Of Labor, Love and a Free State

 

The prime minister was a small bespectacled man who rode a bicycle to his job in a Dublin printing works. The other cabinet ministers were a diverse group of intellectuals, freedom fighters, professionals and working-class people. 

    Some of them came to cabinet meetings on bicycles too, discussing affairs of state quietly and intensely in the unlikely surroundings of clerk's offices and private dining rooms.

    They were the members of Ireland's first genuinely home-grown government, elected in a stunning sweep of nationalist victory in the Westminster parliamentary elections of 1918. For three years they acted as the alternative or provisional government of a  fledgling Republic of Ireland. Arthur Mitchell is their definitive chronicler– his book, The Revolutionary Government of Ireland 1919-1922 was published by  Gill and Macmillan in 1996. 

    He came to his task as a result of a delightful accident of fate - a fate that has also brought him a charming Irish wife, a doctorate from Trinity College Dublin, and an abiding interest in Ireland's development as a modern nation.

    The son of lower middle-class parents with Galway connections, he attended both Boston College and Boston University before taking up a career as a junior high school teacher in that fine north-eastern city.

    'My family background had given me a deep respect for the working class and for the labor movement,' Mitchell says, relaxing in the  staff room of the University of South Carolina where he is a Professor of History.

    He might have continued with his mainly local pre-occupations in Massachussetts had not romance intervened. Marie O'Donoghue Leahy was a young Irish nurse visiting Boston on an exchange scheme after completing her training at St. Michael's Hospital, Dun Laoire, near Dublin. She was a native of the village of Stradbally, Co. Waterford, where her father was stationed as a policeman, but she grew up on Achill Island in Mayo (her family connections in Ireland include the Power family in Callan, and there is a striking likeness to John Power, the Kilkenny Gaelic Games star).

    The relationship prospered even after her return to Ireland in 1963. Apart from a few days spent there in transit two years earlier, Arthur had no previous contact with the country. Now, eager to be nearer the object of his affection, he looked for an Irish-based academic opportunity that would fitted his interests.

'It happened that at about this time, Ireland was celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Easter Rising of 1916,' Arthur notes. (The Easter Rising was a badly-organised, seemingly futile and soon-suppressed mini-revolution against English rule that neverthless produced a collection of heroic figures whose names  and reputations have endured).

    'Most of those involved  in the Rising were executed later. One, James Connolly, had the honour of actually shedding his blood for Ireland in situ, so to speak - he was mortally wounded in Dublin's General Post Office, the focal point of the military action.

    'Connolly was different in his background, motivation and approach to the other leaders of the revolution,' Arthur says. 'He had been at the center if a vigorous labor movement that had pursued a socialist agenda within the broader trade union movement led by Jim Larkin. 

    'Under the banner of the 'starry plough', Connolly and his followers pursued a vision of an Ireland not only free but socialist as well, one of a community of similar nations.'

    For Arthur here was an ideal starting point for his Irish academic adventure, which began with a research grant and developed into a four-year stay, culminating in the award of a Ph.D. from Trinity College.

'Along the way, I became a kind of professional adviser to the Irish labor history movement. Until then it had been mainly the preserve of enthusiastic amateurs,' he says. His writings on the subject began in the late 1960s with short newspaper and periodical profiles of legendary figures from the labor movement, such as George Russell, Thomas Johnson and William O'Brien.

    In 1974 his book Labour in Irish Politics 1890-1930 was published and during the 1980s he collaborated with Pádraig Ó Snodaigh of the National Library in the publication of two compilations of historical documents from the periods 1916-1949 and 1870-1916.    

    Meanwhile, he had married Marie and after spells in the mid-west and at Curry College in Massachussetts, they settled in South Carolina. He found, as he had expected and looked forward to, an area dominated by Celtic influences, unlike the Yankee culture of rural New England.

    But he also found that the South was a territory subject (in the words of George Tyndall) to 'a regional mythology so potent, so profuse, even so paradoxical that it cannot be easily compared to any other region in the English-speaking world'. A mythology, Arthur decided, that almost outdid that other startling regional mythology he had become familiar with – the Irish. And of course the Irish were here too.

    'You must remember that the largest group amongst settlers in the up-country were of Irish origin, including the element known as the Scotch-Irish,' Arthur points out.

    Surprisingly, most of the Irish who immigrated to the southern states in those years either were  or became Protestant. 'I've seen a study that shows that only about a third of the Irish in pre-Famine Ireland could seriously be regarded as practising Catholics,' says Arthur, 'and even those who had been practising in Ireland were often forced to turn to Protestantism because it offered the only pastoral care available when they arrived  - the Catholic  Church was illegal here  before the Revolution.

    'In 18th. century South Carolina, (as in Georgia and New Orleans), over a quarter of the white population was of Irish origin.'

    He reels off the significant Irish figures who played important roles in South Carolina's history - Florence O'Sullivan from Cork, one of the original colonial settlers, commemorated in Sullivan's Island;  another Corkman, Richard Kyrle, short-lived as an early governor; James Moore, descendant of the famous O'Moores of Laois, governor from 1700 to 1703 (and father of General James Moore, also a governor of the state).

    To these names Mitchell has added many others in his essay on the Irish in South Carolina in the Encyclopaedia of the Irish in America published in 1999 - people like Carlow-born Pierce Butler, South Carolina's first senator; John Calhoun, son of a Donegal immigrant, Secretary of War at 35 and later governor, U.S. Vice-President and senator; President Andrew Jackson, the Waxhaw-raised son of Antrim parents; and  James Byrnes, grandson of Famine immigrants, who was congressman, senator, governor and war-time U.S. Secretary of State in the 20th. century.

    Mitchell could add dozens of others - Barnewells, Rutledges, Burkes, Mannings - down to the present-day Rileys and Condons who still wield political power in Charleston and Columbia.

Charleston is also the home of the Hibernian Society, founded in 1798 from the remains of a number of previous groups, and active down through the years in assisting distressed Irish immigrants. Today its impressive headquarters in Meeting Street is essentially a gentleman's club for their distinguished descendants. Mitchell has written the official history of the organisation.

   His other works include an account of John F. Kennedy's connections with Ireland, including his four visits there. He is currently editing a book on Irish soldiers in American wars (Civil and Mexican), with contributions from a dozen historians, and writing a major account of Hitler's magic mountain. the Obersalzberg, where the infamous German leader decided to establish his 'roots'.

    Today Mitchell keeps in touch with Irish studies and politics on summer vacations spent at his apartment in Booterstown, in South Dublin. And he maintains a lively interest in Irish political affairs and the Irish labor movement, now with a fine record of achievement in pioneering social agreements and (through the Labour Party) in three coalition governments. Labor and government in Ireland have both grown up well!