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From International Socialism (1st series), No.65, Mid-December 1973, pp.30-31.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
A History of the Irish Working Class
P. Berresford Ellis
Gollancz, £3.50.
THE BLURB on the dust cover of this book assures the reader,
‘This is the first major study of Irish history from a Socialist viewpoint since James Connolly’s Labour in Irish History, which was publised in 1916.’
This is only partly true although there have been a few, generally more satisfactory, treatments of specific and selected periods in the history of Ireland. It is the total lack of selection and tha length of the period to which the author addressed himself which give rise to the major fault in the book.
It opens with a discussion of the early Celt’s system of communal organisation, described by Ellis as ‘Celtic Communism’. The breakdown of this system, to provide the basis for feudalism, brings the first specific date, the year 1095, when the Irish Catholic Church decided it was about time that their flock was brought into line with the dictates of Rome. From then to the ‘Northern Revolution’, as Ellis describes the current situation, is a hell of a long way to go in a 300-odd pages. Almost every movement, reformist or revolutionary in any sense, gets a mention; but there is no analysis in depth of any single one.
What ‘socialist’ analysis there is in this book is always of a second-hand nature. Thus Connolly is extensively quoted on Irish history before 1916 and Marx and Engels are cited at great length (some of the numerous quotes are longer than a page) on the mid-19th century Fenian Movement. Only with a substantial chunk of Lenin can Ellis attempt to retrieve his own idea of the significence of the Easter Rising, after acknowledging the hefty criticism directed at it by Trotsky. (Trotsky had pointed out, as the time, that, despite the obvious courage and heroism, the Easter Rising did not in any way resemble a proletarian revolution and argued that the historical role of the Irish proletariat was only beginning.)
This is the most quote-using book that anyone is ever likely to find. At times, this tendency appears to be sheer name-dropping to satisfy Ellis that his ‘socialist’ credentials are consistently obvious. It would be far better to read the original material; there, at least, one would get treatment in depth of the particular historical periods.
The period since Partition gets only superficial treatment and the ‘Northern Revolution’ is summarised in 18 pages and amounts to nothing more than a hastily constructed catalogue of events between 1969 and internment in 1971.
The outcome of Ellis’s supposed socialist analysis is questionable. On the one hand he supports the idea that working class solidarity on a revolutionary programme is no pipe-dream in Northern Ireland. But in the South, he concludes that even given ‘considerable left wing activity’ (and we might hesitate in giving him that), there is ‘little chance of Connolly’s Workers Republic being established’. He goes on, ‘even if there were such a move supported by the people, there are greater forces which might lead to its destruction’.
There are only two points to be made. First, why don’t the same ‘greater forces’ exist in the North? Second, if the historical circumstances were such that a Workers’ Republic programme had the support of the people (specifically the working class and the small farmers) there is no force in Ireland or in Britain that could stop it.
Ellis’s book is a readable guide for the purely general reader. It is not a history of the working class in any meaningful sense of that term. It is history of various movements in which the working class makes an occasional appearance. It is certainly not worth £3.50 of anyone’s money.
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Last updated on 21.1.2008