seasonal work as migrant harvesters in Scotland was commonplace.60 It was in Scotland that his radicalism was given a distinct socialist inflection: ‘Glasgow was my doorway to the world of working-class struggle. There was no turning back for me.’61
O’Donnell left school-teaching in 1917 to become a full-time organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, now entering a period of rapid expansion, but his own priorities were soon apparent as he became involved in the IRA in 1919 and resigned from the union job in 1920 to devote himself full-time to IRA activities. By the time of the Treaty he was in command of the 2nd brigade of the IRA’s Northern Division.62 He opposed the Treaty, was captured in the battle for the Four Courts in June 1922 and imprisoned until his escape in March 1924.
Like Mellows, whom he got to know in Mountjoy Jail, O’Donnell became convinced that the anti-Treaty leadership would go down to defeat because of its lack of a radical social programme to win the masses to the ‘Republic’:
The IRA, apart from himself, George Gilmore, Paddy Ruttledge, perhaps Seán Lemass, Seán Moylan and Tommy Mullins, were just as conservative as the First and Second Dáil governments.63
In a subsequent interview, he summed up the central inadequacy of the existing republican leadership:
Very dedicated men, almost religious men … All they stood for was that they would not accept the Treaty, they had no alternative programme. They were the stuff that martyrs are made of, but not revolutionaries … We had a pretty barren mind socially, many on the Republican side were against change. Had we won, I would agree that the end results might not have been much different from what one sees today. 64
However he saw his approach as more developed than that of Mellows, whom he saw – not like some on the left – as a socialist republican, but rather as ‘a great Fenian [the Gaelic name for the insurrectionary nationalists of the IRB, associated particularly with their failed rising in 1867] who saw the poor as the freedom force of the nation; as Tone did’.65 For O’Donnell, social discontent was not something that an existing republican leadership could use for its own purposes; rather it demanded a transformation in republicanism, which would become a broad popular alliance capable of ‘completing’ the national revolution in a socially and economically radical way.
As a leading member of the IRA after the Civil War – he was on the Army executive of twelve elected by the Army Convention and on the seven-man Army Council – he was in a strong position to attempt to socialise republicanism. He was helped by his own significant literary talents – he wrote four novels between 1925 and 1930 and would produce major works of autobiography and contemporary historical analysis. As editor of An Phoblacht, the IRA’s weekly newspaper, from 1926 to 1930, he would use his position to help usher in a period of energetic if amorphous and contradictory republican leftism in an attempt to maintain a continuing and vital role for the IRA. This was all the more necessary given the increasing appeal of Fianna Fáil to many IRA members disillusioned with Sinn Féin’s post-1923 impasse. Fianna Fáil organisers who toured the country to build the new organisation could often rely on local IRA commanders to bring their membership into the new party – numerous IRA companies were transformed into Fianna Fáil cumainn or branches. The skilful ambiguities through which the Fianna Fáil leadership expressed the party’s own relationship to the physical force tradition allowed many such republicans to join Fianna Fáil without breaking their link with the IRA. It would be this ambiguous symbiosis that initially encouraged the social republican project and ultimately absorbed it.
Land Annuities and Left Republicanism 1926-1932
There is now a considerable literature on both Irish socialism and republicanism in the twentieth century, yet little has been written about the agitation which attempted very clearly to link republican objectives to a major social and political issue: the movement against the payment of land annuities to England, which was launched in 1926 by Peadar O’Donnell in his native Donegal. A major reason for this neglect is, ironically, the very success of the movement which imposed itself on de Valera and the national leadership of Fianna Fáil. The Fianna Fáil victory in 1932 and its subsequent domination of Irish politics has tended to obscure the important role that left republicanism played in creating what Seán O’Faoláin referred to as ‘a distinct social flavour about de Valera-ism’.66 A related and important issue is the significance of the agitation for the understanding of the nature of social republicanism.
The early 1930s were to see one of the two major attempts since the Treaty to move the republican movement in a socialist direction, the Republican Congress of 1934. The reasons for the quick collapse of this initiative will be only partly understood if their origins in O’Donnell’s project of the 1920s are not grasped. For in his writings of the period, and particularly in An Phoblacht, O’Donnell articulated perhaps the only serious attempt since partition to create a project of social and political transformation based on a Gaelicised version of Connolly’s writings. This project of pushing republicanism to the left would exercise a continuing influence in subsequent decades and, despite its failure, it would become the unsurpassable limit of republican radicalism until the 1970s. Its intrinsic subordination to a fundamentally nationalist political project meant, however, that it would be incapable of undermining Fianna Fáil’s populist appeal.
The land annuities were those due to be paid by Irish farmers under the 1891 and 1909 Land Acts and amounted to £3 million a year.67 Under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, the new governments in Belfast and Dublin were to have retained the annuities, but this provision was held to have been superseded by the Treaty. The annuities were dealt with under the Anglo-Irish Financial Agreement of 1923, the terms of which were never published. The Irish government was to collect the annuities from the tenants and pay them into the British government’s Purchase Annuities Fund. The Irish government’s undertaking to pay the annuities was confirmed under the Ultimate Financial Settlement agreed with the British in March 1926. The political sensitivity of the issue was indicated by the fact that the Free State government did not publish details of the settlement until eight months after it had been signed.
Although the Labour Party had raised the annuities issue in the Dáil, the mainstream of anti-Treatyite Sinn Féin and later Fianna Fáil were notably slow to take up the issue. As O’Donnell explains in his own history of the agitation, he became aware of it when small farmers from his native Donegal Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking area) told him about the threats of legal action they had received from the Irish Land Commission for non-payment. Non-payment in parts of Donegal went back to 1918, when peasants supported by the local IRA Commander had decided to pay neither rent nor annuities. By the time Free State courts were established, some peasants had accumulated up to eight years of arrears.68 Similar situations existed in other small-farming areas in the west and south-west. For O’Donnell, the harsh economic reality that made it impossible for the small farmers to pay arrears, even if they had wanted to do so, was the most potent material symbol of the failure of the Sinn Féin revolution of 1919-21. As the manifesto of Saor Éire, which O’Donnell had a hand in drawing up, was to put it in 1931, the first Dáil in 1919,
set its face against all tendency towards direct action by the masses to recapture their inheritance … The small farmers and landless men demanded restoration of the ranches [sic] they demanded the relief of rent and in these vital issues the government betrayed them.69
After the Treaty split there was on the anti-Treaty side a slightly more sympathetic audience for the views of agrarian radicals. In May 1922 the IRA Army Council produced an agrarian policy and P.J. Ruttledge, ‘Director of Civil Administration’, issued an order to local commandants to seize certain lands and properties and hold them in trust for the Irish people. These included all lands in the possession of the Congested Districts Board, created by the British administration in the 1890s to deal with the problem of the most impoverished
