Ireland’s recent Eurovision boycott and the debate over the Occupied Territories Bill have drawn attention to the role of sanctions and boycotts in the modern political arena. With a global politics ruled by dysfunction and disaffection in the face of rolling catastrophes, it’s easy to wonder about boycotts which, like that of the Eurovision Song Contest, strike people as surprising ethical front lines.
It’s not immediately obvious how boycotting a campy, polyglot song contest could be politically impactful. However, disproportionate national investment and investigations of voting campaigns suggest that Eurovision is regarded as a key soft power vehicle with which Israel seeks to renormalise its place in the global consciousness.
As is well known here, the term “boycott” came from the public response to the activities of land agent Charles Boycott. In 1880, Boycott managed Lord Erne’s Mayo tenancies and, following a disappointing agricultural year, refused his tenants’ request for a 25 per cent rent reduction. Eviction notices were served.
Following earlier recommendations from Charles Stewart Parnell, who urged complete ostracism of those acting against tenants’ interests, the locals did just that. Boycott’s plight was covered extensively in British media and watched keenly by the Land League and others looking to harness collective power.
READ MORE
Of course, we were boycotting long before the term was coined. Consider 18th-century abolitionist Mary Birkett Card. Aged 17, Card – born in Liverpool but raised in Dublin – published a poem against slavery. In A Poem on the African Slave Trade (1792), the young Dubliner wrote powerfully about the “living death” slavery wrought on its victims, assigning those who “barter living souls for lust of ore” a disposition more “rav’nous than the foulest beast of prey”.
The poem’s subtitle (Addressed to her own sex) specifies its audience and reveals her pragmatic agenda. She appeals to Irish women – whom she believes to be particularly compassionate – that they must play their part in abolitionism. “Yes, sisters, yes, to us the task belongs.”
She notes that women may think their commerce doesn’t amount to much, but actually, they have tremendous power to harm the slave trade. How? They must boycott sugar. “How little think the giddy and the gay/While sipping o’er the sweets of charming tea./Push far away the plant for which they die/And in this one small thing our taste deny.”
Even in Boycott’s case, the centrality of women’s domestic energies to the “impalpable and invisible power” of the strategy is noted. British press accounts emphasised that, though he was just about physically safe, Boycott’s life was hardly worth living because, as Becker’s Disturbed Ireland tells us, he was “reduced to one female domestic” and “no woman in Ballinrobe would dream of washing him a cravat or making him a loaf”.
During the War of Independence, the Dáil approved the “Belfast boycott” of unionist-owned businesses and banks. Cumann na mBan played an important role in enforcing the boycott, but also urged women to think about their commerce and its impact on the cause. Kevin 0’Higgins opined that while young men died “the women folk and their families were filling the war chest of the enemy”. An undated Cumann na mBan handbill in the National Library of Ireland lambastes women sending money out of Ireland, taking sweets and chocolates as examples.
The poster connects the terrible state of emigration and joblessness to reckless spending, citing annual imports of sweets (worth £260,000) and chocolate (worth £330,000) from England. They implore women to connect the dots between domestic expenditure and the broader economy, and see their role in potentially worsening the situation. “You who would not willingly allow one little child to starve are actually starving thousands.” The pamphlet ends: “Every British sweet you eat deprives an Irish mouth of meat.”
Likewise, women are reminded of the valuable economy of their attention. A poster “To Some Young Women in Dublin” directs women to consider how they interact with English soldiers who “represent an alien power trying to crush this nation”. They advise: “They seek to enjoy themselves in our midst. They ask you to help them in spending their money – in making their time pass pleasantly.” They ask women to avoid “all intercourse” (intended broadly, one assumes) “with English soldiers, whether in uniform or not”.
Boycotting is occasionally discussed in terms of “virtue signalling”, a term I find puzzling in its common usage. Surely, if we’re in the business of signalling, it’s sensible to signal our virtues. So perhaps the issue is that we are often merely signalling and not acting to back it up. However, the history of boycotting and divestment shows us that such strategies are typically responses to inactivity in official channels or lack of access to more established power. It’s when governments (and others who can act with immediate impact) fail to act that people look to other ways to drive change and express solidarity.
When so many of us are frustrated with what seem like interminable bureaucratic delays in response to global atrocities, it is natural to find people seeking alternative political strategies. Trying to better align our expenditure and our values is one of the key tools we have.
Dr Clare Moriarty is a Research Ireland enterprise fellow, working at University College Dublin and the National Library of Ireland
