be given it to consolidate itself further as an institution – if the present Free State members are replaced by Farmers and Labourers and other class interests, the national interest as a whole will be submerged in the clashing of rival economic groups.82
This clear avowal of the need to preserve Ireland from the dangers of class politics helps to explain much of the tortuous legalism which characterised de Valera’s position on the annuities. In July 1927 he dealt with the issue in an interview with the Manchester Guardian:
Our farmers ought certainly to pay something for the privilege of using the land. But perhaps what they pay should not be annuities calculated to compensate the landlord for his legal claim to rent but rather a land tax which could be graduated more justly and scaled down in accordance with the farmers’ ability to pay. Still I do not assert that those who advanced the money which the British Treasury used to buy out the landlords should not be repaid. But the question, by whom their money should be repaid, has still to be settled. I am not for a repudiation of debt. A future Republican government could not ignore all the acts of its predecessor, but the financial settlement which Cosgrave has made with England is absurd and will be reopened.83
At the 1927 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis a resolution proposed by a priest from South Mayo was passed calling on the Land Commission ‘in urgent cases where writs have been issued and seizure or sale is imminent’ not to take legal action where a farmer was able to pay the current annuity and was prepared to pay arrears by instalment.84 There was a considerable distance between this and O’Donnell’s campaign in Donegal, where the peasants had been organised to withhold annuities and resist seizures and sales. The conference’s decision to set up a special policy committee on the issue showed a determination that the party should benefit from it, but the report clearly demonstrated that the issue would be presented as a national grievance against England with the minimum possible social content. The basic argument was to be the legal one that the continued payment of annuities was contrary to the Government of Ireland Act and the Treaty. In power, Fianna Fáil would reopen the question with Britain and uphold the right of the Free State to retain the annuities. The funds so retained would be used ‘to help tenant farmers and to facilitate the purchase and distribution of land under the 1923 Act with special reference to the Gaeltachts and the Congested Districts’.85 Legalistic appeals to British legislation had little attraction for either agrarian radicals or republican purists. Discussing the annuities issue at Sinn Féin’s Árd Fheis, the party president, J. J O’Kelly, ‘referred to the means by which the lands of Ireland were confiscated by alien adventurers … His advice to Irish farmers was not to pay another penny in way of land annuities.’86
As O’Donnell admitted, however, by the end of 1927 there was a great danger of the agitation collapsing in its original areas of support: ‘I was desperately in need of some help to widen the area of struggle and to bring new voices onto the land annuities platform.’87 In a significant article, he implicitly recognised the limits of a strategy too closely tied to the peasant periphery. He spoke of ‘a quivering uneasiness in the collective mind of the working masses … a tiredness, a distrust, a cynicism’, and of the feeling that the peasantry were ‘a hard, mean, clutching, self-centred, self-seeking lot who really want to pay out nothing’.88 It was symptomatic of the large element of idealism that remained in even so ‘materialist’ a republican as O’Donnell that suspicion of the peasantry is explained by factors like ‘tiredness’ and ‘cynicism’. Urban working-class lack of interest in the annuities issue reflected the failure of even radical republicans to link it to a broader strategy of economic and social change. O’Donnell saw in the annuities issue a symbol of the continuing imperialist burden which the Free State government was prepared to impose upon a large section of the Irish people. This approach assumed that in the struggle against this burden an effective radical alliance could be built between ‘peasants’ and workers. As we shall see, the social republicans’ grasp of the political possibilities in urban Ireland was a tenuous one, but even their rural strategy failed to appreciate the complexity of rural class structure. It was this failure which ensured Fianna Fáil’s easy capture of the issue.
The situation of peripheral isolation encouraged a move towards Fianna Fáil and this was facilitated by an approach from Colonel Maurice Moore, a member of the Free State Senate who had been waging a campaign against the legality of the continued payment of annuities to England. Moore had produced a pamphlet, British Plunder and Irish Blunder, which he wished O’Donnell to serialise. Until then An Phoblacht had taken little notice of his speeches because, as O’Donnell admitted, ‘It would not occur to me to link up with a Free State Senator who could invoke no better argument than British Acts of Parliament.’89 However Moore was now a member of Fianna Fáil and on its executive was able to put his case strongly to de Valera. Association with Moore made it easier to go about the task of getting Fianna Fáil TDs onto annuities platforms: de Valera had banned them from appearing on platforms with O’Donnell. In February 1928 a national anti-annuities campaign was launched at a meeting presided over by Moore in the Rotunda, Dublin. O’Donnell shared the platform with three Fianna Fáil TDs, Gerry Boland, Dr Jim Ryan and Patrick Ruttledge, one of the foremost agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil, whose frequent speeches on the poverty and unemployment in Mayo were well received in An Phoblacht. In his speech, O’Donnell raised the ‘Call off the Bailiffs’ and ‘No Rent’ slogans which continued to embarrass de Valera, and Ruttledge made the point that while
the platform held people who did not agree on some points … on this matter of ending the payment of an illegal and immoral tax to England, they could agree and work in harmony, maybe opening the way to big things in the future.90
A national ‘Anti-Tribute League’ was created, with a leadership dominated by western radicals who personified the very close links – both ideological and familial – that still remained between the IRA and Fianna Fáil. Its chairman was Frank Barrett, chairman of Clare County Council. An ex-member of the Army Council whose brother was still in the IRA, he was now a leading member of Fianna Fáil.91 The vice-chairman was Eamonn Corbett, an IRA comrade of Mellows, who was now chairman of Galway County Council.92 The campaign attempted to get county councils in areas where annuities agitations existed to pass resolutions against the payment of the annuities to England and also demanding the suspension of legal action for arrears. By the end of the year such resolutions had been passed by Clare, Galway, Kerry and Leitrim county councils and the campaign was getting good publicity and support from the Mayo News and other western tribunes of agrarian radicalism.93 But the radicalism articulated by the Mayo News represented only one strand, however, and, for all its importance, a minority strand in Fianna Fáil. As de Valera’s semi-official biographers have noted, one of the major problems facing the new party was the fear amongst sections of the public of its supposed radicalism. In drafting an election address in 1927, de Valera protested that,
The sinister design of aiming at bringing about a sudden revolutionary upheaval, with which our opponents choose to credit us, is altogether foreign to our purpose and programme.94
The linking of the annuities issue directly to the conditions and needs of the small farmers, the anti-big farmer ethos of the campaign and its aura and rhetoric of direct action to resist the bailiffs were not the forms in which de Valera wanted the issue to be articulated. The increasing involvement of the Fianna Fáil leadership in the annuities question was associated with a sustained attempt to drain it of any specific class dimension. Thus the Nation began to publish articles by lawyers proving the illegality of the payments to England. If they made any appeal to history, it was done in such a way as to include the majority of the agricultural population. In a typical article by a lawyer, the regional and class dimensions of O’Donnell’s revivalism is obliterated in a simple identification of ‘historic struggles’ and ‘the farmer’:
As a matter of political economy, the need to help the agricultural industry requires no emphasis. But the farmer has surely other claims that go nearer
