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Based on original sources, this study charts the development of modern Irish socialism from the influence of William Thompson, Marx and the First International, challenging the myth that socialism emerged with James Connolly and the struggle for independence. The author explores the land war, the challenging position of Irish socialists in relation to Irish independence and the impact of British socialism on Ireland.

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CHOICE Review

Standard histories of Ireland date the establishment of its socialist movement to 1896, when James Connolly founded the Irish Socialist Republican Party. Lane, a researcher with Cork's Munster Literature Centre, has painstakingly sifted press notices, police reports, and private letters to demonstrate the existence of lively, if minuscule, socialist organizations in Dublin and other Irish cities as early as 1872, and a continuous socialist presence in Ireland since 1881. Irish socialist pioneers were handicapped by Catholic Church hostility, prejudice against and from agrarian reformers and political nationalists, indifference of their English counterparts, and a proclivity toward abstraction over pragmatism. Nevertheless, some half-dozen short-lived associations--the most important being the Dublin branch of William Morris's Socialist League--fought the good fight for a decade and a half before the gifted organizer Connolly arrived from Edinburgh to set things right. Lane documents little-known connections between the Irish socialists and Henry George, Michael Davitt, and Charles Stewart Parnell, as well as with the British socialist leaders Morris, H.M. Hyndman, and Keir Hardie. This study overlaps and improves on parts of John W. Boyle's Irish Labour Movement in the Nineteenth Century (1988). Upper-division undergraduates and above. D. M. Cregier University of Prince Edward Island