Anarchism in Ireland has its roots in the stateless organisation of the túatha in Gaelic Ireland. It first began to emerge from the libertarian socialist tendencies within the Irish republican movement, with anarchist individuals and organisations sprouting out of the resurgent socialist movement during the 1880s, particularly gaining prominence during the time of the Dublin Socialist League.
One of the prominent figures in the Irish socialist republican movement was the syndicalist James Connolly, who led the formation of the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union along the lines of industrial unionism and fought in the Easter Rising as part of the Irish Citizens Army. Following the independence of Ireland and the rise of communist tendencies in the country, some left-wing republicans began to gravitate towards anarchism, including Jack White, who himself became an anarchist while fighting on the side of the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War.
It was only in the late 1960s that a specifically anarchist movement began to emerge, in the context of the civil rights movement in Northern Ireland and the outbreak of the Troubles. A number of small local groups formed and dissolved throughout the 1970s before the establishment of the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) in 1984, which continued to exist as a national platformist federation up until its disbandment on 8 December 2021.
Statelessness in Gaelic Ireland
Before the Tudor conquest during the 16th century, It has been suggested by some that Gaelic Ireland was largely stateless, being described as "anarchic" by the Irish historian Goddard Henry Orpen, although this characterisation was disputed by Irish nationalists such as Eoin MacNeill. Gaelic Irish society was largely built around kinship and had few if any political institutions, with the early Irish law scholar D. A. Binchy having written about the absence of any legislature, bailiffs or police, and noting "no trace of State-administered justice". The historian Kathleen Hughes argued that one of the reasons that it took more than five hundred years for the English conquest of Ireland to finally be achieved, was precisely because of the lack of a centralised state in Ireland, as Irish people were reticent to give up their freedoms to any state.
The basic polity form of Gaelic Ireland was the túath, a voluntary assembly of free men that democratically decided how to take action on the issues of the time, with the ability to elect their own kings, resolve matters of war and peace, and institute their own policy. The kings themselves had minimal power, strictly limited to acting as a local military leader and presiding over the assemblies of the túath, which themselves held ultimate legislative power.
Laws were passed down orally by a class of professional jurists known as Brehons who could be consulted by túatha and enforced by groups of private individuals through a system of sureties, which were the basis for almost all legal transactions. Common tactics to resolve disputes included mutual fasting between plaintiffs and defendants, in which the one that broke their fast or refused to submit to adjudication would "los[e] their honor within the community", with the harshest punishments that communities dealt out being outlawing and exile. The Gaelic Irish also did not mint nor issue their own coinage, despite Viking and later English colonists having done so, which allowed for fair and equal exchange to take place.
When the Anglo-Norman invasion established the Lordship of Ireland in 1171, native Gaelic institutions came under some strain as they attempted to adapt to the political system brought by the new state. The conquest of Ireland culminated under the Tudors, who established the centralised Kingdom of Ireland in 1542 and suppressed the last holdouts of rebellion by 1603, finalizing the "destruction of the old anarchic society".
The Plantations of Ireland brought on another series of rebellions against increasing anti-Catholic discrimination, culminating in the Irish Confederate Wars, during which the Irish Catholic Confederation briefly re-established self-governance in Ireland before eventually being conquered by the Commonwealth of England under Oliver Cromwell. Following the Glorious Revolution, Irish Jacobites attempted to restore James II to the throne, but they were defeated and Williamite rule was successfully secured over Ireland.
Origins
One of the earliest examples of anarchism in Ireland was in the early work of the Anglo-Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke. A Vindication of Natural Society, though intended as a satire of Henry St John's deism, elaborated one of the first literary expressions of philosophical anarchism, which inspired the works of the English radical William Godwin and was later praised by the American individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker. Some libertarian scholars have insisted that Burke was initially sincere in his anarchist views, but later disowned them in order to advance his political career, although this characterisation has since been disputed.
Socialism Following the events surrounding the Paris Commune, efforts were made to establish branches of the International Workingmen's Association (IWA) in Ireland, led by Joseph Patrick McDonnell, the Irish representative on the IWA's General Council. In February 1872, a branch of the IWA was established in Dublin by Richard McKeon, but its activities quickly came under attack by anti-communist mobs, which forced its premature closure on 7 April of the same year. A Cork branch had also been established in February, to more success, gaining 300 members within weeks. When an anti-communist meeting was called by city officials on 24 March, a hundred internationalist workers wearing green neckties disrupted the meeting, themselves taking control of the stage after several hours of conflict with its organisers. But like the Dublin branch, the Cork branch was itself driven out of the city amid a "red scare" driven by the local clergy. There were other short-lived branches in Cootehill and Belfast, which were likewise suppressed.
Socialists were not able to establish their own organisations again until the 1880s, in the context of the greater socialist revival happening around the United Kingdom. One early mention of an Irish connection to anarchism was the Boston-based Irish nationalist W.G.H. Smart, who wrote articles for The An-archist in 1880 and 1881. By this time, members of the Irish Home Rule movement led by Charles Stewart Parnell established the Irish National Land League, which spearheaded a period of agrarian agitation for land rights known as the Land War. The implementation of the Coercion Act to suppress the movement triggered the formation of the Social Democratic Federation (SDF), which quickly developed into the first nation-wide socialist organisation in the United Kingdom. By December 1884, attempts were being made to form an Irish branch of the SDF by a local socialist club in Dublin, which on 18 January 1885 established the Dublin Democratic Association (DDA) "to promote and defend the rights of labour, and to restore the land to the people," although this did not affiliate with the SDF due to worries that it would alienate Catholic members of the Irish National League. Only about one quarter of the DDA's members were actually socialists, the rest being a mix of various different radical tendencies, the largest of which were nationalist Land Leaguers. Largely the organisation focused on promoting "the advancement of democratic principles", but after a foreign Marxist was invited to speak at the club, nationalist members protested, causing a split in the DDA that resulted in its disbandment by May 1885.
By this time there had been a split within the SDF, in which libertarian socialists led by William Morris and Andreas Scheu broke from Henry Hyndman's parliamentarian faction, establishing the Socialist League with the intention of fomenting a social revolution. From its outset the League lent its support to the Home Rule movement, with its secretary John Lincoln Mahon setting into motion efforts to recruit Irish members to the League. By June 1885, the League's Michael Gabriel, an English anarchist, had moved to the North Strand in Dublin, where he distributed the League's newspaper Commonweal. Despite a sense of pessimism regarding the prospects of propagating socialism in Ireland, in December 1885, Gabriel was able to establish a branch of the Socialist League in Dublin, drawing its membership from a number of former members of the DDA and even a couple former members of the IWA. The anti-parliamentarism and atheism proclaimed by the League quickly made the rounds at the local socialist club, in spite of the impediment provided by the prevailing religious orthodoxy in Ireland. The Dublin League remained a small organisation throughout its existence, with few more than 20 members, but still managed to successfully propagate socialism for the first time in Ireland. At the first meeting of the Dublin branch, which attracted 60 people, the young Irish anarchist Thomas Fitzpatrick railed against Irish nationalism in favour of internationalism, arguing against Home Rule but without providing a socialist alternative (one which would only later be provided by James Connolly). The Irish Socialist League's opposition to Home Rule came largely from its anarchist rejection of parliamentarism, with Gabriel arguing that "the power of one man to govern another should be swept away under the socialist system."
Unlike its predecessors, the activities and meetings of the Socialist League were able to continue largely unmolested until April 1886, organising among local bottlemakers during a lockout and inviting William Morris to give lectures in the city. But with the defeat of the First Home Rule Bill, the organisation's capacities began to wane as political agitation in Ireland started to focus almost exclusively on the issue of Home Rule. By October 1886, the Dublin League had come into conflict with the London-based Central Council over the earlier expulsion of Charles Reuss, with the anarchist-leaning Dublin branch supporting Reuss in line with The Anarchist newspaper. The branch quickly resolved the dispute within a month, but members had already become discouraged by the conflict, and the Dublin League collapsed in March 1887. Nevertheless, former members of the League continued their socialist agitation for years to come, with the Socialist League being quickly succeeded by the National Labour League (NLL). The NLL mobilised the unemployed to demonstrate in the streets and proclaimed a distinctly revolutionary socialist outlook, calling for the common ownership of land and for Irish workers to rise up against capitalism. By the turn of the 1890s, new unionism was introduced to Ireland by the Irish Socialist Union, laying the foundations for the rise of syndicalism.
Irish writer Oscar Wilde notably expressed anarchist sympathies, especially in his essay The Soul of Man under Socialism.
Around 1890 John Creaghe, an Irish doctor who was joint founder (with Fred Charles), of The Sheffield Anarchist, took part in the "no rent" agitation before leaving Sheffield in 1891. He went on to become the founding editor in Argentina of the anarchist paper, El Oprimido, which was one of the first to support the "organisers" current (as opposed to refusal to organise large scale organisations). In 1892 English anarchists visited Fred Allen at the Dublin independent offices to see if his Fair Trial Fund could be used for anarchist as well as Irish Republican Brotherhood prisoners. In 1894 at Trinity College Dublin's Fabian Society "over 200 students listened sympathetically" to a lecture on "Anarchism and Darwinism".
Syndicalism