JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

ESSAYS 83Eireann in 1925 visibly distanced Cumann na nGaedheal from important elements of the Griffith/Collins legacy and made it relatively easy to portray it as a rump of pro-British reaction. Thus whenJ.J. Walsh, Minister for Posts and Telegraphs, resigned in 1927 over the government's lack of" commitment to protectionism, he wrote an"open letter to Cosgrave alleging amongst other things:'The party itselfhas gone bodily overto the most reactionary elements of the State .. , A Governmentcalmotdepend on the votes of ranchers and importers and at the same time develop industry and agriculture. '15To allow such a government to continue in power when the main opponent was the Labour Partywould have been precisely to risk the institutionalisation of class divisions in the Free State: the LabourParty's relatively strong performance in the first election of 1927 demonstrated the danger."The FP response was a subtle one, in part determined by an astute evaluation of the weaknesses "inthe ideological heritage of Labour. In this a major, if only partially conscious, ally was that section ofthe leadership of the IRA associated with Peadar O'Donnell. O'Connor establishes the autonomousroots of the syndicalist upsurge of Irish labour in the period 1917-21, conterminous as it was with therise of militant nationalism. 16 He demonstrates that class militancy was not, in any substantial way,a by-product of the national revolution and that the leadership of Sinn Fein was either cold or hostileto it. The substantial autonomy of the dynamics of the two processes of syndicalist militancy andnational revolution had clear implications for the subsequent development of politics in the Free State.O'Connor points out that in some senses Irish syndicalism was a caricature of the weaknesses ofsyndicalism generally: .'amorphous, incoherent and transitory' .17 But was the labour militancy of theperiod, with its disregard for 'politics' and the state, simply symptomatic of the lacunae of the widersyndicalist movement? Or was there no alternative to a militant class-oriented strategy which attemptedto maximise the possibilities of wage movements? There could be no conflagration a la Russia in 1917as the rural bourgeoisie was already fIrmly in control of the countryside. The discontent of the smallfarmer population, particularly in the west, would give rise to some localised and sporadic 'antirancher'manifestations but it had neither the social depth nor geographical reach to turn the countrysideupside down. The small farmer and landless labourer were still mesmerised by visions of piecemealacquisition which were easily assimilable by an anti-rancher rhetoric which had been the stock in tradeof Irish nationalism since the days of the Land League.The objective basis for a radical worker-small farmer alliance was not a strong one and thereforethe strategic choice facing the working class was between a militant and necessarily 'sectional' defenceof its interests within a predominantly conservative social and political order or some variant of a'national' approach involving the search for support from other groups which would necessarilyinvolve a dilution of the class strategy. However, once the economy entered recession in 1921 thepertinence of the choice evaporated as the material conditions for syndicalist militancy disappeared.Yet a choice, of sorts did remain.The Labour Party chose the 'national' approach culminating in the severing of the link with theITUC in 1930 to demonstrate that the Party. was more than a political appendage of the trade unionmovement. But the Party had in fact, in its gyrations between class and national vocations, done littlemore than concretise the fatal ambiguities in Connolly's legacy. ForConnolly's own syndicalism hadsat increasingly uneasily with his view of the leading role that the working class must play in the nationalrevolution. The latter implicitly demanded a policy of alliances, yet Connolly's weakness in analysingrural Ireland meant that the nature of the unity of town and countryside was never specified. B ut clearlythe possibility of allying working class militancy and some substantial section of small farmer Irelandwas central to his thinking and to what became the common sense of the left after 1916. As long as itwas not discarded for the chimera that it was, it provided a major point of access for a populistnationalism.It has often been argued that it was the failure of post-1916 labour to challenge Sinn Fein for theleadership of the national revolution which consigned the working class to a subordinate project within