When the periodical Irish Rosary claimed that on a trip to Moscow in 1929 O’Donnell had been trained in ‘anti-religious propaganda’ he sued (unsuccessfully) for libel, denying the charge and adding, ‘On the contrary, I am a Catholic.’139 Republicans were long used to withstanding attacks from the Church – after all, they had been excommunicated during the Civil War, but such anathemas had concerned their role as an ‘armed conspiracy’ and had not questioned their Catholicism. The new assault provoked a headlong retreat from a public leftism which had never been securely grounded anyway. The organisation now joined the broad opposition front including Fianna Fáil, Sinn Féin and the Labour Party, which denounced the increased repression and the government’s conservative incapacity to deal with the economic crisis, but from a safely Catholic position.
Sinn Féin’s Árd Fheis dissociated the ‘republican movement’ from ‘anti-Christian propaganda’ and proposed a social order based on ‘Christian principles’. For people like MacSwiney and the leading IRA man and later supporter of the left Republican Congress, Michael Price, this meant the principles set out in papal encyclicals. Price quoted Aquinas, Pius V and Leo XIII to back up his ideas for social reform.140 James Connolly had set the pattern for this dressing up of radicalism in theological garb in his Labour, Nationality and Religion. Understandable in some ways in a country where Catholicism had such deep roots, this approach created problems with which, by definition, it could not cope in dealings with Ireland’s substantial Protestant population. But the pressure to conform was irresistible, as one organisation after another proclaimed its fidelity to social reform according to Catholic Social principles. As a leader of the Labour Party put it: ‘They already had the framework of an equitable social system especially suited to the people in the Encyclicals of Pope Leo XIII and his illustrious successor, the present Holy Father.’141
For de Valera and Fianna Fáil, it would prove relatively easy to ignore the government’s allegations that they were party, to an upsurge of ‘Bolshevist’ agitation and to benefit from the discomfiture of social republicanism. De Valera was in some ways more robust in his response to the government assault than the leadership of the IRA. Quick to point to the paltry number of Communists in the Free State, he went on to establish that any ‘extremism’ was caused by the country’s manifest and major economic and social problems. These demanded a solution, but,
a solution having no reference whatever to any other country, a solution that comes out of our own circumstances, that springs from our own traditional attitude towards life, a solution that is Irish and Catholic.142
De Valera’s own tendency to substitute a spiritual republican asceticism for economic policy (he informed the Manchester Guardian that he wanted to free Ireland ‘from the domination of her grosser appetites and induce a mood of spiritual exaltation for a return to Spartan standards’143) was quite compatible with electoral promises to provide employment for all who wanted it and to solve the problems of the congested districts and the Gaeltachts.144
In less than a decade his hopes for an Ireland with a population of 20 million would appear empty, a product, as Ó Tuathaigh put it, of his conventional nationalist belief in the creative powers of political sovereignty.145 However in 1931 and 1932 such beliefs inspired the hopes of many small farmers and unemployed workers, while the IRA could only vacillate between its desire to re-establish its national credentials and a residual tendency to criticise the new Fianna Fáil government from the left. The Church’s assault notwithstanding, the rising political tensions produced by the government’s drive against ‘anti-state’ organisations and the frequent clashes between republicans and the newly-formed Army Comrades’ Association (a precursor of the fascist Blueshirts) led to a generalised upsurge of republican sentiment and activity. This benefited both Fianna Fáil and the IRA, whose membership increased, passing 8,000 by 1934.146 In the 1932 and 1933 elections, the IRA told its volunteers to campaign for Fianna Fáil, adding the proviso that such support did not imply acceptance of the limits of de Valera’s objectives.
When it came to specifying the difference between Fianna Fáil and IRA objectives, the political hollowness of militant republicanism became evident. The mainstream evinced an uneasy and ambiguous attitude, lending some credibility to the government’s gradual dismantling of the Treaty, but rejecting de Valera’s requests for the disbanding of the IRA and a ‘fusion of forces’ against the ‘anti-national reactionary forces’.147 A vestigial radicalism was also maintained: thus an IRA statement of 1933 urging members to vote for Fianna Fáil also registered dismay at the government’s ‘attempt to stabilise and build up an economic system, which for all that it relieves unemployment at the moment, will perpetuate the evils of social injustice’.148 The IRA Convention in March 1933, however, adopted a new policy statement, ‘The Constitution and Governmental Programme of the Republic of Ireland’, which formalised the retreat from Saor Éire. It promised social reforms, restrictions on wealth and welfare for the poor, but also stressed the individual right to private property and provided for the safeguarding of private enterprise. There was nothing here with which de Valera could not agree, and at least one thing that must have seemed a boon: the Convention also issued an order prohibiting volunteers from writing or speaking on economic, social and political questions.149
For Moss Twomey, Sean MacBride, son of the executed 1916 leader John MacBride and Maud Gonne who became Chief of Staff in 1936-37, and the majority of the IRA leadership, there would have been little dispute with the claim (from a Fianna Fáil negotiation document) that, ‘They [Fianna Fáil and the IRA] have at bottom the same national and social outlook.’150 The re-creation of republican unity through fusion was desired by both; at issue were the terms of the fusion. In de Valera’s view, Fianna Fáil, which he insisted on characterising as a broad national movement, ‘the resurrection of the Irish nation’,151 should absorb the IRA. The latter appeared to envisage a much more equal partnership in a united front to re-establish the Republic. Meanwhile, they would maintain their separate existence and right to take military action. De Valera had offered fusion on the basis of the republican ceasefire proposals of 1923, which among other things claimed that, ‘The sovereignty of the Irish Nation and the integrity of its territory is inalienable.’152 In five meetings with Sean MacBride in the first eighteen months of Fianna Fáil rule, de Valera maintained that, apart from the ‘outstanding difficulty’ of partition, the spirit of these proposals could be implemented by his government.153
As the government withheld the annuities, entered the Economic War with England and was assailed by a strident big-farmer onslaught in the form of the Blueshirts, its republican credentials were validated not only by the republican electorate but also by increasing numbers of IRA volunteers who were absorbed into the army and a new volunteer force. O’Donnell later commented on this period:
I realised when Fianna Fáil came to power in 1932 that the IRA had no meaning as an armed force. They could offer so many concessions to the Republican viewpoint that it was bound to blur the issues that still divided us. But it would reinforce more than ever my early belief that a government was permitted in Dublin only so long as it remained a bailiff for the conquest.154
The development of the Blueshirts in 1933 was to provide O’Donnell and his supporters in the IRA with another issue which they hoped would allow a clear political demarcation to be drawn between ‘real’ and ‘fake’ republicanism: the struggle against Irish fascism would displace the anti-annuities movement as the main mobilising issue for social republicanism. The Blueshirt movement originated in the anti-republican Army Comrades’ Association founded in 1931 by veterans of the Free State army. After the Fianna Fáil victory in 1932, the ACA opened its membership to the general public. In March 1933 de Valera called a snap election which increased his parliamentary majority, and in the same month he sacked General Eoin O’Duffy, Cumann na nGaedheal’s appointee as Chief of Police. O’Duffy made himself the focus of the ACA, which he renamed the National Guard, and gave it a distinctive style when he instituted the fascist salute and the wearing of a blue shirt as a uniform.