In remembrance of Professor Tom Garvin MRIA we present the second of two of his past Studies articles, ‘Republicanism and Democracy in Ireland’.
First published in the summer of 2013 – in the context of the aftermath of the Great Recession and an Ireland that was on the precipice of closing out its bailout obligations – the article extracted below examines the concept of republicanism, Ireland’s historical approach to same, and the impacts of external forces on democratic self-governance.
For further information on Professor Garvin, please see his obituary in The Irish Times and his In Memoriam from UCD.
Tom Garvin, ‘Republicanism and Democracy in Ireland’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 102, No. 406 (Summer, 2013), 181-189. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/23631163
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This practice of tacit exclusion from citizenship and even from membership of the imagined nation is not new. In the early 17th century, the Irish-language writer Geoffrey Keating famously proposed in his pseudo-history Foras Feasa ar Eirinn: the History of Ireland that the nation be defined as all inhabitants of Ireland descended from the Gaelic, Norse or Anglo-Norman populations loyal to the Catholic faith, while excluding the considerable minority of recent immigrants of Protestant faith.
Two generations later, Clement Molyneux calmly argued the right of the Irish nation to self-determination, while equally calmly assuming that the nation consisted only of the Protestant inhabitants of the island. In this way, the remaining three-quarters were tacitly excluded from citizenship, much as they were being increasingly denied property rights in land. Exclusion of particular groups from the public space of the polity is a common feature of republics and not peculiar to the Irish.
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The most obvious other exclusions, historically, have been of younger people, women and certain ethnic groups. Switzerland excluded women in many cantons until a generation ago. In many states of the US, black people were excluded on grounds of slavery before the Civil War and, afterwards, in some states for a century by means of pseudo-educational and descent laws…Even today, the 14th Amendment is routinely employed in some southern states to exclude black people from the franchise. In the Federal Republic of Germany, citizenship issues disenfranchise many Turkish residents. Republics, in other words, can quite easily be aristocratic rather than democratic and even democratic republics can drift into routine exclusion through apathy and inattention. The price of freedom is, indeed, continuous vigilance.
In Ireland, the association of republicanism with the tradition of insurrection for a long time tended to obscure the actual meaning of the term ‘republic’. In the 18th century, the Jacobite tendency was supported by the bulk of Catholics. The legitimacy of the Stuart ‘king across the water’ was celebrated in popular song, in Irish and English, and a vague hope persisted that the Catholic and rightful heir to the three kingdoms of England, Scotland and Ireland might some day come back.
Gradual abandonment of this hope gave American and French ideas of a popular polity without a monarch opportunities to penetrate the popular imagination…The first real republicans in Ireland were mainly Ulster people, inspired by the ideas of the Scottish enlightenment and the American experiment in republicanism after 1776. Republicanism in the 19th century was often the creed of small groups, often looking to American or France as much as to any Irish historical role model.
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In Ireland, it has to be said that a certain secret contempt for democracy was very old and quite widespread. Its origins are probably to be found in the internalisation by a colonised people of the contempt openly felt towards them by their colonial rulers. That the Irish were unfit for self-government was a commonplace justification for the continuance of rule from Dublin Castle in the late 19th century and the refusal to grant even limited measures of democratic self-government. The eventual result was the catastrophic destruction of the entire sub-polity of British Ireland in 1918-22.
Many of the inhabitants of the new, democratic polity that replaced this in most of the island had inherited a dangerous legacy of self contempt and a poisonous scepticism about representative democracy. The fact that the Catholic church was non-democratic in its internal structures and had also internalised much of that scepticism about any capacity for self-government on the part of Irish people did not help either. As late as the early 1960s, survey research carried out by an American Jesuit sociologist, Bruce Biever, detected a strong preference for clerical and episcopal leadership, as against democratically elected leaders, in the Republic.
Back in the early 1920s, Irish republicans were more sceptical about representative democracy than anyone else and tried to prevent elections taking place. Michael Hayes, first Speaker of Dail Eireann, recalled in his private notes:
‘The idea of the anti-Treatyites was that there would be an election which would reproduce [the Second, non-elected] Dail without change or addition. Nobody would be elected to the Dail except those who were already in it, and then a cabinet would be formed in which each side would get representation, according to its numbers’
The republicans were desperate to avoid a free election for they knew quite certainly that they would lose and lose heavily. The second Dail, the composition of which they were so keen to preserve, had not been elected by anyone but selected in early 1921 by Michael Collins and Harry Boland. Most of them were ‘elected’ subsequently, without competition. The republicans of 1922 felt that the people were commonly slavish and did not possess the true republican spirit; somehow, this could be held to justify denying some or all of them the franchise…Something of this contempt for ordinary people lingered for a very long time after 1922-23.
It extended to a certain disdain for the new democratic political institutions. Hayes noted: ‘Neither the green pillar boxes nor the zoological coinage could prevent a profound sense of disillusionment from taking root in the minds of the people as a whole’…The civil war had also had the effect of splitting the emergent Irish popular political community, or demos, along lines which were not obviously left versus right in the usual European pattern, but rather in terms of acceptance of some form of relationship with the British Empire or outright rejection of any such link. Founding divisions of this kind can be very enduring and even outlive their original relevance.
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A chronic problem in representative republican government is the seemingly inevitable growth of vested interests – minority groups that can get a grip on the decision-making processes of the state simply by being better organised than anybody else and by the judicious use of political pressure and money. In the period between 1922 and 1960, Irish government was severely hampered by a phalanx of interest groups, including the farmers, the Catholic bishops, the trade unions, the medical profession and secret societies like the Knights of Columbanus.
These had a collective veto on certain areas of public policy, in particular in the areas of health and education. It seems that the putatively democratic government of the country was either almost helpless in the face of this phalanx or, alternatively, sympathetic to its point of view.
More recently, public policy has been heavily shaped by an alliance between Fianna Fail, the trade union movement, the building trade and public sector workers. The effect was to tip the distributive scales of government in their favour during the years 1998-2008. This alliance collapsed under its own weight after the crash of 2008, but such alliances of organised veto-groups seem ineradicable under systems of representative government.
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Fintan O’Toole, in a powerful article, in 2013, put his finger on this particular example of a king with no clothes: ‘It’s one thing to be told what to do by a cold, calculating managerial elite but quite another to be subjected to the will of fools. Last week, we had our Wizard of Oz moment – the mighty troika revealed itself to be just another bunch of hapless incompetents’.
He went on to point out that unaccountable institutions such those in Brussels and elsewhere were bound to start making stupid decisions eventually. Their style of government and deliberation was secretive and therefore non-republican. He sees democracy as in suspension and elected governments as being denied the right to make mistakes, a right that all democratic governments must have.
Moreover, undemocratic governments are inherently far more likely to do stupid things because of their unaccountability: ‘All this is being done in the name of efficiency, of hard-headed crisis management. It might make some kind of sense as a very short-term response to an immediate panic. But it is surely clear by now that the crisis not short-term. It is deep, systemic and will be with us for another decade’…The evident enthusiasm for the European project since it first became an active political choice to be made in the late 1960s, combined with the ambivalence about Irish self-government discussed above, seems to have weakened any concern for a subordinating of our democratic institutions to technocratic transnational power in Brussels.
This is particularly the case because of the very gradual and almost invisible extension of that power over the last four decades. The technocratic ideology touted by the elites and their journalist cheerleaders has legitimised profound changes, introduced by stealth. The current crisis in European financial organisation is finally putting the question to the Irish and to other Europeans: is European governance compatible in the long-run with republican and democratic self-government? Recent events suggest that the answer, after forty years of Europe, is still moot.