 Well, a warm welcome to everyone on this finally Sunday afternoon. It's almost spring here in our Boston College campus. My name is Christian Ducont and I'm the director of the John Jay Burns Library, the Rare Work Special Collections and Archives here at Boston College. It's my great pleasure to welcome you on behalf of all of our Boston College libraries, in which there are Senate on our campus here in our library. The director, Tom Wallace, with us is the one with several other elected colleagues. So welcome on behalf to all of you, especially those in our surrounding community here. You know, I've just met a couple more of you from our Chester Hill neighborhood. We'd like to come in and wonder, can I come into the libraries? Yes, you can. In any occasion, not just for events like this, but otherwise. We're very pleased to have our local community be with us. We're also very pleased and honored to have with us our consul general of Ireland with us this afternoon. We just wanted to shape up a little bit of a regular here since coming to Boston. Oh, just before St. Patrick State for all those festivities, it seems you can't get enough of all the great events we do here, so welcome. Thank you for, again, representing. This is a topic of great interest to you and obviously the others have been gathered here. This is our 36th Burns and Scholar Lecture, and that's sort of a magical number. I'm somebody, if you know me, likes Dante a lot in his pictures and his windows, and there's a certain numerology. You can get threes and fours and nines and perfect numbers out of 36. And, of course, we have Jason Merrick as our 36th Burns Scholar, who has a certain numerology of his own. Some of you will have read in the BC Chronicle, the nice article that Sean Smith did about you, as the first American Burns Scholar. So that got some of us, I think I see Beth Sweeney and Kathy Williams, who are Burns Libraries, I scratch my head because he said, we've known a lot of Burns Scholars, and let's see how this works out. Well, we had Lauren Arrington here last fall, and Lauren is American-born, but she was trained in Ireland and is now teaching at Liverpool. So she checked one of the boxes in that one. I think we said Mick Maloney, right? He was born in Ireland and then came over and did studies in the US and of course now he's a musicologist and a musician based in New York through New York University. So he checked two of the boxes. But Jason, you can check all three. You're an American-born, American-trained and teaching at the Central Washington University. So in that perfect numerology of threes, you are. So with that, I will end my welcome remarks, except to say please do all of you stay and join us downstairs, immediately after our question-discussion period for a very nice perception in our Burns Library. And those of you who are coming through the first time will have a chance to see a little bit more of the library itself, and I'll be glad to talk to you more about that. But to introduce Jason more fully, properly and academically, we'll have James Murphy, our director of Center for Average Programs, come to the podium and do that all. So thank you. I'm also an American citizen. I'm honored to be here. Thank you very much. I wonder what the course is for Burns. Oh, that's the point. Hi, good to see you. Yes, all right. Anyways, so it's wonderful to be here this afternoon for this fascinating lecture. I want just to introduce the speaker. And to talk about his lecture, which is Grand Breaking of Earth's Chapter, it really is a very important piece of work that he's doing. And we're delighted to have Professor Jason Nargo with us as our first scholar this semester. He is the works at Central Washington University. And as you might have mentioned, he's why he published a piece of three very important monographs. So we're under his belt over hate women and the dull gender republicanism and the Angora Street published in 2006, mentioning Ireland's independence, debates of the Angora Street in also 2006, and the aftermath of the revolution from under Gale, and Irish politics published in 2014. So he's a really big scholar and a very important scholar and a recently important man. This really is important work. I want to tell you why it's important. Because it has to do with things such as legitimacy and tradition. One of the great lessons any country has is that this government is perceived as being a legitimate government and having widespread and lasting consent. Here in the United States, our government has that by and large, 99.5% anyway, there are groups which claim otherwise, but it's a great blessing for a country to have that consent. Now in Ireland, for hundreds of years, the consent to be governed was contested and we're Mr Gladstone of whom I have laboured so much. His great ambition was to gain the consent, the assent to be governed of the Irish people by the forms he brought in, and he didn't quite succeed. So in these days, here's a little dig at the way our studies is developing where everything about independent Ireland until it's almost 20 years ago is always derided as being awful. It's nonetheless a great achievement that Ireland in its independent phase achieved, the state, the Irish state achieved among itself for a sense of legitimacy, a sense of that consent. And the Irish government was a parliamentary form of government different from our own United States books, but similar in some ways. And key to a parliamentary system is the idea that the parties in parliament all are sent to the way the country is governed, that those who are not in power are not forming, the majority are not forming the government. They can be critical of the government without the destruction of the state, but that's a difficult trick to manage, and that's what President Cormac has been working on. And what's radical about him is he says that this states from the 1920s only, and I think he's correct in this, but in that he tramples over the farmed fantasies of the past. Here's a penis book by Brian Farrell. Anyway, Brian Farrell. Actually, Brian Farrell is an interesting person. In the good old days, in Irish public broadcasting, there were people who struggled the academic world and the broadcasting world, and this book was edited by Brian Farrell in 1970. It's called The Irish Parliamentary Tradition, and so he tries to make a case that the parliamentary tradition takes back to hundreds of years. The Gaely card, I mean there are 16 essays, they start in the Middle Ages, and they make an argument for there being some kind of a tradition, parliamentary tradition in Ireland through all those centuries. And there's two ways of talking about tradition. Firstly, if you see similarities between different periods, and I think that's not a very helpful way of seeing tradition. I think a much more helpful way of seeing tradition is something which has some kind of organic continuity, and in that sense, there really is no Irish Parliamentary Tradition until the period of these classes' contributions show until the 1920s. I was under the fond delusion that there might be, in the 19th century, that's why recently I turned my attention to an Isaiah Tom Fincher work in Dublin Cooperation in the fond hope of discovering their parliamentary tradition. And I haven't found it, so I commend you. You're right, I was wrong. Nonetheless, I'm still going to write a book on it because there's still many interesting things which I don't know if you guys have seen what you've had. Never waste your research on a graduate. Never let go to waste, make some use of it. No, it'll be an excellent one when it comes out, I assure you. Anyway, but nonetheless, why it was deluded was because of the fond and fantasy things people would say. For example, in 1867, Sir John Gray, Dublin Cooperation, loading O'Connor's answers at that stage, said that he had opened the portals of the Constitution to his Catholic fellow countrymen against whom they were so long closed, and he created, referring to Dublin Cooperation, that little civic parliament which would perhaps serve your actor as the model of apartment for the whole environment that people cheered him, but it was not correct because the good cooperation in this debate never developed into, it says, apartment for all kinds of reasons, mostly lack of power and because, I don't know, I wouldn't do all those reasons, but it certainly did not develop into the sense. So Professor Conner is sweeping aside loose thinking and giving us what really happened. So, I mean, without further ado, hand it to you over to me. Thank you, I very much appreciate that. So as James was saying, I've spent my semester here as a bird scholar sort of mulling over this question of how opposition parties behave and how opposition parties particularly behaved in the early days of the Irish Free State, and so that's what I want to talk about today, the development of what's called a loyal opposition in the early Irish Free State. By loyal opposition, I mean an opposition party that is basically loyal to the institutions of the state but opposing the government in power, and at least in the way I look at it, that didn't really exist with the Irish party, the rural party, that didn't really exist during the revolution and so I'm sort of looking at its development, its evolution during the 1920s, okay? Reduced to its core, my argument is that this standard feature of parliamentary government was one of the hardest aspects of democracy to establish in the Free State and it's therefore crucial in understanding why democracy was able to take root and maybe thrive is too strong a word, but become institutionalized in the 1920s at a time when democracy was generally collapsing across Europe. So what I would like to do today is to sketch out how, briefly, how other historians and political scientists have studied the birth of Irish democracy, discuss some of the difficulties in the establishment of a loyal opposition in Ireland and then look at the role, briefly, of the Labour and Farmers Party in modeling the role or the acts of a loyal opposition in the 1920s in the early Free State part. As is well-known, the Free State was one of the first European or one of the few European countries to remain democratic. We'll start that again. As is well-known, except obviously to me, you can't make the sense of it, just surprise to me, it's just on the telephone. As is well-known, the Irish Free State was one of the few European countries created in the wake of the First World War that remained democratic throughout the interwar period. A feat may be remarkable by the fact that it came on the heels of a bitter civil war and coincided with a general post-war economic slump that was particularly devastating in the critical to the Irish area of agriculture. As a result, the birth and the stabilization of Irish democracy has attracted a fair amount of attention from historians and political scientists eager to explain the Free State's lack of normal left-right politics and also the rather quick incorporation of the civil war opposition into the regular parliamentary order by the end of the 1920s. A number of scholars have pointed to structural factors in explaining Ireland's tradition transition to post-colonial democracy. Such factors included the support of the Catholic Church for democracy, which was generally not present in, say, France or Italy during this period. The relative ethnic and religious homogeneity of the Free State after partition, high literacy rates, the partial solution of the land problem with the availability of government to back loans for land purchase after 1903, and what James was alluding to, the familiarity of the Irish people with democratic processes and procedures under the British colonial state. The latter factor included both experience with elections and election campaigns, but also the greater democratization of local government after 1898 when reform was passed then. There also has been a focus on elite attitudes. Biographies of figures on both sides of the civil war, including Collins, Kevin O'Higgins, Cosgrave, De Valera, and Mass, emphasize their fundamental, if at times, wobbling commitment to democratic values and their basic unwillingness to institutionalize authoritarian structures. Tom Garvin, in particular, most directly in this 1922, the birth of Irish democracy, a political scientist, Tom Garvin, has further narrowed this analysis, concluding that the victors in the Civil War, those who supported the Compromising Arms Treaty of 1921, were more democratic, or at least more majoritarian, than the Republicans that they defeated. Garvin and some other political scientists have argued that the treatyites came out of a tradition that was more individualistic, more rooted in the Enlightenment, and more tolerant of dissent than the opponents. Finally, the work of John Regan, who will actually, I think, be here speaking in Boston to the American Conference of Irish Studies next year, has argued that neither side of the thread of British interference with the treaty where we're championing prevented the implementation of anything approaching true democracy. Those works that focus on elite attitudes by and large have analyzed chin fails, leads that come from the party that made the revolution, and those that focus on structural factors have, for the most part, invoked factors that are perceived to have smoothed the way for democracy to take root. My new book project, I say new quite optimistically, I haven't been messing with this for years, but how about unreleased? My unreleased book project in contrast looks at a wider group of political actors and studies the factor, the absence of which, but of threatened democracy, the legitimacy of an opposition that supported the state, but opposed the government. Once the signing of the Angler Irish Treaty in 1921 split the revolutionary movement and led to the Civil War, the party that won the second most parliamentary seats in the election of 1922, the anti-treaty and still-cultured family, abstained from the new parliament between 1922 and 1927. The labor and farmers parties, as well as a variety of independent deputies, decided to enter the DAW. And my intention, or at least my intention in this portion of the project, is that these groups, the activities of these groups as an opposition to the treaty I government during this period were critical in the development of Irish democracy. Even though they could not out-vote the government, they insured a multi-party parliament and they normalized pluralism. Most of the historical attention is focused on the anti-treaty journey from military opposition to semi-constitutional government in 1932. And that's important, but I think the role of these minor parties is important and often overlooked. To what recent historians and political scientists have often focused on factors that enable or stabilize democracy, politicians of the time in the 1920s were nearly unanimous in claiming that Irish democracy was unstable in co-et undefined and poorly understood by the population. They thought that they needed to educate the population in both democratic attitudes and democratic practices. They thought it short that democracy, both in its ideals and its habits, was something that had to be learned, reinforced, and constantly explained. This belief that democracy had to be built is what led me to this analysis of the construction of notions of opposition. The idea in practice of a loyal opposition was something that I think had been largely absent in pre-revolutionary national politics for sure, yet seemed necessary for a functioning parliamentary state. Irish politics, at least in the late 19th century, did not seem to give the electorate experience with a loyal opposition. For as for much of its life, the pre-revolutionary Irish party, the home rule had basically sought to secede from the Westminster parliament not to build up its institutions. It also at times used tactics of obstructionism and withdrawal to further these goals. The political culture of the Irish revolution also made it more difficult to establish a loyal opposition. The revolutionaries created a parliament, Dahl-Eren, but much of the practice of politics by Sinn Fein, the revolutionary party during the revolution, militated against the development of a loyal opposition. First, the revolutionary goal was a one-party parliament. Here's the map of the electoral results of 1918. Sinn Fein's Webby Boards, except for in the north, remnants of the constituency in Waterford, the Trinity College seats in Dublin, and a seat in Liverpool. The various northern parties and the remnants of the Irish party did not accept an invitation to attend the first revolutionary parliament. So it's a one-party state. Labour chose not to run candidates in 1918 and 1921. And so, basically, only Sinn Feiners were in the parliament. This had considerable effects on post-revolutionary politics, as it created a particular path to revolutionary credibility. It gave a certain moral standing and legitimacy to those who had taken part in the military or political wings of the revolution. That was generally the path to getting known. These men, and in general, the case of women is different. These men did not have to justify or explain their presence in Parliament. Everyone knew their records of service and sacrifice to the nation. And the implication was that their opinion mattered more than that of the average non-participant. It was harder for those without such credentials to establish legitimacy. And those who were neither soldiers nor male Sinn Fein activists had to justify their place in the doll and their ability for the nation or for their constituencies. Second, the revolutionary doll meant in conditions not particularly conducive to the raising of oppositional views. It generally meant in secret, in frequently, and on short notice, especially after it was banning by the British government in September 1919. As a result, the cabinet retained a fair amount of autonomy and was not very communicative with ordinary doll members. This actually caused some friction. There were complaints about the Belfast boycott, the attempt to boycott products from the Belfast. There were complaints about personnel decisions that were made without Parliament's approval. But generally speaking, ordinary TDs, ordinary members of the doll were too harried, too ill-informed to really mount sustained opposition to cabinet policies. Sean McNatney, at the time, lamented, quote, under the present circumstances there could be no real opposition to the ministry. Meetings of the doll were gotten too hurriedly and there could be very little discussion on many important subjects. Roger Sweetman, another TD who often dissented, agreed that, quote, it was very undemocratic to have to dispose of deploying questions in a few minutes that could be devoted to them under present circumstances. In addition to political practice, the culture of the revolutionary movement inhibited opposition. There was an obsession with maintaining and displaying revolutionary unity, with dissent often equated with treason or apostasy. The cabinet's public statements always emphasized unity, sometimes to ridiculous lengths. A statement from Arthur Griffith Bragg, quote, the ministry were working in perfect harmony, their decisions were always unanimous. Devalera Chastise, members of the cabinet for showing divided opinions before the doll and rather implausibly said that when the British arrested him in June 1921, quote, they found a statement signed by every one of the ministry of Devalera, saying that never any time during the whole period of their office had there been any difference of opinion between me and them, as regarding policy of them, it just happened to be on him when he was arrested. Even after the signing of the Anglars Treaty brought a lot of these existing disputes out into the open after 1921, Devalera referred to this as, quote, accidental division of opinion in the cabinet, as if it revealed nothing of sort of previous tactical and policy differences. Even as Sinn Fein members expressed significant differences about the treaty's placement of the free state within the empire and about the future direction of the Irish state, they still longed to recreate the perceived unity of the revolutionary period. And I think there are several reasons why this idea of unity was so cosmetic for revolutionaries at the time. First it was thought by all that open division only served the purposes of England. One of the myths dearly held by Irish nationalists of all strikes was that England fostered or even created division in Ireland in order to make the island easier to subjugate. From 1798 when religious strife wrecked any hope of a successful rising to the disputes between young Ireland and O'Connell in the 1840s, internal turmoil had always been perceived to strengthen England's hand. In 1921, doll member Kathleen Clark, Tom Clark's widow, worried that the treaty would function similarly. She said the result will be a divided people, the same old division will go on, those who will enter the British empire and those who will enter England's old game of dividing conquer goes on. The shadow of the Parnel split was also on the TD's minds as they worried that an open division over the treaty could lead to the weakness and dissension that the pre-revolutionary Irish party had suffered through in the 1890s. Donald Callaghan said that people of the country, even those who desire the treaty ratified, are still keen about avoiding the return of days of internal divisions and party turmoil. Patrick McCartney wrote Parnel in a delay in any post-treaty election, to put an issue like this to the country again, you want to have a repetition of what occurred in the Parnel split. You've seen it here in the doll and it will be intensified a hundredfold in the country. This disdain for division was connected to a disdain for party politics and career politicians. Party, just like in the French Revolution, party and politics became dirty words basically in the revolutionary debates. As factions formed within the nation feigning the wake of the treaty, each side accused the other of playing party politics, by which was generally meant that the perceived interests of the nation were being subordinated to selfish political aims. Debaler told the doll in March 1922 quote, we hear a lot about party methods, party is gone bad here. From the other side, Kevin O'Higgins pamphlet Civil War and the events which led to it under the heading party intoxication argued that Erskine Childers quote, normally orderly and logical line was under the influence of the baneful spirit of party and badly intoxicated with the spirit of party. O'Higgins was always trying to go after intoxication right, closure of pubs, bills in 1923 and so on. Cosgrove urged deputies to get away from the page of party politics and the page of party suspicion and the page of party speeches and realize that the nation did not elect us to go on with this nonsense. Both sides accused their opponents of having the party spirit, which contrasted with the national spirit of the revolution. Sinn Fein portrayed itself as a movement or a national party that brought unity instead of factionalism, an emphasis that contributed to the dismay and confusion with which the treaty split was met by a lot of Sinn Fein, particularly non-elite Sinn Feins. Party discipline was also thought to weaken reasoned and unfettered debate on an issue as deputies would vote along party lines rather than according to the strengths of the arguments presented. There was one aspect of revolutionary political culture that on its face might have paved the way for a loyal opposition and that is the elevation of minorities, political minorities, as moral beacons and national vanduards. Nineteenth-century Irish rebellions from Robert Edmond to the Finians had been carried out by advanced minorities that were hailed as principal despite tactical failure. Once the treaty split occurred, the anti-treaty Republican minority which had found itself outvoted in the cabinet and in the parliament, retreated to the self-image of a sanctified minority, they compared themselves to the Easter Relics who had been criticized during and immediately after the Revolution only to hold the rebellion, only to find their point of view embraced by the wider or a wider Irish population within a couple of years. This was the hope of anti-treaty acts as well and while they were in the minority, they attempted to raise the status of such a position and limit the rights of the majority. This is most succinctly expressed in de Valera's famous dictum that the people have no right to do wrong. The Republicans also argued that they represented the soul of the nation, the attitudes of its future citizens and the heroes of its past. The majority had no right to this argued to trample on any of these constituencies. After the treaty passed and the treatyites moved to set up a government, Hala Brua referred to it as quote, this usurping government that has been brought into existence by the majority. So it's both majoritarian and usurping. The rights of the majority were then limited by certain fundamental principles. The Republican paper New Ireland in May 1922 and held here in Burns Library highlighted a 1915 quote from treaty item on Neil on the front page so as to show that Sinn Fein's suspicion of electoral majorities was not new. The quote read, there is nothing sacred in majority rule. The divine right of majorities is no better established than the divine right of kings. A majority can be tyrannical and its tyranny can be of a very impressive kind. There is nothing sacred in the power of 51 men over 49 nor even in the power of 99 men over one. That the decision of a majority should hold good is merely a principle of order not of liberty or justice. Another editorial in the same paper entitled majority rule gone mad noted that quote, the uncritical application of any principle reduces it to the absurd. What, so even for self-determination, the right of majority rule, what then are the limits to this principle? Remember that the real will of the people means the will expressed which stands for the highest interests of the people. You know the majority is not always in favor of the thing which is in its highest interest. So a temporary majority couldn't threaten the highest interests of the people which the Republicans generally defined as sovereign independence. Because the church generally took the pro-treaty side in 1922 Republicans also went to great length to the concept of majority rule from that moral law. Majority rule was not a sacrosanct principle but simply a rule of order, one that could be ignored when the existence of the nation was a stain. This discussion about the meaning of majority and minority within Irish politics stripped from the obvious Republican self-interest and denigrating the temporary pro-treaty majority highlights a fundamental question about the rights of minorities within a democratic system. The connection of majority voted well it seemed for anyone outside the majority. However the way it was framed by Republicans tended to define a minority as a vanguard within the national movement. The rights that minorities could uphold against the majority were those of national sovereignty and freedom from external interference, not internal matters such as civil or economic rights. And the minority in this case was depicted as guarding a sovereignty that existed outside of Parliament, the nation and not within Parliament. So the model of minority behavior theorized and enacted by Republicans actually provided little utility for non-Republicans like Labour, trying to set up a moral parliamentary opposition. So the takeaway from the revolutionary period is that revolutionary politics was a terrain that was in many ways unfavorable to the creation of a loyal opposition. Ireland had little history of such practice and the revolutionary emphasis on national unity and the elevation of Sinn Fein IRA experience as a legitimating factor in politics created obstacles for non-Sin Fein politicians. The revolutionary denigration of politics and party caused similar effects. Descent and opposition was increasingly seen as anti-national, selfish, and implicitly helpful to the former colonial milestone. And these factors are why a study of the Labour Party's entrance into the Third Dawl in 1922 is so critical for understanding the development of Irish democracy. After much internal wrangling among Sinn Fein elites, an electoral pact between Collins and Devillary in 1922 allowed for a general election to take place in June 1922. Collins and Devillary agreed that Sinn Fein would run a united slate of candidates. They would, all Sinn Fein candidates would campaign on telling the public to vote for all Sinn Fein candidates, regardless of the individual's stances on the treaty. Okay? At the insistence supposedly of Collins, although there's some dispute about this. The pact also included a clause that allowed for non-Shin Fein candidates to run for office. Labour, the Farmer's Party, and a variety of independents took advantage of this opportunity and faced a barrage of criticism early on, particularly from Republicans for entering the field. Under a headline that read independent candidates will ruin agreements. A Republican paper editorialized it will not impress the country favorably if middle parties put up candidates. In fact it will prejudice Labour interests if any of the candidates plunge into the controversy no matter what goes. Those who carried on the fight for freedom hitherto, that is to say, those candidates who have represented the Sinn Fein organization should naturally be the people to complete the work. And there is really no scope yet in Irish public life for other interests to intervene no matter how worthy or well-attentioned. Republicans criticized would-be politicians who participated in the revolution as people who took no part in the national struggle, some of which were hostile to the independents and others indifferent to the honor and interest of Irish nationality. And it was said that not Sinn Feiners desire to run for office revealed fundamental selfishness or careerism. Politics here was still conceived of as national, united, and anti-party. Section of minority interests were seen as outside of this definition. Tom Johnson, the head of the Labour Party and the Liverpool Protestant came in for particular score and had his national credentials repeatedly questioned. New Ireland wrote, for a considerable time it seemed to have the outlook rather of an English Labour leader than of the profound and convinced follower of the policy of James Coughlin. We understand he was a traveler for a big English firm and we know that he was strongly against Sinn Fein policy from 1916 onwards. Another editorial made it clear that Johnson's decision to run as a candidate was fundamental, fundamentally anti-national. This is also from the Republican pre-Ziv award of the paper in New Ireland. And it says in his statement why he was fighting the national panel of Sinn Feiners. Mr. Johnston, they don't even get a name for it. Mr. Johnston refers to the national panel as machine representation from a single political party. And by the way, both sides cited Tammany Hall and Irish-American involvement in Tammany Hall as the kind of machine politics they didn't want. That was a frequent allusion. So Johnston calls it machine representation. This statement is both false and insulting. The Sinn Fein movement is a party movement, is a national movement. It represents two parties and the members of the last dollar were in fact the parliamentary forces that fought for Irish freedom. They represent all sections and classes of the community. Both farmers, farm laborers, businessmen and the professions. To refer to the national movement in such terms is false. It is ungrateful in view of their courage in the face of British terrorism last year and insulting not merely to the movement but to the dignity of the nation because the national cause is something far higher than party politics. So this is pretty standard fair and this is what labor and the farmers have to push against basically to establish their legitimacy. It touches most of the points made by Sinn Fein during the revolution. Politics should be national and anti-sectional. The Sinn Fein organization represented all classes and all shades of national opinion and politics was as much about gratitude for past service and sacrifice as it was about future prospects. That matter was basically what the army movement was about in 1924. Decisions were going to be made based on past service or they were going to be made out of the criteria. None of these factors promoted the creation of an oppositional party system. The pro-treaty wing of Sinn Fein although generally more favorable to non-Shin Fein participation in the election because all labor and farmers candidates were pro-treaty. Also a sale of the new labor and farmers with all deputies is being merely sectional and thus less important than the remnants of Sinn Fein. The pro-treaty party eventually called Fungal continued to claim that they were not a mere political party but a national movement that transcended class pre-geography and vocation. In the early days of the state Richard Mokahi connected the treaty aides to this period of revolutionary unity. He said the national party that was the strength of the work of the past few years too has been broken but a sufficiently large section of it still holds together. We have left to us a very great national responsibility and national duty to see that the national party shall strengthen itself, shall solidify and recover its old national strength to pull the country through this crisis. Mokahi still believed despite the obvious split over the treaty in this revival of a national movement instead of the normal appearance of competing parties and signaled that politics in his mind was still the domain of nationals. Ernest Blyth proposed to call the treaty a party of the national party in motion that only lost by a couple of votes to the choice of the Rubigail. And then the party's 1923 address to the nation maintained that it is of prime importance that the program shall have a wide national aspect embracing objects befitting the whole people of Ireland rather than just sectional interests. A North Dublin election flyer for 1927 certainly proclaimed that the policy of the government is broad in conception, national in character solicitous only for the common good. On every issue it has taken decision unflinchingly thereby courting unpopularity with strongly entrenched interests. Coming to Gail is not anti-farmer it is not anti-labor it is national. And basically the depiction here is that only this national party is willing and strong enough to stand out to sectional interests. Local party like Labour and Farmers were perceived as caving to special interests and not national interests. Okay? So in my analysis the ways in which the Labour Party and to a lesser extent the Farmers Party chose to meet this challenge was the role in establishing Irish democracy as the positions and practices established by the Labour Party modeled the role of a loyal opposition that would eventually be taken up in a lot of forms in my feet of fall when Stetler decided to enter the DAW. Labour had to stake out an oppositional position for itself that was different from other pro-treaty parties but blended with acceptable revolutionary goals and troves. To start Labour had to prove that it was Irish. One of the common things drawn against it was that it was international. So Labour had to establish its Irish pedigree. Although Catalo Shannon initially Johnson II in a long time as an organizer at times spoke in Irish about this. Labour generally tried to show its Irishness through a discussion of the indigenous genealogy of its ideals rather than through use of the native tone. The party's paper invoked Wolf Tone and James Fiddler in a 1919 editorial and referenced Tone's appeal to the men of no property in a 1922 campaign ad. Labour tees were told to pin their faith to the Gospel as preached to us by Connolly and Lawler. Quotes from Fiddler, Connolly, Dabbitt and Pierce were presented in 1922 under the heading carry on the true national tradition. Interestingly the Connolly who was invoked was almost always Connolly the parliamentary reformer Connolly the armed insurrectionist who certainly Johnson didn't mention very often and even his associates like Shannon and William O'Brien didn't much either. Connolly was also merged with Pierce, the most, probably the most socioeconomically radical of the other 1916 signatories as a supporter of gaolicism and populism. A Labour Party ad said, it will be well for the future piece of viral if men and women who draw their inspiration from the teaching of Pierce must see that he, no less than Connolly, desired a Republic which should be a real people state in essence a true Workers Republic. Workers too must see that they are betraying Connolly and his cause if they refuse to or omit from their Workers Republic a Gaelic state. A recreation of the ancient Irish speaking and Gaelic thinking democracy. Although Labour generally praised the revolution its relationship initially to parliamentary democracy was complicated. The party expressed skepticism as to the morality and utility of what it perceived as a fundamentally bourgeois parliament while keeping the focus initially on Labour's ultimate goal of the Workers Republic. An early issue of the Watchword of Labour, one of the several Labour Papers, aimed to, quote, preach the whole and entire gospel of James Connolly and make that grand gospel of a Workers Republic. Even Thomas Johnson in 1922 made a lengthy speech in the doll on Johnson's Fair the Moderate about the transcend mere political freedom of a Workers Republic. We must continually please bear in mind that political freedom and enfranchisement is but sounding brass and tinkling symbols unless we use that freedom for the purpose of social, economic and cultural freedom. And he says unless we're going to use political freedom to the end of releasing the country and the people from its other subjections which he earlier says is the incubus of capital of the country. Nothing has been achieved. After all nationality and nationhood is but a means to an end. Labour initially remained unsure about whether parliamentary democracy could bring about the Workers Republic. In October 1921 the voice of Labour criticised the lack of debate in the revolutionary doll and it wrote, it is not for such as we who have no illusions either about formal democracy or parliamentary institutions to teach Irish democratic parliamentarians their business but it is obvious that someone must and it is obvious that within the doll there is no informed and competently led criticism and opposition on affairs purely in general administration. Kyle O'Shaven wrote, the truth is not always found simply by counting heads. And after the treaty was approved by the doll the voice of Labour after the government would favour a quote outworn and effete parliamentary system or establish a system in agreement with modern needs. However as the civil war heated up and Labour began establishing itself that hostility to parliamentary democracy was reduced and the party began justifying its electoral participation in strong returners. When it became clear that the doll would continue to be the government of the country the voice of Labour wrote, the hour is now struck for the workers to emerge from the shade when the contest opens in the political arena we shall take our place. The same editorial argued that this was an honorable position as long as the ultimate focus maintained remained on the Workers Republic. It's no retrogression on the part of the Labour party to avail of the machinery of whatever political instruments may be fashioned in pursuit of our objective. The special congress that voted for Labour to actually run candidates in 1922 resolved that Labour ought to have its representatives in the forthcoming parliament to work in Labour's interests, to frustrate reactionary measures and to use every occasion to hasten the progress towards the Workers Republic. The parties in the 1922 election manifesto noted that only a strong Labour party will prevent the neglect of workers interests by the doll and it made it clear they didn't trust either one machine thing to look out for those. Labour also would ensure that the party was multi-party and while the Labour party will insist the new assembly shall be a working body bearing the responsibilities of government, not merely a public meeting called together occasionally to approve or disapprove the past actions of the ministry, which is what they thought the revolutionary parliament was, basically rubber stamps and stuff that already happened. They wanted to actually go through the process of making legislation. Labour also began to stake out a wider position than just a critic of treaty and socioeconomic policy. As it became clear that the doll was going to be deprived of its second largest party due to abstention, Johnson took on the task of criticizing the government on a much wider front than Labour's normal economic concerns. Both policy towards England and particularly civil liberties. This initially manifested as a critique of what Labour called militarism. As Labour leaders perceived the democratic civil society was threatened by both the IRA and the National Army. With no prospect of a workers republican site, Labour increasingly had to support parliamentarianism. However, bourgeois against what it perceived as the creeping militarism of both wings of Sinn Fein. This stamp was derived from what Labour called its quote traditional principle of opposition to militarism from any quarter. We protested against the gun and the bayonet when handled by foreign armies. We protested against the rule of the gun and the bomb when handled by Irish armies and irresponsible individuals. So they wanted to tie this to what they perceived as their history of anti-colonialism and resisting British militarism. The party did not want to drift, however, too far away from its revolutionary base, and Labour made it clear that it was not opposed to military force in all circumstances. Labour speakers said, let this be clearly understood, Irish Labour's opposition is directed against militarism, not against the use of military force. Irish Labour recognizes none better than under certain circumstances the application of armed forces both necessary and desirable. Many even in Irish Labour will go so far as to say that under certain circumstances an armed force of the workers is necessary. Even Johnson, who was hardly an insurrectionary fireman and described himself as a mensch of it on numerous occasions, told the crowd that Labour were not here as pacifists. They were there to denounce the spirit of military sentencing. The frequent postponement of the third doll, its initial meeting was postponed several times in the Civil War, gave Labour even more reason to elevate the importance of the Parliament as the party but unable to stop the drift towards war and appeared helpless to reverse the policies of the Treaty I government from outside the doll. In July 1922 Labour said that, quote, the immediate assembling of the third doll was a national necessity, not even second in importance to the necessities of the military situation. By August of 1922 Labour threatened to resign its seats to which it had been elected unless the doll met soon, thus threatening to undermine the new doll's legitimacy as a multi-party body. Carlos Shannon said, if they, the government, want to live up to their constitutionalism and up to their democracy, let them come down to the first principle of democracy and as we understand it, the first principle of democracy as interpreted in this country is that the body of the people should speak through their elected representatives and that their elected representatives not half a dozen of their elected representatives are the spokesmen of the nation. Attacks on this militarism allowed Labour to emphasize democratic credentials and to do what I argue it particularly did in trying to establish itself as an opposition party and that's take up the mantle of a defender of civil liberties. A Labour editorial in late 1922 which the author pointedly and repeatedly noted was difficult to pass through the military censors, complained nowhere except in the ranks of Labour and in the Labour press, is there the least regard for any of the liberties of which there is so much to boast. Former Connolly Associated William O'Brien's election address in 1923 claimed that Labour alone of all parties in the state recognized the civil liberties of the people of all the people all the time. It shall be steadfast in its opposition to all militaristic and bureaucratic encroachments upon civil rights. Labour's defense of civil liberties highlighted its transition to a less tactical support of parliamentary democracy as in 1924 when it told county Dublin electors that Labour alone amongst all parties would steadily adhere to the democratic principle of government high the people and for the people and not that of fooling the people with mere constitutional wing address. Labour's vision of an oppositional role was laid out fairly cogently in the run-up to the 1923 election in which it was claimed that a strong turnout for Labour would check the extravagant, violent and budding militarism of this administration and insist that working class majority of this nation rules and that it has determined that economic security shall be secured for all citizens of this country. Thomas Johnson realized that this role had only fallen to Labour because of the odd situation created by champagne extension but he also believed that a parliament needed not position in order to function and he resisted calls to withdraw from the doll as the treaty aides began executing republicans. A common tactic for the Irish party had been withdrawn by a few contested times and Johnson enlarged to do that repeatedly. A particular defense that he makes of non-withdrawal comes in response to a Labour party branch from Tildare urging him to withdraw. He says to demand that the Labour members of the doll should withdraw as a protest against the recent acts of the government and he's talking about the executions here in the fall of 1922. Is equivalent to demanding that Labour should refuse to take part in the political activities of the country until we're in a position to take over the government ourselves. It is practically that Labour should never take part in a parliament until the majority thinks as we think. Labour's political identity therefore became increasingly tied to that of an independent, wide-ranging critical voice within a democratic parliament. The farmers on the other hand opposed the government on much narrower grounds but provided criticism from the right and thus enabled the doll to simulate a normal parliamentary system in the absence of the anti-treaty aides. I couldn't find a picture of Dennis Boyd at the Farmer's Party so I put up a picture of the book I edited that has a chapter on the Farmer's Party by me in it which is a fairly narcissistic choice I recognize but it's a choice I may not understand by. So the farmers tended to support often silently the government's foreign policy and commitment to law and order and in so doing they thought, sought to limit the scope of opposition to economic issues. That was their destination of an opposition party which they tried to do so they could avoid getting their members tangled in political questions like the oath that they thought would cost a vision within the farmer's rights. The Farmer's Party newspaper repeatedly lamented the dominance of political questions at the polls and urged farmers to vote based on economic interests, not on political questions, the treaty based on. Okay? The farmers aggressively promoted economic vision, free trade, low taxes and rates and reductions in public services because they felt the unnatural dominance of Sinn Fein during the revolution had excluded farmers from their rightful position in the free state. They claim that they constituted two-thirds of the population, created 85% of the wealth and both found themselves debarred from the council of the nation. Farmers hoped that the revolution would usher in a era in which agrarian issues dominated government policy, reversing what they saw as years of British neglect. Instead, to the farmers, the revolution brought irresponsible spending, crushing taxation and local councils run by Sinn Feiners with no agrarian roots. So the farmer's conception of opposition was to focus on economic issues and focus on representing what they claimed were people who were under-represented and that's farmers themselves. They tended to see politicians as urban educated bureaucratic elites. The farmer's party is endlessly quotable and I could spend hours up here just reading quotes that amused me from the farmer's party and I won't refrain from doing that. The farmer's, my favorite was that I won't further myself again, but the chapter in this book is from a farmer's quote when they refer to the government as a regime of squandermania. I love the word squandermania. I have tried to insert it in the conversation. The farmer's perceived the central government as a playground for urban educated elites who cared little about the land. Dennis Borey, parliamentary leader of the farmer's party until 1927 when he joined through the Gale, said, we got into the spending habit during the war and we have not got out of it yet. This is most remarkable among our professional business and official people. The fault is not of agriculture but of the parasites living on the back of agriculture. The Dublin picture houses and theaters are overflowing night and day. Borey said quite a lot and how there were too many people going to it. And they are building work. And who is paying for it all? Does it need any answer? The cart horse of the country, the farm laborer and the farmer. A speaker at a farmer's union meeting in 1925 blamed taxation for the agricultural depression and said quote, all the public offices and institutions were overstaffed and the officials overpaid. Reductions all around would have to be made in that sphere. Borey at times claimed that there was rampant overstaffing in the railroads. He said the workers are for the most part of the day doing nothing. In the senate I think the place is overstaffed doing nothing. In the post office, it is quite a common thing in the western rural districts that a postman should not deliver more than one letter in a whole week. The rural districts of Ireland are not inhabited by letter writing people. And in the army, I'd like to throw away quality of this one. And in the army probably there are too many typists employed. I have seen some of them sometimes dancing instead of typing. I could go on a great length for these. I've reduced it to four. He also complained bitterly about the cost of education. Claiming that well we have too much education in Kilkenny. Because it's costing them more than any other people in the world. One of the labor deputies noted that that particular speech was met by laughter. Not just the government but particularly from the labor benches. Conrad Hoek and a farmer's TV made the claim that they were quote being literally blood sucked by this massive officials. And less distressingly another supporter of the farmer said the free state was a paradise for officials. This is a constant refrain in farmer's rhetoric that the state is becoming livable only for officials. By which they tended to meet urban bureaucrats and farmers were paying for this all. It was constantly. And they thought their role as an opposition party was to call attention to that. What they saw as a waste and overspending. Even though neither labor nor the farmers ever came close to obtaining majority the positions these parties stake out the early free state dollar critical to the development of democracy in the free state. Unlike the anti-treaty acts labor and the farmers voiced their discontent form within the parliament. That's half of that there to start with. Functioning as a loyal opposition that accepted the legitimacy of state institutions while subjecting the government's policies to criticism on their merits. The substance of these criticisms would later be taken up by Fianna Faw when it became a parliamentary party. Fianna Faw generally emulated labor's criticism in the pockets of the rich and generally emulated the farmer's criticism of the government as overspending particularly on elite bureaucrats. Fianna Faw adds in twenty seven and thirty two listed salaries of high ranking bureaucrats as a way to go about government-type excessive spending. Perhaps more importantly labor and the farmers took part in the rituals of parliamentary politics. Voting on motions, proposing amendments, opposing second readings, etc. This quotidian activity and the opposition to government policy that was voiced through it was necessary to the legitimacy of the free state dollar without a viable opposition party and without contested votes and motions without the rituals of parliamentary behavior. Five readings, amendments, divisions, this kind of thing. Ritualized behavior. It's difficult to see how the dollar could have gained legitimacy during the five years of anti-treaty and abstention. Without realistic opposition the dollar could have become like basically the Stormont parliament in the north widely seen as a front for one party rule. The tortured path by which anti-treatyites eventually entered the dollar is certainly important in the cementing of Irish democracy. But so too are the efforts of the Labor and Farmer's party to create a loyal opposition in the early years of the state. This ensured that the dollar entered by Fenefall in 1927 as functional, multi-party, and seen widely as legitimate, not entirely, but by a large swath of the population. Factors which I think induced Fenefall to begin its transition away from the non-recognition of the state. Thank you. What did the Labor and Farmer's party think about the dollar? I hated it. Well there was a big there were strike actions in Waterford in particular anti-farmarian laborers. Labor was desperately trying to appeal to and organize anti-farmarian laborers not just the urban base which had been sliced off mostly by partition. And the farmers relentlessly and remorselessly blamed labor for what they received as too high agricultural wages. That they were having to pay union wages to temporary agricultural laborers. So the chances of them that's why they could never even if the government didn't have enough people in the House for a division they were not going to vote together on almost any issue. There was one, I can think of one there was an amendment to the land bill that sought to give farmers better terms by which they could purchase their land that Labor voted for. But by a large they did not support each other in anything they hated each other. Labor deputy said that Cory wanted to buy a farm or hang labor from the land post. And the general went down from there. So they would not agree on anything. One of the other endlessly quotable Dennis Cory quotes that I could have given was he complained constantly about labor particularly hired by the double corporation that it was overpaid did nothing. He said you have to have a microscope to see their movements. And so there was he thought, he thought this is interesting, this is another paper I'm going to present it as this summer. But the farmers tended to think that Ireland was performing poorly economically. Because it was taxed too high and because its workers were pampered and didn't perform. And Labor constantly put out statistics about how American farmers constantly put out statistics about how American bricklayers laid X number of bricks an hour and Irish bricklayers laid one quarter hours. American elementary school teachers made X. And Irish elementary school teachers made 4X. They were constantly talking about the low productivity of Irish capital L labor and small L labor. And they blamed economic performance on that. And Labor obviously didn't take that well. So they didn't agree. Was there a question did anywhere do it for all those homes or did any of the Americans succeed? No. They did introduce them yes. And there was a few that got second readings. And there was a the one that got closest that the government was going to adopt parts of there was a railway malformation bill that Labor had started because it had been able to make it. So yes they did try to introduce private members bills. Johnson in particular and Labor tabled the amendments just about everything. And so they participated that way. The farmers less so. The farmers complained but they amended some economic bills but not that's not the same thing about the system is that the farmers try to build broader consensus in the public and so on. These two parties were just paying to their base all the time. They were trying to win broader public consensus for under that electricity. They were both keenly aware of that. The farmers thought that their base was the majority of the population. And they thought the problem was that ordinary farmers I don't know why I'm pointing to all of that. The cameras are awesome. As I've said many times I had to grow my own food I could get it. But the farmers complained all the time that ordinary farmers voted for the pro or anti treaty party instead of for a farmers party. And if they could just convince farmers to vote for the farmers party the farmers would dominate the state because they dominated the state of America. So they tried. They didn't think they had to broaden to another social group. They thought they had a social group to vote for that. Labor tried and I think that the focus on civil liberties and all that was an attempt to broaden its message. It tried to put itself forward as both the kind of community, the way we think of labor as a communitarian party that would support unemployment insurance parks, libraries, more money for schools that kind of thing. But also as a defender of individual liberties. And I think they thought that that stands as a defender of individual liberties would capture some people who didn't like the treaty rights but didn't want to waste their vote on abstention. It didn't work. Yes, and to be honest that's a part I haven't looked at yet. If there's that book was back up there there's a chapter in it on the Senate by Elaine Byrne whose coast is the Senate as an opposition. And I tend to incorporate ex-unionists into what I haven't done yet. But yes they did. And some of the ex-unionists in the doll functioned in that way. But most of the ex-unionists in the doll functioned as vocational representation. So they voiced the interest of doctors or lawyers, if it's given to people like that. And so they tended to see themselves as more narrowly articulating, like I can think of Sir James Craig, not the James Craig from Northern Ireland, but a deputy from Trinity College, who constantly talked about the government's tariff policies and how it was hurting hospital supplies and things like that. Or the motor car tariff and how that was hurting doctors and office calls. And so they tended to voice narrow kind of upper class vocational opposition. Questions to the fascinating business about the idea that there should be no other party, so there should be a united front on everything that's wrong. And then the rest of the people. Yes it is. But out of that, if that was their mentality it should. Was another move to have why would they force the parliamentarians to do more essentially executive government with a stronger executive with a more powerful presidential figure. Was there ever a move for that? They toyed with that one. They're right in the constitution in 22. One of the things that's floated is what they get, I think they steal it from Switzerland, which was a government sits for three years no matter what. Ministers do what they do. So they did talk about that. It was not implemented at the end of the day. And they also talked about a system, I think honestly, sincerely I should say that a number of treatyites and anti-treatyites envisioned that they would not have partners, that they would have a group of national representatives who would vote in different ways on different issues. And that there would be temporary coalitions but not permanent parties. The problem is, and they have sorts of devices to try to do this. In the 1922 constitution they had what they called external ministers which were ministers who were not part of the government and they supervised a department. And if their proposals got shot down the government were going to fall basically. So not quite a parliamentary system. But the problem was because the issue of treaty, no treaty, dominated everything and the government couldn't afford to lose a vote for fear of losing the treaty, all of these kind of ideas that are rooted about the window pretty quickly. And the government has to put the whips on to get votes through. But they do talk in all sorts of idealistic terms about how they weren't going to have partners. They were just going to have a national group of temporary factions. Before we started the perception, was there one question maybe on this side? The answer to that was why didn't farmers support the part more the same way? Was there, and was there a change to the 20s of that sort of level of support? The perception was that the farmers were kind of an appendage of food to be able to have. And so you may as well vote for the treaty I can, for those farmers who tended towards that direction. They were never able to quite establish their independence in the public mind with its potential supporters and enemies. And so the higher profile that are funded candidates tended to get, tended to get support. And to see a fall, particularly under the mass, was very good. There was a perception also that the farmers' party stood for wealthy farmers and not for landless laborers, you know. And so Feena Faw was very good at taking those folks and getting them to vote for the anti-treaty party instead of farmers' party. Farmers' party tried to say it represents all farmers, you know, grazers, tillage farmers, laborers, landless, you know, agrarian farmers, but the perception was that it was a party of wealthier tillage farmers or wealthier grazers. And it had trouble appealing to the non-wealthy farmers. But it constantly alone that it's leading them over. Well before we or is there one more question? This might have been a very question that I've been taking here. I've had a class and put in information here that I didn't get that much out of the book's bail. So I find it interesting that the majority of other nations that then turned to Ireland in this beginning of a very old moment when you looked to death as in this first speech in a poll you had this idea of opposition, the patriotic opposition through laborer or farmers comes up anywhere in other businesses. This idea that they inspire comes up when other nations are trying to bring away from the Dalmatians in British Empire. Or it's just been swept aside to the kind of for death to set this. Yeah, most of them looked up to damp as the sort of, because the farmers didn't have a lot of colonial credentials, honestly. They spoke nicely of the revolution but a lot of them were not into the participants and a lot of their leaders so they didn't have that kind of anti-colonial credibility that would appeal to a decolonized world in the same way that they did. And labor was generally seen internationally as again kind of a weak sister of the British Labor Party which we've already seen not very, not very fiery, you know. And so not particularly, I would say Johnson is admired personally in international labor circles. Johnson comes to the United States in 1925 or 1926 to meet with the to attend a meeting of the Inter-Parliamentary Union, a group of parliamentarians from across the world and he criticizes the Brits to their face and about how they keep meddling in Irish business and stuff and he gets a fair amount of sort of national or international press for that. But I wouldn't say that labor, Irish labor is seen as a weak and a plunge. Even Carly's not that incorporated into wider European labor thought in the way that some of the German labor thinkers are, I wouldn't say. But that's one thing that I think is interesting about the Farmer's Party is, I mean the blue shirts are going to come along later, right? But at the time, Ireland didn't have a right-wing party that was anti-state in the 20s in the same way that you see in lots of other right? In the French Republic, for example, right? Where a number of parties on the left and right wanted to get dismantled in the Republic, right? The Farmer's aren't going that far. Blue shirts are going to get into different films. But I think that's one of the things that makes them interesting, but I wouldn't say they were weak in the beginning. They thought they were behind. They always wanted to copy other people. The Farmer's wanted to learn to get more in particular, switch a little bit to other small countries. Yeah. Mark, maybe we'll wake it up in the last one. On the question of labor, were they playing double opposition? Did they tend to the North too? They tended to function as one party over the entire new state. In the 20s, that fell apart pretty quickly, and the Northern Irish Labor Party became more or less independent. Johnson had actually cut his teeth a little fast, organizing the economy. That's what he knew actually better. And the intent was to continue to be united, but by and large, they did not. There is some talk about the North, the labor papers in the 20s had a semi-regular feature called In the Wee Parliament, which is what they called the Northern Irish Parliament, that covered Northern Irish events, you know, and covered the Belfast City Council and things like that. But it was not really a unified opposition, despite, I think, good intentions of that, and despite the Northern origins of the known labor leadership. We can start the continued conversation, but we'll still be warm and positive about it. But before thanking you with another round of applause, which you well deserve, as promised, for our breaking talk, there are two other things that we should be thanking Jason for. One is for the course that he is talking to. We actually are burnt scholars teach a course during the semester that they spend in the residency area. So we'll hear students with us here on the course in the island empire, which we've been meeting, and I'm just feeling the energy walking by the room, and you know, I can see that it's been some really good discussions. Thank you for that. Next week, they're going to be talking to us, but it's past the end of deadline. I don't see any comments. He seems late sometimes to give you discussions like we are here. And the other thing maybe for which you might have said more about the introduction, so when you were at two Saturdays ago, this wonderful symposium that Jason led and organized on the question, is there an American school of virus history? And I think we answered that metaphor again this afternoon with the background. And yes, we had a dozen scholars, some of your peers, mentors, students, a really generational conference symposium that we had. That was really quite wonderful support by the Center for Virus Programs and the family funds, so we're grateful for that. And any more personal, we'd love to see you in our meeting room. Many of our burnt scholars spend lots of time that way. We've got a burnt scholar that's spent time with resources at Burns Library, Hellenic Library, and you know being one of the more assiduous ones, we've got a lot of time to do that. So with that, let us thank you.