The situation of peripheral isolation encouraged a move towards Fianna Fáil and this was facilitated by an approach from Colonel Maurice Moore, a member of the Free State Senate who had been waging a campaign against the legality of the continued payment of annuities to England. Moore had produced a pamphlet, British Plunder and Irish Blunder, which he wished O’Donnell to serialise. Until then An Phoblacht had taken little notice of his speeches because, as O’Donnell admitted, ‘It would not occur to me to link up with a Free State Senator who could invoke no better argument than British Acts of Parliament.’89 However Moore was now a member of Fianna Fáil and on its executive was able to put his case strongly to de Valera. Association with Moore made it easier to go about the task of getting Fianna Fáil TDs onto annuities platforms: de Valera had banned them from appearing on platforms with O’Donnell. In February 1928 a national anti-annuities campaign was launched at a meeting presided over by Moore in the Rotunda, Dublin. O’Donnell shared the platform with three Fianna Fáil TDs, Gerry Boland, Dr Jim Ryan and Patrick Ruttledge, one of the foremost agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil, whose frequent speeches on the poverty and unemployment in Mayo were well received in An Phoblacht. In his speech, O’Donnell raised the ‘Call off the Bailiffs’ and ‘No Rent’ slogans which continued to embarrass de Valera, and Ruttledge made the point that while
the platform held people who did not agree on some points … on this matter of ending the payment of an illegal and immoral tax to England, they could agree and work in harmony, maybe opening the way to big things in the future.90
A national ‘Anti-Tribute League’ was created, with a leadership dominated by western radicals who personified the very close links – both ideological and familial – that still remained between the IRA and Fianna Fáil. Its chairman was Frank Barrett, chairman of Clare County Council. An ex-member of the Army Council whose brother was still in the IRA, he was now a leading member of Fianna Fáil.91 The vice-chairman was Eamonn Corbett, an IRA comrade of Mellows, who was now chairman of Galway County Council.92 The campaign attempted to get county councils in areas where annuities agitations existed to pass resolutions against the payment of the annuities to England and also demanding the suspension of legal action for arrears. By the end of the year such resolutions had been passed by Clare, Galway, Kerry and Leitrim county councils and the campaign was getting good publicity and support from the Mayo News and other western tribunes of agrarian radicalism.93 But the radicalism articulated by the Mayo News represented only one strand, however, and, for all its importance, a minority strand in Fianna Fáil. As de Valera’s semi-official biographers have noted, one of the major problems facing the new party was the fear amongst sections of the public of its supposed radicalism. In drafting an election address in 1927, de Valera protested that,
The sinister design of aiming at bringing about a sudden revolutionary upheaval, with which our opponents choose to credit us, is altogether foreign to our purpose and programme.94
The linking of the annuities issue directly to the conditions and needs of the small farmers, the anti-big farmer ethos of the campaign and its aura and rhetoric of direct action to resist the bailiffs were not the forms in which de Valera wanted the issue to be articulated. The increasing involvement of the Fianna Fáil leadership in the annuities question was associated with a sustained attempt to drain it of any specific class dimension. Thus the Nation began to publish articles by lawyers proving the illegality of the payments to England. If they made any appeal to history, it was done in such a way as to include the majority of the agricultural population. In a typical article by a lawyer, the regional and class dimensions of O’Donnell’s revivalism is obliterated in a simple identification of ‘historic struggles’ and ‘the farmer’:
As a matter of political economy, the need to help the agricultural industry requires no emphasis. But the farmer has surely other claims that go nearer to the hearts of his countrymen. He, above all, is the Gael of age long tradition. Far away in the dawn of history, he it was who tilled the land, built up its traditions and fought the battles for the liberty of our country.95
The secretary’s report to the 1929 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis could report on the party’s
vigorous pursuit of the campaign for the retention of the land annuities. No question, in recent times, has aroused such widespread interest among the people, as is evidenced by attendance at public meetings and the demand for literature on the subject.96
In February of that year, however, the National Executive had already adopted a resolution committing the future Fianna Fáil government to use the retained annuities for the abolition of rates on agricultural land. The conservatism of this proposal was clear to many western radicals. As the Connaught Telegraph noted:
What affiliation have the congests of the west with the Farmers’ Union which is composed of the men monopolising the grazing ranches of the country? How will de-rating affect the thousands of congests in Mayo with the 14/- worth of land as compared with the grazing farmers having hundreds of acres of which he tills not a sod?97
Such an approach was clearly radically different from O’Donnell’s, although he accepted that after the repudiation of the payments to England the peasants would continue to make some payment. However all arrears were to be cancelled, something against which de Valera had set his face; the payment was to be not in excess of half the present annuity, and the money was to be used for agricultural credit and for the financing of co-operative enterprises.98 But as the world depression hit Ireland in 1929, O’Donnell began to predict confidently that a tide of radicalism would force Fianna Fáil to the left if it wanted to survive.
Fianna Fáil strove, with some difficulty, to adapt and mould the themes of the annuities campaign to other pre-existing themes of its discourse on the land question. The object was to create an agrarian stance sufficiently radical to consolidate its support amongst the small farmers of the west but not liable to alienate the more solid members of the farming community. Thus while the republicans under O’Donnell’s influence might agitate against payment of the annuities, de Valera’s approach was to emphasise that annuities would continue to be paid but then retained in Dublin. To make this more palatable, he promised that while some of the money would be used for de-rating, it would also be used to speed the process of land purchase and redistribution, particularly in the Gaeltachts and Congested Districts.99
From 1929 to the election of 1932, An Phoblacht and O’Donnell formed a bloc with the agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil in an intense assault on the ‘imperialist’ Free State regime and its main internal class support – the ‘ranchers’. The basic assumptions of the agrarian radicals were clear enough. Of 378,000 Irish agricultural holdings, some 255,000 or 67.5 per cent were valued at under £15 per year. These were the small men of rural Ireland: the total valuation of all these holdings did not reach £2 million, whereas the total valuation of all the holdings together exceeded £9.5 million. It took 315,000 of the smaller holdings, or 92 per cent of the whole, to reach a valuation of half of the Free State, while the remaining half was accounted for by 33,000 holdings (sometimes non-residential and ranching) or a little over 8 per cent.100 For the radicals the political implication was obvious: the lands valued at £5.5 million should be divided