Out of Step

Abstract

When was the Irish Revolution? The question was posed again recently at the twentieth Conference of Irish Historians in Britain, held at the University of Liverpool in July 2016, and answers offered by the roundtable participants and the audience ranged from ‘1798’ to ‘never’.1 In Hesitant Comrades, Geoffrey Bell implies that there was an Irish Revolution and that it began with the 1916 Easter Rising and concluded with the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921.2 Such conservative dating seems odd for a book that takes the labour movement as its subject, especially since James Connolly and – later – Constance Markievicz (first Minister for Labour in Dáil Éireann) regarded 1913 as the initial contemporary revolutionary moment.3 James Connolly’s militarization of the Irish working class began with the organization of the Irish Citizen Army, founded during the 1913 Dublin Lockout to defend Irish workers from brutality enacted by organized capital and by the Dublin Metropolitan Police, whom the workers perceived as acting in the interests of the capitalist-imperialist state. It is well established that a key contributor to the failure of Irish labour’s ambitions during the Lockout was its fraught relationship with British labour, leading to the Trades Union Congress’s refusal to sanction a sympathetic strike in Britain.4 The TUC’s rejection came despite an outpouring of sympathy from the British public and important denunciations of Bloody Sunday (31 August 1913) by prominent figures in the British left, including George Bernard Shaw.5 The dissonance between public opinion and the actions taken by labour leaders in Britain is an essential context for interpreting how the broad spectrum of the British left reacted to the Easter Rising and its aftermath.