the pure ground of the Republic, it was still a party that could be forced in a progressive and anti-imperialist direction. For O’Donnell, the conversion of the IRA to social republicanism was an essential prerequisite for a reconstitution of anti-Treatyism through the transformation of Fianna Fáil or, if that proved impossible, a new united front of ‘anti-imperialist’ forces. Ironically, he was to have more success in pushing Fianna Fáil in a radical, autarkic nationalist direction than in transforming the IRA.
Saor Éire and the ‘Lurch to the Left’
O’Donnell later noted how the international situation helped his campaign to change the IRA:
By the end of the 1920s the world economic crisis had made itself felt so sharply in Ireland as an agricultural crisis that middle and even bigger farmers found the current annuity an embarrassment, and suddenly our movement became self-propelled.106
One of O’Donnell’s motives in instigating the IRA’s break with Sinn Féin and the Second Dáil in 1925 had been to get the IRA involved in social agitations, but he admits that he was to be relatively unsuccessful. Although a member of both the Executive Council and the Army Council and editor of An Phoblacht, he had been unable to involve the IRA as a body in the annuities agitation.107 His use of An Phoblacht to publicise the annuities issue was a source of conflict in republican ranks:
Quite good-intentioned fellows are sizzling with anger against me for using An Phoblacht to push my own set of activities in republican groups in the country. The working-class note will split the compactness of the ‘real republic’ I am threatened … It is my firm conviction that it is by making the working-class ideals active and dominant within the Republican movement that good can come to the revolutionary movement in the country.108
In January 1929 a proposal by O’Donnell and a small group of left-wing IRA men to found a radical political organisation tentatively called Saor Éire (Free Ireland) was rejected by the Army Convention. Instead, volunteers were permitted to join a new political organisation, Comhairle na Poblachta, which was designed as a united front of non-Fianna Fáil republicans.109 The first statement of the new organisation on Irish unity reflected the attitudes of IRA Chief of Staff, Moss Twomey, ‘a dedicated right-wing Fenian, scrupulous in his religious observance’,110 rather than those on the left:
[Irish unity] has become an absolute necessity if Ireland is to remain a Christian entity in a world rapidly becoming pagan … to get the clean, Gaelic, Christian mind of Ireland in revolt against the beastliness of English Imperial paganism should be the task of every right-minded citizen of Ireland.111
But as the 1929 slump cut off emigration outlets in the USA (between 1926 and 1930 over 90,000 had emigrated there112), there was a major decline in the remittances which had helped many small farmers eke out their living. The deteriorating economic and social conditions gave a new immediacy and attractiveness to O’Donnell’s ideas. He was later to claim that it was the inadequate response of the IRA leadership which prevented a revolutionary resolution of the crisis and benefited Fianna Fáil:
There was no political face to this mass unrest … it was a great lurch to the left on definite terms … As it became clear that the government had in mind to subject the IRA to a mounting system of police thuggery, the possibility of another armed clash forced itself into Republican discussions and with it came talk of the need for a Republican policy. We were back to Mellows. At any time the IRA chose, it could have put itself at the head of the whole Republican movement, pushing past Fianna Fáil, de Valera and all, to reach the 1919 position at one stride, by releasing its members into the land annuities agitation.113
However the essential ambiguities of social republicanism are apparent in the fact that, a few pages later in his account of this period, O’Donnell gives a very different evaluation of the possibilities. What he now appears to have desired was active IRA involvement in the annuities movement as a means of returning a Fianna Fáil government of a particular type, one forced by popular pressure to adopt agrarian and other economic policies considerably to the left of what they were committed to:
Facing a general election we believed we could add enough push to de Valera’s campaign to over-run the government party … de Valera and those round him wore no halos for us … These men would be incapable of the comprehensive, state-sponsored schemes, which alone could reach out to the small farm countryside, expand industry … National leadership was not the challenge facing us … Our task was to give coherence to the Fenian radicalism that characterised the crisis. The way to do that would be to put forward a short list of candidates to serve as a rallying point for second tier leadership to impose this militancy on the Fianna Fáil Executive.114
This essential lack of clarity as to what was possible in 1931-32 reflects the fundamental strategic void at the heart of physical force republicanism, whatever its ideological complexion. Its alternative to Fianna Fáil populism was either the ideal ‘Republic’ to be brought about by another attempt at the forcible overthrow of the Free State or an equally abstract social republicanism. Although the latter was prepared to dirty its hands with material grievances, it would seek to direct them to an objective which, for all its Marxist coloration, was effectively as detached from the possibilities of the situation as the ‘Republic’ of purist dreams.
The apparent radicalisation of the IRA leadership in the two years after the rejection of the Saor Éire proposal represented a desperate attempt to staunch what Bowyer Bell has described as the ‘wholesale desertion’ of its members to Fianna Fáil as it moved towards power.115 A movement estimated to have 20-25,000 members in 1926 had declined to a hard core of about 5,000 at the beginning of 1929, although even then its paper An Phoblacht sold 8,000 copies while the Fianna Fáil weekly, the Nation, sold 6,000.116 John McHugh has suggested that in the late 1920s there were three main elements in the IRA – the left, led by people like O’Donnell and George Gilmore, which was a definite minority but with disproportionate influence through its effective control of An Phoblacht; a strong bloc of apolitical militarists, well represented by the Chief of Staff, Twomey; and another relatively small group which adhered to Catholic social doctrines.117 The largest group which, like the bulk of the ordinary volunteers was drawn from small farmers, landless labourers and urban workers, was not unsympathetic to the left. Its own conditions and experiences were reflected in a diffuse social-radical variation on traditional republicanism. The further attraction of social republicanism was that it offered volunteers a deeper rationale for refusing incorporation in constitutional politics through the blandishments of Fianna Fáil.
But while the language of publications and meetings would be increasingly affected by borrowings from the Communist International, and a few republicans like O’Donnell would have close and friendly relations with the tiny coterie of Irish Communists, the substance of the relationship was largely instrumental. Here was a declining movement in desperate need of the issues and language to justify its continued existence. One of the police reports which the Cumann na nGaedheal government was using in an effort to alert the Catholic hierarchy to an approaching ‘red’ threat that included the IRA, gave an astringent estimate of the actual relationship between the IRA and social radicalism:
There can be little doubt that there are in the IRA men who dislike Communism and similarly in Communist circles men who regard the IRA as merely sentimental, old-fashioned patriots, but a union has evidently been arranged on the basis that both parties will do their best to destroy the present order of things. The value of this from the IRA point of view is obvious, every unemployed man, every small farmer who has to pay a Land Commission annuity, every struggling small trader, every discontented worker, will now be told that the IRA is his ally … The depression in agriculture and the repercussions here of the world-wide industrial slump will thus be turned into motive power
