The “Irish Question” had long been a source of political dispute and tension for British imperialism. Despite a number of half-hearted attempts at its resolution through a series of botched home rule bills, no answer could be found that was acceptable to both the ruling class in London and the Irish people. The British were reluctant to relinquish their hold over the country, fearing that any concession to demands for Irish independence would inspire similar demands throughout the empire. It was this global imperial context that ultimately informed the response of the British state to calls for an independent Ireland. They crushed the 1916 Easter Rising—a rebellion of some 1,300 republican and socialist insurgents that sought to end British rule—with the full force of their military might, dealing ruthlessly with those who partook in the rebellion by executing sixteen of its leaders and interning 3,600 people, including many that were not involved in the Rising. Unfortunately for the authorities in London, instead of crushing militant nationalism this repression accelerated its growth and influence throughout the country, transforming republicanism from a tight-knit conspiratorial grouping into a broadly supported national liberation movement. The rise of the IRA as an effective guerrilla force, combined with the emergence of a widespread campaign of resistance and civil disobedience, forced the British to reevaluate their position in Ireland.

Any movement for independence, however, faced one significant difficulty, which the British government worked to exploit— the militant opposition of Unionists in the Northeast of the country to any break with the empire. Led by a number of powerful Protestant industrialists and by sections of the landed Irish aristocracy, Unionist elites viewed the link between Ulster and the British Empire as a crucial component in maintaining the system of privilege that underpinned their political and economic power. In particular, they feared that independence would result in their isolation from the far-flung markets of trade and commerce that had proven so crucial in the expansion of industries like linen and shipbuilding. As an Ulster Unionist Council report in 1911 succinctly put it, “Ulster Unionists … have built up their industries and brought Ulster to its present prosperous condition under the protection of the Imperial Parliament…. This position they are prepared to maintain at all hazards.”¹ Deep political alliances had developed alongside these economic links—particularly between Ulster’s elites, Britain’s Conservative Party, and influential elements in the British military establishment—and this relationship was key to shaping British policy in Ireland in favor of the Unionists.

Unionist elites also feared that independence would undermine the political dominance that they had enjoyed in Ulster over many years. Over the course of the nineteenth century they had skillfully constructed a movement that served the rich and the powerful while simultaneously claiming the allegiance of a significant section of the Protestant working class. The “great strength of the Ulster Unionist movement,” according to one historian, “was that it embraced all social classes and had a mass base”: this all-class alliance was formed in part through regular resorts to sectarianism, but it also depended on the institutionalization of a system of preference in employment and housing, backed by organizations like the Orange Order.² Through this process, unionism built up formidable links between Protestant workers and their employers, which proved effective in containing anti-establishment dissent in times of crisis. As insurance against the possibility that their links with the British establishment would not be enough to prevent the creation of an independent Ireland, Unionists set about creating a paramilitary organization that would violently resist any proposed change, culminating in the formation of the Ulster Volunteer Force in 1912. The close links between Ulster elites and British capitalism and the constant threat of violent resistance to any challenges ensured that no deal would be made over the heads of the Unionists, and republicans were in no position—either politically or militarily—to challenge unionism in the Northeast.

The anticolonial movement had proven itself to be a formidable foe for the British military in Ireland—expelling it from large swathes of the Irish countryside and disrupting its urban political operations—but it contained fundamental weaknesses that limited its scope as a project for radical social change. Republicanism was a largely middle class–led movement, whose appeal was primarily nationalist, limiting its attraction to the Protestant sections of the working class in Ulster and leaving the all-class alliance of unionism secure. This did not mean that republicanism and unionism were mirror images of each other: historically republicanism expressed a desire to break with the injustices that British rule had wrought in Ireland while unionism was determined to maintain them. Nor was republicanism afflicted with the kind of intrinsic sectarian rationale that underpinned unionism. After all, it was at its genesis a creation of radical Protestantism—the majority of the leadership of the United Irishmen, for example, were Presbyterians—and in contrast to the sectarian appeals of unionism, it was committed (verbally at least) to uniting the Irish people as a whole, “Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter.” Despite this, republicanism failed to make any serious inroads into the Protestant population and was largely confined to the Catholic majority, leaving it susceptible to the Unionist critique of Irish independence as a reactionary Catholic ideal (giving rise to the political jab “Home Rule Equals Rome Rule”). This was a shortcoming that opponents of republicanism were eager to exploit.

Unionists skillfully combined scaremongering over independence with an assurance that the socioeconomic well-being of poorer Protestants would be assured through sectarian preference in the allocation of jobs and the security ostensibly afforded by inclusion in the empire. The republican movement, based as it was on appeals to nationalism, had only a limited ability to attract support from this section of the population, leaving the Unionist all-class alliance largely untouched—a case of “better the devil you know than the devil you don’t,” as James Connolly argued:

The only project that might have seriously undermined unionism was one that sought to win a section of Protestant workers to a vision of an Ireland freed not only from British domination but from sharp class inequality, a project that aimed directly at driving a wedge between ordinary Protestants and “big house” Unionists. The easy absorption of working-class Protestants into an elite-led sectarian alliance had never been without its complications: the movement had frequently been convulsed by an “undercurrent of lower-class resentment” against the landed and industrial elites who directed it.⁴ At times this found expression in breakaway independent Unionist currents, most famously when Tom Sloan—an independent Unionist himself, with a base mainly among Protestant workers in the south of the city—took the Westminster seat for Belfast South from the Conservative Party in 1902, largely as a result of discontent with local Unionist bosses.⁵ Independent Unionism did, at times, provide an outlet for working-class Protestant frustrations, though it rarely strayed very far from the project of cross-class unity at the heart of unionism, and despite its nuisance value usually fell in line behind Orange elites. But fissures within the Unionist project could also develop from a more explicitly Left direction: in periods of sharp class polarization, as during the 1907 Dockers’ Strike and the 1919 Engineers’ Strike, the Orange alliance had come under considerable strain.

The 1907 Belfast Dockers’ Strike is, alongside the 1913 Dublin Lockout, the most celebrated struggle in the history of the Irish labor movement. Under the leadership of “Big Jim” Larkin, thousands of previously unorganized dockworkers resisted an attempt by employers to lock them out for daring to organize in a trade union. When employers attempted to break the strike with scab labor, the stoppage spread to local carters who refused to handle the goods emanating from the docks. Some two hundred thousand workers from across Belfast’s sectarian divide marched in solidarity with the strike, and tensions even emerged within the ranks of the local police when hundreds of officers threatened mutiny. The significance of the working-class unity on display during the strike was not lost on Belfast’s ruling class. Echoing the experience of the 1905 Revolution in Petrograd, one local newspaper, the Northern Whig, declared: “We are on the eve of an experience something akin to which has paralysed Russian cities during the last couple of years.”⁶ Alas, the trade union leadership in Britain did not quite have the stomach of those who led the 1905 Revolution: solidarity actions were called off, leaving the strike isolated and ultimately leading to its defeat.

What happened in 1907 was not an aberrant occurrence. In 1919, Belfast was again brought to a standstill as a result of a general strike demanding the introduction of the forty-four-hour working week. It had begun with just twenty thousand workers from the engineering sector, but they were quickly joined by every major workplace in Belfast. Electricity and gas were switched off while essential government services were brought to a halt in actions tantamount to a complete shutdown of the city. In a stunning show of workers’ unity, the mainly Protestant engineering workforce was led by a Catholic, Charles McKay. For a period it appeared as if the committee leading the strike was in control of the city. The lord mayor of Belfast declared that municipal authorities were “entirely at the mercy of the strike committee.”⁷ As in 1907, journalists sensed the rumblings of revolutionary upheaval: “Soviet has an unpleasant sound in English ears, and one uses it with hesitation; but it nevertheless appears to be the fact that the Strike Committee have taken upon themselves, with the involuntary acquiescence of the civic authority, some of the attributes of an industrial soviet.”⁸

Despite the fact that both of these strikes went down to defeat, they played an important role in shaping the contours of politics throughout the home rule crisis. Orangeism was not just crucial to the Unionist elites as a means to unite Protestants against an independent Ireland; it was also a method of protecting their class interests by weakening trade unionism and dividing the working class. As the historian John Gray puts it, “For Belfast’s employers, economic interest and the politics of Unionism were inextricably linked, and they accordingly saw in any major economic agitation— something serious enough in itself—a more fundamentally destabilising threat.”⁹ However, despite the significance of the labor revolts of 1907 and 1919, the working class in Belfast never became a force conscious of its own power to shape events, and it was left without effective political representation throughout the constitutional crisis. The “Workers’ Republic” espoused by socialists like James Connolly, which alone stood a chance of winning support across the sectarian divide, was not championed by any significant force in the country, and as a result workers in the North remained divided behind middle class–led nationalist and Unionist blocs.

Important too was the impact of the defeat of the labor movement, which left its leading activists dejected and demoralized, and opened the door for other forces to intervene and shape the period in their own class interests. Britain took advantage of this impasse to impose a partitioned Ireland—based on the two parliaments announced in 1919 and solidified by the formation of the Northern Ireland state in 1921. This was not the inevitable result of some innate and irreconcilable cultural difference between Protestants and Catholics (or “two nations” in academic parlance), as the history of both the 1907 and 1919 labor unrest attests. Rather, the carve-up of Ireland into two partitioned states was the distillation of a prolonged social crisis involving different class actors, whose ultimate resolution showed the distinct etch marks of an imperial carve-up. As historian Fergal McCluskey observes:

Connolly had warned that such a scenario would be disastrous for the labor movement and would lead to a “carnival of reaction” on both sides of the new border:

This warning, unheeded by both the labor movement and the republican leadership, quickly proved prophetic. Unionist elites were intent on copper-fastening their control by smashing any resistance to the new state. Through relentless sectarian agitation Unionists and their supporters whipped up tensions throughout the North. Loyalist paramilitaries enacted a policy of murderous reprisals against Northern Catholic civilians for attacks carried out against British forces elsewhere in Ireland. Attacks by republicans on the police in Belfast became the pretext for unleashing a wave of state repression and sectarian violence, culminating in loyalist-led pogroms that saw thousands expelled from their homes and thousands more out of their workplaces. Anyone considered subversive was a target. In the main this meant the minority Catholic community. But the violence also targeted those Protestant socialists and trade unionists who refused to lend support to the pogrom and were therefore regarded by loyalism as “traitors.” A Catholic worker who in July 1920 witnessed the violence accompanying the formation of the Northern state described the scene in the shipyards:

In the violence that followed the shipyard expulsions, twenty-eight people were killed and 1,766 wounded. Overall, between 1920 and 1922, 8,750 people were expelled from their jobs and 23,000 driven out of t...