a quick and predictable response from de Valera. After a number of IRA armed attacks on opponents, culminating in the murders of a retired Vice-Admiral in Cork in March 1936 and a policeman in April, the government proscribed the IRA and arrested many of its leaders, including the Chief of Staff, Moss Twomey.197 For one of Twomey’s successors, Sean Russell, an archetypal anti-political republican, there was no feasible way of shaking Fianna Fáil and the Treaty settlement except through exemplary violence outside the Free State, which he mistakenly assumed de Valera would have more difficulty in repressing.
In 1937 Sean MacBride, Chief of Staff and the main political intelligence remaining in the leadership after the Congress schism, accepted de Valera’s new constitution with its ‘de jure’ claim to jurisdiction over the 32 counties as fulfilling most of the republicans’ objectives. Any remaining national goals could be achieved peacefully, and therefore, he declared, the IRA had no further role.198 In marked contrast was the bitter denunciation uttered by the Irish Democrat, a paper produced by the remnants of the Republican Congress: ‘De Valera has sanctified the property system arising from the Elizabethan, Cromwellian and Wilhamite Conquest with religious phrases.’ But still O’Donnell and another prominent social republican, Frank Ryan, who had returned temporarily from the war in Spain, counterposed to Fianna Fáil conservatism an abstract appeal for an all-Ireland conference of ‘Separatists and Labour bodies’ to restore the unity destroyed by the Treaty. This coalescence of an appeal to nation and class had as its premiss a real popular commitment to a progressive 32-county republic: ‘We accuse the Fianna Fáil government of this in a time of trial for the Nation, they ask less of the people than the people are eager and able to achieve.’199
That there was considerable and growing dissatisfaction with the limits of the post-1932 reforms, particularly in the countryside, would very soon become clear. But this dissatisfaction, while it might hold out possibilities of changing political alignments within the southern state, could not shake the broad popular sympathy for de Valera’s movement towards a truncated but nevertheless effective form of sovereignty.
Popular aspirations for a full 32-county republic and a more egalitarian economic and social order may well have existed, although it was undoubtedly an exaggeration to claim that, ‘The 1916 Proclamation was always read to promise a triumph of the poor over the small group of rich men who trafficked in their misery.’200 But such aspirations could not easily be made the basis for an alternative national strategy to that of Fianna Fáil. This was not simply because, as essentially Irish Catholic aspirations, they had no appeal to the obdurate Protestants of Ulster; more fundamentally, they shared with Fianna Fáil the assumption that the attainment of full political sovereignty made the economic and social regeneration of Ireland a simple matter of governmental will. This ingrained nationalist commonplace linked de Valera and many of his most bitter critics. By the end of the 1930s the limits of Fianna Fáil policies for economic and social regeneration were becoming clear:
The great leap forward did not materialise. Emigration and rural depopulation were not halted. The link with sterling was maintained. The free flow of capital and labour between Ireland and Britain was not interfered with. Full-blooded protectionism was being strongly diluted by the late thirties. Between the Coal-Cattle Pact of 1936 and the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1938 Ireland’s trade pattern was returning to ‘normal’; that is to say the economy of the Irish state was being reintegrated into the larger trading economy of the neighbouring state.201
But just as the IRA militarists were trapped in a prison-house of assumptions centring on the notion that the two states had evolved from ‘betrayal’ – from the twists and turns of human desires and weaknesses rather than any factors of a more structural nature – the remnants of social republicanism were trapped in the assumption that the manifest inequalities and oppressions of Irish life could be cured through a more radical, nationalist, political coalition, using the state to institute the socialist republic they claimed was implicit in 1916.
A striking characteristic of both the IRA and social republicanism throughout this period is that, whether ‘left’ or ‘right’, its focus was on completing the revolution by action, military or agitational, that would impose itself on the state governed by Fianna Fáil. In the dispute over whether a military campaign should be aimed at Britain or Northern Ireland, the proposal for a northern focus came from Tom Barry, a veteran IRA leader from Cork. He proposed an attack across the border to seize a northern town, hold it as long as possible and withdraw, having, it was hoped, roused the population and forced the issue of partition upon a reluctant de Valera.202 The rejection of this plan, which led to Barry’s withdrawal from the IRA, had nothing at all to do with arguments against it from the IRA in Northern Ireland. As Bowyer Bell has noted of the IRA leadership from the 1920s to the 1940s:
Despite the size and enthusiasm of the IRA in the Six Counties, the north had played only a minimal part in the leadership of the IRA. Rarely had a northerner served on GHQ [General Headquarters Staff] much less the Army Council, and rarely had the Dublin leadership given consideration to the problems of the north.203
Just as, for a brief period, an exaggerated view of the effects of the Great Depression on the Protestant working class had led the social republicans to accord the north a privileged place in their strategy for ‘reconquest’ of Ireland as a whole, so now a military campaign in Northern Ireland was proposed on the basis of little interest in, or knowledge of, conditions in the North, for what was essentially a southern purpose. The defeat of Barry’s proposal may have reflected some residual distrust of the more sectarian and ‘defenderist’ aspects of the northern IRA, particularly in Belfast. Given the barrenness of the strategy that was decided upon, however, this appears doubtful. Rather, the debate over the objectives of the military campaign illustrates that the leadership regarded itself as still being potentially a major force in Irish political life. It had failed utterly to understand de Valera’s effective closure of anti-Treaty aspirations.
Throughout the 1940s and 50s, the attempt to relate republicanism to the realities of Irish life went on outside the IRA. Absorbing the remaining members of the ‘government’ of the Second Dáil in 1938,204 the IRA under Sean Russell’s leadership ‘declared war’ on England and launched a campaign of sabotage and terror which confirmed its increasing marginalisation in Ireland where, buttressed by the massive popularity of his policy of neutrality, de Valera could take stringent measures to repress the IRA with little fear of popular repercussions. Military courts, internment and a small number of executions and deaths from hunger strikes, together with the predictable internal bickerings and charges of ‘betrayal’ born of patent failure, had effectively destroyed much of the organisation by 1945. In February 1939 Russell had established contact with the German intelligence organisation, Abwehr II, which was to send agents to Ireland to encourage IRA activity in the north aimed at disrupting the British war effort. In May 1940 he arrived in Berlin, where he met prominent Nazis including Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, and received training in sabotage. He was being transported back to Ireland by submarine when he took ill and died. Russell’s intrigues with Germany, which came to nothing, were not uniformly popular in the south, where some IRA men looked askance at contacts with the Nazis.205 In the north, the dominant response was to welcome anything that might lead to British defeat. Those few Belfast IRA men who had been touched by the radicalism of the 1930s could only look on in amused contempt as their comrades in jail jubilantly plotted the eastward march of the German army into the Soviet Union.206
Towards a Border War
Defeat and marginalisation would teach no lessons. Neither would the increasing evidence of rural and urban discontent with the de Valera dispensation. Dissatisfaction with the limited nature of Fianna Fáil agrarian reforms and their failure to deal seriously with the continuing problems of under-employment and emigration in the west was expressed in the temporary success of a western peasants’ party, Clann na Talmhan (Children of the Land) founded in 1938. It won 11 per cent of the vote and fourteen seats
