Between King and Kaiser
The Great War spurred the separatist movement, but it also blurred the lines between nationalism and socialism on the Irish left.
Issue No. 21 | Spring 2016
If you remove the English army tomorrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs. England would still rule you to your ruin, even while your lips offered hypocritical homage at the shrine of that Freedom whose cause you had betrayed. Nationalism without Socialism — without a reorganisation of society on the basis of a broader and more developed form of that common property which underlay the social structure of Ancient Erin — is only national recreancy.
The Great War spurred the separatist movement, but it also blurred the lines between nationalism and socialism on the Irish left.
As Ireland celebrates the centenary of 1916, the conditions on the island offer possibilities for socialist politics not seen in one hundred years.
The Catholic Church waged a century-long war against the Irish left.
The methods and politics of the Paris Commune served as inspiration for Easter Rising leaders like James Connolly.
The revolutionary period sparked by the 1916 Easter Rising offered a vision of a truly democratic Ireland.
Despite its working-class roots, the Irish Labour Party never became an effective vehicle for social democracy.
Bernadette Devlin on her early activism and why the Good Friday Agreement brought some peace, but little justice.
Ireland’s revolutionary women made the fight for emancipation their own.
In the years after the Easter Rising, Ireland saw a wave of worker militancy.
Over its long history, Sinn Féin has shown itself to be a left-nationalist party that is more nationalist than left.
Through the twentieth century, Irish elites treated poverty as a moral failing — and built a brutal carceral state to correct it.
Sinn Féin wants to be more than an opposition force — it wants to lead Ireland’s first progressive government.