2 - ‘Not Alone Personal Liberty but Economic Freedom’: Socio-economic Rights in the Making of the 1922 Irish Free State Constitution

Summary

The most glaring inequalities in wealth which are found in the world today result from the fact that an individual purchases a piece of land that has great strategic value, and in course of years becomes extremely wealthy through no effort of his own but merely from the value given to that land by the community at large…I therefore urge a Constitutional provision which would give the right to an All-Ireland parliament adequate powers to deal with the unearned increment.

– Clement France

I do believe that we have the opportunity of creating a truly Irish Ireland in the Constitution and for this end we must all work.

– Hugh Kennedy

Ireland was not alone in experiencing a surge in popular militancy and self-organisation. In February 1919 in the city of Seattle, Washington, more than sixty-five thousand workers engaged in a five-day general strike, shutting down the city in order to force an end to wartime wage controls. Government and employers united in using the strike to launch a series of red scare panics throughout the United States. Meanwhile, workers divided in support of the Industrial Workers of the World, with its One Big Union policy as a prelude to worker control of society, and the American Federation of Labour, which aimed at securing remedial legislation instead. Clement J. France, a legal counsel at the Port of Seattle and a third-party, Farmer-Labour politician, sided with the latter set of aims, running unsuccessfully for the US Senate in 1920. The following year, France was selected as a Quaker representative of the American Committee of Relief in Ireland, distributing aid to civilians through the Irish White Cross as military violence closed existing welfare infrastructure. Given the IWC's success and non-partisanship, the Provisional Government invited a number of its members, including France, to join a committee tasked with drafting a constitution for the Irish Free State.

France's experiences in Seattle neatly encapsulate what Duncan Kennedy has described as the ‘globalisation of social legal thought’, a transformation in modes of legal argument arising in response to the problems of industrial-urban capitalism in the late nineteenth century, as working-class organisations in Europe and North America confronted government and employers with collective demands for improved working and living conditions.