Soviet na hÉireann
For those that missed it, TG4’s documentary Soviet na hÉireann is currently online. (click Faisnéis – Cartlann on the left then select the programme)
Descrided by the station
Soviet na hÉireann explores that heady post World War 1 era when Ireland stood on the brink of a Soviet socialist revolution which would have utterly altered the course of its history
The documentary explores the extent of socialism during the period that went far beyond the more widely known Limerick Soviet
Of course hindsight is a wonderful thing but it is very difficult to see how a Red revolution could have succeeded in Ireland in the 1920s. The forces of the Catholic Church, the farmers and the middle classes would certainly have made formidable opponents. Even if it had, or even looked like, succeeding the British would certainly have intervened. Britain, which only a few tears before had troops roaming around the Arctic and the Caucasus in support of the Whites in Russia, would certainly not have countenanced a Soviet government on its doorstep. It is just possible that a Communist government in Dublin would have triggered sympathy in Britain itself but this too is unlikely to have been more than a distraction.
If there had been a Red uprising the resulting civil war in Ireland would probably have taken a form similar to that in Spain in the 1930s with terror and counter-terror leaving a legacy of hatred.
Harry Flashman ,
‘I never said that Hitler and Stalin had anything to do with the Munster Soviet and I can’t see why you suggest I did. You seem to be accusing the Limerick/Munster Soviets of committing crimes which they would have committed if they got into power . Think about that for a moment .
Normally one has to actually commit the crime before one is pronounced guilty however your experience in NI may have led you to believe otherwise . I’m thinking ‘internment ‘ and also Guantanamo and the ‘horrors’ of Galtieri’s gulags in South America etc .
BTW Malcolm Redfellow ‘knows’ his stuff re that period of Irish History -more so than I do
I’ve even learnt a few things about that period which up to now I was just vaguely aware of but took little notice . I take his views seriously when he pronounces on serious topics .
It is true that the totalitarian communists ended up ‘winning’ the numerical body count versus the totalitarian nazis 1917 through 1989 anyway . But these ideoligies are not the only ones in history who have the blood of millions staining their ‘ideological ‘ purity . Jared Diamond in his excellent book ‘The Third Chimpanzee ‘ has a list of ‘genocides ‘ worldwide from 1850 through 1960 approx 100 million IIRC . Since then of course there have been many more .
Through the ages those who have died for Allah , Jesus Christ, and other Gods may well outnumber those who have died for ‘totalitarian ‘ politics . And yet even today when we ‘add up ‘ the not inconsiderable number of people who have been ‘demised ‘ by neo conservative forces this past couple of decades in Argentina , Chile , Bolivia , Philipines , Nicaragua etc the toll is in the millions .
If people would only behave like animals the slaughter would have been a lot less
Anyway this whole thread was based on a supposition that Ireland could have avoided it’s later problems of partition, poverty , etc etc if the ‘Soviets ‘ had attained power . I disagree with that conjecture -that’s all .
If Ireland had had a strong Labour leader then perhaps as Malcolm suggest above we might have averted or ameliorated the worst aspects of our ‘theocratic’ state . But overall we would have had to climb our way out of the trough of economic dependency on the UK and this could only have been achieved through membership of a wider Economic Community such as the EU .
In the case of HF versus MR re above subject -I recall the wise confucian admonition that ‘it is unwise for eggs to fight with stones’;)
Are you still upset at Obama’s landslide victory and the sound of Republic seats crashing or is it the lost ‘investment ‘ at the bookies ?
Harry Flashman @ 04:11 PM:
1. Sound and fury, signifying nothing?
2. Harry’s specific assertion was:
The farmers of Waterford could not know about, and therefore be frightened by “genocidal horrors” which were still several years in the future. The farmers of Waterford were not threatened by “Soviet agitators” (despite any insinuation by the programme) but were
3. Harry embellished this with, in the Irish context, the totally-irrelevant
That’s a bit rich, particularly as the only bayonets in this sad story were those ranged behind the Irish Farmers’ Union when it broke the “soviet” of herdsmen in Toorahara and Kilfenora, in County Clare. Harry followed this with the Grand-Guignol of
So, in regard to trolls:
It works for me, even if I should have put it down to ignorance rather than malice:
What all this has ignored so far is the extent to which the co-operatives were the victims.
Let’s start with a bit of primitive technology: the mechanical cream separator. This replaced the old method by hand separation. It cost money. It therefore strengthened the power of the gombeenmen. The small farmers responded by combining into co-operatives. The co-ops were so radical they were backed by the Unionist, Horace Plunkett, who, in 1899 as Secretary of Agriculture, subsidised them. By 1900, 477 co-ops were up-and-running. Plunkett, for all his failings, was a pragmatist, and coined the slogan: Better business. better farming. Better living.
George William Russell, better remembered as the writer “AE”, was more of an idealist. Editing The Irish Homestead he propounded that the co-operative movement would develop into rural communes: James Connolly agreed with that. So the co-ops were becoming politicized.
Moreover, Plunkett, Russell and Connolly, for different reasons, had little time for Irish petty-capitalists and the Nationalist Party that represented them. The result was friction with the likes of the AOH and the United Irish League. When Plunkett affronted the Catholic hierarchy with his book Ireland in the New Century, he had a full house stacked against him — and therefore against the co-ops.
Plunkett was sacked. The subsidy to the co-ops withdrawn. The IFU (i.e. the big farmers) happy.
So, let’s summarise the position in 1923.
Larkin returned from gaol in the USA (where, let it be remembered, he was detained as part of the Red Scare): he was then expelled from the ITGWU which he had founded. Wage reductions were imposed by the Treatyite government. Trades unions were systematically broken by use of scab-labour and black-lists. The IFU boycott, with official government support, closed down the “soviets” and many creameries. While the Right was united, the Left was divided into Republicans, Labour, Larkinites, ITGWU and WUI. That’s the Free State for you.
“Hitler may well have only wanted to extirpate the plutocratic class of parasitical bloodsuckers who were bleeding the decent Germans dry but the end result was the same. ”
If that wasn’t ironic in the context I can only view it as racist – do you mean “Jews” by “parasitical bloodsuckers “
In fairness Dewi I think he was paraphrasing.
Malcolm,
I reckon the left was so weak (and I’d say that probably the majority of republicans were right wing) that while a united left might have been able to stand up for itself better, it is hard to see how the reactionary nature of the state could have been avoided.
Malcolm is even more of a romantic that Dev. Instead of comely maidens dancing at the crossroads, his vision involves ploughs (imported by co-operatives bartering potatoes) and calloused hands and people dying in famines as they are stuck in the dark ages of a non-industrialised society bequeathed to them by the former colonial occupier. Malcolm, dear, medications and cars, et al, cost billions to import, and the only way of acquiring these necessities is to generate the wealth needed to import them is by becoming a modern industrialised and financial economy, not a terribly romantic agrarian co-operative run by socialist fuckwits. Ireland’s citizens remain the wealthiest per capita in Europe. Even as our wealth (created by capitalism) takes a hit in the current bust, we will still remain wealthier than our neighbours whose wealth is falling likewise. As for unemployment benefit in Ireland, it is 3 times higher than it is in England. This should now be slashed, as the kind of misguided ‘socialism’ that degrees that a non-productive member of society should be paid the equivalent of the minimum wage in the UK is no longer sustainable. None of these considerable advances would have been possible under your demented and utterly destructive vision, so I only commend the vision of the early citizens of the ‘free-state’ for rejecting your lunacy in its entirety.
Eh, it was socialists (as well as good old Dev and his autarky) who wanted to industrialise the country rather than maintain a dependence on exporting farm produce to Britain. But, once again, never let the facts stand in the way of a good story.
Garibaldy @ 07:58 PM:
Perhaps on some occasion we can debate those points further: I’m probably dropping out of this thread shortly, because of heavy commitments for the rest of the week.
A place we could start is exploring the inconsistencies in Connolly:
However, Connolly Mark One did bring the IRSP to a radical programme of national economic controls, liberal education, social welfare, universal suffrage and the 48-hour week. He was, of course, blinded by his double romanticism: that Dublin workers could be inspired by Jemmy Hope, and that the peasant/tenant could be led to co-operativism.
His 1903 departure for the USA left a vacuum, which was promptly filled by the front organisations of the IRB. When they coalesced as Cumann na nGeadhael, that promoted Arthur Griffith and his “Hungarian” theories. When the Cumann, the National Council and the Dungannon Clubs duly merged to form Sinn Féin, the new party’s policy could reconcile both Connolly’s old sidekick PT Daly and the liberal-capitalist Griffith.
Enter Larkin, stage left, to organise the Belfast docks. His technique of sympathy strikes subverted sectarian thuggery and lock-outs: thus was born a pragmatic trade-unionism, the ITGWU and its admission to the ITUC, the Socialist Party of Ireland, and thereby a strong leftist presence. Larkin then brought back Connolly to be the ITGWU Belfast organiser.
Connolly Mark Two was now possessed of the wisdom of the Wobblies, that a syndicalist working-class could supplant the bourgeois state. A nice idea: except that the organised unskilled industrial worker was not commonly found in Ireland, outside of Belfast.
So, flash forward to 1916. The thesis in Garibaldy @ 07:58 PM is well put. Sinn Féin had distinct wings: Eoin MacNeill, Bulmer Hobson and Arthur Griffith on the anti-socialist, capitalist Right; Pearse, MacDonagh, Eamonn Ceannt and Thomas Clarke vaguely further Left.
There were further complications:
“Connolly Mark Two was now possessed of the wisdom of the Wobblies”
Forget Harry a mo – Wobblies history is wonderful – Big Bill Haywood and the WMF…he came to Wales in the Cambrian Combine strike – and he told them to stop singing hymns and get serious….
Malcolm,
I’d be very interested in debating these issues sometime. Perhaps a post on your blog, and hold the debate there? Or I suppose I could use mine. Let me know what you think.
I do agree though that the unformed syndicalism floating about was a problem. I’ll have to go back and check my copy of Connolly’s collected works, but from memory I do think he saw a greater role for a political organisation towards the end of his life. Pearse’s last writing, The Sovereign Nation, I think is underestimated too.
As for hoping Jemmy Hope’s example may prove useful, I guess I’m in no position to talk!
(codeword labor – seems appropriate)
Dave on Oct 27, 2008 @ 09:09 PM:
As I said in the immediately-previous posting, I’m under some severe time-pressures here. So forgive an ill-edited response.
First, I cannot see the relevance of Dave @ 09:09 PM to the situation of 1923, which is the focus of this thread.
For all its failings, the Saorstát showed enterprise in key areas. Patrick Hogan, the Minister for Agriculture, deserves credit for delivering exports vital to the new State. Inevitably, those exports must be mainly from agriculture, and particularly cattle and dairy products (pigs came into the equation a bit later, when it was noticed how successful “Ulster” bacon was as an export). Hogan set about delivering all that by reducing production costs. The downside of that was pressure on wages (see my earlier post). On the other hand, there was the Shannon scheme and rural electrification, the Barrow drainage, sugar beet processing, control and subsidy of agricultural products, the founding of the Agricultural Credit Corporation, setting up higher-level education in agriculture. Irish exports, at first, gained from two factors:
The losers here, apart from the landless agricultural workers, were the small farmers, less able to export and still paying land annuities (the latter significant to Fianna Fáil’s gaining power).
Sheer survival apart, Cumann na nGaedhal’s greatest achievement was to ensure that the new State established sound democratic governance. Seymour Martin Lipset [Political Man, 1960] argued that the survival of democracy required a level of material wellbeing. He saw Ireland (this is 1960, remember) alongside India as deviant cases — “too democratic” to fit his neat linkage of economic factors with democratic institutions. Frank Munger, studying the 1932 change of government, noted that Ireland, as late as the 1960s, scored lowest in economic prosperity among a score of stable democracies; and that Ireland’s historic profile better fitted a unstable or authoritarian régime. R.K.Carty [Party and Parish Pump, 1982] counted Ireland “among the most politically overdeveloped countries in the world”, suggesting that the century before independence generated experience of mass politics.
So, credit where it’s due. The Cumann na nGaedhal government had a conscious policy of being inclusive: there was (relatively) little victimisation. Republicans in the public service kept their jobs (not so in the army, of course; but Ireland’s military was effectively demobilized after 1923]. Mulcahy expressly refused IRA veterans’ demands that those who served the Imperial administration should be dismissed and their jobs reallocated. The 1923 Civil Service Commission took appointments out of the hands of local politicians and the clergy: selection by examination replaced patronage. A national courts system was simplified and widely accepted (there was a kerfuffle over proper court dress; but Irish mockery settled that).
I have tried here to stay relevant to this historical thread. This is my recognition of why the State succeeded. It may suit those who merely want a lurid political narrative that suits a narrow political prejudice.
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Jeez Dewi I was of course explaining the justification that the Nazis used, not my own opinions.
Greenflag, MR may know his stuff but I know that he insinuated I was a troll and a piece of shit, read the brief comment to which I objected.
If he hasn’t the decency and good manners which I have always displayed towards him to retract that ugly and insulting comment and apologise for describing a fellow poster in such repulsive terms than I can only conclude that he is an ill-mannered gulpin.
So what about it Malcolm are you an ill-mannered gulpin or will you now have the good manners to retract that dreadful comment about me?
I have after asked you to do so several times, your failure to address the issue speaks volumes about your arrogance and offensiveness.
Malcolm, while you are an eloquent writer (and always a pleasure to read), I think you tend to use a flourish of details to obscure spurious conclusions. Essentially, the reader is encouraged to agree with you because you appear to be an expert on the subject. It’s a bit like reading an architect’s itemised breakdown of his fee: lots of impressive sounding stuff that really doesn’t do much to reassure you that you haven’t just be conned out of the best part of 20k.
Just to add to that we can only compare what-might-have-been with that which actually was: the Soviet Union. As that was the model that these socialists held out for Ireland, we can thank our lucky (plough and) stars that it never came to pass.
Ireland, starting from the unhappy position of being the only colony in Europe, and being duly systematically stripped of its recourses and wealth, was left in a destitute position after the coloniser was ejected. The confidence of its people was also deliberately suppressed as a part of that process of subjugation, and the effects of that have only lessoned in recent years. As you said, Irish people didn’t want to buy Irish goods. That is true, but the reason is that they perceived Irish goods to be inferior to imported goods, not because they were inferior but simply because they were Irish. This process of inoculating feelings of inferiority into Irish people is ongoing, and many practice it in ever-so-subtle ways (Don’t they, Malcolm?). However, nowadays we see it for what it is and dismiss it with a sense of contempt.
Starting from this low base and with post-colonial confidence handicap, Ireland made a phenomenal leap forward in less than a century under self-government to become the second richest country in the world per capita. It has the highest number of third-level graduates in the word per capita. It has the highest wage rates in Europe and the second highest in the world. Indeed, its unemployment benefit is the same as the minimum wage in the UK. It is ranked second on the Freedom Index of free market countries. None of these things would have been possible under socialism. So, this is the actual result of the ‘free state’ and if you try to argue that this or even better would have been the outcome under backward socialism, then I need only point you to the Soviet Union (and perhaps to a good psychiatrist) to conclude that you are talking twaddle.
We may not have you (coveted) approval, Malcolm, but I’d rather we continue to gain kudos from media that matter. Sadly, the UK is way down there at 29.
Only colony in Europe? Yes, because colonies often had political representation in the Parliament of the mother country. And their inhabitants often played central roles in the central government, and administered large parts of the Empire as the imperial masters. Never mind of course the many parts of eastern Europe that had a more valid claim to being colonised. And you’re accusing Malcolm of obfuscation in an attempt to sound expert.
Sent by iPodtouch.
Dave @ 05.19 AM: noted. You are still confusing 1923 (my context) and 2008. We’ve done the ongoing consequences of the Lemass Wirtschaftswunder elsewhere (try writing that on a 3in touch-screen).
Gardibaldy @ 10:27 PM and 10:00 AM: Agreed. I’ve tried to send a PM through your Hotmail account. Thank’s for the inputs.
Dewi @ 09:54 PM: Yeah: I too still go gooey for all things IWW. We’ll have another go at that some time.
And as for anyone else, sorry for what? Some things are beyond excuse as “irony”.
Back to the delights of the (congested) A1(M). Over and out.
“sorry for what?”
Sorry for calling me a piece of shit, you piece of shit.