2. Historical Role of Bourgeois Nationalism¶
Core Argument¶
In this chapter, the historical role of bourgeois nationalism in Ireland is subjected to a rigorous Marxist critique, demonstrating that the Irish bourgeoisie proved incapable of resolving the national question. Arriving too late to compete with English capital, it was content to play second fiddle to English landlords and capitalists, betraying the national cause at decisive moments for selfish economic interests. Connolly, Lenin, and Trotsky shared this analysis, and Wolfe Tone’s dictum that Ireland could only be freed by the “men of no property” proved prophetic.
Grattan’s Parliament of 1782 is exposed as a hollow show: an unreformed parliament of wealthy Protestants, corrupt and rotten. Connolly described Grattan as the ideal capitalist statesman, caring more for property than human rights. The United Irishmen, by contrast, were revolutionary democrats and internationalists, linking national liberation with social emancipation and demanding universal suffrage irrespective of class or creed. Their movement was betrayed by middle-class informers like Thomas Reynolds. After 1798, British imperialism deliberately fomented sectarian division, using the Orange Order to break Catholic-Protestant unity, while the Catholic hierarchy backed the British against the revolutionaries. Emmet’s conspiracy, more working-class in composition, decreed confiscation of church property and nullification of landed property transfers, showing he understood the producing classes would not rally unless the revolution meant freedom from social as well as political bondage. Connolly insisted that the struggle for national liberation is unthinkable unless linked to the social emancipation of the working class.
After the Reformation, religious division deepened Irish national oppression. The Protestant Episcopalian Church enforced the tithe, a hated tax resisted by Catholic peasants who formed secret societies unsupported by middle-class nationalist politicians. The Catholic Church, in response to Protestant proselytism, enforced English in all elementary schools, sealing the fate of the Irish language, further decimated by mass emigration after the Famine. Daniel O’Connell typified the middle-class nationalist exploiter: he repudiated Wolfe Tone as a “criminal,” benefited from the 1832 Reform Act which enfranchised the Catholic middle class, and opposed factory acts in Parliament, defending capitalist interests against workers. At Mullingar in 1843, he declared loyalty to the Queen and opposed separation. This is the authentic voice of the Irish bourgeoisie: unprincipled, reactionary, cowardly, grovelling. The abyss separating socialists from nationalism is class-based: socialists fight for working-class emancipation, not subordination to the Nation. As Connolly argued, a free Ireland must not guarantee capitalist and landlord privileges with green-coated soldiers.