obvious.11 George Dangerfield in his 1976 study of the period The Damnable Question also spoke of the "unfinished...