History of The Irish Labour Party - Labour in The Irish Free State

Labour in The Irish Free State

The Anglo-Irish Treaty divided the Labour party. It did not take an official stand. From his American prison cell, Jim Larkin opposed the Treaty while the only Labour member of the Dáil, Richard Corish of Wexford spoke and voted for the Treaty. Johnson, never a republican, privately supported the Treaty, while O'Brien did not oppose it. Following the approval of the Treaty by the Dáil in January, 1922, the executive of the ITUCLP succeeded at a special conference held in February, in passing a motion to participate in the forthcoming General Election. Successful Labour candidates were required to take their seats in the new Free State Dáil, and a reformist programme was adopted.

Johnson and the other Labour leaders tried to stop the slide to civil war to no avail, including holding a one day national strike across the 26 counties on 24 April. Labour candidates were nominated for the election on June 16, despite the difficulties of poor organisation, internal opposition to participation and limited finance. When The Collins/De Valera Pact was agreed on May 20, the pressure on the party was intensified. The Pact provided for the pro and anti Treaty sides to have one agreed slate of candidates with a coalition government to be established afterwards. Other parties and groups, including Labour, were asked to stand down again in the national interest. Effectively, the old Sinn Féin was about to deny a democratic election from being held and to prevent the public expressing their preferences. While de Valera had a notable success in persuading Patrick Hogan, a future Labour Ceann Comhairle, from standing in Clare, 18 other Labour candidates resisted the pressures on them from the IRA and went forward for election. These were perceived as pro-Treaty, and when Michael Collins repudiated the Pact four days before the election, it benefited the Labour Party as well as the pro-Treaty party. Seventeen of the eighteen Labour candidates won seats, with the 18th losing only by 13 votes. Some candidates had nearly twice the quota but had no running mates to transfer their surplus votes.

As well as being a triumph for the Labour Party, the election confirmed the popular acceptance of the Treaty. The Civil War broke out shortly later, between the IRA and the new National Army, and ravaged the country in the following months. The new Dáil did not meet until September preventing Labour from having any influence over events. Public opinion and voting habits crystallised in a deeply polarised fashion in this period between the two sides of the national movement, and led to the effective marginalisation of the Labour Party and of social and economic issues that was to last for the rest of the twentieth century.

When the third Dáil eventually met in September, Labour attempted to amend the new Free State Constitution to remove the elements imposed by the Treaty but pragmatically accepted the new order when it was adopted. The Labour deputies took the controversial oath of fidelity to the British monarch, viewing it as a formality.

In the immediate aftermath of the Civil War, an economic slump and collapse in union membership led to a loss in support for the party. In the 1923 election Labour only won 14 seats. However, from 1922 until Fianna Fáil TDs took their seats in 1927, Labour was the major opposition party in the Dáil. It attacked the lack of social reform by the Cumann na nGaedheal government. Johnson became the leading figure in the Parliamentary Labour Party and the leader of the Opposition to the new Government.

In 1923 Larkin returned to Ireland. He hoped to take over the leadership role he had left, but O'Brien resisted him. Larkin sided with the more radical elements of the party and in September that year he established the Irish Worker League.

In 1932 the Labour Party supported Éamon de Valera's first Fianna Fáil government, which had proposed a programme of social reform with which the party was in sympathy. In the 1940s it looked for a while as if Labour would replace Fine Gael as the main opposition party. In the 1943 general election the party won 17 seats, its best result since 1927. But further aspirations were disappointed as the party was damaged by internal division for the remainderof the decade.