Facing a general election we believed we could add enough push to de Valera’s campaign to over-run the government party … de Valera and those round him wore no halos for us … These men would be incapable of the comprehensive, state-sponsored schemes, which alone could reach out to the small farm countryside, expand industry … National leadership was not the challenge facing us … Our task was to give coherence to the Fenian radicalism that characterised the crisis. The way to do that would be to put forward a short list of candidates to serve as a rallying point for second tier leadership to impose this militancy on the Fianna Fáil Executive.114
This essential lack of clarity as to what was possible in 1931-32 reflects the fundamental strategic void at the heart of physical force republicanism, whatever its ideological complexion. Its alternative to Fianna Fáil populism was either the ideal ‘Republic’ to be brought about by another attempt at the forcible overthrow of the Free State or an equally abstract social republicanism. Although the latter was prepared to dirty its hands with material grievances, it would seek to direct them to an objective which, for all its Marxist coloration, was effectively as detached from the possibilities of the situation as the ‘Republic’ of purist dreams.
The apparent radicalisation of the IRA leadership in the two years after the rejection of the Saor Éire proposal represented a desperate attempt to staunch what Bowyer Bell has described as the ‘wholesale desertion’ of its members to Fianna Fáil as it moved towards power.115 A movement estimated to have 20-25,000 members in 1926 had declined to a hard core of about 5,000 at the beginning of 1929, although even then its paper An Phoblacht sold 8,000 copies while the Fianna Fáil weekly, the Nation, sold 6,000.116 John McHugh has suggested that in the late 1920s there were three main elements in the IRA – the left, led by people like O’Donnell and George Gilmore, which was a definite minority but with disproportionate influence through its effective control of An Phoblacht; a strong bloc of apolitical militarists, well represented by the Chief of Staff, Twomey; and another relatively small group which adhered to Catholic social doctrines.117 The largest group which, like the bulk of the ordinary volunteers was drawn from small farmers, landless labourers and urban workers, was not unsympathetic to the left. Its own conditions and experiences were reflected in a diffuse social-radical variation on traditional republicanism. The further attraction of social republicanism was that it offered volunteers a deeper rationale for refusing incorporation in constitutional politics through the blandishments of Fianna Fáil.
But while the language of publications and meetings would be increasingly affected by borrowings from the Communist International, and a few republicans like O’Donnell would have close and friendly relations with the tiny coterie of Irish Communists, the substance of the relationship was largely instrumental. Here was a declining movement in desperate need of the issues and language to justify its continued existence. One of the police reports which the Cumann na nGaedheal government was using in an effort to alert the Catholic hierarchy to an approaching ‘red’ threat that included the IRA, gave an astringent estimate of the actual relationship between the IRA and social radicalism:
There can be little doubt that there are in the IRA men who dislike Communism and similarly in Communist circles men who regard the IRA as merely sentimental, old-fashioned patriots, but a union has evidently been arranged on the basis that both parties will do their best to destroy the present order of things. The value of this from the IRA point of view is obvious, every unemployed man, every small farmer who has to pay a Land Commission annuity, every struggling small trader, every discontented worker, will now be told that the IRA is his ally … The depression in agriculture and the repercussions here of the world-wide industrial slump will thus be turned into motive power for the IRA. It was fairly clear that the IRA could not continue to live on its original base. The number of people who are prepared to imperil their lives and fortunes for the difference between the existing state on the one hand and a Republic such as the USA or France on the other hand is negligible. That a civil war – even a short one – was fought even partly on such a basis was due to purely temporary and personal causes which have already lost much of their force. The men who wished to keep the IRA alive had therefore to look around for support springing from some other motives than the traditions of Irish independence and they found support in the widespread movement against the system of private property and private enterprise.118
Undoubtedly the predominant tendency in the IRA looked to the annuities movement and to the intensification of problems of unemployment and agricultural depression as the material from which a ‘second round’ could be engineered. The intense problems of the small farmer in the west, exacerbated by depression and the effective closure of emigration outlets, produced optimum conditions for a recrudescence of a form of republican intransigence which can be identified primarily as a form of traditional rural resistance to an ‘oppressor’ state. It was in many ways a land war disguised as a national struggle.
O’Donnell, who attended a congress of the Communist International’s European Peasant Committee (the Krestintern), was eager to give his annuities agitation an ‘internationalist’ flavour, and in March 1930 the Anti-Tribute League was transformed into the Irish Working Farmers Congress, which met in Galway. The rhetoric of the meeting did much to convince the police and the government of the reality of a ‘red’ menace:
This Congress accepts the platform and programme of the European Peasant Congress … by fighting on this platform, in alliance with town workers for the common interest of all toilers against capitalist exploitation, against land annuities ... the working farmers are at the same time fighting for the complete independence of our country.119
In fact, the alliance with urban workers was as speculative a construction as the link between the farmers’ struggles against annuities and the fight for ‘complete independence’. The substantial reality was a widespread spirit of lawlessness in many rural areas. At the centre of this was the inability of tens of thousands of farmers to pay annuities, the growth of arrears and the resultant action by the Land Commission to recover them, which could take the form of seizure of animals and even of the land itself. O’Donnell had always seen in the occasions of conflict between bailiffs and farmers the opportunity to demonstrate the ‘imperialist’ nature of the Free State and the possibility of a new republican offensive which, unlike the usual IRA military activities of the period – arms aids, the shooting of policemen and intimidation of jurors – would not leave the masses cold or hostile.
By 1931, as the police complained of a ‘growing feeling against payment of debts and against private property’,120 and the government adopted an increasingly repressive demeanour, the IRA’s secret paper commented on ‘an amazing resurgence of feeling throughout the country during the present year … Several companies and battalions have doubled and trebled their strength.’121 This ‘Fenian Radicalism’, as O’Donnell termed it, drew its strength predominantly from the areas with a history of participation in the annuities agitation. According to the police, the areas most disturbed by illegal drilling and other forms of ‘irregularism’ were Tipperary, Kerry, Leitrim and Donegal.122 These were also often areas with strong traditions of agrarian agitation and anti-Treatyism. There was in many parts of the western periphery a potent mixture of present economic grievance and an abiding ideological tradition which the Department of Justice characterised thus: ‘For generations there has been in Ireland the tradition of opposition to the state – a readiness in word and action, to question the authority of its institutions.’123
For the mainstream of the IRA leadership and much of its membership, the Saor Éire radicalisation was opportunistic. It held out the prospect of using material grievances to launch a new campaign. For them, O’Donnell’s re-coding of republicanism in the language of class struggle held out the possibility of enlisting