“It is the left republican tradition started by Connolly and continued by Mellows, Gilmore, O’Donnell, the Republican Congress, Clann na Poblachta and even the Workers’ Party to which we belong.” Discuss

The quote in the title comes from Eoin Ó Broin at the launch if his book last night, referred to here, and reported in the Irish Times. Ó Broin is an effective communicator (if I am right he received some training in the US along with many other Irish political representatives during the 1990s), and built a good reputation whilst a councillor in north Belfast, before working in his party’s European department, then becoming his party’s Dun Laoghaire representative. He has been involved in publishing a magazine promoting left policies, and has written another book on the Basque situation. After the very poor general election results in the south, he wrote several articles in An Poblacht advocating a more clearly left position.

I’ll come back to the quote in a minute, but I want to talk briefly about the striking front cover (see the first above link), which has someone looking two ways, at Pearse on the one hand, and at Connolly on the other; the implication being that these represent the two main choices open to those who consider themselves republican: romantic nationalism on the one hand and a socialist republicanism on the other. This dichotomy is one that many have put forward, such as in the debate as to whether – or more often when – Connolly abandoned socialism for nationalism by throwing in his lot with Pearse. And yet it is not a dichotomy that many socialist republicans accept. For Tomás Mac Giolla, for example, Pearse’s final work, The Sovereign People (dated March 31st 1916, just a few weeks before the Rising and in which Pearse declared that he had no more to say on “the Irish definition of freedom”) reflected a conversion of Pearse by Connolly to a socialist understanding of the major issues a new Republic would have to face. And in fact, Pearse does indeed make the case that in the Republic, all property is subject to the nation, which has the right to determine how that property is to be distributed, and countenances the possibility of the nation paying a wage to all, with the surplus going into the national treasury. The work discusses the political thought of major republican figures, including Tone on the men of no property and examines in detail the ideas of James Fintan Lalor, from whom Pearse is clearly developing his final definition of Irish freedom:

“Tone sounded the gallant reveillé of democracy in Ireland. The man who gave it its battle-cries was James Fintan Lalor.”

Towards the end of The Sovereign People, Pearse states the following

And just as all the four have reached, in different terms, the same gospel, making plain in turn different facets of the same truth, so the movements I have indicated are but facets of a whole, different expressions, and each one a necessary expression, of the august, though denied, truth of Irish Nationhood; nationhood in virtue of an old spiritual tradition of nationality, nationhood involving Separation and Sovereignty, nationhood resting on and guaranteeing the freedom of all the men and women of the nation and placing them in effective possession of the physical conditions necessary to the reality and to the perpetuation of their freedom, nationhood declaring and establishing and defending itself by the good smiting sword. I who have been in and of each of these movements make here the necessary synthesis, and in the name of all of them I assert the forgotten truth, and ask all who accept it to testify to it with me, here in our day and, if need be, with our blood.

This notion of the need for battle and blood may well chime with the Pearse we are used to hearing about, but we should not overlook the statement about the nation meeting all the physical needs required by a people to live in freedom. Although Pearse was clearly no Marxist and identified himself primarily as a nationalist, unlike Connolly, perhaps the cover of the book is mistaken, and Arthur Griffith should be facing Connolly.

To return then to the quote from Eoin Ó Broin. I don’t know about everyone else, but I was very surprised when I saw it. I’d have thought that claiming to belong to the same tradition as The Workers’ Party remained strictly verboten. In fact, the angry response over several decades to any comparisons with The WP and the hostility among Provisionals to the joke that did the rounds after the Provisional ceasefire about the difference between the sticks and the provos being 20 years suggests that Ó Broin is very much out of step with mainstream Provisional thinking. And I wonder how far the people he is roping into this tradition would agree with him. I am open to correction here, but I’m fairly sure that Gilmore and O’Donnell, who lived into the 1980s, never regarded Ó Broin’s party as being part of their tradition. Why then is Ó Broin drawing these comparisons? Clearly, like every generation since 1798, he is looking for historical precedents, although I’d have thought that this particular bunch of precedents was unlikely to enamour his argument to too many people within his own party. In fact, I wonder if in drawing on these precedents he is being forced outside of his own party tradition precisely because there is little that he can draw on within it for inspiration. In a world where your party leader is invited to the White House for the inauguration of a president whose main foreign policy objective is to double the number of troops in Afganistan, surely it requires a great deal of mental flexibility if not self-delusion to argue that the party as a whole represents an authentic socialist republicanism? Could it be then that the real target audience is not in fact people within his own party, but the British left? I’m not sure.

What I do know is that The WP response to the 20 years joke was to add “and socialism”, and that that whirring sound people can hear is most likely Joe Cahill spinning in his grave.

ADDS: On a pedantic point that I forgot about in the main text, the left republican tradition, it seems to me, was central to the republican tradition in Ireland from its inception, and can be found right throughout its history, rather than emerging with Connolly. A particularly good example of this is the Fenian Proclamation of the Republic in 1867 available here.

ADDS PART DEUX: It seems possible from Wednesday and Remi in the comments zone that Ó Broin may have been misquoted, and that he referred to Official Sinn Féin as part of the Left Republican tradition, but not The Workers’ Party. Whether this makes the comment and more or less interesting I’ll leave it for others to judge.