ABSTRACT
It will be argued in this chapter that there was a much more diverse and interesting range of socialisms in Ireland during the first half of the nineteenth century than the existing literature suggests. At the risk of caricaturing the standard account, we are usually presented with Thompson, Ralahine, sundry Irish Chartists and labour activists in England, working-class and trade union militancy, and various non-socialist thinkers who are included because of their social radicalism (Lalor, for example). This inadequate picture does, however, reflect the marginality of early Irish socialism. The various writers and movements discussed below have been easily missed because they were relatively isolated and peripheral, and left little in the way of historical traces. Alternative ideologies triumphed in history and historiography. Where, for example, artisan socialism sought to oppose O'Connellite nationalism, it was crushed, and effectively vanished from the historical record; or when The Irishman sought to combine socialism with radical nationalism it was absorbed by the latter and reduced to an insignificant footnote in the rise of nationalism. It is not therefore the claim of this chapter that a major historical force has failed to receive its due, but that an historically interesting phenomenon has been the victim of inadequate treatment. The concluding year in the title of the chapter is not arbitrary because the mid-century point marks the end of a particularly turbulent period of economic, social and political dislocation. Inevitably, this means that the FenianisnlSocialismlFirst International relationship, which intervenes before the socialist revival in the 1880s, is not discussed. However this relationship has already received scholarly coverage elsewhere.! Our own discussion will deal with the following forms of socialism: Elite Socialism, Artisan Socialism, Socialism and Nationalism, and Christian Socialism.
