of the more ludicrous aspects of the attacks on de Valera’s party. Sean Hayes, who presided at the conference and was a veteran of the annuities campaign, was a Fianna Fáil county councillor and would soon be a TD for the party.129 The links of personality, ideology and outlook between many in the IRA and Fianna Fáil made the Saor Éire denunciations distinctly unimpressive. Even more demoralising for the minority of serious leftists in the IRA was the shallowness of the new commitments. O’Donnell was later to criticise Saor Éire as ‘evasive action’, the adoption of a social programme as an alternative to active involvement in popular struggles.130 And a more forthright dismissal of the whole venture came from Frank Edwards, a member of the IRA in Waterford city and later an International Brigader in Spain:
It was a most undemocratic way to send out invitations [to the Saor Éire Congress], just the Commandant and the Adjutant. It was IRA through and through. They got a county council member from Clare [Hayes] as chairman … He startled everybody by commencing with a religious invocation. Then to cap it all Fionan Breathnach stood up later and said we should adjourn the meeting as some wished to attend the All Ireland in Croke Park that afternoon. It showed you how seriously they were taking their socialism.131
A convinced socialist who was selling 600 copies of An Phoblacht a week at the time, Edwards emphasises that, for all its proclaimed leftism, the IRA effectively functioned not as the scourge but rather as the left wing of Fianna Fáil. Of An Phoblacht’s readers, he concludes disconsolately: ‘I suppose it was the people who voted for Fianna Fáil afterwards who bought them. We republicans had nothing to offer them politically.’132
The Republican Congress Minus Workers and Protestants
The Catholic bishops received their copies of the Department of Justice memorandum on ‘subversive teachings and activities’ and duly responded in a joint pastoral letter on 18 October 1931. Saor Éire was condemned as a ‘frankly communistic organisation’ trying to ‘impose upon the Catholic people of Ireland the same materialistic regime, with its fanatical hatred of God, as now dominates Russia and threatens to dominate Spain’.133 The government introduced new Public Safety legislation under which twelve organisations including Saor Éire, the IRA and the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups (precursors of the Communist Party of Ireland, whose earlier incarnation had been dissolved) were banned, military tribunals were introduced and hundreds were arrested.
Seán Cronin claims that the church-state offensive took the IRA by surprise: ‘They had moved out of the shelter of “national rights” into the exposed ground of “social rights” and were bombarded by everyone.’134 The Catholic Church’s offensive certainly demonstrated the clear ideological constraints on the agrarian radicalism of which people like O’Donnell had such high hopes. The Mayo News, which, as a militant supporter of small farmer agitation, had published one of O’Donnell’s pamphlets,135 made its position on Saor Éire very clear. Reprinting the manifesto in full, it then attacked it at length, particularly for its claim to continuity with 1916:
Patrick Pearse and his co-signatories of 1916 placed ‘the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God’. The engineers of the new Workers’ Republic at their first conference sent fraternal greetings to the Russian Soviets whose proclaimed policy is anti-God, who excel in obscene caricatures of the Blessed Virgin. The proclamation on which Saor Éire takes its stand, was drafted not by Patrick Pearse, but by Mr Stalin in Moscow. The whole programme is foreign as well as anti-Christian, it is against every tradition and principle of Irish nationality … [If] the mask of Republicanism under which it is masquerading were torn off this face, it would show itself in all its anti-National and anti-Christian ugliness.136
The response of the bulk of republicans was to discard the Saor Éire programme and forcibly assert their fidelity to nation and Catholicism. The remnants of Sinn Féin were produced to vouch for the soundness of those who had unfortunately produced a ‘misguided’ social programme. Mary MacSwiney, while opposing Saor Éire (‘It is a bad national policy to divide the people on a class basis’), claimed that of those who produced the policy, ‘Most … are practising Catholics and not one single one of my acquaintance would stand for an anti-Christian state.’137 A stalwart of the IRA and the annuities movement like Eamonn Corbett would publicly proclaim, ‘Many of us are indifferent or hostile to communistic ideas and propaganda but feel very strongly on the national question.138
When the periodical Irish Rosary claimed that on a trip to Moscow in 1929 O’Donnell had been trained in ‘anti-religious propaganda’ he sued (unsuccessfully) for libel, denying the charge and adding, ‘On the contrary, I am a Catholic.’139 Republicans were long used to withstanding attacks from the Church – after all, they had been excommunicated during the Civil War, but such anathemas had concerned their role as an ‘armed conspiracy’ and had not questioned their Catholicism. The new assault provoked a headlong retreat from a public leftism which had never been securely grounded anyway. The organisation now joined the broad opposition front including Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Labour Party, which denounced the increased repression and the government’s conservative incapacity to deal with the economic crisis, but from a safely Catholic position.
Sinn Féin’s Árd Fheis dissociated the ‘republican movement’ from ‘anti-Christian propaganda’ and proposed a social order based on ‘Christian principles’. For people like MacSwiney and the leading IRA man and later supporter of the left Republican Congress, Michael Price, this meant the principles set out in papal encyclicals. Price quoted Aquinas, Pius V and Leo XIII to back up his ideas for social reform.140 James Connolly had set the pattern for this dressing up of radicalism in theological garb in his Labour, Nationality and Religion. Understandable in some ways in a country where Catholicism had such deep roots, this approach created problems with which, by definition, it could not cope in dealings with Ireland’s substantial Protestant population. But the pressure to conform was irresistible, as one organisation after another proclaimed its fidelity to social reform according to Catholic Social principles. As a leader of the Labour Party put it: ‘They already had the framework of an equitable social system especially suited to the people in the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and his illustrious successor, the present Holy Father.’141
For de Valera and Fianna Fáil, it would prove relatively easy to ignore the government’s allegations that they were party, to an upsurge of ‘Bolshevist’ agitation and to benefit from the discomfiture of social republicanism. De Valera was in some ways more robust in his response to the government assault than the leadership of the IRA. Quick to point to the paltry number of Communists in the Free State, he went on to establish that any ‘extremism’ was caused by the country’s manifest and major economic and social problems. These demanded a solution, but,
a solution having no reference whatever to any other country, a solution that comes out of our own circumstances, that springs from our own traditional attitude towards life, a solution that is Irish and Catholic.142
De Valera’s own tendency to substitute a spiritual republican asceticism for economic policy (he informed the Manchester Guardian that he wanted to free Ireland ‘from the domination of her grosser appetites and induce a mood of spiritual exaltation for a return to Spartan standards’143) was quite compatible with electoral promises to provide employment for all who wanted it and to solve the problems of the congested districts and the Gaeltachts.144
In less than a decade his hopes for an Ireland with a population of 20 million would appear empty, a product, as Ó Tuathaigh put it, of his conventional nationalist belief in the creative powers of political sovereignty.145 However in 1931 and 1932 such beliefs inspired the hopes of many small farmers and unemployed workers, while the IRA could only vacillate between its desire to re-establish its national credentials and a residual tendency to criticise the new Fianna Fáil
