The spoken and written statements of Eamon de Valera our great chief, openly and candidly convey to the ranchers that this state of things which keeps our people in poverty must end, as a consequence they are putting forth every effort to defeat him. Those men who lock up God’s storehouse have the acres, but they have not the votes.101
The Mayo News was typically blasé about the major obstacles to such radicalism:
Roughly we have agriculturalists living on land valued at two million pounds. They are our only originating source of wealth, and all other classes in the community are directly or indirectly deriving their income from them. They are a small number of men occupying land of the valuation of £5,500,000 whose sole occupation is, as the late Michael Davitt put it, watching cows’ tails growing. They confine the land to growing blades of grass. They are practically worthless as an originating source of wealth to the community. The loss to the community per acre of such land is the difference between the life-sustaining capacity of an acre of tilled land and an acre of grass.102
A typical rural radical dismissal of any productive role for urban social classes, and displaying the moralistic ‘tillage’ mentality which blithely dismissed meat, the mainstay of Ireland’s exports, as ‘practically worthless’, this passage ignores important political realities. It was one thing to put the top 8 per cent as ‘enemies of the people’, but quite another to put the top 32.5 per cent in this category. Yet this article implicitly identified Fianna Fáil with 67.5 per cent of Irish farmers and against the 32.5 per cent at the top. However much some western radicals might like such an approach, the Fianna Fáil leadership attempted to avoid it; their adoption of agricultural de-rating was a sign of their willingness to compromise with larger farmers.
Nevertheless, the weight of the western small farmer and landless labourer component in the party’s support base, together with the undoubted influence of the annuities agitation in giving a national political focus to intensifying agrarian unrest from 1929 onwards, forced even de Valera to sound a radical note. Thus at a meeting in Irishtown, County Mayo, where the Land League had been launched in 1879, he presented Fianna Fáil in terms of a utopian rural radicalism:
The Ireland his party stood for was the Ireland of Fintan Lalor – an Ireland which still was their own from sod to sky … with the country’s resources fully developed, employment and the means of existence for a population of 20 million could easily be supplied.103
In the 1932 election campaign he seemed to be willing to contemplate a much more radical attack on the large farmers:
What about the rich lands? Have they been divided? In Meath, the richest land in Ireland, 5 per cent of farmers own 41 per cent of the land. These are the farmers who own 200 acres each; 631 persons own 234,575 acres: 631 own practically a quarter of a million acres of the best land in Ireland … In Tipperary 485 persons own 200,000 acres and in Kildare 6 per cent of farmers own over 172,000.104
In office, Fianna Fáil would disappoint many of its rural supporters, but its first years of power nevertheless witnessed a considerable increase in the pace of land redistribution. The Land Act of 1933 was crucial here under it, the Land Commission was empowered to expropriate, with compensation, any property that seemed suitable and distribute it among small farmers and the landless. This was coupled with the withholding of the land annuities which precipitated English tariff reprisals on Irish exports and brought the dislocation of the crucial cattle export trade. A brief irruption of Irish fascism in the form of the Blueshirt movement was the intense and fevered reaction of the large farmers, who saw the Fianna Fáil victory as a form of agrarian ‘Bolshevism’.
The radical element in Fianna Fáil’s appeal in 1932 was heavily influenced by the pressure of social republicanism. The annuities campaign had developed in a way that appeared to vindicate O’Donnell’s line inside the IRA. He put this forward very clearly in an exchange with Mary MacSwiney, who opposed the introduction of class issues into republican discourse:
My method of influencing an organisation is to raise issues behind it and force it either to adjust itself so as to ride the tidal wave or get swamped … If we wake up the country Fianna Fáil would either have to rearrange itself to stand for the people’s demand or it would be swept as wreckage around the steps of the Viceregal Lodge.105
Implicit in this was the idea that, although Fianna Fáil had forsaken the pure ground of the Republic, it was still a party that could be forced in a progressive and anti-imperialist direction. For O’Donnell, the conversion of the IRA to social republicanism was an essential prerequisite for a reconstitution of anti-Treatyism through the transformation of Fianna Fáil or, if that proved impossible, a new united front of ‘anti-imperialist’ forces. Ironically, he was to have more success in pushing Fianna Fáil in a radical, autarkic nationalist direction than in transforming the IRA.
Saor Éire and the ‘Lurch to the Left’
O’Donnell later noted how the international situation helped his campaign to change the IRA:
By the end of the 1920s the world economic crisis had made itself felt so sharply in Ireland as an agricultural crisis that middle and even bigger farmers found the current annuity an embarrassment, and suddenly our movement became self-propelled.106
One of O’Donnell’s motives in instigating the IRA’s break with Sinn Féin and the Second Dáil in 1925 had been to get the IRA involved in social agitations, but he admits that he was to be relatively unsuccessful. Although a member of both the Executive Council and the Army Council and editor of An Phoblacht, he had been unable to involve the IRA as a body in the annuities agitation.107 His use of An Phoblacht to publicise the annuities issue was a source of conflict in republican ranks:
Quite good-intentioned fellows are sizzling with anger against me for using An Phoblacht to push my own set of activities in republican groups in the country. The working-class note will split the compactness of the ‘real republic’ I am threatened … It is my firm conviction that it is by making the working-class ideals active and dominant within the Republican movement that good can come to the revolutionary movement in the country.108
In January 1929 a proposal by O’Donnell and a small group of left-wing IRA men to found a radical political organisation tentatively called Saor Éire (Free Ireland) was rejected by the Army Convention. Instead, volunteers were permitted to join a new political organisation, Comhairle na Poblachta, which was designed as a united front of non-Fianna Fáil republicans.109 The first statement of the new organisation on Irish unity reflected the attitudes of IRA Chief of Staff, Moss Twomey, ‘a dedicated right-wing Fenian, scrupulous in his religious observance’,110 rather than those on the left:
[Irish unity] has become an absolute necessity if Ireland is to remain a Christian entity in a world rapidly becoming pagan … to get the clean, Gaelic, Christian mind of Ireland in revolt against the beastliness of English Imperial paganism should be the task of every right-minded citizen of Ireland.111
But as the 1929 slump cut off emigration outlets in the USA (between 1926 and 1930 over 90,000 had emigrated there112), there was a major decline in the remittances which had helped many small farmers eke out their living. The deteriorating economic and social conditions gave a new immediacy and attractiveness to O’Donnell’s ideas. He was later to claim that it was the inadequate response of the IRA leadership which prevented a revolutionary resolution of the crisis and benefited Fianna Fáil:
There was no political face to this mass unrest … it was a great lurch to the left on definite terms … As it became clear that the government had in mind to subject the IRA to a mounting system of police thuggery, the possibility of another armed clash forced itself into Republican discussions and with it came talk of the need for a Republican policy. We were back to Mellows. At any time the IRA chose, it could have put itself at the head of the whole Republican movement, pushing past Fianna Fáil, de Valera and all, to reach the 1919 position at one stride, by releasing