The mystery of the ‘All For Ireland League’

“The Banshee’s Kiss: William O’Brien MP & the All for Ireland League in Cork, 1910-1918” was the title of a talk by Pat J. Murphy at the Mother Jones Festival in Cork on 29 July.  It was based on his thesis for Liverpool University of a similar title from August 2019 and an article in Saothar 46, 2021.

When it comes to the All For Ireland League I should declare an interest. I am a product of it. Both my grandfathers were supporters. One a farmer and the other a farm labourer – the latter being my paternal grandfather.

Both had clear reasons for their support.  No need for convoluted reasoning about it. For the farmer William O’Brien was the hero of the land war and the man responsible for the settlement of the land issue. For the latter it was the aim and achievement of getting a new Labourer’s cottage and an acre of land.  Both secured social security through these achievements. The Labourer’s cottage and acre was the equivalent of the Welfare State for a rent of one shilling a week. And it gave the inhabitants real bargaining power when it came to employment.   Nobody need starve in such a cottage as with a bit of initiative it could be a mini farm or business  usually run by the housewife. Animals and fowl  plus fruit and vegetables were typically grown. And there was always “the long acre” that could be utilised.  

The final legislative   form for these cottages was the enabling Labourers Act of 1906 which was the achievement of the Land and Labour Association led by O’Brien‘s ally D D Sheehan MP. And they were the envy of many farmers as they were fully modern concrete two storey structures with a spring well and slated roofs in contrast to the thatched mud huts (essentially) of many farmers. There was also the fact that the necessary land was compulsorily purchased from farmers who did not take kindly to this.  Thousands were built across the South West and the resentment of the compulsory purchase is felt to the present day in some cases. As early as 1912 over 40, 000 had been built and continued apace.

Against this background everything I read from academia about the AFIL is tedious and torturous. Mr Murphy’s thesis and writing is no exception.  His talk in Cork has a similar title to his thesis of 2019 and follows the same route as the article in Saothar. His knowledge seems acquired solely from academia as his sources make clear. The problem for them is that the AFIL was unique as it was dealing with a unique situation.  It does not fit any preconceived thought structures that they are familiar with particularly those of the Left – and who is not left wing these days? The torturous arguments arise from trying to explain O’Brien and the AFIL with a leftwing ideology. 

The judgement is based on its relationship with the working class. The problem is that in this period there were in reality two working classes in Ireland – the urban and rural. The left see it as a division within the working class but   that assumes there was a singe overriding original common class interest that got divided in that period but there was no such thing.  The rural farm labourers as personified by my grandfather had nothing in common with Dublin or Cork dockers – and even less with the inmates of Britain’s “dark satanic mills.”  They had totally different social origins and experiences. They lived in different worlds and they each had to find different ways   to progress in life.  To see it otherwise is purely ideological. 

Murphy and many others highlight and condemn the lack of support for the 1913 lock out shown by the AFIL. But it was not a common struggle and it   is a false narrative to paint it as such.  Also he and they also cannot understand why O’Brien and others were not automatically enthusiastic for the Pensions Act. 

The Land and Labour programme would make no sense to modern socialists like Connolly and others. It would seem so conservative and reactionary.   The land war of decades had made the rural society look on the state as its enemy and had learned to look after itself against the state.  On the other hand Socialists looked to the state to solve its problems and this created a very different temperament towards political action regarding the state. The Plantations, Confiscations, Tithes, Evictions etc. had made land the central issue for centuries. It was the all-consuming issue and therefore solutions had to be found to this issue before all others and for all classes and the AFIL together with the Land and Labour Association had found the key to that.  

To put it simply, tenant farmers found more reliable security in owning their land and labourers felt likewise with a cottage and acre than rely on state plans for pensions. It is not exactly unknown today for people, and our most entrepreneurial, to put their faith in property for further security rather than rely on the state for their security in pensions! 

This in no way prevented rural inhabitants from taking full advantage of pensions when available as the number of applicants from Ireland showed when the Pensions Act became law in 1908.  Incredible numbers of people claimed to have been born before births were first recorded in 1864 and they would not look a gift horse in the mouth no more than anybody else would.  There was an element of getting something from the state for the first time in their lives. Before that, as well as the land issues mentioned above there was the Penal Laws and the so called ‘Famine’ that the state had to make up for and the old age pension was not exactly considered fair compensation and in any case they had to pay the necessary extra taxes for the pensions.

The state is the socialists’ friend – but it was regarded in rural Ireland as its natural enemy for centuries and for perfectly good reasons.  That is why there could not be an automatic and easy meeting of minds between socialists   and rural Ireland’s interests at the period in question. That should be explained but not explained away as Mr Murphy and others do as a matter of course and that is why the AFIL remains a convoluted mystery to him and others.

Murphy concludes that the AFIL failed because of “The fear of centrifugal forces, of encouraging further divisions, was a significant factor in enforcing homogeneity and adherence to nationalist principles. Within the narrowed bounds of that conformity at a time of national crisis, there was no room for the AFIL and its message of reconciliation.”  

Remove the abstractions and replace it with some actual history:  the AFIL was defeated by Redmondism who wanted the British to put down by force in a Home Rule Ireland   the only “centrifugal force” in the situation – the Northern Unionists. That Redmondite aim failed disastrously and for the AFIL it caused Partition which their policy would have avoided. Murphy grudgingly admits this as any objective account would.  If that was failure what a glorious failure it was. And if that was failure what was success – John Redmond and Partition?

Murphy is oblivious to the great contribution that O’Brien and the AFIL made to Irish political history – it introduced political party politics, an essential part of  democracy, long before the usually proclaimed origin in the so called ‘civil war’ which should be correctly called the ‘Treaty War.’ There would be no more monolithic politics thereafter. The party divide it created outlived the AFIL itself. But the essential cleavage was established by it and each side had it direct successors. 

On one side, the AFIL, Sinn Féin and Fianna Făil personified by  several people most notably Frank Gallagher who was editor of the Cork Free Press, a major contributor to the Irish Bulletin and the first editor of the Irish Press. On the other side, Redmondism, Free Statism, Fascism and Fine Gael. Take your pick!

Jack Lane

PS. 

Mr Murphy’s research skills may be judged by his reference in the thesis to D D Sheehan MP leaving Cork in 1918. Sheehan was Ireland’s first Labour MP. Around mid-1918 he left Cork to stand as a Labour candidate for Limehouse in the General Election of 1918. He was clearly seen and saw himself as a future major Labour figure in British politics. He had been acting as Chief Whip of the existing Labour group in the Commons.

 He lost the election and that was a personal, political and financial disaster for him. The Labour politics of that area was then determined by the Irish and the Jews.  But they cancelled each other out when it came to elections and later they all had to agree to support a little nondescript Englishman to get a Labour man elected and he turned out to be Clem Attlee.  It is a tragic story for Sheehan. 

A yarn has been going the rounds for some years that he was driven out of Cork by Republicans and Murphy endorses this yarn:

“Irish Times, 16 February, 2001. Jack Lane of the Aubane Historical Society, disputes the family’s claim that Sheehan was driven out by the IRA and Sinn Féin (Letter from Jack Lane, The Corkman, 22 November 2002). However, it is difficult to imagine who else could have been responsible. Sheehan stood unsuccessfully as a Labour candidate for Limehouse in London in 1922. He returned to Ireland in 1926 and resumed his previous career as a journalist.”

This happened in mid-1918 when there was no IRA war. Murphy does not specify the source of the ‘family’s claim’. It was not D D himself who claimed it though he was a journalist, MP and Barrister and never shy in saying what he had to say. Neither does his biographer mention it.   The ‘family’ was his daughter in her nineties as reported by Kevin Myers in the Irish Times.  Readers can judge such a source for its objectivity by Myers when writing about Republicans. She must have had a great memory because she was a very young child at the time of the alleged dramatic event. She obviously had to be given an explanation as to why she was suddenly moved from a happy childhood home in Cork to London. And a bogeyman was created to do the job. A tried and tested method for such situations.  

Not only did D D never mention it, nobody else in the family did either. No fellow AFIL MP or any other public figure did so, no newspapers reported such a dramatic and unique event. Dublin Castle was silent as was the Irish Times, that self-proclaimed journal of record – don’t laugh!  

It did not happen.

Moreover, D D was not a man to be intimidated. He led the O’Brienites in many a street battle against the infamous Molly Maguires (Redmondite party thugs) at all elections throughout Cork for nearly two decades. And he joined the British Army and served in WWI. Not a man to be messed with and everyone knew that. 

But Murphy puts a yarn before facts and that applies to most of his thesis.  The AFIL had a slogan “God Save Ireland” and nowadays it should be amended to “God save the AFIL” from such as Murphy and Academia.

Irish Political Review, September 2023 

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