Ireland in Transition, 1867-1921

D. George Boyce, Alan O'Day

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781134320004
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

This wide-ranging collection brings together multiple perspectives on a key period in Irish history, from the Fenian Rising in 1867 to the creation of the Irish Free State and Northern Ireland in 1921, with a focus on the formation of Irish identity. The chapters, written by team of experts, focus on key individuals or ideological groups and consider how they perceived Ireland's future, what their sense of Irish identity was, and who they saw as the enemy. Providing a new angle on Ireland during the period from 1867 to 1921, this book will be important reading for all those with an interest in Irish history.

Part I

HOME RULE, IRELAND AND A ‘UNION OF HEARTS’

1

MAX WEBER AND LEADERSHIP, BUTT, PARNELL AND DILLON

Nationalism in transition¹

Alan O'Day

Parnell died, the greatest statesman we had since O'Connell.

diary entry, 6 October 1891²

Introduction

The observation above by an obscure diarist links Daniel O'Connell and Charles Stewart Parnell, the two towering personalities of Irish nationalism between the Union in 1801 and the Easter Rising of 1916. How individuals and events interact, whether political figures initiate the movements they lead or merely ride the whirlwind, is a perennial question. In the older literature the Irish party often is portrayed as inflexible and a collection of bureaucratic wire-pullers while more recent writers have seen it as responsive, even vibrant. Three related matters are examined in order to shed light on the issue: first, whether individuals or movements shape history is analysed; second, there is consideration of theoretical formulations of nationalism; third, three key individuals who embodied distinct forms of leadership — the respected, the charismatic and the bureaucratic — are assessed. The case studies of three national leaders reveal a transition in Irish politics, a transition consistent with Max Weber's analysis of leadership. The rationale for focusing on political and party leaders is provided by Tom Garvin who observes that the ‘development of the militant pragmatic, disciplined mass political party [w]as the characteristic Irish political institution’.³

O'Connell, the founder of modern Irish nationalism, saw his task as getting ‘all Catholic Ireland acting as one man’.⁴ His labours were directed towards moulding ‘a people who can be thus brought to act together and by one impulse are too powerful to be neglected and too formidable to be long opposed’. For his efforts, O'Connell is celebrated as the ‘Emancipator’ and commemorated by the foremost public monument in central Dublin. O'Connell was the visible personification of the demand that Catholics be granted civil liberties within the United Kingdom. He did not achieve this on his own; numerous other people, some holding secure niches in the pantheon of national heroes and others now long forgotten, walked in his shade upholding the standard. Yet O'Connell had no difficulty in professing that it was his tenacity that gained the final triumph of Emancipation in 1829. Admirers and critics alike at the time accepted O'Connell at his own valuation.⁵ However, this apparent historical truism can no longer be taken for granted. As Kevin B. Nowlan points out, ‘Daniel O'Connell probably more than any other major figure in modern Irish history has been the victim of the shifts in popular attitudes to nationalism and its significance’.⁶ The injection of new forms of analysis — history from below — over the past two generations awards pride of place to changes in economic structure, social forces and to large impersonal factors as the catalyst in Nationalist transformation. Patrick O'Brien, when Director of the Institute of Historical Research in the University of London, championed this fashionable methodology, observing that ‘historians are educated to deal with group rather than personal behaviour, in part because their subject has been deeply permeated by the social sciences’.⁷

Tom Bartlett illustrates the tendency to throw cold water on the purported achievement of great men, arguing that O'Connell was the beneficiary of changes in society that allowed him to seize credit for an emancipation that would have been achieved in his absence.⁸ K.T. Hoppen challenges the centrality of Nationalist politics altogether, proposing that there was a ‘gap between local realities and the rhetoric of national politics. Such communities, whether individual in the geographical or the social sense, often maintained a style of politics only intermittently, in step with the stated aims and methods of the movements generally held to have dominated Irish history in the nineteenth century’.⁹ He contends that ‘the two great movements of “national consciousness” led by O'Connell and Parnell should not, therefore, be seen as the only true representations of authentic political feeling, but rather as unusual superimpositions upon the deeply pervasive and enduring localist traditions of Irish political life’.¹⁰ Jim McLaughlin insists that it was neither the political leaders nor Nationalist intellectuals but school teachers, priests, newspaper editors, what he calls the ‘organic intelligentsia’, who were the building block of a Nationalist construction of the Irish nation in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹¹

In contrast, the ‘high politics’ school adopts the line that only significant people matter. Its doyen, Maurice Cowling, maintains, ‘between the inner political world and society at large on the one hand and between personal and policy objectives on the other, no general connection can be established except whatever can be discovered in each instance about the proportions in which each reacted on the other’.¹² Carrying the argument further, Alistair Cooke and John Vincent claim that politics was the business of an elite consisting even in the case of Great Britain of about 100 people at any one moment. Ideas, commitment, social movements, mass opinion are subordinate, in this interpretation, to the momentary requirements of party and personal ambition. ‘For [Tories], as for Liberals,’ they write, ‘the Irish question was not one into which practical Irish considerations entered in any detail’.¹³ Their intervention represents an extreme affirmation that leaders alone dictate the pace and agenda of political life.

This debate about the relationship between individuals and their impact in history receives an airing from the opposite pole when Patrick O'Brien asks the question ‘is political biography a serious enough genre to engage the attention of academic historians?’. To his rhetorical query, he responds ‘most of us … think not’.¹⁴ He objects,

unless the outcomes of a policy or set of policies are recognised by historians as significant and until those policies can be attributed in large measure to the ideas and leadership exercised by prominent politicians, then their lives, however deeply researched and readable, contribute very little to our understanding of the history of government and politics …¹⁵

While we cannot yet make a reasoned judgement about whether individuals were or were not the key element in the making of modern Irish nationalism, we can proceed knowing that the question has exercised academics and the chattering classes.

Post-1867 nationalism

Irish nationalism is a dynamic ideological movement for attaining and maintaining the autonomy, unity and identity of Ireland and her people; it is a vehicle for activating people and creating solidarity among them in the common quest for a cherished goal. In Ireland, according to Garvin, the ‘traditional character of mass politics and the habit of mobilising everybody in the community for political action were deeply ingrained in the political culture’.¹⁶ Nationalism arose in the later eighteenth century at the point in time when a market economy, efficient transport network, literacy and print media enabled disparate peoples to ‘imagine’ that they had a common identity. The Catholic Church spread national consciousness and provided the grass-roots management of a political movement. National identity does not materialise out of thin air, it must be inculcated. Leaders have the essential function of informing the masses whom they wish to adopt the national ideal what it constitutes and how they inescapably are part of the nation, imagined or otherwise. Some writers dwell on the role of an overarching coterie of a comparatively small number of individuals, such as O'Connell and Parnell, others on much wider national or local elites. Most, however, follow Miroslav Hroch in Social Preconditions of National Revival in Europe (1985) who pinpoints the intelligentsia as the prime agents in the process of creating the nation. Hroch constructs a threefold typology for national movements. In the initial stage, intellectuals develop an interest in the antiquities of the territory. This corresponds to the establishment of the (Royal) Dublin Society and the (Royal) Irish Academy in the eighteenth century. He notes that the purveyors of this culture lack a political programme at the outset and do not seek to mobilise the masses until a further metamorphosis has taken place. In the second phase, the now numerically expanding intelligentsia develop a political programme and seek to incorporate the masses into their conception of the nation. Finally, his third stage is when a significant sector of the population is converted to and pursues political aspirations — mass mobilisation. In the instance of Ireland, the stages, though not always in Hroch's sequence, existed. Hroch's model highlights the core ingredient of leadership and indirectly offers a framework for understanding its different manifestation in differing phases of nationalism. The intelligentsia, in his formula, are superseded by moderate bourgeois leaders who in turn give way to politicians advocating more radical national goals. Garvin adopts a compatible scheme, pointing to four incremental aspects in the unfolding of Irish nationalism: the origins of political culture; the emergence of popular political organisation; the growth of public opinion; and, beyond the period, the development of the machinery of the state.¹⁷ It should not be expected, therefore, that individual leaders possess identical qualities, sponsor the same programmes or utilise common means over time. The second and no doubt fundamental point in Hroch's description is the role of leaders. They may and usually do build on pre-existing identities as a stage in creating an overarching sense of a common bond. Benedict Anderson adds that ‘nationalism has to be aligned with large cultural systems that preceded it’.¹⁸

Max Weber, a founding father of sociology, was concerned about modes of authority and domination. He identifies three sets of power relationships: legal domination which is continuous and subject to rules (corresponding to Garvin's fourth stage, establishment of the machinery of government); traditional domination based on a belief that the legitimacy of authority has always existed and subjects obey out of personal loyalty; and charismatic domination, in which power is exercised by a leader who possesses extraordinary qualities. Leadership is a core element in all three, but Weber had a particular interest in charismatic authority and this is pertinent to the present discussion. As he points out, charismatic leadership is a uniquely personal response to a crisis but, when the crisis itself passes, either the followers desert him or they seek to transmute the leader's authority into bureaucratic structures for dealing with everyday problems. For Weber, history alternates between the charisma of the great figure and the routinisation of bureaucracy. Therefore, just as nationalism has distinctive phases, the leadership of a nationalist movement exhibits different faces in the course of its evolution. As well, analysis of leadership is enhanced by communications theory. Paul Lazerfeld sees the audience as a tissue of inter-related rather than isolated individuals whom the communicator activates.¹⁹ For him, ‘opinion leaders’ fulfil the role of ‘intervening variables’ between the media and the audience. In George Gerbner's estimation, media has the function of forming the ‘mass’ by creating shared ways of selecting and viewing events; by delivering to them technologically produced and mediated message systems. Thus the result is that by channelling mass society into common ways of seeing and understanding the world the cultivation of dominant image patterns binds together communities. Michael Gurevitch stresses the mutual dependence between the political communicator and the media. Politicians, he maintains, command scarce resources and for the purveyors of the media there is pressure to give chief figures the lion's share of attention. Additionally, John B. Thompson notes the distinctive nature of the mass communication process, emphasising that messages are produced for an audience not physically present at the place of production, the necessity of an information storage mechanism which persists, the reproducible nature of information and the availability of the message. These propositions feed into the discussion by emphasising the function of leadership and how it connects to the mass audience. Leaders necessarily have to adapt to shifting demands. Butt had to motivate a bourgeois following at a time before mass mobilisation; Parnell needed to first inspire and then canalise an aroused public opinion; and Dillon from the 1890s sought to convert Parnell's mass appeal into a bureaucratic political system.

Each of the three people represents a form of leadership within the established paradigm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Ireland in Transition, 1867-1921
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• A time of transitions
• PART I Home rule, Ireland and a 'union of hearts'
• PART II Irish Ireland and a separatist identity
• PART III Reformed Ireland or 'risen people'?
• Notes
• Index