Republicanism is one of the most heavily worked words in Irish political conversation and one of the most consistently imprecise. It is used to describe the founding tradition of the modern Irish state, the position of the political party currently leading the opinion polls, the philosophical orientation of the American constitutional founders, the dominant ideology of the modern French state, the cause of armed groups that continued to operate in the North into the 21st century, and a long list of other not-obviously-related things. Most arguments involving the word are conducted by participants using two or three different definitions at once.

This piece is a short primer. There are at least three distinct republican traditions, and they share less than the common word suggests. I will sketch the classical and French traditions briefly so the comparison is available, then spend most of the piece on the Irish tradition specifically, because that is where most Irish readers' interest lies and because the Irish strand is genuinely distinctive.

The Irish republican tradition is the single most important political tradition in modern Irish history. Its successes built the state we live in. Its failures, particularly its slow drift from the non-sectarian civic vision of Wolfe Tone into the Catholic-coded ethnic nationalism of the post-1922 settlement, shaped what that state became. Its current condition, with the constitutional question of partition becoming politically live again, is one of the most consequential open questions in the country.

A definition that survives most strands

At its broadest, republicanism is the political tradition built around the proposition that legitimate political authority derives from the citizenry rather than from a hereditary monarch, and that a republic, a polity organised around active citizen participation in self-government, is a higher form of political organisation than monarchy or aristocracy.

This commitment, in its general form, is so widely shared in modern democratic societies that the word "republican" can feel decorative. The interesting differences are in the more specific commitments each tradition has built on this base.

The classical-civic tradition

The oldest strand traces from Cicero and the Roman Republic through Machiavelli, James Harrington, Algernon Sidney, John Adams, and the American constitutional founders. The defining commitments are civic virtue, the active participation of citizens in their own governance, the suspicion of inherited or concentrated power, and the belief that political corruption is the principal threat to a free society.

The classical-civic tradition is not necessarily democratic in the modern sense. The Roman Republic, the Florentine Republic, and the early American Republic all restricted citizenship to property-owning men. The argument was about how a self-governing political class should organise itself, not about universal political participation. The slow democratisation of the tradition over the 19th and 20th centuries is a separate development.

The contemporary academic revival of the tradition, associated with figures like Quentin Skinner, Philip Pettit, and Maurizio Viroli, has emphasised the classical-republican concept of freedom as non-domination, distinct from both the liberal concept of freedom as non-interference and the positive concept of freedom as self-realisation. This is an analytically interesting distinction and is worth knowing about, particularly because it underwrites a different account of what political institutions are for.

The French tradition

The French republican tradition descends from the Revolution of 1789 and the subsequent Republics. Its defining commitments are laïcité (a strong, militant secularism that treats the state as the protector of the public sphere from religious authority), the indivisibility of the French Republic (a single nation of citizens with no recognised intermediate group identities), and a distinctive conception of the state as the active embodiment of the general will.

This tradition is unusual in its insistence that group identities (religious, ethnic, linguistic, regional) should be politically irrelevant in the public sphere. The state recognises individual citizens directly, not communities, and is hostile to any politics organised around sub-national identities. The recent French controversies about the headscarf, multiculturalism, and immigrant identity politics are direct expressions of this tradition.

The French tradition has had relatively little direct influence on Irish republicanism, despite the obvious surface affinities. The Irish tradition has had a substantially different relationship with religion, with regional identity, and with sub-national community structures. The French model is therefore mostly relevant as a contrast.

The Irish tradition

The Irish republican tradition is distinct from both the classical-civic and the French traditions, although it has drawn on both at various points. It is the dominant political tradition in modern Irish history. Its constituent commitments have shifted substantially across two and a quarter centuries, and the current form of the tradition is significantly different from its founding form.

I am going to give a fairly long account here because the tradition is large, the misconceptions about it are many, and the current public conversation about it is conducted in a vocabulary that is mostly inadequate to its history.

The founding moment: Wolfe Tone and 1798

The Irish republican tradition begins, on most reasonable accounts, with Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) and the Society of United Irishmen, founded in 1791. Tone was a Dublin Protestant lawyer of Anglican background, drawn into politics by the wider Enlightenment-revolutionary moment of the 1780s and 1790s. The United Irishmen were initially a constitutional reform movement seeking parliamentary reform and Catholic relief. They radicalised over the 1790s into an insurrectionary movement aimed at separation from Britain.

The defining commitment Tone articulated, in language that Irish republicans have invoked ever since, was the substitution of "the common name of Irishman in the place of the denominations of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter". This was a non-sectarian civic-republican vision. The proposed Irish Republic was to be a political community of citizens, with religious denomination as a private matter, drawing on the same Enlightenment sources that animated the American and French Revolutions.

The 1798 Rebellion attempted to bring this vision into being, with French military support, in a series of risings across Ulster, Wexford, and other counties. It failed, with very heavy casualties, particularly in Wexford. Tone was captured at Lough Swilly, condemned to death by court martial, and died of self-inflicted wounds before execution.

The legacy of Tone and the United Irishmen is contested. The non-sectarian civic-republican vision was genuine and historically substantial, particularly in Ulster, where significant Protestant Dissenter (Presbyterian) participation in the United Irishmen complicates the standard 20th-century picture. The Wexford rising, however, took on a more sectarian Catholic character on the ground, and the post-1798 period saw the slow Catholicisation of the broader Irish national project. The non-sectarian vision survived as an ideal that subsequent generations of Irish republicans would invoke, frequently while operating in conditions that did not honour it.

The 19th century: Young Ireland, the Fenians, the Land League

The 19th-century Irish republican tradition continued through several formations. Young Ireland in the 1840s, including Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, articulated a romantic-nationalist version of the tradition that was more culturally Irish-Catholic in tone than Tone's vision but retained substantial civic-republican commitments. The 1848 rising was a small and unsuccessful affair but the intellectual influence of Young Ireland on subsequent Irish nationalism was considerable.

The Fenians, properly the Irish Republican Brotherhood (founded 1858) and its parallel American organisation the Fenian Brotherhood, organised the longer-term insurrectionary tradition. The 1867 rising was unsuccessful. The IRB persisted as an oath-bound revolutionary organisation through the second half of the 19th century and into the 20th, eventually playing the central organising role in the Easter Rising of 1916.

The Land League, founded 1879 under Michael Davitt, James Daly, and Charles Stewart Parnell, transformed the political situation in rural Ireland. The Land War of 1879-1882 used boycott, rent-strike, and mass mobilisation to break the legal and economic power of the landlord class, and produced the long sequence of Land Acts that eventually transferred most Irish farmland from landlord to tenant ownership. Davitt's specifically republican-socialist analysis, set out in The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904), is one of the more substantive theoretical contributions to the tradition. The Land League is worth dwelling on because it is the most successful Irish republican project in modern history. It actually changed the structural ownership of the country and did so in a way that subsequent Irish politics has lived inside ever since.

1916 and the founding of the modern tradition

The Easter Rising of 1916 is the canonical foundational event of the modern Irish republican tradition. The seven signatories of the Proclamation (Patrick Pearse, James Connolly, Tom Clarke, Seán MacDermott, Joseph Plunkett, Éamonn Ceannt, and Thomas MacDonagh) were executed in the aftermath. The Proclamation itself remains, on most readings, the canonical statement of Irish republican commitments.

The intellectual content of 1916 was internally divided in ways that have shaped the tradition ever since.

Pearse's position was a romantic-Catholic blood-sacrifice nationalism, drawing on a particular reading of Irish-Gaelic cultural revival and on a theological framing of national redemption through political martyrdom. Pearse's writings, particularly the political essays of 1913-1916, are one of the most influential and one of the most genuinely dangerous strands in the tradition. The blood-sacrifice framing has continued to shape Irish republican rhetoric in ways that other strands of the tradition have struggled to contain.

Connolly's position was Marxist socialism applied to Irish national circumstance. The Citizen Army, which Connolly commanded, was a syndicalist workers' militia rather than a nationalist volunteer force, and Connolly's writings, particularly Labour in Irish History (1910), articulated a class-analytical reading of Irish history that the broader nationalist tradition mostly ignored. Connolly's joint participation in the Rising with Pearse remains one of the more puzzling tactical alliances in modern revolutionary history. The two men's politics were genuinely different.

Clarke and the older IRB tradition represented the longer Fenian organisational continuity. Less theoretically articulate than either Pearse or Connolly, but operationally central to the planning of the Rising itself.

The post-1916 period, the War of Independence (1919-1921), and the Civil War (1922-1923) saw the slow consolidation of the tradition into a single mass political movement. Sinn Féin, originally a small constitutional nationalist organisation founded by Arthur Griffith in 1905, became the political vehicle through which the post-1916 generation organised. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 produced the split that has, in modified form, shaped Irish politics ever since.

The Treaty split and after

The Treaty of December 1921 produced two Irish republican positions that have persisted, in evolved form, into the present.

The pro-Treaty position accepted the partition of Ireland and the dominion-status arrangement on the grounds that this was the most that could be obtained at the moment, and that the freedom to achieve full independence subsequently could be built from the institutions the Treaty provided. This position was held by Michael Collins, Arthur Griffith, and most of the eventual Cumann na nGaedheal / Fine Gael lineage.

The anti-Treaty position rejected partition and rejected the oath of allegiance to the Crown that the Treaty required, on the grounds that these constituted abandonment of the republican commitment that 1916 had articulated. This position was held by Éamon de Valera, Cathal Brugha, and most of the eventual Fianna Fáil and (much later) Sinn Féin lineage.

The 1922-1923 Civil War between the two sides was vicious, brief, and politically formative. The pro-Treaty side won militarily. The anti-Treaty side, after a long political reorientation under de Valera, eventually won electorally with the formation of Fianna Fáil in 1926 and the FF election victory of 1932.

The slow drift from the founding civic-republican vision into something more conservative and Catholic-coded happened across the post-1922 period in both states (Free State / Republic of Ireland in the South, and the de facto British state in the North) and in both lineages (pro-Treaty and anti-Treaty). The Free State of the 1920s and 1930s was substantially clerical-conservative in character. The Northern Ireland of the same period was substantially sectarian-Unionist. The Irish republican tradition became, in operational practice, the Catholic-and-nationalist tradition of the southern state, with the non-sectarian civic vision of Tone surviving as a rhetorical inheritance more than as an active political programme.

The Northern conflict

The post-1969 period in Northern Ireland was the largest sustained Irish republican military campaign since 1798. The Provisional IRA, formed after the 1969-1970 split in the IRA, conducted a thirty-year armed campaign that ended formally with the 1998 Belfast Agreement and the subsequent decommissioning. The Provisional Sinn Féin, the political wing of the movement, evolved into the modern parliamentary Sinn Féin that operates in both jurisdictions today.

The intellectual record of the Provisional movement is mixed. The political analyses produced by Sinn Féin in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly under the pen of Danny Morrison, Gerry Adams, and others, were a significant theoretical effort within the broader republican tradition. The combination of armed struggle, electoral politics, and community organising that the movement developed (the "Armalite and ballot box" formula) was a substantial political innovation that subsequent insurgent movements internationally have studied.

The human cost of the period was enormous on all sides. Approximately 3,500 deaths across the conflict. The republican tradition's relationship to the violence of those decades is a question the tradition has been working through, and continues to work through, in terms that are not yet fully resolved. Honest engagement with what was done in the name of the tradition is part of any current republican project.

The current condition of Irish republicanism

The current Irish republican tradition is in transition. Several developments are reshaping it.

The constitutional question is active again. The 1998 Belfast Agreement provides a procedural mechanism for a border poll on Irish unity. The demographic and political conditions in the North have shifted in ways that make a unification poll, in the next decade or two, plausible in a way it has not been since 1922. The republican tradition is having to translate its founding commitments into operational policy proposals about what unification would actually involve, which is a kind of practical politics the tradition has not had to do at scale before.

Sinn Féin is now the largest opposition party in the South and was the largest party in the most recent Northern Assembly election. The party's policy programme is broadly social-democratic on economic questions and broadly republican on the constitutional question, with a complicated relationship to the legacy of the Provisional movement. The party's transition from movement to mainstream parliamentary politics is one of the more significant Irish political stories of the last twenty years.

Aontú is, as discussed in the parties long-read, the explicitly socially-conservative republican alternative. The constituency it represents (republicanism plus traditional Catholic social commitments) is small but real and is currently under-served by the broader political offering.

Smaller dissident republican groupings persist, including Saoradh and the various Continuity / Real / New IRA formations. The political and operational significance of these groupings has substantially diminished since the 1998 Agreement but they are not entirely absent.

Fianna Fáil retains "republican party" in its self-description and remains officially committed to the long-term unity goal. The operational reality is that FF has become a centrist managerial party for which the republican commitment is largely ceremonial.

The non-sectarian civic-republican vision of Tone is substantively under-represented in the current tradition. The dominant strands are either ethno-Catholic-coded nationalism (the inherited 20th-century pattern) or movement-republicanism inheritor of the Provisional tradition. The pure Tone vision, of a non-sectarian Irish Republic in which Protestant, Catholic, and Dissenter share equal civic citizenship, is mostly heard in academic and rhetorical contexts rather than as a live political programme. Recovering it, in the context of current debates about unification, is one of the more important intellectual tasks for the tradition in the coming period.

What Irish republicanism gets right

Worth being explicit about.

The non-sectarian civic-republican vision of Tone is genuinely valuable. The proposition that political community should be organised around shared citizenship rather than around shared religion or ethnicity is, in 2026, one of the most important political principles available. The Irish republican tradition has this principle at its founding and, despite the long drift away from it, retains it as a recoverable resource.

The Land League's success in transforming Irish landownership is a major achievement of the tradition and one of the most successful political projects of the 19th-century European left. The Davitt-Lalor analytical framework around land and class is intellectually substantial and remains relevant to current debates about housing and ownership.

The recognition that political legitimacy derives from the consent of the governed, while now widely shared, was a radical proposition when Tone articulated it for the Irish context. The Irish republican commitment to popular sovereignty has been a real political asset across two and a quarter centuries.

The post-1969 movement's eventual transition from armed campaign to parliamentary politics is, whatever else it was, a substantive political achievement. The Belfast Agreement and the subsequent decommissioning were not inevitable. They required serious political work by people who could have continued the armed campaign.

What Irish republicanism has gotten wrong

Worth being honest about.

The slow Catholicisation of the tradition across the 19th and 20th centuries betrayed the Tone vision. The post-1922 Free State, in particular, was substantially clerical-conservative in ways that the founding republican commitment did not require and that, on Tone's vision, it should have actively prevented. The recovery of the non-sectarian commitment requires honest reckoning with how thoroughly the tradition departed from it.

The militarist strand, particularly in the Pearse-influenced blood-sacrifice register, has produced enormous human cost across the modern period. Whatever one's view of the 1916 Rising itself, the longer pattern of armed-republican action through the 20th century is not a record the tradition can claim as unambiguously positive. The Provisional IRA campaign in particular killed substantial numbers of civilians and produced trauma in nationalist and unionist communities that is still being worked through.

The treatment of Northern Protestants and Unionists has often been substantively poor across the tradition. The default position, that unionists are British-identifying Irish people who would settle into a united Ireland once the constitutional anomaly was resolved, has had limited engagement with what unionists themselves consistently say about their identity and political preferences. Genuine reckoning with this is part of what any serious unification project would require.

The tradition's relationship to its own internal violence has been incomplete. The 1922-1923 Civil War was politically formative and is still substantially unresolved at the level of historical memory. The 1969-1998 conflict produced commemorative practices on all sides that often serve to obstruct rather than support honest political reckoning. The republican tradition is not unique in this. It is also not exempt.

These are not minor issues. They are the live questions for any contemporary recovery of the tradition.

Why this matters for the citizen

The Irish republican tradition is the political tradition that most directly shaped the country we live in. Its successes and failures are baked into the institutional, cultural, and political structures of modern Ireland. A citizen who wants to think seriously about Irish politics has to engage with the tradition, including its founding commitments, its actual historical record, and the live question of what its current condition asks of contemporary politics.

The unification question, which is moving from the background to the foreground of Irish political life over the next decade, will be the largest test the tradition has faced since 1922. The procedural framework is in place via the Belfast Agreement. The political and intellectual framework is much less in place. The republican tradition has not yet articulated a clear, operational vision of what a 32-county Republic would actually look like, in terms of constitutional structure, fiscal arrangement, treatment of unionist identity, relationship to the European Union, defence policy, and the rest. Doing this work is the major political-intellectual task in front of the tradition now.

The recovery of the Tone civic-republican vision, in a form adequate to present circumstances, is part of this task. So is honest reckoning with what the tradition has done in its own name across two centuries. So is the substantive engagement with unionist identity that the tradition has historically been unwilling to do. None of this is glamorous work. All of it is necessary.

Further reading

If you have an evening: Tone's An Argument on Behalf of the Catholics of Ireland (1791), or any of the shorter selections from his journals. The voice survives the centuries surprisingly well and is the most direct entry into the tradition's founding moment.

If you have a week: Roy Foster, Modern Ireland 1600-1972 (1988). The standard scholarly history. Critical, careful, and essential. Then James Connolly, Labour in Irish History (1910), as the most theoretically developed primary text from inside the tradition.

For the founding period specifically: Marianne Elliott, Wolfe Tone: Prophet of Irish Independence (1989). The standard biography.

For the 1916 generation: Foster's Vivid Faces: The Revolutionary Generation in Ireland 1890-1923 (2014) is the best recent treatment. Pearse's political writings are worth reading, with awareness of their own internal tensions.

For the Land League: Davitt's The Fall of Feudalism in Ireland (1904) is the canonical primary text. Sam Clark, Social Origins of the Irish Land War (1979) is the standard scholarly treatment.

For the post-1969 period: Ed Moloney, A Secret History of the IRA (2002, expanded 2007), is the standard journalistic account. Tommy McKearney, The Provisional IRA: From Insurrection to Parliament (2011), is the most substantial account from inside the movement. Diarmuid Ferriter, The Border: The Legacy of a Century of Anglo-Irish Politics (2019), covers the constitutional question across the period.

For the contemporary unification debate: Brendan O'Leary, A Treatise on Northern Ireland (three volumes, 2019), is the most rigorous recent academic treatment. The various Senator Mark Daly Seanad reports and the Constitutional Future of the Island materials are useful primary documents.

For the philosophical tradition specifically: Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (1997), is the standard contemporary academic statement of the broader republican tradition's philosophical resources. Pettit, an Irish-born Australian philosopher, has written extensively about the relevance of the republican tradition to current democratic theory.

The thing the Irish republican tradition asks, that the broader tradition has been working out for two centuries, is whether a political community can be organised around shared civic citizenship rather than around shared religion, ethnicity, or accident of birth. The tradition has answered the question well at moments, badly at others, and is currently being asked to answer it again. What happens next is one of the largest open questions in the country.

Related in the Political Literacy series

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