 I think Ireland as a country and its kind of history is something that a lot of people feel well in Britain especially I think they very much feel you know it's a foreign country despite being kind of right next to it I think that a lot of people might especially Marxists who might you know feel like they know more about the Russian revolution and about the German revolution than they do about the Irish revolution despite it being so geographically close and so kind of politically intermingled as well when it comes to kind of 20th century history and earlier and yeah I definitely recommend Ireland's book Ireland republicanism and revolution it gives I guess a much kind of longer view of Irish history than I'm going to give here which is about kind of just the period in the early 20th century and the kind of development of these all of these ideas are about you know Irish republicanism and obviously the development of a kind of Marxist tendency in Ireland as well so I mean Ireland is known as Britain's oldest colony I think to to many people for good reasons I mean it was one of the first countries that was conquered by you know members of the British ruling class and it faced hundreds of years really of conquest and of exploitation and of repression at the hands of a British kind of colonists and purists and it was always held in a state of colonial underdevelopment you know Ireland was and still is really in a lot of ways a largely agricultural society just kind of forced really to feed Britain's own industrial revolution allowing absentee landlords you know based in in England or in Scotland to grow fat you know of the sweated labour of Irish peasants and this colonial oppression of course produced you know numerous atrocities it's a long and bloody history which will not get into too much detail I think it's enough to say you know Lenin he commented once that the exploitation of the Irish peasantry showed the depths of cruelty to which even the liberal bourgeois would go in their kind of colonial expansions and conquests you know the greatest and most famous I suppose of these atrocities was the great Irish famine of 1845 to 1849 you know millions of people died were emigrated you know they left Ireland producing this you know big Irish diaspora that exists around the world and you know Ireland's population still not recovered from that famine in fact you know population studies think that Ireland's population probably won't recover from you know the famine in the 1840s until about 2050 so about 200 years later really it shows how devastating really it was and of course as well as this this history of oppression which is you know quite ugly Ireland also has a long history of rebellion and resistance you know as a result of this oppression you know producing national or aspirations for national freedom and self-determination in Ireland you know it's kind of I guess famous what's got this is definitely a kind of a famous aesthetic anyway of Ireland is this kind of rebellious country anyway you know there were revolutionary democratic uprisings in 1798 and 1848 and other years you know often inspired by the bourgeois revolutions of Europe and you know these movements were of course often led by bourgeois and kind of and petty bourgeois democrats you know there were reformist sort of constitutionalist organizations formed out of this kind of national liberation movement like the Irish parliamentary party that after the 1801 act of the union they sought to achieve a home role for Ireland similar to there's a movement in Scotland as well you know which essentially was just advocating you know the re-establishment of of an Irish parliament you know these people the Irish parliament party they were purely bourgeois kind of nationalists they just wanted their share of the profits you're being squeezed from Irish workers and poor farmers and it was obviously as well a more more radical petty bourgeois tendency as well like the secret underground Irish republican brotherhood you know known as the Finians as well we'll see today the word is mostly offensive but that's what they were known as at the time and they you know as the name suggests were republicans they sought to establish an independent Irish republic you know they're often inspired by you know the kind of the radical left wing of like the French Revolution you know Jackpins people like August Blonkey and things of that and Marx and Engels you know they commented in their time on the Finians you know in the era of the the first international you know they condemned for example the public execution of Finians in Manchester the Manchester martyrs of 1867 and it was an important kind of issue for them they came to understand that the solution to the national question in Ireland this Irish problem as it was referred to by the ruling class in Britain it was a necessary part or you know prerequisite for the proletarian revolution in Britain they understood that as long as Ireland was held in chains and the British workers could never be free that national oppression would always be a reactionary bulwark against class solidarity so this poem is you know part of the Marxist position on the national question up to today and the social liberation of the working class and the national liberation of oppressed peoples are fundamentally intertwined and that's why as Marxist we stand for the slogan of the right of nations to self-determination you know this is a democratic demand that can only be guaranteed we think on the basis of international socialism and it was through his own direct experience of the bourgeois revolutions in Europe in 1848 that Marx discovered you know the reactionary deeply reactionary nature of the bourgeois even in these national uh nationally oppressed countries you know they're so tied to the wealth and privilege of the old regime and they so feared you know unleashing the revolutionary energies of the working class this new class in society that they you know could not even lead a bourgeois you know the bourgeoisie could not even lead a bourgeois democratic revolution to its own conclusion and it's from this you know experience the Marx would coin the term permanent revolution which is one that's very important for us when we study Ireland you know permanent revolution is of course a theory that was subsequently developed by Leon Trotsky it's a theory that you know ascribes the leading role in the national liberation or bourgeois democratic movement to the working class as the only consistently revolutionary class who in the process of completing the tasks of the bourgeois democratic revolution you know they realised the necessity of adopting proletarian socialist you know tasks first this theory of permanent revolution here has been confirmed by history in a positive sense by the Russian revolution of 1917 but importantly for this session I think in a negative sense by the Irish revolution because as we'll see the bourgeois leaders of the Irish revolution they betrayed the Irish revolution the Irish working class and the Irish labour movement you know played only an auxiliary role to the bourgeois nationalists and republicans without their own proletarian revolutionary leadership the working class the the prospect for social revolution in Ireland was lost I think that's what the main kind of point we're going to try and bring out today so the Easter Rising of 1916 is probably the most famous example of you know Ireland's you know a rebellion and trying to achieve independence it was the spark which you know lit the fires really of this Irish revolutionary period and the event itself I think people or maybe have some familiarity with it but you know the Irish volunteers kind of armed group nationalist group in the Irish citizens army they attempted to provoke a general uprising against the British in Ireland by staging an insurrection in many of its cat towns and cities it was in Dublin where the main fighting took place were members of the Irish volunteers in the citizens army they read out the famous proclamation of the Irish Republic which declared Ireland a free country independent from Britain and they read that outside you know the general post office very famous kind of image and they fought British troops for control of the streets in Dublin now the Irish citizens army is a bit more interesting to us as Marxists because it was not just an armed nationalist group like the volunteers were but it was the armed wing of the Irish transport and general workers union a trade union and it's sometimes called you know the world's first red army or the world's first red guard the first instance of an armed kind of body of workers you know to be a member of the ICA you had to be a member of a trade union you had to pay your kind of dues and so on and they were formed for this express purpose of you know defending workers you know both the union and the citizens army they were formed in the titanic class battles in the period before 1914 so a little bit before the 1916 Easter Rising you know with the 1907 Belfast Dockers strike which is you know broadened out to be a general strike and the 1913 Dublin lockout as well and in this lockout which was an attempt to destroy the transport union the ITGW workers you know were killed in baton charges by the double metropolitan police you know there are instances of drunken police officers you know going from house to house beating people up attacking picket lines and so on and in response to this the the union you know said they needed to to arm themselves and you know they were organized into military units to protect strikers essentially and I guess a shadow of maybe things to come and you know bourgeois nationalists like Arthur Griffiths who headed the Sinn Fein party which was a tiny obscure party at this point they actually opposed the workers in the lockouts them they sided with the bosses they argued that you know that the the union was some kind of British plot to destroy Irish industry you know kind of ridiculous idea and it was James Connolly you know Ireland's perhaps most famous revolutionary Marxist at least who had come to lead the the Irish citizens army and be the main military commander in Dublin on the day well the few days of fighting in Easter 1916 and laid many of the the plans for the uprising as well the uprising itself was brutally crushed and wasn't successful you know the rebels were vastly outnumbered and like gunned the British army you know shelled destroyed the entire city centre of Dublin which the the volunteers they didn't expect them to do you know Dublin at this time was you know one of the the great kind of colonial capitals like Liverpool or Glasgow or well British imperial capitals I guess you know the destruction of the city centre of Dublin was so great nothing like it in fact been seen this is in the middle of World War one of course but nothing like it had been seen since the Napoleonic Wars and the destruction of Moscow or Copenhagen and thousands of civilians were killed in the crossfire of British machine guns and it was a huge disaster really a blunder on the behalf of the British as well as you know a field uprising on behalf of the the insurrectionists but you know the failure of the uprising was not just due to the kind of poor planning or anything necessarily it was largely due to the fact that most of most of the Irish volunteer troops most of their their actions had been called off you know they were supposed to parade on Easter morning all throughout the country and then you know this declaration would be in red out and they would you know seize control of all the kind of major places in the country but there was a countermanding countermanding order you know issued at the kind of 11th hour by Bono Neo one of the heads of the Irish volunteers which meant that only a minority of the the available forces kind of turned out and important for us when it comes to Marxist analyzing an insurrection of this type there was no general uprising you know provoked by this because of you know what we would say was a kind of premature social situation you know the the period before 1914 was one of like I mentioned there was kind of big you know bloody kind of class struggles but that kind of was cut across by the the beginning of the First World War in 1914 you know was Lenin who commented you know Lenin and Trotsky they both defended the Easter Rising against you know certain Marxists like Plekinov and so on who said it was just a push and you know it was just a ridiculous kind of nationalist attempt at some sort of coup they said it was a heroic episode and Lenin he commented you know that the misfortune of the Irish was that they arisen prematurely when the European revolt of the proletariat has not yet matured you know James Connolly he insisted on it however you he felt the urgency of trying to stop the war you know he took the as you know a minority of Marxists in the world did he took the the declarations of the second international and the workers parties before the First World War seriously this plan that they said you know if there was going to be a war then there should be a European European wide uprising of the working class to stop the war and in Lenin's words you know transform the the imperialist predatory war into civil war of you know class against class and that was kind of Connolly's perspective I think for the Easter Rising and trying to do that you know we wanted to stop the war and importantly to prevent the introduction of conscription in Ireland as well which would have been a disaster for for the Irish working class and the nationalists they took part because you know I think some of the national leaders they had this romantic idea of sacrificing themselves to set an example as previous kind of rebellions in 1798 and 1848 had done this crisis however the kind of international crisis this European revolt of the proletariat as Lenin called it would mature of course by 1917 with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution it's wrapped kind of spread around Europe to Germany and other places and it was this that you know really brought the First World War to an end as you know they had kind of predicted and in Ireland revolutionary republicanism it you know leapt from being this minority underground tendency to being a mass movement in fact you know people were shocked by the brutality of the executions the arrests the internment of thousands of people following east of 1916 you know as many as it has many times throughout history the whip of reaction drove revolution forward because you know one at a time in fact day after day and reported in the press you know the leaders of 1916 were all executed with the exception of Eamon de Valera and Connolly himself he was so badly injured in the rising that he could not even stand to face a firing squad so instead he was lashed to a chair and shot which provoked a lot of sympathy for him amongst the Irish public so the change in the situation really was it was apparent after the 1918 general election in which Sinn Fein you swept the board despite even many of its candidates still being interned in prison camps in Wales and other places you know Sinn Fein actually had nothing to do with the Easter Rising and you know historically weren't even a republican party but they were so heavily vilified by the press that their public profile increased dramatically and the leaders of the Irish republican brotherhood who you know had planned the Easter Rising they took over the party and it became their kind of political vehicle became a kind of a mass kind of a republican party you know the Irish parliamentary party that I mentioned before this kind of bourgeois constitutional nationalists they were completely smashed by the election people didn't forget how their leader John Redmond had supported the war and encouraged Irish people to volunteer to fight in the British army you know which had completely split the nationalist movement but importantly for us Irish Labour there was a Labour party in Ireland at this point which had been founded in fact by James Connolly and they did not even contest the election in December 1918 you know after the death of Connolly it meant a kind of loss of leadership for the the Irish Labour movement and the Labour Party much in the same way you know after the death of you know Rosa Luxembourg or Carl Leibnacht in Germany led to kind of a dearth of revolutionary leadership you know the Labour Party under people like Johnson they adopted an opportunist position when it was advocated by Sinn Fein and it was known as Labour must wait so this idea that you know the working class uh he needs to be subordinate to the nationalist leaders that Labour issues about you know jobs poverty things like that all needs to be postponed until after you know Ireland has been freed from British rule and in practice as we'll see this meant opposing the independent revolution reaction of the working class so on the 23rd of April 1918 there was a general strike declared throughout Ireland you know every time big enough to have a trades council held a demonstration hundreds of thousands of workers who had never even been on strike took part you know the Times commented that Irish Labour had found its strength after viewing this how solid the strike was and it was evident from 1918 onwards that it had you know the number of strikes doubled in 1918 versus 1917 there were 20 new branches formed a month for the Irish Transport and Generals Workers Union versus two a month in 1917 you know the union had over 70 000 members by the end of 1918 versus less than 5000 at the time of Easter Rising and there was unrest among workers and poor farmers all throughout the country you from land seizures in Clare to occupied coal mines in County Litrum but despite all this despite this you know opportune situation for Labour the Irish Labour leaders they stood aside in the December election as I already mentioned and the general strike that year in April was officially only about protesting conscription of course the Labour movement opposed this and it should but the republican kind of leadership which the Irish Labour Party supported needed itself to try to restrict the strike just to to those demands about conscription um it's the following year it's the following year in 1919 that marks you know the beginning of the Irish War of Independence and the kind of real beginning of this revolutionary period you know the Irish Republican Brotherhood and the volunteers they emerged to form the you know Irish Republican Army the IRA and they began their guerrilla war targeting you know the Royal Irish Constabulary in the countryside um I assume everyone has kind of heard at least a little bit about this campaign it's obviously one of the most kind of famous elements of Ireland's revolution you know the flying columns Michael Collins active service unit the debris of terrorism ordered by Winston Churchill in the form of the black and sands and so on and um while many you know legends have been written about this guerrilla campaign it obviously played a significant part in liberating Ireland and the real thing that brought the British Empire to its knees was not the IRA but in fact the Irish working class that made the entire country just ungovernable for the British administration so in January 1919 Sinn Fein MPs they gathered to form a provisional revolutionary government um called the first all Dolaren you know affirmed the Easter proclamation issued an appeal to governments of the world for recognition um you know at the time the past peace conference was going on after the First World War um and in a kind of a reciprocal favour to the Labour Party for standing aside in the December election which meant the labour had no actual representatives in the first all um they passed you know the democratic program which you know contained policies like the nationalisation of land of natural resources state education the alleviation of poverty and so on however Sinn Fein didn't really take these policies seriously they didn't issue any revolutionary decrees to implement them um they didn't put any money towards them um and most Dol members didn't even read the program before voting for it um and it was redrafted at the last minute to uh to remove some of its more socialist elements um it was a really just an affirmation of the labour must wait policy you know these things were for after Ireland was freed from Britain um despite this policy however the working class would not sit on the sidelines and while the IRA you know fought to expel British forces um also in January 1919 a general strike took over Belfast for several weeks you know it started as a strike in the shipyards uh broadened out to include other industries um and when railway workers who were you know some of the best organised workers you threatened to join it um it was clear that the strike committee was completely in control of the city uh something that they weren't entirely comfortable with uh the Lord Mayor of Belfast you know he said as much that he had lost control of the of the city um and your reactionary unionists they call them their loyal subjects to stand guard against Bolshevism in the city the Manchester Guardian in fact even called it a Soviet um and this term obviously coming from the Russian Revolution would be adopted consciously by Irish workers in April uh 1919 in the famous episode of the Limerick Soviet which has been revived somewhat in recent years it was very well covered um at the time in the press um and it's a kind of an interesting episode so in Liberic 14,000 workers um and their families you know most of the town's 38,000 population they demonstrated against British militarism um you know it was a political strike against the imposition of a draconian militarised police state in their town where workers had to get you know special passes to go to work and so on um you know during the strike workers they took over the food supply of the town you know they expropriated grain from Canadian um uh Canadian ships um and your bakery workers who took over their workplaces they inscribed on the walls uh you know this was the workers Soviet mills we make bread not profits and when the town began to run out of money um the strike committee even printed their own currency to try and uh to pay for everything so the town you know in Limerick it was completely defiant you know the police were unable to control the situation they were unable to get reinforcements even because the country was overrun by disturbances as they called it um this heroic episode however it ended um in a non-popular compromise um mainly because of a lack of of outside support either from the revolutionary government that they'll learn or from the the labour movement the labour leaders they refused to call a general strike across the whole country to support the Soviets despite the fact that there was a risk of you know it being besieged and and you know starved out essentially um and they were unwilling you know to take the initiative from Sinn Féin and from you know the revolutionary the doll who um in fact they kind of opposed the Soviets you know they didn't want these kind of independent spontaneous um working class uprisings happening you know um and rather than you know what it was which was you know a citywide strike where the workers were in power um you know they portrayed the movement as an Irish town that was besieged by British forces and they even certainly put together this plan to evacuate the town I mean can you imagine like a strike happening and then posing to you know evacuate the picket lines or something and the strike was eventually ended through negotiations that were facilitated by the local Catholic bishop which enraged many workers they tore down posters and stuff that declared the strike was over but they were all had to go back to work and another kind of episode of a betrayal like this you know followed a year later in 1920 there was another solid national strike all throughout the country um which was about protesting and trying to get the release of republican hunger strikers you know the Manchester Guardian again it commented that uh it was no exaggeration to trace a flavor of proletarian dictatorship in the strike movement you know with the aims of the strike uh limited to average just to you know hunger strikers by Sinn Féin and by the labour leaders um you know the strike was again called off once the uh the hunger strikers were released uh from my joy prison um and I am the kind of microcosm of of this uh outside that prison um there was an enormous crowd um but they were who threatened to you know storm the gates there was a rumor going around that they were going to steal a tank and crash it through the gates they were fraternizing with the British soldiers who were hesitating um but they were all kind of convinced to leave uh and to go home by a group of you know Sinn Féin politicians um and Catholic priests as well um so there are countless other examples really um smaller ones throughout the country of workers taking action against the British militarism and imperialism um but this whole you know period of unrest um this you know revolutionary period this revolutionary crisis in Ireland uh was limited really because of this lack of a real revolutionary proletarian leadership um the greatest betrayal of of the Irish revolution however um and would one that would directly lead to reaction and the end of this revolutionary period um came with the acceptance of the partition of Ireland in 1921 it's breaking up into north and south so for centuries the British ruling class had laid the basis of sectarian division in Ireland's you know Catholic versus Protestant in a classic kind of divide and conquer tactic um something you know they they practiced in Ireland and have used in all other kind of a colonial projects throughout the world um you know many times there were Irish history in the period we've just covered in the pre 1914 period and others you know the working class uh stood you know united against this division conscious of its own class interest versus this divisive interest based on the on creed um and in order to permanently seemingly break this unity and cement sectarianism into Ireland you know the imperialists they proposed to the doll a peace treaty in 1921 um which created two semicolonial states essentially one in the north and one in the south um and this is the situation territorially that you know remains today with northern Ireland and the republic um you know this tree proposal that split the nationalists they had no real kind of uh uh response to it um into pro-tree and anti-treaty sides which uh led to you know the Irish civil war in the kind of 1930s um but uh in reality you know despite this kind of civil war uh both sides were actually willing to accept partition at least as a temporary kind of thing um and these two you know halves of the republican movement um the pro-tree and anti-treaty um they formed you know the two civil war parties that still exist to this day Fennifall and Finagil you know who's you know supposedly oppose each other um but you know and if they form the current government of Ireland actually today they're they're in coalition with each other they're the two kind of parties the two halves of the Irish ruling class really you know Fennifall a bit more of an economically nationalist and inward kind of looking um wing whereas Finagil it represents more the the wing of the Irish wars really it's directly dependent on um you know the British empire and on foreign capital 30 minutes gone um so decades before you know this acceptance of partition here James Connolly he had warned that the partition of Ireland would lead to what you call the carnival of reaction um and he was proven correct really you know the northern Irish state was immediately in one one in which Catholics were oppressed as second-class citizens you know with extreme property qualifications to vote the entire borders of the state in fact were drawn up so as to ensure that the Catholic population was a permanent minority and could never really exercise any democratic um uh you know power in the state um and all this of course laid the basis really for the troubles later in the 20th century um and in the south where the Irish free state was formed um they are just renamed to the republic um you know there was a reaction against uh against labor in the trade unions you know breaking up of strikes um of trade unions um you know treaty membership went down um and most notably especially after you know the anti-treaty side uh Fina you know Finafall led by Immendive Allure once they entered government um the Catholic church was included you know constitutionally in the country's education and healthcare system something which the original you know founders of the state never really envisaged um and you know this has led to many uh many you know atrocities kind of since with the mother and baby homes and so on um and you know Emily mentioned this recently this kind of huge sort of progressive movement in in Irish society against Catholic church control against the the social power that the Catholic church wields in Ireland um on behalf of the rodent class on behalf of the bourgeoisie um those in the republican and labor movements who were close to James Connelly's ideas at the time and you know they warned against the acceptance of partition and the angle Irish treaty um but the labor party and trade union leaders they took essentially an ambivalent approach which was just viewed by much people as a de facto support for it um and thus um Ireland's revolution um this revolutionary period of 1918 to sort of 1921 um it was cut short really um by the betrayals I think of these bourgeois nationalists um and the kind of opportunist labor leaders um had there been a Bolshevik party for example in Ireland um uh in this period um it could have I think turned out very differently you know by putting following a kind of Marxist policy of putting no trust in the so-called national bourgeoisie who in the epoch of imperialism were ultimately tied to the interests of imperialism and pushing the working class to the forefront of the struggle for national and social liberation as James Connelly envisioned Ireland could have formed a worker's state or you know at least helped form one um and you know provoke a revolution in Britain perhaps you know which could have you know helped break the isolation of the Russian worker's state um but didn't come to pass however um and a much uglier history I think followed from 1921 but despite that I think there are many lessons um for us to take for future struggles um and I hope everyone feels enthused to to study a bit more about Irish history um and about the uh the struggle for independence