their lives and fortunes for the difference between the existing state on the one hand and a Republic such as the USA or France on the other hand is negligible. That a civil war – even a short one – was fought even partly on such a basis was due to purely temporary and personal causes which have already lost much of their force. The men who wished to keep the IRA alive had therefore to look around for support springing from some other motives than the traditions of Irish independence and they found support in the widespread movement against the system of private property and private enterprise.118
Undoubtedly the predominant tendency in the IRA looked to the annuities movement and to the intensification of problems of unemployment and agricultural depression as the material from which a ‘second round’ could be engineered. The intense problems of the small farmer in the west, exacerbated by depression and the effective closure of emigration outlets, produced optimum conditions for a recrudescence of a form of republican intransigence which can be identified primarily as a form of traditional rural resistance to an ‘oppressor’ state. It was in many ways a land war disguised as a national struggle.
O’Donnell, who attended a congress of the Communist International’s European Peasant Committee (the Krestintern), was eager to give his annuities agitation an ‘internationalist’ flavour, and in March 1930 the Anti-Tribute League was transformed into the Irish Working Farmers Congress, which met in Galway. The rhetoric of the meeting did much to convince the police and the government of the reality of a ‘red’ menace:
This Congress accepts the platform and programme of the European Peasant Congress … by fighting on this platform, in alliance with town workers for the common interest of all toilers against capitalist exploitation, against land annuities ... the working farmers are at the same time fighting for the complete independence of our country.119
In fact, the alliance with urban workers was as speculative a construction as the link between the farmers’ struggles against annuities and the fight for ‘complete independence’. The substantial reality was a widespread spirit of lawlessness in many rural areas. At the centre of this was the inability of tens of thousands of farmers to pay annuities, the growth of arrears and the resultant action by the Land Commission to recover them, which could take the form of seizure of animals and even of the land itself. O’Donnell had always seen in the occasions of conflict between bailiffs and farmers the opportunity to demonstrate the ‘imperialist’ nature of the Free State and the possibility of a new republican offensive which, unlike the usual IRA military activities of the period – arms aids, the shooting of policemen and intimidation of jurors – would not leave the masses cold or hostile.
By 1931, as the police complained of a ‘growing feeling against payment of debts and against private property’,120 and the government adopted an increasingly repressive demeanour, the IRA’s secret paper commented on ‘an amazing resurgence of feeling throughout the country during the present year … Several companies and battalions have doubled and trebled their strength.’121 This ‘Fenian Radicalism’, as O’Donnell termed it, drew its strength predominantly from the areas with a history of participation in the annuities agitation. According to the police, the areas most disturbed by illegal drilling and other forms of ‘irregularism’ were Tipperary, Kerry, Leitrim and Donegal.122 These were also often areas with strong traditions of agrarian agitation and anti-Treatyism. There was in many parts of the western periphery a potent mixture of present economic grievance and an abiding ideological tradition which the Department of Justice characterised thus: ‘For generations there has been in Ireland the tradition of opposition to the state – a readiness in word and action, to question the authority of its institutions.’123
For the mainstream of the IRA leadership and much of its membership, the Saor Éire radicalisation was opportunistic. It held out the prospect of using material grievances to launch a new campaign. For them, O’Donnell’s re-coding of republicanism in the language of class struggle held out the possibility of enlisting new masses for traditional objectives. The ambiguities of social republicanism were apparent in O’Donnell’s address to a massive republican gathering at Bodenstown in June 1931:
What is the state machine? To understand the machine it is necessary to see that the British ruling class pushed in here, not just to place soldiers in Dublin, Cork and Belfast but to enrich themselves by the order of life they would establish here … Every struggle that arises, every strike in the cities, every fight on the land must be interpreted in this light so that the mass of the people may be led into revolt against the machinery of the state … not merely against the police.124
One interpretation of O’Donnell’s speech is as a restatement of Connolly’s identification of the conquest with imposed capitalism and of real freedom with socialism. This was probably O’Donnell’s intended meaning. However, articulated at the grave of Wolfe Tone to a gathering of republicans, most of whose knowledge of Connolly’s writings would have been minimal, its actual significance was different.125 It was an invitation to republicans to reinterpret concrete economic and social grievances and struggles as part of the national struggle. While this may have had the temporary advantage of raising IRA morale by apparently opening up new opportunities, it also had the effect of interpreting the ‘class struggle’ in Ireland in terms of fundamentally nationalist objectives. For most republican supporters – the small farmers and workers – the most appropriate mixture of social objectives and nationalism would be that provided by Fianna Fáil. In 1930 and 1931, for many of those in the IRA, the growth of social tension, the increasingly repressive response of the government and the radical noises of even the Fianna Fáil leadership presaged a massive attack on the whole Treaty settlement, in which the IRA would be able once again to become a popular force. In one sense, therefore, a move to the left also appealed, as holding out the possibility of intensified state repression and, in response, a non-parliamentary break with the institutions of the Free State. For a brief period this appeared to be a possible outcome. But the IRA, too narrowly entrenched in the traditional redoubts of rural resistance, underestimated the urban and rural appeal of Fianna Fáil’s mild social reformism and pacific, gradualist dismantling of the Treaty settlement.
The IRA’s General Army Convention meeting in Glendalough in April 1931 had adopted the Saor Éire programme. Its goal was now apparently ‘to achieve an independent revolutionary leadership of the working class and working farmers towards the overthrow in Ireland of British Imperialism and its ally, Irish Capitalism’.126 The initial public manifestation of the new programme was its first congress in Dublin attended by over 150 delegates in September. Not surprisingly, An Phoblacht hailed it: ‘Saor Éire gives a lead which, if acted upon, will achieve the Reconquest.’127 Claiming continuity with the 1916 Proclamation, the manifesto attacked the First Dáil for opposing ‘the direct action of the masses’ and denounced Fianna Fáil as
the party of the Irish middle class … [By] retaining much of the phraseology of their more robust days, Fianna Fáil ties up to their party a strong backing among the National population. They promise a higher tariff wall, so they get the small manufacturer and delude a section of workers in Irish industry; they promise to prevent the shipment of land annuities to England and make that, with derating, a gesture towards farmers. But the crisis is exposing them. They fail to campaign for the maintenance of the unemployed; they fail to support workers against wage cuts; they are unable to support the campaign against forced sales; they oppose the slogan ‘No Rent’, they refuse to support the demand for the overthrow of the land monopoly without compensation and to the consternation of their own youth they condemn rising IRA activity.128
This denunciation implicitly recognises the real ideological and material appeal of Fianna Fáil policies to both workers and small farmers, but then blithely denies it, either classifying it as illusory or simply raising more ‘leftist’ demands for which there was in fact no substantial constituency.
The shallowness of this attempt to overtake
