The Irish revolution, however you choose to define it, was the founding event in modern Irish history. Even with the passage of a century, it continues to cast its glow across our land and, of course, there are those too who see it in a more shadowy light.
It has been argued that it wasn’t a revolution in any real sense. Unlike its French and Russian counterparts, the Irish version did not seek a transformative social and economic outcome. The years that followed the emergence of the Irish Free State were marked by a conservative continuity that made the preceding excitements seem like a blip. Kevin O’Higgins once described his contemporaries as the most conservative-minded revolutionaries ever to conduct a revolution.
This new collection of essays, The Irish Revolution: Diplomacy and Reactions, 1919-1923, seeks to settle the “was it a revolution?” question on its opening page. It maintains that, with the setting up of “a national counter-state” in 1922, Ireland exhibited “the central trait of revolutions since 1789″. The events of that time placed Ireland in an international spotlight that had lasting, positive effects on our national reputation. I recall meeting many Indian admirers of Ireland’s revolutionary history during an assignment in New Delhi in the early 1980s.
The revolutionary era was remarkable, a kind of “gilded age” for Ireland, and not just politically. WB Yeats wrote and published some of his greatest works at that time, which also saw the publication of Ulysses, and provided the inspiration for Sean O’Casey’s three great Irish history plays.
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It remains a puzzle that a people who in 1914 were ecstatic about the attainment of home rule quickly came to insist on a far more advanced form of self-government. Moreover, many Irish people were prepared to put their lives on the line in pursuit of an aim that their parents’ generation would have considered completely fanciful.
While we rightly see those events embedded in their Irish setting, they were also part of an era of violent upheaval that gripped Europe during and after the first World War. Absent the global crisis of those years, some form of a home rule settlement would most likely have prevailed, at least for a time. Disrupted international conditions notwithstanding, it was a real feat for the Irish Free State to wrestle itself free from the control of one of the war’s victorious powers.
What role did the Irish diaspora play? This study dwells comprehensively on that dimension, with chapters on the Irish in the United States, Britain, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, as well as a focus on Sinn Féin’s efforts to garner support for Irish independence in Europe and beyond. Envoys were sent to more than a dozen countries to plug the case of independence. There is even an analysis of the Irish impact on Basque and Catalan nationalism.
The book’s editors argue that our revolution had an unmistakable external orientation, the urgent quest for international recognition being one of its defining qualities. After all, the First Dáil decided on its opening day in January 1919 to send envoys hotfoot to Paris for the peace talks. The revolution’s international face probably reflected the past experience of Irish nationalists, as exiles in France and America, transportees to Australia and beneficiaries of generous support for their cause from the overseas Irish.
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The most potent support invariably came from Irish America, although it was not plain sailing there by any means. The British government was forever fearful of the capacity of Irish America to spoil its relations with Washington. The Friends of Irish Freedom (FOIF) emerged as a mass-membership organisation after the Easter Rising but, despite two supportive Congressional resolutions, Irish America failed to secure the Sinn Féin delegation a proper hearing at the Versailles Peace Conference. Woodrow Wilson, even though his Democratic Party enjoyed extensive Irish support and he had an Irish-American, Joseph Tumulty, as his chief aide, just wasn’t prepared to discommode Britain in order to please Irish America.
There were internal tensions too when de Valera fell out with the most powerful figure in Irish America, Judge Daniel Cohalan. Their rivalry resulted in the setting up by de Valera of a rival organisation, the American Association for the Recognition of the Irish Republic. A key difference between them was that Cohalan was a dogged opponent of American membership of the League of Nations, while de Valera enthused about the potential of the league for enhancing the international reach of Irish sovereignty.
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In his chapter on Irish America, Owen McGee argues that official America regarded Ireland as an aspect of transatlantic commerce rather than an object of diplomatic attention. While the independence movement aspired to make Ireland “the gateway of the Atlantic”, independent Ireland remained a marginal actor in the transatlantic economy until recent times. Ironically, our current prominence in transatlantic trade and investment exposes us to new risks in a changed geopolitical environment.
McGee makes the intriguing suggestion that an alliance between Irish republicanism and American internationalism might have blossomed had the United States decided to join the League of Nations but that was a “road not taken” by a self-satisfied America enjoying its “roaring ’20s” and decisively discarding Wilsonian liberalism.
There is a sense in which our independence had two step-parents, Irish America and the Irish in Britain. We know that Michael Collins spent formative years in London and that both our major GAA trophies are named after British-based figures from that era, Sam Maguire and Liam McCarthy. The assassination of Sir Henry Wilson by two demobilised London-Irish British soldiers has also been well documented. Less well known is the work of the Irish Self-Determination League and its prime mover, London-born Art O’Brien.
That left the country’s wartime prime minister, Billy Hughes, with the conviction that the Irish question was ‘at the bottom of all our difficulties in Australia’
Drawn into Irish nationalism through the London branch of that nursery of revolution, the Gaelic League, O’Brien became a tireless advocate for Irish independence. He even managed to organise a 10,000-strong rally of supporters of Ireland’s cause at the Royal Albert Hall in 1920 while the War of Independence was still raging. O’Brien’s League also agitated on behalf of Irish prisoners in Britain and helped turn the death of Terence MacSwiney into a publicity coup that reverberated around the globe. As elsewhere, the Treaty, which O’Brien opposed, divided the Irish in Britain but brought an end to nationalist agitation as most of the Irish there accepted the Free State settlement.
In her chapter, Mary MacDiarmada concludes that the efforts of the Irish in Britain had a real impact. Their publicity campaigns ensured that criticism of government actions in Ireland, and the case for independence, were repeatedly put before the British public at that crucial time. It meant that the London government could never rest easy when it came to public acceptance of its actions in Ireland. A key to the negotiated outcome to the War of Independence was that the measures needed to suppress Sinn Féin probably could not have commanded wide public support in postwar Britain.
Chapters on Australia and New Zealand reveal the diversity of diaspora experience. The Irish revolution coincided with controversies that put the Irish community at the heart of Australian politics during the first World War. The Irish were largely responsible for stymying two government attempts to introduce conscription, both ending in referendum defeats.
That left the country’s wartime prime minister, Billy Hughes, with the conviction that the Irish question was “at the bottom of all our difficulties in Australia”. Melbourne’s Irish Catholic Archbishop Daniel Mannix became a fervent supporter of the Irish cause in Australia and beyond. There were extensive protests in Britain in 1920 against the government’s decision to ban Mannix from Ireland on account of his uncompromising nationalist views.
Most readers will be completely unfamiliar with the fledgling Irish missions to France, Germany and Italy. German-speaking Nancy Wyse Power was sent to Berlin in April 1921, where she was able to tap into support from German scholars of Irish such as Kuno Meyer and Julius Pokorny with the production of a German-language Bulletin containing translated material favourable to the Sinn Féin cause. The assumption that Germany would be sympathetic to the Irish cause on account of a presumed animus towards Britain turned out to be chimerical. In fact, Weimar Berlin was deeply anxious not to do anything that would damage its relations with Britain.
The chapter on The Shared Histories of Irish Nationalism and Zionism is a timely reminder of “the long-standing practice, within Irish nationalism, of analogising the two nations, a practice that Zionism itself reciprocated”. Both movements were driven by a need to disprove stereotypes that had underpinned discrimination against their peoples. Both resorted to language revival projects as a motor of national renewal.
By sketching the activities of Ireland’s revolutionary diplomats and the influence of diaspora communities, as well as delving into the response of the wider world to Irish developments, this book fleshes out our understanding of the international context of the Irish struggle. It contains much fascinating material and also acts as a tribute to the late UCC academic, Dermot Keogh, who was a pioneer of the study of Irish diplomacy and of modern Ireland’s place in Europe.
Daniel Mulhall is a retired Irish ambassador and author whose latest publication is Pilgrim Soul: WB Yeats and the Ireland of his Time (Dublin 2023).
Further Reading
David Brundage’s Irish Nationalists in America: the Politics of Exile, 1798-1998 (Oxford University Press, 2016) examines the fortunes of Irish-American nationalism and its influence on Ireland, from the experience of exiled United Irishmen through the influence of O’Connell and Young Ireland, to the creation of the Fenian movement and the role of Irish America in persuading the Clinton administration to prioritise support for peace in Northern Ireland.
Mervyn Busteed’s The Irish in Manchester, c. 1750-1921 (Manchester University Press, 2016) is a study of the Irish community in the city of the “Manchester martyrs” from its earliest days to the Anglo-Irish Treaty which, as with the rest of our global diaspora, was accepted by a majority of the Manchester Irish.
Patrick Mannion and Fearghal McGarry (eds), The Irish Revolution: a Global History (New York University Press, 2022), part of the Glucksman Irish Diaspora Series, also covers the international dimension to Ireland’s freedom movement, seeing it as a transnational event, part of a global struggle against Empire.
Miriam Nyhan Grey (ed), Ireland’s Allies: America and the Easter Rising (UCD Press, 2016) is a detailed study of Irish America’s role in helping bring about the Easter Rising. It contains Joe Lee’s pithy observation – “No America, no New York, no Easter Rising. Simple as that.” Lee also reflects on the Rising’s seismic impact on Irish-American opinion, enabling it to sustain its commitment even when the United States entered an alliance with Britain in 1917.
Maurice Walsh’s Bitter Freedom: Ireland in a Revolutionary World, 1998-1923 (London, Faber & Faber, 2015), an exploration of the Irish revolution in its international context, concludes that, while Woodrow Wilson’s vision for the postwar world held great promise for Ireland, in reality independence and sovereignty offered limited opportunities “in an inhospitable world still shaped by great powers and vast economic forces”.
