17 - The Story of Irish Socialism

Summary

Historiography

One is sometimes all too tempted to treat the national story as the main narrative of the period. As regards the early twentieth century, this would be particularly unfair because the social question had recently erupted onto the political scene and was clamouring for attention in more ways than one. The nineteenth century had seen the gradual politicisation of social affairs, especially in urban areas. This had begun in Britain in the late 1830s when Thomas Carlyle had announced the urgency of dealing with the so-called ‘condition of England’ question. The poor and their rights and wrongs, as he had put it, were newly visible. By 1900, it was called the ‘social question’, indeed at times ‘the problem of problems’, and it was a great preoccupation of legislators and social reformers, filled with dread, as they were, about the growth of an ‘underclass’ and the consequent degeneration of a society and an empire.

The social history of Ireland long had to play second fiddle to the political history. D. G. Boyce observes in this regard that ‘[t]he class struggle in Ireland was a nationalist struggle; therefore the only class which stood in the way of freedom was the peculiar class which stood for the union’. This began to change firstly under the influence of Marxist and neo-Marxist historians such as Rumpf and Hepburn.