On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth-Century Ireland

Four main explanations have been offered to account for the absence of a major agrarian party in post-independence Ireland and for the minor status and transience of those agrarian parties that did appear. For contextual reasons associated with nationalism and modernity, two of these suggest that there was no real need for a major agrarian party to begin with. Two other explanations point to the inability of the three main agrarian parties that did emerge to transcend the class divisions that prevented farmers becoming a coherent political class, and to counter the inadequacies that left them organisationally and tactically disadvantaged vis-a-vis their political rivals. The author's reading emphasises how the difficulties generated by class and political divisions were mutually reinforcing and how these difficulties in turn impacted on organisational and tactical prospects.