Book review: Intriguing essays revive spirit

The editors of 'Spirit of Revolution' have done a fine job in bringing together a number of new scholars of independent Ireland with some established names to explore history from below

Extremely rare Limerick Soviet five shillings note inscribed 'April Limerick 1919 — General Strike Against British Militarism'. File pictur: Brian Gavin/ Press 22

• Spirit of Revolution: Ireland from below, 1917-23 
• Edited by John Cunningham and Terry Dunne
• Four Courts Press, pb €22.45

Three months out from the election for Limerick mayor, the People Before Profit candidate, Ruairí Fahy, has announced that he wants to reinvoke the spirit of the Limerick Soviet of 1919.

Limerick was home to one of a number of self-declared Irish soviets formed in Munster during the revolutionary period from 1917 to 1923.

Over 100 years later, it is back in vogue with at least one of the candidates for Ireland’s first directly elected mayor.

While the word “soviet” has gone into disrepute since the demise of the Soviet Union, People Before Profit have long dreamt of an Ireland populated by councils of workers who control their own place of work.

That was the idea of the Limerick Soviet and others across Munster in places such as Knocklong, Bruree, and Cork Harbour, as Dominic Haugh outlines in his chapter on the Munster soviets of 1922, in a very intriguing new collection of essays on history from below in revolutionary Ireland entitled Spirit of Revolution.

Haugh’s fascinating story of the disputes between workers and owners, and how the Munster soviets posed a serious threat to employers and the leadership of the trade union movement alike, suffers from an ailment that often afflicts writers of class in Ireland, and that is the inability to understand why the people acted or did not act as they did particularly when it comes to not supporting socialist causes.

He notes that, by the time the Comintern had corrected the programme of the Communist Party of Ireland at the end of 1922, “large sections of the Irish working class had gone down to defeat and the capitalist class had regained the upper hand — bolstered by the reactionary policies of the new Free State government”.

People Before Profit would heartily concur.

Haugh writes that the fledgling Communist Party of Ireland, established in 1921, could potentially have grown rapidly on the back of the wave of workplace soviets and strikes in 1922, were it not for the fact that it focused exclusively on agitating for the anti-Treaty nationalist leadership during this period.

How dare they in an age when the civil war was tearing the country apart.

The fact that they were continuously wrong in predicting the impending defeat of the Free State in the civil war does not forge confidence that they would have grown significantly in its aftermath.

Cunningham and Dunne have done a fine job in bringing together a number of new scholars of independent Ireland with some established names to explore history from below.

That is the history of the ordinary people of Ireland or, as the editors say, the movements and the people who were defeated and demoralized.

They argue that what their contributors show is that a spirit of revolution was widespread in Ireland during the 1917-23, which was manifest in a number of mass movements that are often overlooked by historians who are consumed by the demand for formal national independence.

Yet, the reality is that many of the citizens were also consumed by that demand for independence, and so it is not really surprising that radical labour issues struggled to gain a foothold.

This volume is, however, very welcome as an antidote to the high politics that has driven much modern historical scholarship.

At times, I wondered about the mass nature of the movements. Certainly, there were a number of differing labour movements, but to call them mass seems a bit of a stretch and most of them petered out for various reasons in quick time.

Nevertheless, we get a fascinating tour of class, labour, and gender struggles and strikes in places as diverse as allotments in Dublin, the Castlecomer coal field in Kilkenny, agricultural labourers in Athy and Maugherow, and the small holders and landless of rural Galway.

A recurring theme is the difficulty many labour agitators had in overcoming the deep-rooted status structure which permeated rural communities, as Liam Alex Heffron observes in his chapter on IRA Volunteers in Moygownagh.

The standout chapter as befits his status as one of Ireland’s finest modern historians is Brian Hanley’s account of the role maritime workers played in the revolutionary effort.

This is perhaps because Hanley uses an international lens to assess maritime activists in a comparative setting, most notably Liverpool and New York. 

He astutely shows how the Irish struggle could not be separated from the wider global radicalism of the age, even in a state which became overtly conservative.