Why did socialism never take off in Ireland? Perhaps it never took off anywhere - assuming you don’t count the warped versions of socialism that blighted so many lives during the 20th century.
Mainly because of Joseph Stalin’s tyrannical rule over the former Soviet Union, socialism is now synonymous with dictatorship and totalitarian control. But other voices on the left have promoted quite a different form of socialism, one centred on the person rather than on the state.
George Orwell, the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, was a socialist who fought against the fascist rebellion during the Spanish Civil War. Yet he was driven out of Spain by the communists because he valued personal liberty over submission to centralised dogma.
Like Orwell, Dublin-born writer, Frederick Ryan (1873-1913) believed in freedom of expression. While researching the early life of James Connolly, I came across one of Ryan’s articles and was immediately impressed.
I wrote a commentary on that article in 2016 and it is published here for the first time.
Long before he marched out one April morning to launch the 1916 Rising with Patrick Pearse, James Connolly edited his own newspaper, The Workers’ Republic. This was the official organ of the Irish Socialist Republican Party (ISRP), which Connolly founded in 1896.
Aside from the standard anti-capitalist rhetoric, the newspaper included articles on Irish economic and social issues, some written by Connolly, others by fellow-socialists. Among the latter was 27-year-old Frederick Ryan who, in addition to his socialist connections, was part of the literary circle around poet W. B. Yeats.
Ryan died in his late-thirties before his evident promise as an author could be fully realised. It is perhaps a measure of the esteem in which Connolly held his young associate that he allocated two-thirds of the July 1901 edition of The Workers’ Republic to an 8-page article entitled ‘The economic future of Ireland’, with the author’s name printed at the end simply as ‘F. Ryan’.1 Apart from the quality of the prose, what comes through most clearly in the writing is its open-minded, philosophical tone. If Connolly’s own articles sometimes suggested that the author was shouting to make his message heard, Ryan’s piece is quieter and more reflective.
In his article Ryan made it clear that he was not aiming to preach to the converted, i.e. fellow socialists. He was addressing the political class, nationalist and unionist alike, on the assumption that they pursued their opposing policies in the honest belief that they would ‘benefit the people and make their lives richer, fuller, and happier’. Ryan placed this goal above all others, including native culture, national sovereignty, and even ‘spiritual progress’. ‘For it is idle’, he observed, ‘to contend that a man's moral and intellectual nature is independent of, or is unaffected by, his material surroundings.’ Having established a common, rational basis for discourse with his opponents, Ryan moved on to discuss the iniquities of the current economic system.
While his analysis drew on stock socialist concepts of predatory capitalism and ground-down masses, he instanced a surprising benefit to Ireland of English rule. His country ‘ha[d] been spared to a great extent that factory system which is the commercial glory and the social curse of England’. The industrial revolution had barely touched Ireland. As a result, the economy was based almost wholly on agriculture. Consequently, Ryan argued, reforming Ireland’s economic system must centre on the land question, with nationalisation as ‘the only real and permanent settlement’. Before we consider his views on this topic, let us look at what was happening in Ireland in the years before independence.
Beginning in 1870, a series of legislative measures by the British government led to the transfer in ownership of most of Ireland's agricultural land from a relatively small number of proprietor landlords to a much greater number of tenant farmers. In less than a half-century, the proportion of land-owning rural-dwellers rose from 3% to almost 64%, with more than 11 million acres changing hands. This was, in the words of one historian, ‘a social revolution'.2
However, not all nationalists were in favour of this policy, most notably a prominent land agitator named Michael Davitt. Davitt founded the Irish Land League in 1878 as a vehicle for protest on behalf of tenant farmers. Reflecting the views of an earlier Irish nationalist, James Fintan Lalor, Davitt argued for a system whereby the land would become “the national property of Ireland”, with the land-holder paying a tax in lieu of rent.3 In taking this position, Davitt was also echoing American economist Henry George's doctrine that land is a community rather than an individual asset. However, Davitt's ideas were disregarded and a policy of ‘peasant proprietorship' prevailed.
Once the transfers of ownership got underway, Connolly’s ISRP was one of the few voices continuing to call for land nationalisation, and they did not have many allies. This was not helped by the denunciations of Davitt himself that appeared from time to time in The Workers’ Republic. Apparently Davitt was too equivocal on the issue for the paper’s liking. But perhaps Connolly’s sensitivity is understandable. The growth in tenant proprietorship posed a serious challenge to the ISRP, neatly encapsulated by an historian of the land wars.
A nation predominately of farmers, Ireland was now dominated by small capitalist peasant proprietors, their interests distinctly different from when they had been tenants, and their outlook now generally freed them from the traditional bane of their lives, rent-demanding and in other ways interfering landlords. Their concerns were now primarily focused on improving their agricultural efficiency and productivity.4
In short, a significant proportion of the Irish people was establishing a vested interest in the status quo; they were not likely to support radical change. By the time Ryan’s article was published, land nationalisation must have seemed like a hopeless cause. Yet he argued for it valiantly.
Wisely, he opened his case by acknowledging that ‘peasant proprietary for a time may be a better deal than the old form of landlordism… [and] may for a time work admirably’. However, from a national viewpoint, he saw the policy as problematic. Ryan argued that it merely replaced a small number of Anglo-Irish landlords with a larger number of native ones. These would be entitled to buy and sell land creating the possibility that this valuable national resource would at some future time fall into the hands of “syndicates of capitalists”.
His second plank rested on the moral argument outlined by Fintan Lalor and Henry George. It was as wrong for a man to own land, Ryan submitted, as it would be for him ‘to claim the sea or the air’. These natural resources, he continued, belonged to the nation as a whole and not to a favoured few. However, it was in his third point that Ryan got to the heart of the problem from the socialist viewpoint.
The peasant proprietors were being drawn ‘into a support of the competitive regime by being made to imagine that their interests are in some way or other bound up with that regime’. In making this charge, Ryan was perhaps unconsciously paraphrasing British policy as pronounced by the recently-departed Chief Secretary of Ireland, Gerald Balfour. In 1895 Balfour described government strategy towards Ireland as ‘killing home rule with kindness’. Whatever about home rule, Irish socialists such as Ryan must have feared that the land reforms would also destroy support for more radical expressions of nationalism. Nevertheless, he concluded his case with two final points, neither likely to convince anyone unmoved by his previous arguments.
Firstly he made a plea on behalf of the labourers employed by the farmers; they would gain nothing from the government’s measures. If Ryan intended this to appeal to his readers’ sense of fair play, his final point was more of a warning. In the United States technology was transforming agriculture into an intensive industry against which the individual Irish farmer could never hope to compete.
Although a socialist, Ryan was not a dogmatic one. His article encompassed the spiritual and material, the urban and the rural, unionism and nationalism, self-sufficiency and international trade. Capitalism might be evil, he observed, but its proponents were fallible human beings, just like the workers they exploited. All had their faults and foibles. Such vision is not indicative of someone enslaved to any –ism.
Ryan’s appeal for reason and honest debate in resolving Ireland’s problems seems especially heartfelt.
… real thought is more important than mere parrot-like adherents for it is only by real thought that real progress can be made… Personally I am not so enamoured of any reform or any opinion as to blind myself to what can be urged against it… I plead therefore for thought.
Given such unusual open-mindedness, historian Roy Foster’s description of Frederick Ryan as a ‘reliably awkward socialist’ hits the target I believe.5
Alice Milligan, a Protestant nationalist, Thomas Finlay, a Jesuit priest, and Horace Plunkett, a Unionist-turned-Home Ruler, were just three of the many other writers, thinkers, and activists who, at the turn of the 20th century, imagined how Ireland could develop one day as a free nation. The details of their economic analyses might have differed - from each other’s and from those of Frederick Ryan. Nonetheless I believe all four would have agreed on one important principle: Ireland should not follow Britain down the path of unbridled capitalism.
In the Workers’ Republic article Ryan outlined his own vision. I can’t imagine any of his contemporaries disagreeing.
If the Ireland of my dreams became the Ireland of fact, though it might not leave behind a record of empire such as Rome has left or England will leave, it would do something mightier and something more…The Ireland of my ideal, in short, would not be a second England. It would on the contrary be a country in which there were healthy men and healthy women, strong of body, active of mind, pure of heart.
Researching “Viruses, Variolation & Vaccines” has proven to be a bigger task than I expected. So I am sorry for the delay in publishing Part 3 of this series. I hope to make it available on this platform soon.
The Workers’ Republic, Jul. 1901, vol. 4, no. 28. Connolly’s colleague, William O’Brien, donated his collection of The Workers’ Republic to the National Library of Ireland. Before doing so, he wrote the full names of the authors of many unsigned or partially-signed articles in the margins of his copies, including the edition here cited. See Virginia E. Glandon, Arthur Griffith and the advanced-nationalist press, Ireland, 1900-1922 (New York, 1985), p. 33. fn. 98.
Diarmaid Ferriter, The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000 (London, 2005), pp 62-3.
Liverpool Mercury, 7 Jun. 1882.
Philip Bull, Land, politics and nationalism: a study of the Irish land question (Dublin, 1996), p. 173.
R. F. Foster, Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland, 1890-1923 (London, 2014), p. 49.