Stafford Cripps, 'Can socialism come by Constitutional means?, London, Socialist League,1933, (pp , 42-3).

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1 Stafford Cripps, 'Can socialism come by Constitutional means?, London, Socialist League,1933, (pp , 42-3). Those who have held radical and humanitarian views have counted upon the pressure of the ever-widening democratic basis of the electoral franchise to compel capitalism to yield better and better terms to the workers. In the pre-war period this theory of gradual advance seemed plausible enough. With a growing national prosperity, the national standard of living showed a steady rise. Capitalism was ready to pay a price for its continued control in the form of higher wages and fuller and better social services of all kinds. During and immediately after the war this tendency became more developed. The workers demonstrated their strength and their power to protect capitalism with their lives and their labour; their demands were satisfied so far as the capitalists considered it economically possible, but always with the reservation that nothing must be done to deprive capitalism of its effective power of control, whether in the financial, economic or political sphere. As soon as it became apparent that the limit of concession was being reached and that, with a growing slump in world trade, capitalism would break down under the burden it had taken upon itself in more prosperous times, an immediate halt was called; the National Government was formed to protect capitalism and to bring about a rapid reversal of the progress by the withdrawal of the concessions which had been made to the workers. It was essential that the Government should be called National, as otherwise it might have occurred to the great mass of the electorate that it was merely a device to stabilise capitalism and not, as was claimed for it, a means to save the country From the moment when the Government takes control rapid and effective action must be possible in every sphere of the national life. It will not be easy to detect the machinations of the capitalists, and, when discovered, there must be means ready to hand by which they can be dealt with promptly. The greatest danger point will be the financial and credit structure of the country and the Foreign Exchange position. We may liken the position that will arise somewhat to that which arose in August 1914, but with this difference, that at the beginning of the war the capitalists, though very nervous and excited, were behind the Government to a man, whereas when the Socialist Government takes office they will not only be nervous and excited but against the Government to a man. The Government s first step will be to call Parliament together at the earliest possible opportunity and place before it an Emergency Powers Bill to be passed through all its stages in one day. This Bill would be wide enough in its terms to allow all that will be immediately necessary to be done by ministerial orders. These orders must be incapable of challenge in the Courts or in any way except in the House of Commons. This Bill must be ready in draft beforehand, together with the main orders that will be made immediately upon its becoming law. It is probable that the passage of this Bill will raise in its most acute form the constitutional crisis. 66

2 Beatrice Webb, diary, October 1931 (N. and J. Mackenzie, eds, The Diary of Beatrice Webb, Vol. IV: , London, Virago, 1985, pp ). The Parliamentary Labour Party has been not defeated but annihilated, largely, we think, by the women s vote. On the Front Opposition Bench there will be only one ex- Cabinet Minister George Lansbury only two ex-ministers of rank Stafford Cripps and Attlee; with one or two ex-under Secretaries and Household Officers. This Parliament will last four or five years; and the Labour Party will be out of office for at least ten years. The capitalists will remain, for this fourth decade of the twentieth century in complete and unchallenged control of Great Britain, as they are of the U.S.A., France and Italy. Meanwhile the Labour Movement may discover a philosophy, a policy and a code of personal conduct all of which we lack today. The desertion of the three leaders was not the cause of our defeat; it was the final and most violent symptom of the disease from which the Party was suffering The Great War and the world upheaval brought the Labour Party on to the Front Opposition Bench and transformed it into a definitely Socialist party. Two spells of office and the embraces of the old governing class converted the more prominent leaders into upholders of the existing order. Gradually becoming conscious of their leaders lack of faith, the P.L.P. rapidly disintegrated. The dramatic desertion of the three leaders on the eve of the battle turned a certain defeat into a rout. But it revealed a solid core of seven million stalwart Labour supporters, mostly convinced Socialists. Whether new leaders will spring up with sufficient faith, will-power and knowledge to break through the tough and massive defences of British profit-making capitalism with its press and its pulpits, its Royalties and house of Lords, its elaborate financial entanglements of credit and currency all designed to maintain intact ancient loyalties, and when necessary, promote panics in favour of the status quo, I cannot foresee. Have we the material in the British Labour Movement from which can be evolved something of the nature of a religious order a congregation of the faithful who will also be skilful technicians in social reconstruction? What undid the two Labour Governments was not merely their lack of knowledge and the will to apply what knowledge they had. but also their acceptance, as individuals, of the way of life of men of property and men of rank... The Labour Party leaders have shown that they have neither the faith, the code of conduct, nor the knowledge needed for the equalitarian state. 67

3 Lecture 11 Ireland to 1937 Introduction: Ireland before 1845 Three main peoples. The English colonization The Irish resistance. The battle of la Boyne (1690). The battle of the cradle. Rebellion by the United Irishmen (1798). The Act of Union (1800). The United Kingdom of Great-Britain and Ireland. The Famine ( ) Potato blight (1845). Approximately 1 million people died from hunger and disease. Another million had to emigrate between 1845 and Political consequences of the Famine. The growth of Irish nationalism O Connell and the Catholic Emancipation Act (1829). Young Ireland. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (1858). The Fenians. The Land League. The demand for Home Rule. Gladstone and the first two Home Rule Bills ( ). The Easter Rising Patrick Pearse. The river of blood. The Sinn Féin Party Eamon De Valera and the Dail Eireann. The War of Independence and Partition The Irish Republican Army (IRA). Home Rule was finally granted by Lloyd George (1920), but with Partition. The Treaty of July 1921 created an Irish Free State in the South of Ireland (a member of the Commonwealth). The Irish Civil War ( ). Towards the Republic The Statute of Westminster (1931). De Valera s Fianna Fàil. The 1937 constitution. Eire. 68

4 FAMINA DIARY by Brendan o'cathaoir 'TIMES GIVES ITS VIEW OF THE IRISH 69

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6 May 3rd1847: The Famine suffering is sapping not only the vitality but the compassion of the people. In Skibbereen, Dr Daniel Donovan is given ample opportunity to study thee sensations experienced by the starving. Young and old are becoming increasingly insensitive to the wants of others, he notes, responses being dictated by the-desperation of their own needs. Dr Donovan has seen mothers snatch food from their starving children, sons and fathers fight over a potato, and parents look on the dead and decaying bodies of their offspring without evincing the slightest emotion. While the people dread that they or their relations might be buried without a coffin, they are terrified of pestilence. Corpses are lying out in the fields, Bishop Charles McNally of Clogher tells the president of Maynooth College, and none but the clergy can be induced to approach. I yesterday sent a coffin out for a poor creature who died in a field of fever, and have just heard that no one could be prevailed to put the body in it. In Co Kerry, Archdeacon John O Sullivan of Kenmare records there is nothing unusual to find four or five bodies on the street every morning. They would remain so and in their homes unburied. had we not employed three men to go about and convey them to the graveyard. In Tralee a visitor is informed that the local distress is "quite beyond their means of relief" even though the town is situated on the estate of an " unencumbered landlord, who draws about 12,000 a year out of it but those whose subscription for the relief of his starving tenants was paltry in the extreme" The body of a child lies in the main street opposite the principal hotel, "and the remains have lain there for several hours on a few stones by the side of a footway like a dead dog". From Clare and Cork, Galway and Mayo come reports of the dead being buried without coffins everywhere, as the living are too weak to carry their bodies to the graveyard. The Times, always ready to pounce on the sister kingdom' s wound says the astounding apathy of the Irish themselves to the most horrible scenes under their eyes and capable of relief by the smallest exertion is something absolutely without parallel in the history of civilised nations The brutality of piratical tribes sinks to nothing compared with the absolute inertia of the Irish in the midst of the most horrifying scenes." It regards the Irish as a people born and bred from time immemorial in inveterate indolence, improvidence, disorder and consequent destitution" It argues that money spent on Irish relief is wasted. Ireland needs real men possessed of average hearts, heads -and hands. Edward Twistleton, the Chief Poor Law Commissioner in Ireland, is concerned that such racist opinions in the most influential newspaper of the day are having a negative impact on British policy. 66

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8 TONY BLAIR'S FAMINE STATEMENT Sir, Does the Irish Government carry so little about the relationship between.great Britain and Ireland that it does not even acknowledge Tony Blair s admission and apology for the British Government s -reaction to the famine over 150 years ago? Surely Tony Blair has taken an important step towards a better relationship between Ireland and Great Britain one which John Major failed to take in so many years. - The Labour: government has finally lit a candle after years of darkness and betrayal by the British government. I ask the Irish Government to keep this candle burning and not let it burn out. Yours, etc., - JOANNA LAIRD. Dublin A chara, In my opinion, the single most important contribution to the commemoration of the famine is the regular Famine Diary by Brendán O Cathaoir in your own paper. This never fails to illustrate the enormity and horror of what happened to our own forebears just a few generations ago. Thankfully it a1so commemorates the many, like the Christian Brothers of Lombard Street in Galway, who as the column of May 3lst told us " are concerned not with the risks to their own health in the midst of such misery but at being unable to feed more than half of the 1,046 hungry boys crowding into their schools" Yours, etc. ANTHONY JORDAN, Gilford Road, Dublin 4. The Irish Times, June 12,

9 Ireland: The Great Hunger By Meadbh Gallagher From An Phoblacht/Republican News, 7 September, 1995 This docunent is part of the Ireland History Section of the docunentary collection, World History Archives, and is associated with the world history resource page, Galeway to World History. The Irish famine, An Gorta Mor, was unparalleled. No famine ever claimed such a high percentage of a country's population. Only two famines this century have claimed more lives. Below, Meadbh Gallagher looks behind the stories of its horror to the thinking which allowed it to happen. The Cure POVERTY WAS THE DISEASE. Over four million died of it. Over two and a half million became refugees, fleeing Ireland to seek new lives abroad. This horror took place in the space of five years, beginning this week 150 years ago. Poverty is never a natural disaster. Impoverishment was the cause. Poverty for the many was, as always, the byproduct of wealth for the few. But the catalyst for what we call An Gorta Mor, was natural. It was a blight, a fungus growth which began to take effect on potato crops in Ireland in September The blight had visited other European countries, but none of these experienced famine. Ireland s poor depended upon the potato for survival - for over three million people it was their only food. When blight damaged nearly half the crop in 1845, millions of peasants faced a winter of partial famine not new to their experience. Continuous rain until March 1846 provided ideal conditions for the spread of the fungus and the worst conditions for those already succumbing to starvation and disease. In 1846 there was total crop failure and total famine. By 1847, the blight was less severe, but the effect of the famine had multiplied. Most vulnerable were the poorer, densely populated, Irish-speaking areas in the south and west. Two thirds of the peasant farmers of Connacht were cottiers, surviving on less than five acres of land. Throughout the island, 130,000 families were trying to survive on less than one acre. This massive class of the poor and the poorer grew grain to pay their rent, For as long as they could sell their grain, they could pay the landlord and avoid eviction. The grain they sold was exported to feed the working class of England, whose staple diet was increasingly bread. On the worst land, the Irish peasants grew potatoes, their food. About 40% lived in one-room mud cabins without windows or chimneys. They shared that cabin with an average of ten other people. The English establishment had a word for this extreme poverty. They called it pauperism. Economic advisor to the British government, Nassau Senior, railed against the cancer of pauperism. The establishment s magazine of wit, Punch, described Irish paupers as the blight of their own land, and the curse of the Saxon. Pauperisation was blamed on the paupers themselves. The size of the Irish peasant population had come to be seen as a threat to the economic viability of Britain as well as the future incomes of Irish landlords in 1841 Ireland s population was one third that of Britain s. With a mindset reminiscent of the right-wing response to the spread of AIDS amongst the gay communities of the US and the general population of Africa in the early 1980s, establishment Britain deemed the famine to be the cure for "Irish overpopulation. The permanent undersecretary to the British Treasury, Charles Trevelyan, a civil servant with responsibility for Irish famine relief, believed the famine was divine retribution. The overpopulation of Ireland, he wrote, being altogether beyond the power of man, the cure had been applied by the direct stroke of an all-wise Providence in a mariner as unexpected and as unthought of as it is likely to be effectual. Aided by a natural blight on potato crops recurring three years in a row, Trevelyan and other servicers of the creed of political economy directed Irish land into totally different patterns of use over a relatively short period of time. The fact that millions of Irish peasants were in the way of this land clearance was of little consequence to the end game. Mass eviction was encouraged. in one case, in March 1846, the entire village of Ballinglass was evicted in order to turn the land use to grazing. Some landlords paid their tenants emigration fares. The Foreign Secretary, Lord Palmerstown was typical. Half his income came from his Irish estates and in 1847 alone, his agents emigrated 2,000 people from his Sligo land. To Nassau Senior, who regarded the unfolding horror as an invaluable experiment for political economists, a million deaths would scarcely be enough to do much good. Trevelyan s superior in 1848, the Chancellor of the Exchequer Charles Wood, wrote to an Irish landlord: I am not at all appalled by your tenantry going. That seems to me a necessary part of the process... We must not complain of what we really want to obtain. The prime minister, Lord Russell, whose father had served as Viceroy in Ireland, was content to hide behind evasive parliamentary rhetoric when confronted with factual accounts of what was happening in Ireland. And these accounts were ever forthcoming. By 1848, Russell s own appointee in Ireland, the Lord Lieutenant Clarendon, was calling his government s policy there extermination. During the period of the Great Starvation, two British governments held office; one Tory, under Robert Peel, the second Russell s Whig administration. Laissez-faire economics was the creed of the day and neither government deviated much from this. The role of parliament was to protect the interests of the few against the plight of the many. Politicians of the day were busy replacing the interests of landlords with those of traders. Under the banner of thee trade, one form of protectionism was being swept aside to make way for another. Supply was to feed demand, but demand was only recognised as such when it came with purse in hand. The Irish peasantry bad no purchasing power. Neither did they have political power. Their impoverishment was helped by their disempowerment. and the support they lent to Catholic middle-class agitation led by Daniel O Connell had done nothing to change their status. O Connell, himself a landlord of some ill-repute, summed up his politics thus: I desire no social revolution, no social change. In short, salutary restoration without revolution, an Irish parliament, British connection, one King, two legislatures. The politics of the man they called the Great Advocate was hardly power to the people. 67

10 The churches in Ireland also offered little hope to the peasantry in forcing change. The Church of Ireland was the established church, it was entitled to collect taxes from tenants regardless of their religion. It was vehemently on the side of the landlords, and it was left to the Society of Friends (The Quakers) to seek long-term relief for the Irish poor. The Catholic Church hierarchy remained largely silent on the holocaust taking place. It is worthy of note that in the years following the famine, the Catholic Church multiplied its ownership of property in Ireland. The group that offered most hope of democratic revolution in the period of the starvation, the vanguardist Young Irelanders, were themselves largely of the landlord and urban professional classes and had little grass-roots appeal. They offered high-minded ideals but no change from the property system impoverishing the people. One voice which did offer an alternative politics was that of James Fintan Lalor, but his appears as a voice in the wilderness at the time. He stated in 1848: I acknowledge no right of property which takes the food of millions and gives them a famine... I assert the true and indefeasible right of property - the right of our people to live in this land and possess it. Lalor was also clear that this full right of ownership maynd ought to be asserted and enforced by any and all means. He saw through the Young Irelanders rhetoric and pointed out that they desired, not a democratic, but a merely national revolution. Resistance Resistance to the Great Starvation did take place, but it was sporadic and disorganised. In addition, both the constitutional nationalists and the British government responded predictably to it. Daniel O Connell frequently called for more troops to be sent to quell the Secret societies which resisted landlord oppression. The British government had heavily armed escorts accompanying Irish food transports within six months of the first potato crop failure. Within a year, a mobile force of 2,000 troops had been deployed and the military guarded food depots, export ships and harvest fields. In mid-october 1846, extra troops were drafted into trouble spots, where food riots were taking place. In November, the Chancellor, Charles Wood, wrote to his Irish Lord Lieutenant urging him to go to the verge of the law and a little beyond in suppressing revolt. A month later, a new emergency powers act was in place, the Crime & Outrage Act, voted in with the help of most Irish MPs. Fifteen thousand extra troops were sent to Ireland that same month and an additional 10,000 in The degree of destitution among the people was enough to quell any hope of organised revolt, but that did not stop the English government from crushing any show of revolt that did take place. Relief Local responsibility and private charity were stressed as the methods of famine relief. Between 1846 and 1853, Britain spent 9.5 million in Ireland on famine relief while its system of Poor Rates and landlord borrowings in Ireland collected 8 million for the same purpose. Much of the British exchequer outlay was originally given in loan form only, thus hindering its ability to be used where it was most wanted. Management of the economy in the interests of the landlord and trading classes was such that Irish food exports continued unhindered while millions fell victim to starvation and disease. Between July 1845 and February 1846 alone, over 1 million worth of food was exported. In 1845, Robert Peel s administration bought 100,000 worth of Indian corn in America but this was stored rather than distributed immediately. The policy was to offer it for sale when local Irish prices rose, thus keeping prices down without affecting the ability of local traders to make a profit. Poor rates on landlords were used to fund local relief schemes. The country was divided into Poor Law Unions based on district electoral divisions. Each Union had a workhouse. Only people who became inmates of the workhouses could receive assistance. Each Union was managed by ex-officio and elected Guardians, overseen by a network of inspectors answerable to the English government. Workhouses were designed to deter spongers, and conditions were so bad them that inmates often committed misdemeanours in order to get transferred to jail, where their chances of survival were better. By 1847, providing work was of little use as people were physically incapable of working by that stage. Nevertheless, a layer of public works schemes was already in place. These were largely unproductive, as the government didn t wish to upset the chances of profit for private developers. The system of government famine relief in Ireland was elaborate and widespread. It was designed to contain the Irish problem, not to relieve it. The physical design of the workhouses speaks volumes: at the end of each was an exit point known as the Dead House. A few years after the Great Starvation, Britain was to spend 69.3 million on the Crimean war. As today, money was thrown at imperialistic ventures whilst famine victims were left to die by natural causes. The cause In his analysis of the famine, James Connolly strongly argued that within the lines of capitalist political economy, the actions of the English capitalist class and the Irish landlord class were unassailable and unimpeachable. No one who accepted capitalist society and the laws thereof can logically find fault with the statesmen of England for their acts in that awful period. They stood for the rights of property and free competition and philosophically accepted their consequences upon Ireland. In words which must surely dominate the great debate currently being waged about what bas been described as The Irish holocaust, Connolly wrote: The non-socialist Irish man or woman who fumes against that administration is in the illogical position of denouncing an effect of whose cause he is a supporter. That cause was the system of capitalist property. In 1849, Queen Victoria paid her first visit to Ireland. Punch magazine pleaded with a nation ravaged by famine, Let Erin forget. Today, the call to forget is more widespread and closer to home. For the sake of an understanding of what continues to be called famine in today s world, none should forget the cause of the Irish Great Hunger, and none should ignore the cure accepted for it. 68

11 In focus: Irish Economic Development, Home Rule and Ulster Unionism The last major domestic political event before the outbreak of the First World War was the passage of the Home Rule Act which legislated for the devolution of limited powers to a parliament in Dublin. Implementation of the Act was suspended until the end of the war but subsequent events, including the Easter Rising by the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1916, the ensuing polarization of Irish opinion, and the Anglo-Irish war rendered the Act a dead letter. In 1920, one hundred and twenty years after the Act of Union of Britain and Ireland had achieved royal assent, the government of Ireland Act divided Ireland into two parts, each with its own parliament. This reactivation of the Home Rule Act failed to reflect the political shift which had occurred among Irish nationalists in the intervening period. The following year, while six northern counties remained part of the United Kingdom, twenty-six southern counties gained dominion status within the British Empire as the Irish Free State. The events which resulted in this settlement were propelled by two contending nationalist ambitions on the part of inhabitants of Ireland: a nationalism which favoured the creation of a separate Irish political entity and a nationalism which identified with the British crown and maintenance of the United Kingdom. Furthermore, although there was support for political union in the southern counties of Ireland, the majority of Ireland s unionists lived in Ulster. However, although these contending nationalist aspirations provided the initial dynamics of the Irish Question in the half-century before 1921, the importance of economic factors should not be neglected. Relative economic development and relative levels of average income, within the United Kingdom and within Ireland itself, provided important considerations which contributed to the process that resulted in political bifurcation. Moreover, despite us underdevelopment relative to Britain, there is evidence that Ireland, particularly in Dublin and Ulster, exhibited features which were similar to those of the British labour market described above. in Ireland, however, these features were too weakly developed to counter the structural divisions caused by the cultural differences and uneven development which divided the North and South. Nineteenth-century Ireland, which had a predominantly agrarian economy, was the poorest of the four constituent countries which comprised the United Kingdom; Ireland alone experienced a fall in population, a trend which persisted until the First World War. Industrial development in Ireland occurred very unevenly, reflecting to some extent the limited endowment of appropriate natural resources, particularly coal which was imported from Britain. Dublin, the major administrative centre, was a relatively underdeveloped industrial centre which processed the agricultural produce of its rural hinterland. Ulster, the northern province. had Ireland s highest average per capita income and produced the bulk of Ireland s manufactured goods though labour productivity in its industrial sector was low relative to Britain. Belfast, Ireland s largest city and Ulster s industrial centre, depended heavily upon three industries which were oriented towards the export trades: linen manufacture, engineering, and shipbuilding. In the second half of the nineteenth century, Ulster prospered under the stimulus of external demand as world trade expanded. Although American markets were significant, British and Empire markets provided the most important outlets for the linen factories and Belfast shipyards. However, this pattern of uneven economic development within Ireland reflected a long standing division which was cultural, political and religious in nature. This split was clearly indicated by the 1911 census of Ireland: Protestant Catholic Total Ulster 891, ,000 1,582,000 Three southern provinces 250,000 2,550,000 2,800,000 Ireland 1,141,000 3,241,000 4,382,000 69

12 From R.Foster (ed), The Oxford Illustrated History of Ireland, Oxford Univesity Press,