3. Feargus O’Connor and the Fenians¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 3: Feargus O’Connor and the Fenians¶
This chapter dissects the fraught relationship between nationalism and class struggle in nineteenth-century Ireland, arguing that the bourgeoisie invariably subordinates national liberation to its own class interests. The national movement unfolded against a backdrop of immiseration: Marx noted that between 1849 and 1869, Irish wages rose 50–60 per cent while the cost of necessities more than doubled. Feargus O’Connor discovered that Daniel O’Connell’s class feeling was stronger than his desire for Irish freedom, confirming the bourgeois pattern of siding with the enemy bourgeoisie against its own working class.
The Fenians represented the most advanced wing of Irish revolutionary democracy, drawing support exclusively from labouring and artisan classes while attracting the hatred of wealthy nationalists and the Catholic Church. Marx and Engels supported the Fenians but sharply criticised their adventurist tactics, terrorist tendencies, and refusal to link with the English workers’ movement. The Clerkenwell Prison explosion of December 1867, which wounded 120 people, turned London masses against the Irish cause, illustrating the political cost of such methods.
The Land League, established by Michael Davitt in 1879, organised peasants to pay only fair rents and resist evictions. The 1881 Land Act excluded 100,000 poor peasants in arrears, and the movement was ultimately sold out by middle-class leaders. James Connolly advocated a revolutionary alliance of workers and peasants, recognising that the partial solution—transferring land to Irish ownership through deals at the top—merely swapped one oppressor for another. The Land League’s demise revived socialism, with the Democratic Federation (later the SDF) founded in 1881 in response to Irish agitation.
British imperialists cynically deployed the Orange card to block Home Rule, stoking sectarianism for self-interest. The only hope of defeating Orange reaction lay in splitting Protestant workers from landlords on a class basis, as Connolly and James Larkin attempted. A significant development came with the Independent Orange Order, formed after T.H. Sloan, a shipyard cement worker, defeated a wealthy Tory landowner for South Belfast in 1902 as the ‘Democratic candidate’. Under R. Lindsay Crawford, the Order broke from extreme Protestant bigotry. Its July 1905 manifesto declared the Boyne victory was not over creed or race but for human liberty shared by Roman Catholics, calling for bridging the gulf dividing Ireland and cooperating with those who place the country first. The manifesto insisted that those unable to rise above party and sect on a national issue are foes to nationality and human freedom.