PC: Communist Ireland

Do any of you think that the Republic of Ireland could have plausibly gone Communist?
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No.

Mind blowing impossible due to the influence of the RCC
This.

Eh, no.
I mean, technically the Program for Economic Expansion by Whitaker in the 50s was state intervention in the economy, which sounds awful like communism. But that was mainly because Ireland really needed it post WW2. But if a communism threat gets serious, the Marshall plan will be used to try and prevent it.
More Keynes than Lenin.

If James Connolly lives, then Ireland has a chance.
The chance of a whelk in a supernova. Remember Connolly House in '33? And The Siege of 64 Great Strand Street? And the rest.
"Here in this holy Catholic city of Dublin, these vile creatures of Communism are within our midst."
 
Again do they have a choice, or risk their own hard left/communist groups in GB taking strength from Ireland going "Red" and the impact that would have? A Nationalist Free State is far less threatening to the "powers that be" than Communism spreading imo.
It's an interesting scenario. More cooperation between the revolutionaries in Ireland and Britain in 1918-9 would be extremely dangerous for the UK government. Remember in 1919 Valiant was sent to Liverpool to assist in putting down the strikes and disturbances, including by bombarding the city.

If there was more armed resistance to (for example) batoning the demonstrators in Wales and the industrial cities and town and putting down of the army mutinies, it could lead to massacres in Glasgow, naval bombardment of Liverpool, Trenchard lynched, the "Calais Soviet" succeeding and more dead at the Battle of Kinmel Camp et cetera.
 
What if they did send troops into Ireland to prevent Communists from taking control though? In Ireland especially, wouldn't that only succeed in further boosting popular support for the communists, especially if the non-communist alternative is effectively a puppet regime installed by a British military occupation force?
Think Vietnam. Or read Newman's Teddy Bears' Picnic.
 
Amending my earlier comment, you do have the example of the USA and Cuba.

Cuba is a really weird case, but what seems to have happened is that Castro turned to the USSR for support, which put nukes on the island. After that the USA could not do anything about Cuba without starting World War 3. I'm not sure why Cuba wasn't targeted for regime change after the fall of the USSR.

So maybe a post World War 2 Fianna Fail government decides to ally with the USSR and join the Warsaw Pact, so Ireland is under the USSR nuclear umbrella. But it just makes no sense why an Irish government would do that. Again, you need to get the UK to screw things up even worse than they did IOTL.
Not going to happen. There was/is no ideological connection between any mainstream irish political party and Soviet style communism. Maybe it the UK went fascist and the US went isolationist but nothing short of that.
 
If it can be done the man to do it was James Larkin. Maybe he returns earlier from the US
Larkin's flirtation with Soviet Communism was fairly brief, didn't help him with the Irish union movement and appears to have been mainly opportunistic.
 
Think Vietnam. Or read Newman's Teddy Bears' Picnic.
Probably a bit more complicated and three cornered than that. The "collaborators" would not merely be the venal and despicable (of the Boleslaw Beirut or Klement Gottwald ilk) or out of touch Southern Unionists, they could include the Church hierarchy and a lot of the more conservative nationalists OTL (half of deValeras's Cabinet and all of Cosgrove's for starters) who would conclude that British oppression was better than rule by the godless atheists. Quite a lot of Poles thought that way about the Germans 1939-41 and, bad as the Tans might have been, they were nowhere near as bad as the SS. Britain quite likely to be able to prop up a Dominion of Ireland in the (unlikely) event of a serious Communist threat.
 

Pangur

Donor
It's an interesting scenario. More cooperation between the revolutionaries in Ireland and Britain in 1918-9 would be extremely dangerous for the UK government. Remember in 1919 Valiant was sent to Liverpool to assist in putting down the strikes and disturbances, including by bombarding the city.

If there was more armed resistance to (for example) batoning the demonstrators in Wales and the industrial cities and town and putting down of the army mutinies, it could lead to massacres in Glasgow, naval bombardment of Liverpool, Trenchard lynched, the "Calais Soviet" succeeding and more dead at the Battle of Kinmel Camp et cetera.

Its possible and in that scenario I would look more at Glasgow and Liverpool as the cities where the unionist cause in Belfast is undermined.
 
It's an interesting scenario. More cooperation between the revolutionaries in Ireland and Britain in 1918-9 would be extremely dangerous for the UK government. Remember in 1919 Valiant was sent to Liverpool to assist in putting down the strikes and disturbances, including by bombarding the city.

If there was more armed resistance to (for example) batoning the demonstrators in Wales and the industrial cities and town and putting down of the army mutinies, it could lead to massacres in Glasgow, naval bombardment of Liverpool, Trenchard lynched, the "Calais Soviet" succeeding and more dead at the Battle of Kinmel Camp et cetera.

The danger for the Irish Revolutionaries is there's a fairly high chance that the British revolutionaries will be just as Unionist as the previous Government.
 
The danger for the Irish Revolutionaries is there's a fairly high chance that the British revolutionaries will be just as Unionist as the previous Government.
Very possibly. It depends on which of the groups dominates the revolutionary coalition. However, whatever happens, Britain will be much weaker and unable to influence events in Ireland, post-war Germany and revolutionary Russia to the historical levels.
 
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