republicanism. The immediate cause of the split was a division between those who wanted a commitment to the slogan of a Workers’ Republic and those, led by O’Donnell and Gilmore, who wished the Congress to mobilise around the struggle for the Republic, which Fianna Fáil was incapable of leading to a successful conclusion.158 The O’Donnell position, which had a pyrrhic victory, was consistent with the dominant tendency of social republicanism since the annuities campaign. It aimed at a united front of IRA members, rank-and-file Fianna Fáilers, Labour Party members and workers and small farmers, who would be appealed to with a combination of national and social issues. Within this combination, the nationalist inflection was quite systematic.
The first issue of the Congress’s paper had defined the main task as the struggle against the Blueshirts: ‘Above all else, an organ of mass struggle against fascism that must be the slogan of every committee working towards the Republican Congress’.159 But fascism was portrayed as a stalking horse for the traditional enemy:
Once in power, British backing beyond anything given those that played England’s game in 1922 would be given. For, Britain seeks to have Ireland in chains before adventuring into the war for which she is feverishly preparing.160
Like the annuities campaign, anti-fascism was to provide material for a popular upsurge to ‘complete’ the national revolution. Fianna Fáil’s alleged inability to deal with the Blueshirts was traced to its unwillingness to challenge the ‘conquest’ in rural Ireland by expropriating the ranchers without compensation and redistributing their land to the small farmers and the landless. In a pamphlet written at the beginning of the Economic War, O’Donnell had argued that the anti-rancher policy was the central task in completing the national revolution:
The thinning down of the rural life and the organised dependence on Britain was the economic organising of our national enslavement. It is the national issue that is in the forefront in breaking down that dependence and increasing rural employment. This rancher-based cattle trade versus tillage fight is now primarily a fight on the national issue.161
Large-farmer and rancher support for fascism appeared greatly to strengthen the social republican case against Fianna Fail policies. In fact, there was not a lot of evidence that small farmers were as yet dissatisfied with the pace of the government’s agrarian reforms, and, more significantly, even the Congress’s paper had to record serious rural unease with the radical tone of social republicanism. A supporter from Tipperary reported, ‘Very few people in the country districts know anything about James Connolly. There is a prejudice against his policy.’162 More specifically, another supporter complained that the slogan ‘Seize the ranches’ was not well received and served to generate much confusion:
The words ‘confiscation’ and ‘communism’ and all sorts of other -isms are thrown at those who use it and unfortunately some small farmers believe that the adoption of such a policy will lead to the seizure of their little farm.163
If the fascist threat to the government and its agrarian reforms had been as substantial as the Congress supporters claimed, there would perhaps have been some hope for its strategy of arousing the countryside.
The Congress analysis of Fianna Fáil’s supposed weakness in the face of the Blueshirts directly followed Marx’s diatribe against the failure of European bourgeoisies to carry through the revolutions of 1848:
Fianna Fáil cannot fight Fascism. Irish Capitalism is caught between two threats – the threat of Imperialist dictatorship on the one hand and the fear of the roused working class and small farmer population on the other. This is the secret of Fianna Fáil’s hesitation.164
In fact, the 1934 local government elections in Mayo, in which O’Duffy had been predicting a major victory, represented a substantial defeat for his movement – as the Mayo News commented: ‘The county council and municipal elections in the Irish Free State have pricked and deflated the ‘Blueshirt balloon’.165 The mainstream IRA, which had consistently refused to accept the Congress analysis of the fascist threat, noted that the election ‘proved conclusively that the Imperialist-Fascist organisation commands the support of only a minority of the people’.166 No doubt the IRA leadership was pleased to see the main mobilising efforts of the Congress so quickly deflected. The Rathmines split would reveal the other strategic weaknesses of social republicanism.
The initial statement of the Congress group had declared that the way to make ‘the Republic a main issue dominating the whole political field’ was to identify it with the workers and small farmers: ‘A Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots Capitalism on its way.’167 But there was no evidence that the discontents of parts of rural Ireland had any affinities with the struggles of urban workers, and even less on which to base the Congress’s hopes in urban Ireland. Here the social republicans were fatally handicapped by a broader republican incapacity to relate seriously either to the existing labour movement or to the Protestant workers of Ulster.
Michael Price, addressing the Woodworkers Union for the Congress organising committee, explained that the Irish Labour Party was not being invited to participate. One of the reasons for attacking the Labour Party was that ‘they are certainly not leading any struggle for the overthrow of capitalism’ – which was certainly true, if unsurprising – but the core of his complaint was that it had ‘betrayed the Connolly teaching and tradition in 1922 … The Irish Labour Party is shifty on the Republican issue.’168 Price and the other social republicans were true to Mellows here in choosing Labour’s relation to republican objectives as the fundamental test of its progressive claims. In a communication to Frank Gallagher (later a key member of Fianna Fáil), Mellows defined the left-republican position on the leadership of the Labour Party:
By their acceptance of the Treaty and all that it connotes … they have betrayed not only the Irish Republic but the Labour movement in Ireland and the cause of the workers and peasants throughout the world.169
Throughout the period of social-republican dominance, An Phoblacht was characterised by a lack of serious coverage of the labour movement, especially as compared with its intense concern with the annuities campaign. What it did have to say tended towards denunciations of the ‘anti-national’ role of the leadership. Particular venom was reserved for the man who had led the Labour group in the Dáil, Thomas Johnston. An Englishman, Johnston brought out the more xenophobic impulses in his republican critics. O’Donnell seems to have been typical of those whose judgement of the labour movement was permanently distorted by the passions of the Civil War. (A biographer relates an incident which reveals the depth of republican resentment at Labour’s ‘betrayal’: when O’Donnell was in jail during the Civil War, his wife went to Johnston’s office and ‘warned him to his face that if anything happened to Peadar, he himself would not be alive that night’.170)
As the annuities campaign developed, the lack of interest which it generated in urban Ireland, and particularly in the labour movement, seems to have alienated O’Donnell even more. The labour movement was charged with forsaking the legacy of Connolly, and although this was sometimes argued in the ultra-left language of the Comintern during its highly sectarian ‘Third Period’, the core charge against Labour was a nationalist one. In a typical blast in an article on Connolly, O’Donnell appeared to dismiss not only the leadership but the rank and file of the Labour Party as well:
I have not the slightest doubt but that outside the Republican movement … there are no right elements. That section of the working class element that follow Johnston will supply the thugs and police to be hired by the Imperialists in the event of any treasonable goings on such as 1916.171
At the heart of social-republican alienation from the Labour Party and
