the dawn of history, he it was who tilled the land, built up its traditions and fought the battles for the liberty of our country.95
The secretary’s report to the 1929 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis could report on the party’s
vigorous pursuit of the campaign for the retention of the land annuities. No question, in recent times, has aroused such widespread interest among the people, as is evidenced by attendance at public meetings and the demand for literature on the subject.96
In February of that year, however, the National Executive had already adopted a resolution committing the future Fianna Fáil government to use the retained annuities for the abolition of rates on agricultural land. The conservatism of this proposal was clear to many western radicals. As the Connaught Telegraph noted:
What affiliation have the congests of the west with the Farmers’ Union which is composed of the men monopolising the grazing ranches of the country? How will de-rating affect the thousands of congests in Mayo with the 14/- worth of land as compared with the grazing farmers having hundreds of acres of which he tills not a sod?97
Such an approach was clearly radically different from O’Donnell’s, although he accepted that after the repudiation of the payments to England the peasants would continue to make some payment. However all arrears were to be cancelled, something against which de Valera had set his face; the payment was to be not in excess of half the present annuity, and the money was to be used for agricultural credit and for the financing of co-operative enterprises.98 But as the world depression hit Ireland in 1929, O’Donnell began to predict confidently that a tide of radicalism would force Fianna Fáil to the left if it wanted to survive.
Fianna Fáil strove, with some difficulty, to adapt and mould the themes of the annuities campaign to other pre-existing themes of its discourse on the land question. The object was to create an agrarian stance sufficiently radical to consolidate its support amongst the small farmers of the west but not liable to alienate the more solid members of the farming community. Thus while the republicans under O’Donnell’s influence might agitate against payment of the annuities, de Valera’s approach was to emphasise that annuities would continue to be paid but then retained in Dublin. To make this more palatable, he promised that while some of the money would be used for de-rating, it would also be used to speed the process of land purchase and redistribution, particularly in the Gaeltachts and Congested Districts.99
From 1929 to the election of 1932, An Phoblacht and O’Donnell formed a bloc with the agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil in an intense assault on the ‘imperialist’ Free State regime and its main internal class support – the ‘ranchers’. The basic assumptions of the agrarian radicals were clear enough. Of 378,000 Irish agricultural holdings, some 255,000 or 67.5 per cent were valued at under £15 per year. These were the small men of rural Ireland: the total valuation of all these holdings did not reach £2 million, whereas the total valuation of all the holdings together exceeded £9.5 million. It took 315,000 of the smaller holdings, or 92 per cent of the whole, to reach a valuation of half of the Free State, while the remaining half was accounted for by 33,000 holdings (sometimes non-residential and ranching) or a little over 8 per cent.100 For the radicals the political implication was obvious: the lands valued at £5.5 million should be divided and peopled by agriculturalists on holdings from £20 to £50 pounds in valuation. Thus the Mayo News declared:
The spoken and written statements of Eamon de Valera our great chief, openly and candidly convey to the ranchers that this state of things which keeps our people in poverty must end, as a consequence they are putting forth every effort to defeat him. Those men who lock up God’s storehouse have the acres, but they have not the votes.101
The Mayo News was typically blasé about the major obstacles to such radicalism:
Roughly we have agriculturalists living on land valued at two million pounds. They are our only originating source of wealth, and all other classes in the community are directly or indirectly deriving their income from them. They are a small number of men occupying land of the valuation of £5,500,000 whose sole occupation is, as the late Michael Davitt put it, watching cows’ tails growing. They confine the land to growing blades of grass. They are practically worthless as an originating source of wealth to the community. The loss to the community per acre of such land is the difference between the life-sustaining capacity of an acre of tilled land and an acre of grass.102
A typical rural radical dismissal of any productive role for urban social classes, and displaying the moralistic ‘tillage’ mentality which blithely dismissed meat, the mainstay of Ireland’s exports, as ‘practically worthless’, this passage ignores important political realities. It was one thing to put the top 8 per cent as ‘enemies of the people’, but quite another to put the top 32.5 per cent in this category. Yet this article implicitly identified Fianna Fáil with 67.5 per cent of Irish farmers and against the 32.5 per cent at the top. However much some western radicals might like such an approach, the Fianna Fáil leadership attempted to avoid it; their adoption of agricultural de-rating was a sign of their willingness to compromise with larger farmers.
Nevertheless, the weight of the western small farmer and landless labourer component in the party’s support base, together with the undoubted influence of the annuities agitation in giving a national political focus to intensifying agrarian unrest from 1929 onwards, forced even de Valera to sound a radical note. Thus at a meeting in Irishtown, County Mayo, where the Land League had been launched in 1879, he presented Fianna Fáil in terms of a utopian rural radicalism:
The Ireland his party stood for was the Ireland of Fintan Lalor – an Ireland which still was their own from sod to sky … with the country’s resources fully developed, employment and the means of existence for a population of 20 million could easily be supplied.103
In the 1932 election campaign he seemed to be willing to contemplate a much more radical attack on the large farmers:
What about the rich lands? Have they been divided? In Meath, the richest land in Ireland, 5 per cent of farmers own 41 per cent of the land. These are the farmers who own 200 acres each; 631 persons own 234,575 acres: 631 own practically a quarter of a million acres of the best land in Ireland … In Tipperary 485 persons own 200,000 acres and in Kildare 6 per cent of farmers own over 172,000.104
In office, Fianna Fáil would disappoint many of its rural supporters, but its first years of power nevertheless witnessed a considerable increase in the pace of land redistribution. The Land Act of 1933 was crucial here under it, the Land Commission was empowered to expropriate, with compensation, any property that seemed suitable and distribute it among small farmers and the landless. This was coupled with the withholding of the land annuities which precipitated English tariff reprisals on Irish exports and brought the dislocation of the crucial cattle export trade. A brief irruption of Irish fascism in the form of the Blueshirt movement was the intense and fevered reaction of the large farmers, who saw the Fianna Fáil victory as a form of agrarian ‘Bolshevism’.
The radical element in Fianna Fáil’s appeal in 1932 was heavily influenced by the pressure of social republicanism. The annuities campaign had developed in a way that appeared to vindicate O’Donnell’s line inside the IRA. He put this forward very clearly in an exchange with Mary MacSwiney, who opposed the introduction of class issues into republican discourse:
My method of influencing an organisation is to raise issues behind it and force it either to adjust itself so as to ride the tidal wave or get swamped … If we wake up the country Fianna Fáil would either have to rearrange itself to stand for the people’s demand or it would be swept as wreckage around the steps of the Viceregal Lodge.105
Implicit
