Did Sinn Fein Make a mess of the Irish Revolution

[brasco]

Just after reading some anarchist tract which roundly criticises SF for being Imperialist lackies!!!!! Continues to class 1916-21 as the counter class war?

Can someone enlighten me...

[Eorna]

I think that the problem lies with the "anarchist tract". I would take anything from it, with a large pinch of salt.

[Duth Ealla]

Hi,

One analysis is that the national movement in the time of the anglo-irish war was drawn from many disparate elements united by the over-riding ambition of ending the British occupation.

Within there were people like o'Malley but then also the Kevin o'Higgins and Cosgraves with their conservative agenda

I can see why there would then be reason to see the civil war as having some type of class element.

Why the 16-21 period would be defined as such by the anarchists is not clear to me unless it is because the national question was to the fore and all other considerations were pushed to the side.

As all workers are the same then independence or occupation would still see workers oppressed by the Man. Therefore anything other than focus on class warfare is to ignore the real struggle and is a type of counter-class-struggle.

Makes sense?

I dont support the anarchists myself as I think they see things only in absolutes when the world is alot more complex than that. There is a discussion there though but I think the civil war period is closer to what they might imagine as class-warfare.

[Eorna]

Anarchists would have seen the 16-21 period, being driven by Nationalism which they would see as a product of an imperialist society. It defines people by borders and nations, which anarchists would see as barriers that the ruling class have set up to divide workers, and have them fight amongst themselves.

[Duth Ealla]

Anarchists would have seen the 16-21 period, being driven by Nationalism which they would see as a product of an imperialist society. It defines people by borders and nations, which anarchists would see as barriers that the ruling class have set up to divide workers, and have them fight amongst themselves.

yup i agree. which is what i tried to say but didnt get across so succintly

[Mitsui]

A V-E-R-Y big question for any forum!

If by SF you mean the various folks who fought in the war of independence, they were amateurs, with sometimes wildly differing aims, temporarily burying their differences to fight absolute experts in a game that - & we often forget this here in Ireland - had never really been played before: a 20th century freedom struggle.

As such they (collectively) played a blinder, all things considered and in spite of major errors (and in spite of arguing wildly among themselves), such that the Irish war of independence was studied later in the 20th century (for both positive and negative lessons) by every similarly-inclined group from Algeria to Vietnam.

One can argue from now till Tib's Eve about the rights & wrongs of it, and what was essentially gained, but they really did have no rule-book or precedent on how to do it properly. The real argument (& it's barely started, it often seems to me) is what we did with our 'freedom' (I know some will object to the word, which is why I put it in quotation marks) once we got it.

The sadly-missed Breandán ó hEithir, in his brilliant Begrudgers Guide to irish Politics, tells a wonderful story about a priest who's walking down the street one day in an Irish village on the day the papers carry the announcement that the Treaty has been signed in London. He passes a smithy and sees the blacksmith standing there looking very disgruntled. 'It's a great day for Ireland!' the priest sez, but the blacksmith answers
(I tell the story from memory, so the quotes are not exact) 'Maybe so, but not for me. This freedom is all very well, but if we get rid of the gentry I'll be broke - I depend on them for my trade!"
To which the priest says: "Oh, cheer up - sure we'll have our own gentry now."
At which the blacksmith gets suddenly very fierce and growls "Father, we will in our a*se have our own gentry!!"

What happened after independence, basically, was that various jumped-up sorts decided that they'd be "our own gentry". This ranged from the professionals (politicians, lawyers, bankers, doctors etc - the crowd whose spiritual and sometimes literal descendants often still act like they are our "gentry, and many of whom are up to the oxters in making our current mess) to the Catholic Church, whose chokehold on the minds of the overwhelmingly Catholic electorate meant that all political parties would have to kowtow to them for generations.

Later Dev whipped up a lot of expectations among those who felt disenfranchised by the new order when he decided to found Fianna Fáil, which he organised along the Tammany Hall lines he'd learned in the States and which was never really designed as anything other than a vehicle to bring him to power. An awful lot really was expected from FF but Dev had committed himself (for the above mentioned necessary electoral purposes) to compromise with the Catholic Church and once he achieved power he proceeded to sell out a whole range of supporters from feminists to socialists and eventually even the IRA, who'd been very, very useful to him. Todd Andrews, a senior founding member of FF and Dev loyalist, writes ruefully in his autobiog of how the fierce revolutionary FFers in power fell over themselves to gentrify themselves.

Like I say, it's a huge question you ask, and I won't pretend this is an answer. It's really just meant to indicate how complicated your question is! Again, it's not so much Sinn Féin in 1916-21 that you want to take a look at as what happened afterwards when they all split up and started killing each other. Books which actually examine your core question in depth are few and far between (and so far as I know invariably recent). One you might find informative is The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921-1936 by a fella called John M Regan.

Edit: OP much better answered by more immediate replies - I hadn't seen them because I was still writing the above screed when they posted. Slow typer - sorry!