Counter-revolutionary masculinities: gender, social control and revising the chronologies of Irish nationalist politics

ABSTRACT

The period from 1912 to 1923 is the most heavily privileged period in modern Irish historiography and it has become commonplace to describe this period as “The Irish Revolution.” Moreover, a number of Irish historians have built on this to see the post-1922 period as the “Irish Counter-Revolution,” when more radical political impulses were suppressed in favour of the Free State’s vision of conservative law and order. This paper challenges these paradigms by arguing that the themes commonly associated with the “Revolution” – meritocracy, violence, the excitement about acquiring national power – had currency within Irish nationalism long before 1912. Similarly, the defining features of the “Counter-Revolution” – coercion, fear of socialism and feminism, a desire to force Irish citizens to live up to certain prescribed social roles – were already implicit in the politics and culture of the “Revolution.” Viewing Irish nationalism through the lens of masculinity shows how there was much continuity here: the Irish nationalist project of creating politically reliable, implicitly male citizens can be traced from the period of the cultural revival, through the “Revolution” and into the post-1922 “Counter-Revolution.” Moreover, “Masculinity” was a key means of supressing more radical political currents in the years after 1916.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• masculinity studies
• historiography
• Irish revolution

Acknowledgments

My thanks to the participants at the Revolutionary Masculinities symposium at Maynooth University, June 2017, who gave valuable feedback on an earlier draft of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s)

Notes

1. Beatty, Masculinity and Power; “Irish Revolution Without a Revolution”; and “Gaelic League and the Spatial Logics.”

2. O’Hegarty, Victory of Sinn Fein, 56, 57.

3. Cf. Ryan, “In the Line of Fire.”

4. Regan, Irish Counter-Revolution, 140–141.

5. Burke, like O’Hegarty, was horrified by the idea of politically assertive women, writing in 1796: “The revolution harpies of France, spring from night and hell, or from that chaotick anarchy, which generates equivocally ‘all monstrous, all prodigious things’, cuckoo-like adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring State. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves, in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters) flutter over our heads, and souse down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.” “Letter to a Noble Lord” (February, 1796) in Burke, Further Reflections on the Revolution in France. The “Noble Lord” was the 4th Earl Fitzwilliam, a close ally of Burke’s. The quote Burke uses here is from Paradise Lost’s description of Hell.

6. O’Hegarty, Victory of Sinn Fein, 104–105.

7. “Capital and Labour.” Irish Freedom, November, 1913.

8. O’Hegarty, Victory of Sinn Fein, 178–180.

9. Untitled Essay (1966), National Library of Ireland (NLI), Dan Breen Papers, MS41929/1-3.

10. O’Malley, Another Man’s Wounds, 59, 144.

11. General Election: Manifesto to the Irish People (1918), Military Archives, Bureau of Military History, Contemporary Documents 95/4/1.

12. O’Ceileacher, Labour Problem.

13. Claims on Property: Sinn Fein Manifesto, Handbill, NLI, Piaras Béaslaí Papers MS 33912 (11).

14. Laffan, Resurrection of Ireland, 315–316.

15. Ibid., 315.

16. Peace and Prosperity or Red Ruin, de Valera Handbill (1917), NLI LO P1116, Item 63.

17. Quoted in Ryan, Gender, Identity and the Irish Press, 213.

18. Letter from Eamon de Valera to Mary McSwiney (11 September 1922), University College Dublin Archives (UCDA), de Valera Papers, p150/657.

19. Quoted in Cronin et al., GAA: A People’s History, 320.

20. Barry, Guerrilla Days in Ireland, 62.

21. O’Malley, Another Man’s Wounds, 70 and O’Malley, Singing Flame, 21.

22. Military Archives, Bureau of Military History, Contemporary Documents, 202/5, Cumann na mBan: Scheme of Organisation, n.d. (circa, 1921–22); NLI LOLB 161, Item 26, The Volunteers, the Women, and the Nation, Cumann na mBan Pamphlet, 1915.

23. NLI EPH B13, Cumann na mBan Constitution, n.d. (circa 1921).

24. NLI LOLB 161, Item 5, Cumann na mBan Pamphlet, n.d. (circa 1919–21).

25. Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism, 89.

26. T. Mac S. [Toirdealbach Mac Suibhne, i.e. Terence MacSwiney] “Irish Womanhood: Wolfe Tone’s Wife: A Model for Cumann na mBan.” Fianna Fáil/The Irish Army: A Journal for Militant Ireland (31 October 1914).

27. Banerjee, Muscular Nationalism, 54.

28. Ibid., 105.

29. “The Murder Machine” (1913) in Pearse, Political Writings and Speeches, 7.

30. “The Value of the Irish Language and Literature,” An Claidheamh Soluis, Vol. 1, No. 38, 2 December 1899. Quoted in Ó Conchubhair. Fin de Siècle na Gaeilge, 22. This article was an account of a public meeting in Carraig an Ime [Carriganimmy] in Cork.

31. O’Hickey, Irish in the Schools.

32. Forde, Irish Language Movement.

33. National University of Ireland-Galway (NUIG), Stephen Barrett Papers, G3/1476, Reasons Why You Should Join the Gaelic League, n.d.

34. MacPherson, Women and the Irish Nation, 88. See also: Pašeta, Irish Nationalist Women, 22 and passim.

35. Eoin MacNeill, Inishmaan, to “Charlie,” 17 July 1891, UCDA, Eoin MacNeill papers, LA1/G/283; An Claidheamh Soluis, 29 November 1902, quoted in McMahon, Grand Opportunity, 136. “Treating” refers to the social ritual of men buying alcoholic drinks for each other. MacNeill also felt that the Gaelic League should work to prevent late-night dancing: Eoin MacNeill to O’Daly, 12 January 1904, UCDA, Eoin MacNeill papers, LA1/J/10.

36. McMahon, Grand Opportunity, 132.

37. O’Conor-Eccles, Simple Advice. Copy in NUIG, Stephen Barrett papers, G3/1189.

38. Gaelic Journal, June 1897, quoted in McMahon, Grand Opportunity, 159.

39. Harvey, Spaces of Hope, 163.

40. Hobson, Defensive Warfare.

41. Hobson, Flowing Tide.

42. Liam de Roiste (10 October 1914) “Children and Men.” Fianna Fáil/The Irish Army: A Journal for Militant Ireland, Vol. 1, No. 3.

43. Griffith, How Ireland Has “Prospered.” The National Library of Ireland catalogue suggests this may have been published in 1911, but since it talks of England “fighting for her life,” it was presumably written after the outbreak of the War, but before the Easter Rising (a monumental event of which it makes no mention).

44. Stopford Green, Irish Republican Army.

45. O’Malley, Singing Flame, 12.

46. UCDA, Kevin O’Higgins Papers, P197/170, State of National Emergency: The Garda – Armed or Unarmed, Confidential Memo to Minister for Justice from Eoin O’Duffy, 6 December 1926.

47. Kevin O’Higgins believed that centuries of English rule had left the Irish without “political faculties” and with little in the way of “civic sense.” Thus, he claimed that anti-Treatyite republicans were ignorant that “man is a social being and not a wild animal.” O’Higgins, Catholic Layman in Public Life. And O’Higgins’ famous speech at Oxford in 1924 is filled with claims that the Irish need to be made ready for self-government (a tacit admission that they were not yet ready for this). O’Higgins, Three Years Hard Labour.

48. Beatty, “Zionism and Irish Nationalism,” 325–329.

49. Connolly, Re-Conquest of Ireland, 44.

50. Ó Ceallaigh Ritschel, “Under Which Flag,” 61–62.

51. As Hobsbawm observed: “no serious historian of nations and nationalism can be a committed political nationalist… Nationalism requires too much belief in what is patently wrong.” Nations and Nationalism, 12.

52. Beatty, “Fianna Fáil’s Agrarian Man”; Ellis, “De Valera’s Gains”; Hatfield, “Games for Boys”; Heffernan, “Physical Culture”; Machnik-Kékesi, Gendering Bodies; and Mytton, Revolutionary Masculinities.