against ‘anti-state’ organisations and the frequent clashes between republicans and the newly-formed Army Comrades’ Association (a precursor of the fascist Blueshirts) led to a generalised upsurge of republican sentiment and activity. This benefited both Fianna Fáil and the IRA, whose membership increased, passing 8,000 by 1934.146 In the 1932 and 1933 elections, the IRA told its volunteers to campaign for Fianna Fáil, adding the proviso that such support did not imply acceptance of the limits of de Valera’s objectives.
When it came to specifying the difference between Fianna Fáil and IRA objectives, the political hollowness of militant republicanism became evident. The mainstream evinced an uneasy and ambiguous attitude, lending some credibility to the government’s gradual dismantling of the Treaty, but rejecting de Valera’s requests for the disbanding of the IRA and a ‘fusion of forces’ against the ‘anti-national reactionary forces’.147 A vestigial radicalism was also maintained: thus an IRA statement of 1933 urging members to vote for Fianna Fáil also registered dismay at the government’s ‘attempt to stabilise and build up an economic system, which for all that it relieves unemployment at the moment, will perpetuate the evils of social injustice’.148 The IRA Convention in March 1933, however, adopted a new policy statement, ‘The Constitution and Governmental Programme of the Republic of Ireland’, which formalised the retreat from Saor Éire. It promised social reforms, restrictions on wealth and welfare for the poor, but also stressed the individual right to private property and provided for the safeguarding of private enterprise. There was nothing here with which de Valera could not agree, and at least one thing that must have seemed a boon: the Convention also issued an order prohibiting volunteers from writing or speaking on economic, social and political questions.149
For Moss Twomey, Sean MacBride, son of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride and Maud Gonne who became Chief of Staff in 1936-37, and the majority of the IRA leadership, there would have been little dispute with the claim (from a Fianna Fáil negotiation document) that, ‘They [Fianna Fáil and the IRA] have at bottom the same national and social outlook.’150 The re-creation of republican unity through fusion was desired by both; at issue were the terms of the fusion. In de Valera’s view, Fianna Fáil, which he insisted on characterising as a broad national movement, ‘the resurrection of the Irish nation’,151 should absorb the IRA. The latter appeared to envisage a much more equal partnership in a united front to re-establish the Republic. Meanwhile, they would maintain their separate existence and right to take military action. De Valera had offered fusion on the basis of the republican ceasefire proposals of 1923, which among other things claimed that, ‘The sovereignty of the Irish Nation and the integrity of its territory is inalienable.’152 In five meetings with Sean MacBride in the first eighteen months of Fianna Fáil rule, de Valera maintained that, apart from the ‘outstanding difficulty’ of partition, the spirit of these proposals could be implemented by his government.153
As the government withheld the annuities, entered the Economic War with England and was assailed by a strident big-farmer onslaught in the form of the Blueshirts, its republican credentials were validated not only by the republican electorate but also by increasing numbers of IRA volunteers who were absorbed into the army and a new volunteer force. O’Donnell later commented on this period:
I realised when Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932 that the IRA had no meaning as an armed force. They could offer so many concessions to the Republican viewpoint that it was bound to blur the issues that still divided us. But it would reinforce more than ever my early belief that a government was permitted in Dublin only so long as it remained a bailiff for the conquest.154
The development of the Blueshirts in 1933 was to provide O’Donnell and his supporters in the IRA with another issue which they hoped would allow a clear political demarcation to be drawn between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ republicanism: the struggle against Irish fascism would displace the anti-annuities movement as the main mobilising issue for social republicanism. The Blueshirt movement originated in the anti-republican Army Comrades’ Association founded in 1931 by veterans of the Free State army. After the Fianna Fáil victory in 1932, the ACA opened its membership to the general public. In March 1933 de Valera called a snap election which increased his parliamentary majority, and in the same month he sacked General Eoin O’Duffy, Cumann na nGaedheal’s appointee as Chief of Police. O’Duffy made himself the focus of the ACA, which he renamed the National Guard, and gave it a distinctive style when he instituted the fascist salute and the wearing of a blue shirt as a uniform. At its height, it claimed a membership of 100,000, and for a year from the autumn of 1933 it seemed a formidable force. However the challenge would be easily defused; the movement’s collapse reflected the leadership’s failure to create a broad-based coalition of opposition. The Blueshirts were too dependent on one social group, the big farmers and their sons, particularly the large cattle farmers in Limerick, Cork, Waterford and Kilkenny, who were suffering from the disruption of the cattle trade by the Economic War.
For O’Donnell and his supporters, however, Irish fascism represented the issue that would allow the IRA to take the initiative against de Valera’s increasingly successful incorporation of its constituency. Throughout 1934 there were continuous clashes between republicans and Blueshirts and the police and army. The Blueshirts had adopted the tactics of the anti-annuity movement, organising non-payment of rates and land annuities, and resisting attempts to seize animals. Republican attacks on Blueshirt meetings allowed the government to adopt a statesmanlike stance, more or less even-handedly dispensing ‘justice’. In 1934 the military tribunal established to deal with such disturbances convicted 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA men. Naturally enough, the IRA bitterly denounced any action directed against it as a betrayal, but there is no sign that it decreased the government’s popular appeal. For the left in the IRA, de Valera could never defeat the Blueshirts because he left the economic and social basis of the movement – the large-farmer class – untouched.155
An apocalyptic vision of the fascist threat merged with traditional obsessions:
The British preparations for war are being reflected here in the hectic drive of the Imperialists for power. Britain at war can only be safe when Ireland is gripped in the steel jacket of the Imperialist Fascist dictatorship.156
Precisely because there was so little evidence of the Blueshirts’ capacity to mount a real challenge to the state (after all, ‘constitutional’ republicanism of the Fianna Fáil variety could easily label Irish fascism as an essentially anti-national minority, given its Free State origins), social republicans were driven to portray it mythically, as part of a British assault on the Irish nation. Fianna Fáil would now be portrayed as a government unable to satisfy the demands of its small-farmer and worker supporters and, more critically, unable to prevent a political counter-revolution from the ‘imperialist’ elements in the country. Social republicanism would be proved correct in its estimate of Fianna Fáil’s reformism, but such prescience as it could claim was small compensation for the continuing subordination of its social radicalism to a nationalist political project. So much became apparent in the short-lived Republican Congress.
At the 1934 IRA Army Convention, Michael Price, who had moved considerably from his position of opposition to Saor Éire, proposed that the IRA should adopt as its objective a Republic as envisaged by Connolly. The leadership, no doubt mindful of the recent intense assault from the Church on Saor Éire, opposed the Workers’ Republic as a goal and, when his resolution was defeated, Price withdrew. O’Donnell and George Gilmore then proposed a resolution that the IRA should mobilise a ‘united front’ campaign for a Republican Congress, a rallying of republican opinion which ‘would wrest the leadership of the National Struggle from Irish Capitalism’.157 A majority of the delegates supported the resolution, but the vote of the leadership ensured its defeat and O’Donnell and his supporters left the IRA.
The Congress supporters established a newspaper and local groups in preparation for a national conference to launch the united front. The almost immediate collapse of the project
