The British Labour Party and the Establishment of the Irish Free State, 1918–24, by Ivan Gibbons

In April 2014, President Michael D. Higgins marked the first Irish State Visit to the United Kingdom since the former’s foundation in 1922, with an address to British political leaders at the Palace of Westminster. Concluding his remarks, Higgins framed the political upheavals which forced Irish independence as reciprocal history: ‘The journey of our shared British–Irish relationship towards that freedom has progressed from the doubting eyes of estrangement to the trusting eyes of partnership’. The ‘shared past–shared future’ paradigm holds immense political currency, but to what extent does this equation hold true of historiography? This monograph by Ivan Gibbons presents itself as one such study of British–Irish history. British Labour Party policy on Ireland, Gibbons argues, moved ‘bewilderingly’ between support for Home Rule, self-determination and dominion status within the Empire across this period; its position on partition, correspondingly, evolved from ‘outright opposition’ to conservative ‘consolidation’. Labour indecision, it is posited, was conditioned by an underlying ‘craving for [British] political respectability’, within government and without. Gibbons’s scholarship is of Pellingite tradition. Socio-political transformations in early twentieth-century Britain and Ireland constitute its theoretical framework; Labour’s political institutions its empirical focus. The study’s originality within British historiography, the author submits, lies in its concentrated analysis of early inter-war Labour and Ireland.

Dominion · Economic history · Historiography · Home rule · Irish · Opposition (politics) · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · History · Irish and British Studies · Law