In an address to trade unionists in the Independent Labour Party hall in Belfast, O’Donnell attacked the NILP for
dodging the Republican issue … the working-class movement in the North-East has weakened the whole national struggle by its failure to see that its own freedom is inseparably bound up with the unity and freedom of an Irish Workers’ Republic.186
In the face of developments like the sectarian riots in 1935, this incapacity to gauge the depth of Protestant working-class antagonism to ‘the national struggle’ could only sustain its optimism by more frantic attacks on the ‘pro-imperialist’ leaders of the northern labour movement and the reactionary and sectarian role of the IRA leadership in Belfast.
Prior to the outdoor relief riots, An Phoblacht had criticised northern republicans for being little more than a Catholic defence force and making no attempt to establish contacts with Protestants. Belfast republicans were said to be ‘on the whole possessed of a bigotry that is dangerous to the cause they have at heart’.187 The failure of the Belfast IRA to get involved in the outdoor relief strike as an organisation was also attacked by O’Donnell, who claimed that they had been encouraged to make contacts with the Protestant working class:
But always the reply was a thousand and one good reasons why it could not be done. Even on the eve of the ODR workers’ uprising the local OC pooh-poohed the idea that such a development was likely.188
It was true that, except for a small number of socialist-inclined volunteers and a small number of Protestant IRA men, the Belfast organisation was not fertile ground for social republicanism. Its concerns were predominantly military and geared towards its role of communal defence. As O’Donnell bluntly put it: ‘We haven’t a battalion of IRA men in Belfast; we just have a battalion of armed Catholics.’189 To claim, as the Congress did, that, ‘The erection of the border was made possible by the separation of the Republican movement from the working class movement,’190 was, however, greatly to exaggerate the role of these negative features of Belfast republicanism.
The failure to achieve the Republic was explained away on the republican left by various failures of leadership – the 1919 failure to support the demands of the small farmers and landless men, or the Belfast IRA’s lack of proselytising activity amongst the Protestant workers. That the problem lay in the objective was never raised as a possibility. Social republicanism emerged as a strategy evolved to overthrow the Treaty settlement. Its use of the language of class and its attempt to link republican objectives to social and economic issues did have some real effects. Most crucially, it ensured that Fianna Fáil sounded the note of agrarian radicalism in 1932, but although it could play a role in pushing Fianna Fáil to the ‘left’, it could achieve little more. Attacks on de Valera in power only alienated its rural constituency, which feared ‘socialism’. Left republicans had the weakest of roots in the southern working class and only illusions about Protestant workers. The Congress would split and disappear, divided between a majority led by O’Donnell, who still held to the strategy of mobilising the masses by demonstrating that only an economically and socially radical strategy could achieve traditional republican objectives, and a minority led by Michael Price and two of Connolly’s children, who argued that only a specifically socialist objective could ensure the support of the Protestant workers of Ulster.
The majority position completely failed to take account of the fundamental change that Fianna Fáil’s victory had brought about. Before that, it was possible to argue for a radical republican movement to force Fianna Fáil to the left or even to displace the party altogether. With the resources of state power, de Valera had proved able to siphon off large elements of the republicans’ constituency. It was much more difficult to mobilise an ‘anti-imperialist’ united front when the government could not be so easily portrayed as a reactionary pro-British rump. The minority position failed to attract because of the manifest difficulties facing any exponent of a ‘Workers’ Republic’ in a state where the headquarters of the tiny Communist Party had recently been burned down by a clerically-inspired mob. Nevertheless, its supporters made some highly pertinent criticisms of the arguments of O’Donnell and Gilmore. These had emphasised that the only principled approach to adopt in Northern Ireland was to put the republican position straight to Protestant workers:
It is harder to go among Protestant workers and insist that they must team up with the Republican masses against British Imperialism than to go under the banner of a Workers’ Republic.191
In response, it was argued not simply that such propaganda would get nowhere in Belfast, but, even more significantly, that the continued affiliation to republican objectives would tie the movement to some of the most reactionary Catholic integrative political currents in the south. In an astonishingly prescient attack on the proponents of a republican united front strategy, Michael Price recalled a recent bellicose statement by Seán T. O’Kelly, a Fianna Fáil Cabinet minister, threatening to impose the Republic on the north by force of arms and an offer by O’Duffy, the Blueshirt leader, to sink his differences with de Valera in a common campaign against Ulster. ‘The united front movement might lead them to become involved in an attempt to make positive the jurisdiction of an all-Ireland Republic.’192 It would in fact be the IRA, not the Congress, that would soon be involved in such a campaign. The social republicans had greatly exaggerated the radical potentialities of the rural and urban masses and were unable to combat the absorptive capacity of Fianna Fáil’s populist nationalism to which they had contributed. On the issue of Protestant Ulster, social republicanism had failed utterly to escape the iron cage of nationalist assumptions and, while they might look with dismay at the subsequent IRA attempt forcibly to ‘complete the national revolution’, O’Donnell and his supporters would continue to judge all issues by their relationship to an objective they happily shared with the most conservative and militaristic elements of the IRA.
3 In de Valera’s Shadow
For almost thirty years after the collapse of the Republican Congress, physical force separatism was the overwhelmingly dominant form of republican activity. The Congress’s debacle was used to reinforce traditionalist nostrums concerning the futility of ‘politicisation’, while in reality the leadership of the IRA was content to accept de Valera’s objectives as legitimate, reserving a continued role for the IRA simply by emphasising the need for an intransigent point of pressure to ensure that the risks of Fianna Fáil vacillation were minimised.
But as de Valera pressed ahead with creating a state that would satisfy the republican aspirations of broad swathes of the population, the IRA’s pretensions to the status of an alternative leadership became increasingly ludicrous. Membership of the IRA, which had soared in 1931-32, fell to 7,358 in 1935 and 3,844 a year later. In the same period the membership in Dublin almost disappeared, falling from 490 in 1934 to 93 in 1936.193 The collapse in the Dublin membership reflected the specific effects of an increasingly hard government line against the last vestiges of IRA ‘radicalism’ – its intervention in a transport strike in Dublin in March 1935, when volunteers sniped at army lorries used to replace trams, and shot policemen.194 As the situation in Spain moved towards civil war, a wave of anti-communist feeling developed in Catholic Ireland, with Dublin most liable to its irruptions. At the 1936 Easter commemoration march, contingents from the Communist Party and the remnants of the Republican Congress were stoned by the crowd.195 A substantial number of left-wing IRA men were among the 400 or so Irish who fought for the Republic in Spain.196
The IRA leadership was increasingly dominated by those who saw the key to the ‘Republic’ in a military campaign in either Northern Ireland, Britain or in both. Fianna Fáil would be forced to complete the national revolution, not, as the Congress had predicted, through the activation of a grass-roots radical coalition but by armed action which would rekindle popular nationalist sentiment and force a confrontation with Britain. In part, of course, the IRA had little choice. Its very existence required at least
