Dr John Cunningham (Respondent

Respondent

Dr John Cunningham, NUI Galway Recovering Imagined Futures: A Spirit of Revolution?

Dr John Cunningham

An Dr John Cunningham

In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a retired Athlone train driver, contributed two articles to the Irish Independent. Martin was originally from Galway, and he grew up in a railway family in the shadow of the Augustinian church in Middle Street before joining the Midland Great Western Railway himself.1

In the articles, he discussed his part in the munitions embargo, a trade union action which impeded the movement of British military equipment between May and December 1920 and which, for that reason, loomed large in the calculations of Michael Collins and his colleagues.2 That it involved large numbers is established by the figures for those dismissed or suspended for taking part – 1000 railway workers and 500 dockers. If the trade union embargo had a major impact on the conflict in 1920, it did not have the same impact on historical narratives, and nearly fifty years later Martin O’Sullivan concluded his account in the Independent by expressing his bewilderment that ‘those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland’.3 The embargo is the subject of a recent publication by railway and labour historian, Peter Rigney, and it features obliquely in the opening scene of Ken Loach’s The Wind that Shakes the Barley, but it would be fair to say that it remains part of the hidden history of the period. The same might be said, more or less, about other contemporary labour mobilisations. To give two examples: the Irish Trade Union Congress’s anti-conscription strike in April 1918 played a large part in changing the course of events during that fateful year; while the

1 I am grateful to Peter Rigney for his help with the following biographical note. Joining the MGWR as a fireman in 1911, Martin O’Sullivan (1891-1977) worked as a fireman and as a locomotive driver until his retirement from CIE in 1957. He married Mary Hughes, and the couple raised a large family at Bogginfin, Athlone. In retirement he was a long-serving national secretary of the CIE Pensioners Association. (Birth certificate for Martin Sullivan, Water Lane, Galway, 22 October 1891; 1911 Census, Household Schedule No. 4, Middle Street, Galway East Urban; ‘CIE Pensions’, Irish Independent, 9 December 1963; ‘He wins pension increases for 800’, Irish Independent, 2 December 1974; ‘Obituary: Mr M. O’Sullivan’, Westmeath Independent, 18 March 1977). 2 Peter Rigney, How Railwaymen and Dockers Defied an Empire: The Irish Munitions Embargo of 1920, Dublin: Iarnród Éireann with Umisken Press, 2021. 3 Martin O’Sullivan, ‘How Railwaymen Defied an Empire’, Irish Independent, 13 August 1967. The articles were published together in a historical journal after the author’s death: Martin O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish Munitions Strike of 1920’, Cathair na Mart: Journal of the Westport Historical Society, vol. 11 (1990), pp. 132-6.

general strike of April 1920 forced the British government to release hunger-striking prisoners within two days.4 Martin O’Sullivan’s indignant disappointment has relevance to the Machnamh theme of ‘imagined futures’. Defying the military, he and unarmed comrades risked their lives as well as their livelihoods in defence of the incipient republic. They had the reasonable expectation of having this acknowledged, but in the dominant narrative of the struggle, their contribution was ignored – relegated by the drama of ambushes and elections, but also by the state-making imperatives of a conservative polity. Social remembering and commemoration, as Margaret O’Callaghan reminds us, has involved selective forgetting. Some of the forgotten things, one hopes, may be recovered in initiatives such as Machnamh 100.

Behind the mobilisations I’ve mentioned lay other imagined futures. Trade unions could put boots on the ground because of the increase in their membership, itself a reflection of a widespread determination to fight for a better life. The most remarkable growth was in the ITGWU, founded by the absent Jim Larkin, which grew from around 5,000 in 1916 to more than 100,000 in 1920. Of that number, approximately half were farm labourers, and their embrace of the ITGWU represented the impulse of a marginalised group to exert some control over their working lives. Strikes, workplace seizures, ‘soviets’, were among the weapons they used.5 As scholars including Pamela Horn, Emmet O’Connor, and Fintan Lane have shown, rural labourers had fitfully organised in previous decades in bodies like the Irish Land and Labour Association.6 They had exerted pressure, especially after labourers won the right to vote in local elections in 1898. The key achievement of the earlier collectivities was a transformation in housing. In the thirty years before the first world war, under the Labourers’ Acts, almost 50,000 labouring families had swapped their unsanitary hovels for council houses with tillage plots.7 The process was treated informatively and engagingly by the Loughrea writer, Séumas O’Kelly, in his one act play Meadowsweet. O’Kelly was familiar with the arcane workings of the Labourers’ Acts from his day job as editor of the Leinster Leader.8

But if labourers’ secured decent houses, wages and conditions were a different matter – in those respects, labourers had remained at the mercy of farmers and landlords. War would change the balance of forces in the countryside. Wartime demand brought price inflation – good for those like farmers with something to sell; bad for those dependent on wages. Other developments, though, gave workers a bargaining position. With military enlistment reducing the numbers available, compulsory tillage increased the demand for labour. An Agricultural Wages Board was established in 1917 to guarantee the wartime food supply by encouraging labourers to remain on the land.9 However, it was necessary for labourers to become unionised to claim their new entitlements and their share in agricultural prosperity. Initially there was something of a resurgence of the older Associations, but most were soon absorbed by the burgeoning ITGWU, which mushroomed in those parts of Leinster and Munster where farm labourers were most numerous.

4 Emmet O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, 1824-2000, Dublin: UCD Press, 2011, pp. 109-16; John Cunningham, ‘Éire 1920: Lucht Saothar ag Seasamh an Fhóid’, Tuairisc, Bealtaine 2020, https://tuairisc.ie/sraith-comortha-eire-1920-lucht-saothair-agseasamh-an-fhoid/, accessed 4 July 2021. 5 Francis Devine, Organising History: A Centenary of SIPTU, 1909-2009, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2009; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 105-6. 6 Pamela Horn, ‘The National Agricultural Labourers’ Union in Ireland, 1873–9’, Irish Historical Studies, vol. xvii, no. 67 (1971), pp. 340–52; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 41-44; Fintan Lane, ‘Rural Labourers, Social Change and Politics in Late Nineteenth Century Politics’, in Lane and Ó Drisceoil, eds, Politics and the Irish Working Class, Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2005, pp. 113-39.

7 Enda McKay, ‘The Housing of the Rural Labourer, 1883-1916’, Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, vol. 17 (1992), pp. 27-38. 8 Seumas O’Kelly, Meadowsweet: A Comedy in One Act, Dublin: Talbot Press, 1925; George Brandon Saul, Seumas O’Kelly, Lewisburg NJ: Bucknell University Press, 1971, pp. 15-42, 54. 9 O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 104-5.

Even for a county like Mayo, with relatively few labourers, Francis Devine lists 19 ITGWU branches in 1918-19, including Achill Sound, Belmullet, Ballycastle, Cong, Crossmolina, Kilkelly, Kiltimagh, and Shrule.10 The story in Ulster was rather different, with complexities that I can’t do justice to here. It merits separate treatment.

The ITGWU, of course, promised more than wage increases. In its periodicals and rhetoric, it also promulgated an imagined future of its own, encompassed in the idea of the Workers’ Republic. It was an idea formulated by James Connolly, and that union laid claim to its martyred leader and his legacy, increasing its authority throughout nationalist Ireland, while pointing frequently to the Russian revolutions as current manifestations of the Workers’ Republic.11 The Manchester Guardian reported in May 1920:

The returned Irishman would notice in his old market town a rich crop of buttons or badges on the coats of the younger men. These are not the badges of the League or Sinn Féin, but of trade unionism, usually of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union. He would notice if he peered into the old shop windows that it would be far easier to buy a photograph of James Connolly than of de Valera. The Irish Transport and General Workers Union, Connolly’s body, is particularly active all over the country and penetrates to such remote spots as Clifden, the far end of the desert of Connemara.12

While Guardian readers were digesting all this, another wave of unrest was sweeping from the west, this one involving small farmers – so-called ‘congests’ – anxious to add to their uneconomic holdings while there was still the chance. Land held by graziers was targeted, and the repertoire of agitation – cattle-drives, land seizures – was drawn from decades of agrarian struggle. The context is well analysed in works by Heather Laird, Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, Michael D. Higgins and others.13 Of many dramatic episodes, I’ll mention one, where J.G. Alcorn, High Sheriff of Co. Galway and landholder at Kilroe, Corrandulla, was taken from his house in daylight by a crowd estimated at two or three hundred, submerged in Lough Corrib, and threatened with drowning if he refused to sign over his grazing land. He didn’t refuse. This was the culmination of a protracted conflict between Alcorn and local small farmers, in the course of which he had been shot and injured on his way to Mass in January 1918, and his steward shot and killed in March 1918.14

So alongside military engagements, separatist victories in elections, and the creation of Dáil courts, these social struggles were taking place. The overlapping and intersecting phenomena have been collectively characterised in recent decades as the Irish revolution.

But was there really a revolution? The question is posed by Marc Mulholland who identifies features associated with revolutions, including a fundamental change in the social order, and found most of them lacking. If there was an Irish revolution, he suggests, it started in 1879 and one of its key achievements was the wresting of control of the land from the landlords.15

10 O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 105-6; Francis Devine, ‘The Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union in Mayo, 19181930’, Journal of the Galway Archaeological and Historical Society, vol. 71 (2019), pp. 91-108. 11 Donal Nevin, James Connolly: ‘a full life’, Dublin: Gill & Macmillan, 2005. 12 Manchester Guardian, 13 May 1920. I am grateful to Dara Folan for this reference. 13 Heather Laird, Subversive Law in Ireland, 1879-1920: From ‘Unwritten Law’ to the Dáil Courts, Dublin: Four Courts, 2005; Fergus Campbell, Tony Varley, eds, Land Questions in Modern Ireland, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013; Michael D. Higgins, John Gibbons, ‘Shopkeeper-graziers and land agitation in Ireland, 1850-1900’, in P.J. Drudy, ed., Ireland: Land, Politics and People, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 93-118. 14 ‘More Ruffianism’, Tuam Herald, 6 April 1918; ‘Dastardly Outrage’, Tuam Herald, 26 January 1918; ‘The Land Agitation in Co. Galway’, Connacht Tribune, 3 April 1920. Alcorn was a very headstrong individual. Injured by gunshot in the January 1918 episode, he proceeded to Mass and addressed the congregation afterwards. In the contretemps at Lough Corrib, he would not sign a proffered document, but he gave his word that he would settle, and this was accepted. 15 Marc Mulholland, ‘How revolutionary was the Irish revolution’, Working Paper, 2019: https://www.academia.edu/41110690/ How_Revolutionary_was_the_Irish_Revolution, accessed 7 July 2021.

And if the process was protracted, the context was also very broad. In March 1919, Prime Minister Lloyd George, wrote in confidence to the Paris Peace Conference:

… The whole of Europe is filled with the spirit of revolution. There is a deep sense not only of discontent but of anger and revolt among the workmen against pre-war conditions. The whole existing order, in its political, social, and economic aspects, is questioned by the masses of the population from one end of Europe to the other. In some countries, like Germany and Russia, the unrest takes the form of open rebellion; in others, like France, Great Britain, and Italy, it takes the shape of strikes and of a general disinclination to settle down to work, symptoms which are just as much concerned with the desire for political and social change as with wage demands.16

Whether we conclude that there was in fact an Irish revolution, Lloyd George’s ‘spirit of revolution’ was certainly at large in the years around 1919. In addition to the examples I’ve given, there are many others in an imminent publication of that title that Terry Dunne and I have been putting together.17 And thanks to Terry for bringing the Lloyd George document to my attention. Frequently we see IRA Volunteers involved in contemporary labour and agrarian struggles, but this was discouraged by IRA and Sinn Féin leaders. Sinn Féin courts and dedicated land courts quickly clamped down on agrarian agitators, and from the period of the Truce, there was less tolerance of labour militancy. By the early free state period, strikes were being labelled labour ‘irregularism’.18 The servants of the embryo state generally saw social agitation that was outside their control as opportunistic, destabilising, and illegitimate. Vigorous interventions to stamp out agrarian militancy in 1920 were followed by similar stands against labour unrest – ‘soviets’ early in 1922; farm labourer strikes in Kildare and Waterford in 1922-23.19 Research for the ‘Spirit of Revolution’ suggests that there was little to distinguish between the attitudes of pro- and anti-Treaty camps in this regard. The historiography has often echoed the architects of the state in treating social agitation as opportunistic and largely peripheral, which is puzzling insofar as influential social science and historical writings – notably Eric Hobsbawm’s and Charles Tilly’s – have recognised ‘popular contention’ or mass mobilisation as key markers of revolution.20 It is to be hoped that a more holistic view will be a legacy of decade of centenaries research. However, there is the risk that over-reliance on newly-available sources such as Bureau of Military History witness statements and military pensions’ application — exciting and informative as they are — will tend to give even more attention to ambushes at the expense of creamery soviets and land seizures. Contemporary newspapers and police reports tend to have more on popular contention.

My paper has focused on male manual workers, but their success in greatly increasing their wages drew others to trade unionism. There was an influx of women, and of professionals who would not hitherto have identified with labour. In discussing Annie M.P. Smithson, Caitriona Clear mentions the Irish Nurses’ Union, which was established in 1919. The new Irish Bank Officials Association went on strike in the same year. Established bodies, including the important INTO, treated definitively by Niamh Puirséil, affiliated with the Irish Trade Union Congress. In May 1920, at the peak of the cattle drives, the ASTI placed pickets on schools operated by the Christian Brothers and others, outraging the religious employers, some of whom would victimise the teachers involved when things settled a few years later. Other clergy, it should be said, were supportive of labour, acting as intermediaries and arbitrators.21

16 David Lloyd George, ‘Some considerations for the Peace Conference before they finally draft their terms’, quoted in Francesco Severio Nitto, Peaceless Europe, London: Cassell, 1922. 17 John Cunningham and Terry Dunne, A Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from Below, 1916-1923, Dublin: Four Courts, due April 2022. 18 Fergus Campbell and Kevin O’Sheil, ‘The Last Land War? Kevin O’Sheil’s Memoir of the Irish Revolution (1916-1921), Archivium Hibernicum, vol. 57 (2003), pp. 155-200; O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 121-2. 19 O’Connor, A Labour History of Ireland, pp. 120-3. 20 E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘Revolution’, in Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, Revolution in History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, pp. 5-46; Charles Tilly, From Mobilisation to Revolution, London: Longman, 1978. 21 Gordon McMullan, ‘The Irish Bank “Strike”, 1919’, Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, vol. 5, 1979, pp. 39-49; Niamh Puirséil, Kindling the Flame: 150 years of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation, Dublin: Gill Books, 2017; John Cunningham, Unlikely Radicals: Irish Post-Primary Teachers and the ASTI, 1909-2019: Cork University Press, 2009, pp. 48-53.

Through all the ferment, some were looking forward to putting the spirit of revolution back in the bottle, and we can see this, inter alia, in debates on social issues in the Irish Ecclesiastical Record. I’ll mention one that is topical, drawing on research I’ve been doing with Sarah-Anne Buckley. An anonymous ‘Sagart’ writing in the Record in 1922 on ‘How to Deal with the Unmarried Mother’, argued that any new scheme should shield ‘the girl in trouble’ from further ‘degrading and corrupting influences’ by placing her in care, and should also have a ‘deterrent effect on the girls of her neighbourhood’. Continuing, he suggested that if the new Mother and Baby institutions were …

… brought into touch – quietly of course – with people throughout the country who would be likely to cooperate with them, people such as the clergy, nuns, members of the St Vincent de Paul Society’, Catholic doctors, district nurses, social workers, etc., they would receive a much greater number of cases.22

That all came to pass; the Workers’ Republic did not. The fact that radical visionaries were not as coherent or as cohesive in their vision was only part of the reason. Concluding, I’ll return to Martin O’Sullivan, so irked by the version of events in the history books that he put pen to paper himself. Before going to the Independent with his account of the rail embargo, he had written to RTÉ and to the history departments of all Irish universities. He got no reply.23 The theme of ‘imagined futures’ reminds us to be more attentive to stories like his.

In 1967, Martin O’Sullivan, a veteran on the munitions embargo of 1920, expressed his disappointment that ‘those important events were not recorded in any recent history of Ireland’.

Photo courtesy of Trudie Gannon and Martin O’Sullivan.

In 1967, léirigh Martin O’Sullivan, a raibh ról lárnach aige sa trádbhac arm in 1920, a mhíshástacht nach raibh ‘na himeachtaí tábhachtacha sin sa chuntas in aon leabhar staire de chuid na hÉireann le gairid’. Grianghraf le caoinchead Trudie Gannon agus Martin O’Sullivan.

22 Sagart, ‘How to deal with the unmarried mother’, Irish Ecclesiastical Record, August 1922, pp. 145-53. See also Sarah-Anne Buckley and John Cunningham, ‘Commemorating the Irish Revolution: Disremembering and Remembering the Women and Children of the Tuam Mother and Baby Home’, in Linda Connolly, ed., Women and the Irish Revolution, Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2020, pp. 198215. 23 O’Sullivan, ‘The Irish Munitions Strike’, p. 136.