This is scanned in from Atlantis 5, April 1973. Seamus Deane was the Editor; John Dillon was the co-editor for this issue; the editorial board included also Michael Gill, Derek Mahon, Augustin Martin and Hugh Maxton. Dillon's Editorial over-viewed the New Ireland concept, harking back to Davis in the 1840s and Plunked in the 1900s, also to EA in the 1920s, though without mentioning the Irish Statesman; the Bell alas seemed to have been forgotten. I give my own contribution in full, and I abstract some of the others subsequently.

I choose the above title with apologies to the shade of Frederick Engels, whose classic 'Socialism: Utopian and Scientific' was one of my earliest political influences.

I was prompted to do so by the Editor's listing of the subjects he wanted covered in this special issue. Were we not being asked to construct, each of us, our personal Utopia?

On various occasions in the past I have sat down to do just this. I have found the effort unrewarding. Although I had read Engels in youth, I feel I am only now beginning to understand him.

Engels' argument was directed against the philosophy and practice of the 'Utopian Socialists', Robert Owen, Saint-Simon and Fourier; this consisted of constructing a theoretical ideal society and then proceeding to attempt to build it within the contemporary society, without taking into account the internal dynamics of the latter, dominated as it was (and indeed still is) by laws derived from the principle of private ownership of the means of production.

The most successful of the Owenite Communes was that at Ralahine, Co Clare, which flourished at the time of the Famine. It came to an end because it depended on the goodwill of the landlord, Vandaleur, who gambled away the estate. The new owners dispersed the Commune and evicted the tenants.

With due respect to the Editor, I therefore refuse to be party to a Utopia-building exercise. I prefer to analyse some concepts of a 'new Ireland' which have been put forward in the course of the past two decades, and to use these as material on which to base some propositions which might be useful in helping towards forming a consensus on the immediate next steps.

I could, if a historian, go further back. I would like to see a scholarly yet readable study of the concept of the Republic as it existed theoretically in the minds of the successive generations of Irish revolutionary leaders. No-one to my knowledge, has collected in one place the written evidence of what Tone, Lalor, the Fenians, Parnell, Davitt, Pearse, Connolly, etc, thought the 'new Ireland' would be like. The fact that their written material on this subject is scarce constitutes, I suggest, evidence that they were not Utopian dreamers but men of action, whose writings were directed at achieving immediate objectives, and whose long-term thinking was no more detailed than it need have been, given the uncertainties in the immediate future.

I would also like to see a study of the ideas of those who linked social change with the idea of the Republic as they evolved in the period starting with the Democratic Programme of the First Dail(1)and ending with the present day. The data for this study is available mainly in private collections of people who have had some residential continuity and have been consistently involved with Socialist or left-republican politics over some or all of the period: Sean Nolan, George Gilmore, Sheila Humphries, Moss Twomey and Maire Comerford come to mind.

Nodal points in such a study would be the Mellows letters from prison(2), Sean Murray's 'Ireland's Path to Freedom' published in 1931 as the Manifesto of the Irish Communist Party, and the Athlone Manifesto of the Republican Congress of 1934(3)

There is a wealth of ephemeral literature from the twenties, thirties and forties which would enable a scientific historian to supplement people's memories and illuminate the dark period of defeat of the Irish Republic and to give an insight into the thinking of those heroic people who resisted the rising tide of reaction. Useful light has been thrown on the agrarian struggles of the twenties and early thirties in the Northwest by Peadar O'Donnell(4) but books of memoirs by active participants should never be taken as the last word, as any historian knows.

In general, the active radicals of this period had little time for building Utopian systems, no more than had their better-known predecessors.

A historical study of the nature I propose would not be repeating the work of Bowyer Bell(5). It could use him as a source, insofar as he outlines the evolution of one of the many elements in the situation.

When I started to think about this article, I intended trying to do what I have just outlined. After some reflection, I decided it needed a dedicated period of research, by a Marxist historian, with access to all known socialist and republican archives. It is not a job for an academic historian, unsympathetic to the ideas of the Irish Revolution. Eclecticism has no place in this game. 'Philosophers hitherto have contemplated the world: the point however, is to change it.'

Nor is it a job for hack journalists who trade in violence and sensationalism without seeking for origins(6).

What I can usefully do, however, is to look at the period 1950-1972, where I can claim some direct experience. I have to hand a number of documents which represent the thinking of the various elements which, if ever they were to become integrated, could constitute the Irish Revolution, thereby generating a New Ireland.

These documents represent the thinking of those who aspired to a New Ireland in that period, and were prepared to organise politically to achieve it. In chronological order, they are:

(a) the Sinn Fein Social and Economic Programme (1952),

(b) Ireland's Path to Socialism (CPNI 1962),

(c) Ireland Her Own (IWP 1963),

(d) Social and Economic Programme (Sinn Fein 1964),

(e) the New Republic (Sinn Fein, 1967),

(f) Local Government Policy (Sinn Fein 1968),

(g) the Labour Party outline policy 1969,

(h) Eire Nua (Sinn Fein, Kevin St. 1972).

Returning to the Engels argument: I have already touched on the weakness of the Utopian approach; what then about the scientific?

The scientific socialist, or Marxist, approach does not begin with an ideal concept of a desired society. It analyses the forces at work in the present society and tries to develop them in the desired direction by a process of organic growth. The 'desired direction' is defined in terms of the interests of those people who produce the wealth (I know this definition bristles with problems, like how to distinguish between subjective and objective interests; broadly speaking, any move which gives working people more direct control over the decisions affecting their lives, and which decreases the degree of alienation between the workers and the job, is 'progressive'.) At a certain point, this organic growth can no longer be contained within the bounds of the old society, whereupon a revolutionary change takes place. The essence of this is the transfer of ownership and control of productive property from an unproductive owning-class to the co-operative or collective ownership and control of those who work.

The amount of violence involved in this process depends, usually, on the extent to which the dispossessed ex-owning class is able to call on counter-revolutionary intervention from abroad.

The documents under examination fall into three groups: (I) those which treat the formation of a New Ireland as an organic growth subject to scientific laws; (II) those which attempt to define the post-revolutionary structure without the organic growth process from the present, although more or less implying that some such process must have taken place; (III) those which define a new structure which while containing progressive elements is not in fact revolutionary.

Sinn Fein 1952

On agriculture there is a questioning of the rate of mechanisation, given the level of unemployed. There is a suggestion of support for group farming, co-operatives, etc., and a willingness to use cheap credit as a stimulus in this direction. Again, there is no analysis of the present structure. There is a proposal for a National Economic Council to co-ordinate the flow of investment into the various resources.

The education section is critical of the examination system, which divides the world into 'successes' and 'failures'. There is criticism of the way in which education is divorced from practical work. There is a rural bias in that they want agricultural science integrated into the curriculum, while apparently not being aware that there is also scope for practical subjects in urban schools. They were clearly thinking of the primary school system, the vast majority in 1952 left school at 14.

There is a 'sexist' approach (domestic economy for girls) and there is absolutely no reference to the question of school ownership. clerical managements, etc. Religious control is implicit in some of the statements: there is no hint of the existence of a sectarian problem. The nation, I suspect, is conceived as a Roman Catholic nation.

On transport: they are pro-rail, pro co-ordination, pro-canal; this can be regarded as backward-looking and nostalgic if one's mores are sixties-capitalist; it also happens to be long-term sound policy. On fisheries there is a realisation that capital and development is needed, and that the prime bottleneck is the distribution system. There is no hint of co-operatives, nor any quantitative analysis.

On housing there is a suggestion that at present the banks get the cream; there is realisation of the need to control site prices. They wanted a single Housing Trust, but they accepted the existence of a private-public split, without trying to quantify this.

The section on forestry, unlike the others, shows signs of quantitative analysis of the then situation, in some detail. There is also some quantitative analysis of insurance, but in a manner which completely misses the point. While regarding foreign-owned insurance as a drain on resources, they use net profit as the argument and ignore the much more forceful argument that a foreign owned insurance company accumulates Irish people's savings and invests them abroad.

On shipping it is envisaged that a large fleet be developed and built in Ireland, using existing resources.

This then, is the New Ireland which was in the minds of some at least of the republicans of the generation of South and O'Hanlon. I have no hesitation in classing it as a non-revolutionary utopia: it has no dynamic and does not question the capitalist basis of finance and industry. It is, in fact, in the spirit of Fianna Fail 1932 and Clann na Poblachta 1948.

Communist Party 1962/3

(I cannot resist putting in, as insight-giving spice, a reference to the approximate coincidence in 1963 of the funeral of Sean Murray with the Wolfe Tone bicentenary. The former, a Catholic, was followed to his grave by Protestant trade unionists, while the latter, a Protestant, was commemorated by Catholic republicans. It is inconvenient little facts like this which, while showing that we are a divided nation, none the less make the theories of the 'apartheid' two-nations school of thought untenable. Likewise, the usage of the term 'our people in the North': Kevin O'Higgins and Austin Currie use it in one sense (the former in discussion with Tom Jones(7), the latter at Dungannon in August 1968 after the famous Coalisland march) while Michael O'Riordain used it in another, at a public meeting outside the GPO in 1969 after the British soldiers had shot some Protestant working-class on the Shankill Road. That ambivalent 'we': watch it like a hawk!)

The 1962 CP(N1) programme starts off firmly in the present situation with a historical analysis of the roots of the problem in the 1914 arming of the Orangemen to counteract the unifying work of Connolly and Larkin among Belfast workers which had begun in 1911. It shows the negative effect of British economic policies on the fringe-economy of the six counties, and exposes the powerlessness of Stormont to act positively in this matter, lacking any fiscal powers.

It refers to the 1957 Isles and Cuthbert report which reveals that the only factor able to balance the import-bill against exports, in the absence of fiscal powers, is the creation of unemployment.

The 1962 CP(NI) way forward is the concept of a 'progressive government at Stormont' as an interim stage in the establishment of a free Socialist Ireland.

The key policy of this government would be that it be 'prepared to demand from the Imperial Parliament the necessary extended fiscal powers which are essential to the implementation of this policy'. Policies dependent on this key step include: cheap loans, control of export of capital, transformation of estates into agricultural co-operatives, development of economic and political relations with Dublin, etc.

The social forces behind this theoretical progressive government are listed: workers, small farmers, small businessmen and intellectuals. The latter, particularly, are regarded as allied because of the existence of pro-English discrimination in top jobs. There is a critique of the current political party structure, and a realisation that the key to the political situation is to destroy the hold of the Unionist Party over the Protestant working class.

There is a stress on the importance of the trade unions as a potential unifier of working-class interests across the religious boundaries. The NILP is criticised for failing to come out against Special Powers, and a realisation that the latter Act is basically anti-working-class while only conventionally anti-republican. There is thus an implicit 'civil rights' step in the theoretical approach to breaking the Unionist grip, but no indication of a 'civil rights movement' approach. There is an implied path via the adoption of Civil Rights objectives by the Trade Union Movement. (That this was in fact done is shown by the records of the meetings of the Belfast Trades Council, whose September 1969 resolution embodied, in effect, all the NICRA demands, and the 1971 TUC in Britain, which adopted a demand for the enactment of a Bill of Rights by Westminster.)

The CP(NI) 1962 document goes on to evaluate the Republicans as consistent and uncompromising opponents of imperialism, but criticises their then reliance on arms as the only form of struggle, pointing out that this unites the Unionists and leaves the Catholic workers and small farmers without any progressive political leadership and at the mercy of the conservative Nationalist party. They attack the disfranchising of Sinn Fein by Stormont, realising that the development of republicanism as a political force can only be, beneficial.

In a section on the National Question, they underline British responsibility under Article 75 of the 1920 Government of Ireland Act. They reckon with Protestant objections to Dublin rule and they answer anticipated Protestant criticism of their programme by analysing how the existence of Partition has contributed to the political, economic, social and cultural backwardness of the 26 counties.

A key item in their strategy is the concept that progress by the Irish towards initially democratic reform and ultimately national independence must rely on an informed and conscious British working-class blocking any imperial counter-moves.

The 1963 Irish Workers Party document 'Ireland Her Own' contains a historical analysis of the rise and stagnation of Fianna Fail and its retreat into the Common Market. There is a recognition of the positive role of the state industries. There is a class analysis of agriculture: the small farmer rears the calves and takes the risk, the rancher gets the profit. There is an analysis of the Labour movement and a critique of its failure to assume a leading role.

The role of the CP is seen as a generator of policies within the broad labour movement such as to give confidence to the Northern working-class that a united Ireland would be a progressive place to live in. rather than a green Tory theocracy. The concept emerges of a progressive Dublin government, or a government under strong Labour Movement pressure, putting forward progressive 32-county development policies such as to help expose the Unionists and win support for their replacement by a progressive alternative, as in the CP(NI) programme.

The basic programme of this 26 county transitional progressive government includes: nationalisation of the financial system, nationalisation of the large firms which at present have foreign links, state investment in mineral resource development, encouragement of consumers and producers co-ops, diversification of foreign trade, special economic measures for the Gaeltacht to provide a basis for Gaelic culture.

While the social forces which form the theoretical basis of this programme are listed (workers, small farmers, small businessmen and intellectuals, as in the North) when it comes to the point of translating this into political terms the focus blurs. The IWP in 1963 can, I feel, be forgiven this, in view of their then numerical weakness and their long period of isolation in the pre-Pope John Fifties, when Marxism was a dirty word.

The CP(N1) in 1962 was closer to a political recipe, in that they saw, implicitly, the potential of political republicanism allied with Northern Ireland Labour as the basis for their 'progressive Stormont'. The analogue in the 26 counties would be the alliance of Labour with a left-republican agrarian party which was capable of taking the rural roots of Fianna Fail away from control by its present party-boss patronage. No explicit vision of this existed in 1963 in the IWP.

Taking both these programmes together, it is clear that the Marxist vision of the New Ireland in the early sixties was positive, dynamic, had a sense of history and organic growth. There was a clear vision of a transition-epoch with two states, whose progressive elements co-ordinated their strategy, and an ultimate, but not detailed, vision of a socialist, independent, united Ireland owned and controlled by its working people. This is in the genuine tradition of scientific socialism.

Sixties Sinn Fein

This was discussed at length within the movement but never formally 'adopted' or published. I still have the duplicated version which was made available at the 1964 Ard Fheis in the Bricklayers' Hall, and my own manuscripts on which it was based. The 'planning and housing' section was written by Uinsean MacEoin.

1 will not burden the reader with the details. If he wishes to study it, he will find it now available, in 90% approximation but without acknowledgement, in the Eire Nua programme published last year by Sinn Fein (Kevin St.).

It is a Utopian document, in that while it does have some analysis of the present, it lacks any hint of the transition from the present to a political situation in which it could be implemented. It implies that a revolution has taken place and state power is in the hands of the working people under conscious progressive leadership. It served a purpose at the time in that it stretched the imagination and helped along the trend within a movement which was becoming socially aware. Mercifully it was not published(8) as if it had been it would have, I feel, hindered the organic growth of a class-conscious approach to social problems through practical work in relation to the housing question, redundancies, etc., and of course, in the North, Civil Rights. It would have encouraged an elitist political approach after the fashion of the traditional parties: 'we have all the answers, vote for us.'

It is in this spirit, unfortunately, that it has been published by Kevin St. Sinn Fein. It is ironical that the people who resisted its publication in 1964-5, and who displayed the most suspicion of its socially progressive.theoretical concepts, should have been so quick to publish it, with flourish of trumpets, in 1971.

There are progressive points in the 1967 Sinn Fein Local Government policy which derive from the thinking and discussions which went into the 1964 Utopia: regionalisation, rates reform, home health services, de-commercialisation of housing finance, taking urban land off the free market, extension of vocational schools to comprehensive level, nomination from below on the council sub-committees by the relevant organisations rather than co-option, etc.

However, due to the lack of organic links between the average Sinn Fein Cumann and the local people and their organisations, this policy lacked credibility in most areas and overall representation dropped. The quality changed. however: previously the representation was, largely, the aftermath of the sentimental vote of the Fifties. The 1967 crop of Sinn Fein Councillors showed an appreciable trend towards the concept of organic growth of a movement linked to the peoples' needs; in a few areas where the new ideas had taken root energetic committees were elected. But the overall effect was minimal. People do not believe in Utopias. The central problem is the transition: the next tiny step.

The Labour Party 1969

Basically it refers to a 26-county situation., it has no hint of recognition that there is a national problem. It has a section on 'workers democracy' where brave words are said about the need for control. and much attention is paid to getting the worker in on the management decisions, but the question of basic ownership of the means of production is quietly avoided.

The section on Agriculture contains a critique of the Department of Agriculture which attributes its exclusive role in national planning to its 'seniority' and continuity of work since the time of British rule. There are proposals for support for co-operatives, and for the dismantling of the present patchwork grant and volume-subsidy system, development of a system of marketing boards, etc. Greater development of food processing is envisaged.

There emerges a positive concept of democratisation of the semi-state bodies by structuring their boards from representatives, not only of the state, but also of the workers, suppliers and consumers. There is, however, no suggestion that this excellent democratic structure might be pushed right across the board into the so-called 'private sector', thus rendering redundant the old style of director representing the shareholders alone, and indeed the principle of private shareholding.

The Social Welfare reforms proposed include the establishment of a national pension scheme absorbing all the present private superannuation schemes. Such a scheme would, of course, arouse the ire of defenders of those systems which currently subsidise the pensions of time-savers (loyal servants of the company) by theft of the forced savings of those who believe in gaining experience through mobility. A relatively innocent-sounding measure, like a national pension scheme, could have quite revolutionary effects in liberating people from long-term routine-job slavery.

There is, however, little or no evidence of any basic departure from existing Civil Service procedures. Nor is there any evidence of common thinking between the social welfare section and the taxation section. Even in Tory Britain they are starting to see the administrative advantage of having an integrated system, with social welfare appearing automatically as a 'negative tax' below a certain threshold.

Progressively, they plump for an integrated education system, with semi-specialised senior schools between the age of 16 and third-level. They envisage a local Education Committee, with parent, teacher. local government, economic organisation and the church.

They have apparently given little thought to how to structure an interdenominational system. The place for the church representatives, I suggest, is not on the local Education Committee, but on a special Religious Education Committee within an overall democratically-controlled lay system.

They favour regional groupings of local authorities, the abolition of the managerial system in local authorities, the devolution of real power.

On Finance, they are for nationalising the banks. They recognise that this involves, in a partitioned Ireland, some surgery.

It is significant that this one small negative reference is the only recognition of the existence of the national question. It does not seem to have occurred to them that the imposition of progressive fiscal policies in the 26 counties in isolation would impose severe stresses on the Border; the existence of this unnatural boundary was a major factor which contributed to the general weakness of the economic nationalism of the thirties and to the lack of any serious attempt to control the flight of capital.

There is an excellent section on shipping which shows the influence of the research work of the Maritime Institute (Dr de Courcy Ireland). Many of these ideas are beginning to gain official State recognition, at least at the level of publications by the Institute for Industrial Research and Standards(9) and the National Science Council(10), with the government under pressure from the realities of the balance of payments.

To summarise: this is a catalogue of non-revolutionary reforms, a rather pragmatic Utopia. The implied dynamic is 'elect us and we will implement it via the existing state structure, possibly with the help of a few changes in the details of the latter'. It is in no sense a 'New Ireland' since it is fundamentally 26 county; many of the reforms suggested are good in that if implemented they would strengthen the security of the working class, and improve their standard of education. There is no concept of a dynamic class alliance of the various groupings which suffer under the present imperialist-dominated structure; the key event is, presumably, a Labour majority in an election.

The odds against this happening are astronomical, given the bias inherent in the present electoral procedure in favour of parties able to mobilise and finance a professional organisation. This latter factor places the Labour programme for democratic reform, even with its obvious pragmatic and non-revolutionary content, firmly in the category of Utopias.

The Way Forward

The only possible democratic way forward to a united, independent Irish state, within which the nearly-strangled Irish nation may perhaps at last reach maturity, is along the lines suggested in the 1962-63 documents: democratic reform in the six counties, giving a structure with some power to do good (this is basically the NICRA Bill of Rights); reforms in the 26 counties such as to overcome the theocratic image; in both parts of the country progressive alliances need to arise which unite workers, working farmers, small businessmen and intellectuals; in both parts of the country the old political structures need to be cut across by means of a principled attack on the patronage system.

The precise nature of the organisational forms which will enable a movement to grow organically from the needs of the people towards working-class and national unity are not blueprinted in the 1962-63 documents, or in any other. Indeed, it might be as well if they weren't. A blueprint giving predictable and expected structures, in the hands of the enemy, could bring about a final strangulation of our nation. After all, there is a war on; it will not be over until we have, in the words of Lalor, 'Ireland Her Own, from the sod to the sky'.

NOTES

2. Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution, CD Greaves, (Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1971) p363.

3. 1934 Republican Congress, G. Gilmore (Dochas Co-op Society. Dublin, undated but c. 1968) p30.

4. There will be Another Day, Peadar O'Donnell (Dolmen Press, Dublin, 1963).

5. The Secret Army, J. Bowyer Bell, (Academy Press, Dublin,1971).

6. The origin of violence in Ireland must be understood to be the responsibility of those who, with the connivance of the British military machine, armed the Orangemen in 1914. See Joseph Johnston, Civil War in Ulster, (Sealy, Bryan and Walker, Dublin, 1913; second edition UCD Press, Dublin 1999).

7. Government by Duplicity, Roy Johnston, Atlantis, September 1972, p8).

8. A condensed version was duplicated and circulated internally in 1967; it is questionable whether this merits separate examination. This is the 'New Republic' referred to in the original listing.

9. Marine Resources (F Cahill; Dublin, 1972).

10. Report of Conference on Marine Resources (Dublin, 1971).