was said to have been drawn up by de Valera and, perhaps even more incredibly, to ‘emphasise and develop the ideals of the Gaelic state’, predictably unspecified. Other instances may not have impressed many Scottish socialists: describing her stint as Minister for Labour, she spoke of how, ‘The people, both employers and workers, believed in the justice of their own Republican government, and of our desire to act fairly, and to secure the best for the worker without ruining the employer.’ There was an appeal to Irish shopkeepers, ‘if they [did] not want their children to be reduced to the condition of starving wage slaves’, to join the workers in reorganising businesses on ‘true co-operative lines’.51
This attempt to inflate republican social radicalism was one of the earliest indications of a move by a section of the anti-Treatyites from purity to politics and a more populist republicanism centring on economic protectionism – ‘Why encourage the peaceful penetration of Ireland by English capitalism?’ and a distinctive Irish strategy of balanced economic development:
We should guard against the conquest of Ireland by foreign capital, and the development of her villages along the lines that have created the ‘Black Country’ and the this-world Hells to be found in Glasgow, Liverpool and all British industrial cities.52
Behind the whimsical mystifications there was a clear attempt to establish the popular credentials of the key republican political leader, Eamon de Valera, whose ‘noble simplicity of life’ was contrasted with the Free State government: ‘the future aristocracy of Ireland … who are rolling around in limousines and acquiring fine residences’. Markievicz’s articles represent the first substantial attempt by republicans to use class discontents and a populist Gaelic version of Connolly to criticise the new state. The mystificatory and manipulative version of this strategy embodied in these writings would soon be contested by a more substantial version from within the IRA itself.
2 Republicanism in Inter-war Ireland
The Civil War ended in April 1923 with a ceasefire signed by de Valera as president of the ‘Government of the Republic of Ireland’ and Frank Aiken as Chief of Staff of the IRA.53 The declaration contained an ambiguous but significant clause:
That the ultimate Court of Appeal for deciding disputed questions of national expediency and policy is the people of Ireland, the judgement being by majority vote of the adult citizenry, and the decision to be submitted to, and resistance by violence excluded, not because the decision is necessary, right or just or permanent, but because acceptance of this rule makes for peace, order and unity in national action and is the democratic alternative to arbitrament by force.54
For many of the defeated republicans, of whom over 12,000 were imprisoned at the time of the ceasefire,55 democratic criteria would come into play only after the overthrow of the whole Treaty settlement – the ‘people of Ireland’ could not be truly represented through ‘corrupt’ institutions like the Free State and the Northern Ireland state. There were many in the IRA who regarded physical force as crucial in bringing about change, and who saw ‘politicians’ above all as an unnecessary evil. The military front in the War of Independence had been opened independently of the Dáil and the government of the Republic, and during the war the military men showed increasing contempt for the politicians.56 After the Treaty, the tendency to effective IRA autonomy developed to a high degree, and although the IRA had taken an oath of loyalty to the Dáil during the War of Independence, the anti-Treaty IRA was largely independent of control by de Valera as president of the notional republic.
However military defeat gave the politicians an opportunity to reassert themselves. De Valera successfully urged participation in the general election of August 1923 and, although the republicans did unexpectedly well, given the imprisonment of many candidates and election workers, the result inevitably stirred up the suspicions of some in the IRA that Sinn Féin was destined for incorporation in the Free State.57 It certainly became difficult to ignore the fact that, while the Free State government lacked massive popularity and although there was still substantial republican support, it was the support of a minority: a clear majority had voted for candidates who accepted the Treaty. The maintenance of a purist abstentionism held out little prospect of increasing Sinn Féin support against a state which could rely on popular memories and revulsion at the Civil War to isolate republicans so long as it seemed that they were simply preparing for a ‘second round’.
By 1925, with more and more evidence that abstentionism was depleting popular support, de Valera and a substantial section of the Sinn Féin leadership had decided that the road to the ‘Republic’ lay in a long march through the institutions of the Free State and that this meant entering the Dáil. A pivotal role would be played by the Dublin-based Sinn Féin leader, Seán Lemass, soon to emerge as the economic strategist of the new party and the architect of its hegemony over the urban working class. Lemass was an abrasive critic of those in Sinn Féin whose idealist insistence on the ‘de jure’ republic of 1919 prevented them from acknowledging current realities:
There are some who would have us sit by the roadside and debate abstruse points about ‘de jure’ this and ‘de facto’ that, but the reality we want is away in the distance and we cannot get there unless we move.58
The split in Sinn Féin came in March 1926 at a special Árd Fheis to consider de Valera’s proposal that, once the oath of allegiance was removed, ‘It becomes a question not of principle but of policy whether or not republican representatives enter the Dáil.’ The proposal was narrowly rejected and de Valera and his lieutenants moved quickly to begin the process of organising a new political formation – Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) – which would rapidly consign the idealist intransigents of Sinn Féin to the margins of Irish political life. The relation of the new party with the IRA would be a complex and ambiguous one.
At the General Army Convention of the IRA in November 1925, Frank Aiken – the Chief of Staff and a de Valera supporter – admitted that some members of the ‘government of the Republic’ were discussing the possibility of entering the Dáil. He provoked substantial and angry support for a resolution from the Tirconail battalion in Donegal, calling on the IRA to sever its connection with the ‘shadow’ republican government composed of the Sinn Féin members of the second Dáil. The resolution was stridently anti-political:
That in view of the fact that the Government has developed into a mere political party and has lost sight of the fact that all our energies should be devoted to the all-important work of making the Army efficient so that the renegades who, through a coup d’état, assumed governmental powers in this country, be dealt with at the earliest opportunity, the Army of the Republic sever its connection with the Dáil, and act under an independent Executive, such Executive be given the power to declare war when, in its opinion, a suitable opportunity arises to rid the Republic of its enemies and maintain it in accordance with the proclamation of 1916.59
This motion was proposed by Peadar O’Donnell, who would soon personify social republicanism and would play a crucial role in republican political development in the inter-war period. O’Donnell saw himself as the link with the legacy of Mellows and set out self-consciously to politicise the IRA.
Born in 1893 into a small farming family in Meenmore near Dungloe in Donegal, Peadar O’Donnell trained as a teacher before the war. Radicalised in part by an uncle who returned from the United States where he had been a ‘Wobbly’ (a member of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World), he was crucially influenced by a trip to Scotland, on which he had been sent by the people of Aranmore island off the Donegal coast, where he was teaching. He was to report on an agricultural strike that was affecting the seasonal earnings so crucial to the economy of the island, as to many other parts of the Donegal seaboard where tiny holdings of poor land could not provide for large families. Emigration to the United States was a structured necessity
