the greater part of their time abroad, and all but 100-200 acres and mansion houses of landlords residing permanently in Ireland. Divisional land courts were to be established.70 It soon became clear, however, that the leadership of the anti-Treaty side was predominantly unsympathetic to a clear identification with agrarian radicalism. Thus in his Jail Notes, Liam Mellows reminded Austin Stack that the IRA already had a land programme which should now be actualised as part of the struggle ‘if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence’.71 But as O’Donnell was to say later of de Valera, ‘He was numb rather than hostile to the working class struggle. He was as scared as Griffith [the founder of Sinn Féin in 1905] of the gospel of Fintan Lalor.’72
For O’Donnell, the anti-Treaty leadership had failed to learn the crucial lesson of the War of Independence. This he stated clearly in a polemic with the purist Mary MacSwiney in the pages of An Phoblacht. His attitude to her organisation, Sinn Féin, was the same as it was to the pre-Treaty Sinn Féin:
It is a compromise with the conquest. To attempt to define Sinn Féin as the undoing of the conquest and restoration of the common ownership of land, among other things, thus coming bang up against the order that has arisen out of the conquest – unthinkable. It would break up the ‘national’ movement.73
It was Connolly who had developed the notion that the substance of the socialist task in Ireland was the country’s ‘reconquest’ from the capitalist structures which English colonisation had imposed. This was an ambiguous notion. It could mean simply that, just as the imposition of foreign rule on Ireland had profound economic and social dimensions as well as political ones, the breaking of that foreign rule would necessarily involve equally radical economic and social transformations. However this facet of the notion was sometimes linked to a more romantic Gaelic revivalism. As David Howell has noted, Connolly’s major work, Labour in Irish History, must be placed firmly within the broad current of the Gaelic literary and cultural revival which developed from the 1880s. Connolly was particularly influenced by Alice Stopford Green’s The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, which focused on the destruction of Gaelic culture following the conquest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was presented as a rupture which rendered subsequent developments abnormal. The liberation of Ireland required a reconnection with the older traditions.74
Such a viewpoint naturally tended to privilege those sections of the Irish population seen to be nearest to Gaelic traditions, and in the conditions of the 1920s this inevitably meant a focus on the peasantry of the western periphery. It was, of course, in these areas that the greatest concentration of small farmers was wresting a living from the poorest soils in Ireland. Agitation against annuities would inevitably have tended to focus on those areas where their burden was hardest to bear. For O’Donnell, however, there was more to the issue than material conditions in these areas. He believed that the annuities issue enabled him to give the crucial material and class dimension to the republican struggle against the ‘imperialist’ Free State regime:
To talk of nationhood as something outside the people on which they are to rivet their eyes and struggle towards is wrong … organisation will only come from the struggles of the hard-pressed to drive hunger out of their lives. I am convinced that the hard-pressed peasantry and the famishing workless are the point of assembly.75
The small farmers of the western periphery were crucial to his project for reasons that went beyond any strategic calculations of their conditions or class interests. O’Donnell in fact gave them a privileged role in the anti-imperialist struggle. As he plainly stated in his introduction to Brian O’Neill’s The War for the Land in Ireland:
In my opinion the relationship between the social rights of the toilers and the fight for national independence has been more persistently maintained by the small farmer population, even than by the industrial workers in the south.76
This valuation of the peasantry owed more to Gaelic revivalism than to socialist ideology. As Terence Brown has pointed out, the 1920s saw the confirmation of the west and of the Gaeltachts as the main locus of Irish nationalist cultural aspiration. The acutely depressed conditions in rural Ireland in this period, manifested in high levels of unemployment and emigration, weighed particularly heavily on the Gaeltacht areas, and for a central tendency in nationalism this became a critical issue. Brown quotes Douglas Hyde, the Irish Protestant co-founder of the Gaelic League, commenting on a recently published report of the Gaeltacht Commission in 1926:
Remember that the best of our people were driven by Cromwell to hell or Connacht. Many of our race are living on the seaboard. They are men and women of the toughest fibre. They have been for generations fighting with the sea, fighting with the weather, fighting with the mountains. They are indeed the survival of the fittest. Give them but half a chance and they are the seeds of a great race … it will save the historical Irish nation for it will preserve for all time the fountain source from which future generations can draw for ever.77
O’Donnell made clear his fealty to an ultra-Gaelic version of Connolly’s ‘reconquest’ when he specified that his objective was ‘not merely to set up a Republic but to restore the old Gaelic civilisation on the ruins of the capitalist state foisted on us by Imperialism’.78 Clearly this meant that the preservation of the Gaeltacht areas was crucial, for their peasantries were the least corrupted bearers of Gaelic and anti-capitalist values. When decrees for non-payment of annuities were issued against peasants in the Tirconail Gaeltacht in Donegal, where the agitation had begun, O’Donnell responded in a typically revivalist way:
Are the remnants of Gaelic stock to be sought out among the rocks and stripped naked under a cruel winter? Are these homes stamped unmistakably with the personality of these Gaelic folk – and they are as yet a vital, unbroken set of people – to be razed because tribute to England is not being paid?79
Thus Gaelicised, the annuities were an issue that had significant potential for Fianna Fáil. In April 1927 the desperate state of some small farmers was tragically revealed in the Gaeltacht area in west Cork with the death from starvation of a farmer, his wife and two of their five children. (O’Donnell took the name of their village, Adrigoole, as the title of a novel published in 1929.) The Nation, a weekly newspaper supporting Fianna Fáil, took up the issue in a way broadly similar to the approach of An Phoblacht:
The policy of our efficient Minister of Agriculture is having unexpected success. He informed the country recently that as far as he was concerned, help would be given only to those farmers who can help themselves … The Berehaven man, with his uneconomic holding could not help himself, and went to the devil … If he had been one of the rich farmers he could have helped himself out of public funds. But unhappily for him and his kind he belonged to the Celtic fringe, he is a remnant of the old Irish that were driven by the invaders to the bogs and mountains … Last year, 30,000 people, mainly from the Celtic fringe, left Ireland in order to escape the fate that awaits the landholder along the coast. Yet the grass is growing on the empty plains of Meath.80
There was a hint of the traditional agrarian radical demand for the break up of the grazing ranches But the Nation’s main advice to its readers was, if they wanted to ‘save the Gael’, to vote Fianna Fáil in the forthcoming election. At this time Fianna Fáil had no concrete agrarian policy; although there was some sympathy for O’Donnell’s campaign,81 the position of the national leadership and of de Valera in particular was much more cautious.
It was the potentially divisive nature of the campaign which obviously worried de Valera. Soon after the extraordinary Sinn Féin Árd Fheis in 1926 and the subsequent decision to set up the new party, de Valera wrote to Joseph McGarrity, the leading figure in the Irish-American republican support group, Clan na Gael, explaining the decision:
You will
