The Irish Revolution’s
overlooked history of nonviolent resistance
Original article at https://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/irish-revolution-overlooked-history-nonviolent-resistance/
·
January 20, 2019
This month marks the 100th anniversary
of Dáil Éireann, Ireland’s Parliament. Amid the better-known events of a
century ago that led to Ireland’s independence from its union with Britain,
such as the Easter Rising or the island’s partition with the Anglo-Irish
Treaty, the significance of Dáil Éireann’s founding on January 21, 1919 is
often underappreciated. This is unfortunate, since it played a crucial role in
the Irish Revolution’s outcome and was a path-breaking event in the emergence
of nonviolent civil resistance methods over the last century.
The usual story of Ireland’s
independence struggle runs something like this: Revolutionary movements such as
Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen in 1798 or the Fenians in 1867 staged a series of
violent “risings” against British rule that, while creating romantic
nationalist heroes, were easily suppressed (Google “the battle of Widow
McCormack’s cabbage patch” to get a sense of how they often turned out). These
“physical force nationalists” were opposed by “constitutional nationalists”
such as Daniel O’Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell who instead pursued a
nonviolent reformist agenda within the British political system that gradually
proved more successful.
A political
cartoon from 1886 showing men kicking British Prime Minister William Gladstone
and the Home Rule bill in the air. (Wikimedia Commons)
O’Connell’s Catholic Emancipation
movement won civil and political rights for Irish Catholics in the first half
of the 19th century. Toward the end of the century, Parnell welded most of the
British Parliament’s Irish representatives into the Irish Parliamentary Party,
a block of votes that traded its ability to make or break majorities for
concessions such as land reform that helped transfer farms from absentee
British landlords to their Irish tenants. The chief goal of the constitutional
nationalists was Home Rule, which would grant Ireland its own parliament and
significant autonomy, though still as part of the larger British constitutional
system and under some measure of British sovereignty. After a decades-long
fight and several near misses, the British finally granted Home Rule in 1914,
only to suspend it with the outbreak of World War I.
This is where momentum shifted back
toward physical force nationalism. As majority-Protestant areas around Belfast
in the north raised a militia and imported arms to resist Home Rule and keep
the British union as it was, majority-Catholic areas in the rest of Ireland
responded in kind. In an environment of increasing militarism, Patrick Pearse
and a small group of armed rebels seized key positions in Dublin on Easter Monday
in 1916 and proclaimed an Irish Republic completely independent of Britain.
The British military’s heavy-handed
response — reducing the center of Dublin to ruin, executing the Rising’s
leaders, imprisoning thousands not even involved, and declaring martial law —
further radicalized the country. Within three years, the Irish Republican Army,
or IRA, had launched a bloody insurgency campaign against British troops and
local police units. The Anglo-Irish War, fought as a series of ambushes,
assassinations and civilian reprisals, finally forced the British to cede
Ireland its de facto independence in 1922, but only after partitioning off six
counties that would remain part of the British union as Northern Ireland.
The usual story’s framing of violent
versus reformist methods in Irish nationalism is true as far as it goes, but
also incomplete. What it misses is a powerful third tradition of radical,
extralegal, but still nonviolent resistance. In the 19th century, many rural
communities, often organized by women in the Ladies’ Land League, refused to
pay rent to British absentee landlords or work for their local land agents at
harvest time. Indeed, our word “boycott” is named for Captain Charles Boycott,
a land agent in County Mayo ostracized by his local community in 1880 during a
noncooperation campaign.
An Irish Land
League poster from the 1880s. (Wikimedia Commons)
Nonviolent methods grew more
widespread leading up to and during the revolutionary period. In the years
preceding to the Easter Rising, Dublin saw major industrial and transportation
strikes; activists such as Helena Molony, arrested for destroying a picture of
King George V during his coronation visit to Ireland, refused to pay fines and
took jail sentences instead; and some Irish juries would not convict locals
accused of opposing the British war effort during World War I. After the
Rising, railway workers refused to carry British troops and munitions, other
work-stoppages secured the release of political prisoners, and hunger strikes
by Irish nationalists in British custody brought international condemnation
down on the British government.
The key figure in this tide of
nonviolent defiance was Arthur Griffith, the founder of Sinn Féin. Griffith was
not a principled pacifist, but he believed nonviolent methods would prove more
effective against British rule in Ireland. His was a nationalism that advocated
dissolving the political and economic ties that linked Ireland to Britain by
acting as if they no longer existed, an approach signaled by the name Sinn
Féin, which is Irish for “Ourselves.”
Founded a decade before the Easter
Rising, Griffith’s Sinn Féin movement came into its own in the revolutionary
environment of the Rising’s aftermath. When the British government, desperate
to replace soldiers killed at the front during World War I, decided to extend
military conscription to Ireland in early 1918, Sinn Féin joined labor unions
and Catholic clergy to coordinate a massive nationwide civil disobedience
campaign. Almost two million people signed an anti-conscription pledge after
Sunday masses that April 21. Arresting Griffith and other movement leaders only
strengthened opposition, and ultimately the British found conscription
unenforceable.
The anti-conscription campaign was a
springboard for Griffith’s most innovative idea: using British elections
themselves to select, legitimize and seat a rival Irish government outside the
British system. When elections to the British Parliament, long delayed by World
War I and featuring a newly expanded franchise with the inclusion of women
voters, arrived in late 1918, Sinn Féin candidates, again backed by labor
activists and Catholic leaders, swept to victory everywhere except the unionist
strongholds in the north. Following Griffith’s policy of “abstentionism,” they
refused to take their seats in the British Parliament and instead, acting as if
British authority no longer existed, gathered at Mansion House in Dublin to
declare themselves Dáil Éireann, or Assembly of Ireland, establishing the
independent Irish government that exists to this day.
The Sinn Fein
members elected in the December 1918 election at the first Dail Eireann
meeting, on January 21, 1919. (Wikipedia)
While the British outlawed the Dáil as
a “terrorist organization,” it continued to operate underground in accordance
with its newly drafted constitution, appointing government ministers, sending
diplomats to foreign capitals, and issuing bonds to raise money hidden from
British authorities in sympathetic Irish banks. Operating as a parallel
government, it attracted increasing allegiance from ordinary Irish people.
Crucial to its growing legitimacy was
the Dáil’s ability to extend its authority down to local communities. In early
1920, Sinn Féin again swept elections, this time at the city and county levels,
gaining control of many local governments that quickly flipped their loyalty to
the Dáil, refused to cooperate with British tax collection, switched their
purchasing contracts to Irish-owned firms, and closed workhouses associated
with the hated British poor-law system. Even more dramatic was the creation of
“Dáil Courts,” a multi-tiered parallel judicial system that spread across most
of Ireland. British courts formally remained in place, but they essentially ceased
functioning as enforcers of British law when local people instead began taking
their disputes to the new Dáil judicial system that became, in the words of one
local observer, “the only authority in the County.”
The nonviolent defiance of British
authority led by Dáil Éireann existed alongside and overlapped significantly
with violent methods during the Anglo-Irish War. Many nationalists supported
both approaches and moved back and forth between the Dáil’s political
resistance and the IRA’s military operations. But while mainstream, popular
historical accounts give the violence more attention and credit for the Irish
Revolution’s outcome — often through romanticized accounts of leaders such as
Michael Collins — they underplay or miss entirely other critically important
aspects of the struggle.
The historical evidence is clear that
the Dáil’s campaign of noncooperation and parallel government did just as much
or more to make Ireland ungovernable and force the British into negotiations.
These actions eventually led to an independent country in the 26 southern
counties and the formal handover of administrative power to the Dáil as that
country’s legitimate government.
Arthur
Griffith. (Wikimedia Commons)
If the methods developed by Arthur
Griffith and Dáil Éireann are underappreciated in the usual story of Ireland’s
independence struggle, the same is true of their contributions to the history
of nonviolent civil resistance more generally. Few realize the impact
Griffith’s innovative techniques for withdrawing authority from an occupier had
on better-known nonviolent campaigns that followed him. India’s is the most
notable. After attending a Dublin Sinn Féin meeting in 1907, Jawaharlal Nehru
wrote: “They do not want to fight England by arms but to ignore her, boycott
her, and quietly assume the administration of Irish affairs.” Leaders of the
Swadeshi movement that organized boycotts of British goods praised Griffith as
a “model.” And, perhaps most significantly, Gandhi himself cited Griffith’s
direct influence on his own ideas, though he decried the later turn to violence
by many Sinn Féin members.
This influence shows how Griffith’s
noncooperation techniques embodied by Dáil Éireann were important early
contributors to one of the most significant developments of the last century:
the emergence of organized civil resistance as an alternative to armed
struggle. Indeed, as researchers such as Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth
demonstrate, nonviolent civil resistance movements since 1900 are twice as
likely as violent ones to succeed against an oppressive regime or foreign
occupier.
And the case of Griffith and Dáil
Éireann suggests such comparisons may actually understate the power of
nonviolence. The Irish Revolution is an example of nonviolent strategies
operating effectively, if more quietly, within an otherwise violent campaign,
revealing how even seemingly successful violent movements may actually owe much
of that success to overlooked nonviolent techniques operating behind the
scenes. Dáil Éireann’s centenary, then, is a chance to celebrate this
still-underappreciated revolutionary power of nonviolence.
—
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David Carroll Cochran is professor of politics at Loras College in
Dubuque, Iowa, and the author of "Catholic Realism and the Abolition of
War" (Orbis Books).
Waging Nonviolence content falls under a Creative
Commons Attribution 4.0 International License
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