Fuck I wrote a whole thing and then lost it. Russia was majorly Orthodox at October, how the heck did they do a socialist revolution? More than that Ireland has always had a complicated relationship between the Catholics and the diocese. The pope funded the army of the Orangists that crushed Ireland. During '98 and '03 the church condemned the risings, and yet priests like father Murphy literally led their parishioners into battle in defiance. The workers didn’t exactly love it when the church refused to let the children of workers get food aid from British trade unionists during the Dublin Lockout cause it would “spread protestantism”.

Greece had a huge communist partisan movement, how could that have happened in a country that was so Orthodox? They didn’t legalize abortion until 1986. Some clergymen joined the communists or stayed out of politics, otherwise what did the workers and peasants of that Orthodox country do? They fought for communism while not letting their faith be controlled by the clergy or a section of it.

It is such an anti materialist thing to note. Communist countries have a mixed history with abortion access even well AFTER their revolutions. More than that you are looking at an outcome and using it to explain the cause. Ireland was controlled by the church and Fianna Fail and Fine Gael from the 30s until this century. Progress was not only halted but reversed in places. But more than that socialist movements arise for a variety of reasons and not every aspect is widely accepted. Some communist nations never had good access to abortion

The larger reason things didn’t work in ireland is that the IRA had nothing to offer workers, even though those workers had little love for the Free State. They fought a guerrilla war, there was no land to give back or factories to hold. I can’t find the quote but at the end of the war one of the IRA leaders said they lost because they didn’t offer labor anything tangible.

Even then Ireland had soviets formed and they didn’t fail because they where some backwards “hardcore Catholics” they got crushed by the state. We saw something similar in Russia, churches that collaborated with the white armies or that horded their bejeweled cathedrals while their parish starved faced reprisals from their parishioners which was made possible because they had a successful army aligned with the peasants and labor. In Ireland the army was too scattered to protect them. Plus during the War of Independence its not like many clergymen didn’t support the IRA on some level.

This article is great for the missteps and how during the civil war you had a strong labor movement in need of action and a national liberation army that was being compared to the Bolsheviks and the Jacobins that needed popular support and how those missed their chance to really unite again. https://www.socialistparty.ie/2022/06/war-against-bolshevism-the-irish-civil-war-1922-23/

In August the pro-treaty National Army (NA) seized Tipperary after heavy fighting with anti-treaty forces. The NA, the new armed forces of the Irish Free State, put an end to the Soviet movement in the town, as they did all over the country as they advanced (2) The anti-treaty forces, the Irish Republican Army (IRA), burned down the creamery before they retreated, leaving the militant workforce unemployed.

This local episode in some ways represents the Civil War in miniature. On the part of the pro-treaty forces, we see repression in the interests of the wealthy. On the part of the anti-treaty forces, we see a stubborn resistance but a complete lack of strategy, leading to destructive actions. On the part of the organised workers’ movement we see great power and potential. But the labour movement was let down by its leadership over several years, then defeated during and after the Civil War by the violence of the pro-treaty forces.

and

By 1921 the struggle for independence had reached a dead-end. There had been huge potential for a movement of the working class and poor in which socialism and national liberation were linked. This could have appealed to working-class and poor Protestants in the North. Instead Sinn Féin offered an independent capitalist Ireland which appealed to the Church and the wealthier classes. The leadership of the labour movement modestly stepped back and allowed them to take the lead, instead of boldly offering an alternative. Sinn Féin fought for this programme with a guerrilla strategy that, while heroic, had no chance of success in and of itself.(3)

…Some socialists attempted to appeal to IRA members. Peadar O’Donnell, a member of the Communist Party of Ireland, was also on the anti-Treaty IRA executive. Liam O’Flaherty, later a famous writer, and Roddy Connolly, son of James, were two of over a hundred socialists who fought on the anti-treaty side during the battle for Dublin. Their courage should not blind us to the fact that their strategy was a disaster. The Revolutionary Socialist Party pursued a better policy, leading the Munster soviet movement. But both parties were very small and underdeveloped, and it appears both were dealt fatal blows by the Civil War and the repression that followed.

ah what could’ve been. regardless it was in the Catholic majority areas of the occupied counties that the socialist Provisional IRA found its base.