For O’Donnell and his supporters, however, Irish fascism represented the issue that would allow the IRA to take the initiative against de Valera’s increasingly successful incorporation of its constituency. Throughout 1934 there were continuous clashes between republicans and Blueshirts and the police and army. The Blueshirts had adopted the tactics of the anti-annuity movement, organising non-payment of rates and land annuities, and resisting attempts to seize animals. Republican attacks on Blueshirt meetings allowed the government to adopt a statesmanlike stance, more or less even-handedly dispensing ‘justice’. In 1934 the military tribunal established to deal with such disturbances convicted 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA men. Naturally enough, the IRA bitterly denounced any action directed against it as a betrayal, but there is no sign that it decreased the government’s popular appeal. For the left in the IRA, de Valera could never defeat the Blueshirts because he left the economic and social basis of the movement – the large-farmer class – untouched.155
An apocalyptic vision of the fascist threat merged with traditional obsessions:
The British preparations for war are being reflected here in the hectic drive of the Imperialists for power. Britain at war can only be safe when Ireland is gripped in the steel jacket of the Imperialist Fascist dictatorship.156
Precisely because there was so little evidence of the Blueshirts’ capacity to mount a real challenge to the state (after all, ‘constitutional’ republicanism of the Fianna Fáil variety could easily label Irish fascism as an essentially anti-national minority, given its Free State origins), social republicans were driven to portray it mythically, as part of a British assault on the Irish nation. Fianna Fáil would now be portrayed as a government unable to satisfy the demands of its small-farmer and worker supporters and, more critically, unable to prevent a political counter-revolution from the ‘imperialist’ elements in the country. Social republicanism would be proved correct in its estimate of Fianna Fáil’s reformism, but such prescience as it could claim was small compensation for the continuing subordination of its social radicalism to a nationalist political project. So much became apparent in the short-lived Republican Congress.
At the 1934 IRA Army Convention, Michael Price, who had moved considerably from his position of opposition to Saor Éire, proposed that the IRA should adopt as its objective a Republic as envisaged by Connolly. The leadership, no doubt mindful of the recent intense assault from the Church on Saor Éire, opposed the Workers’ Republic as a goal and, when his resolution was defeated, Price withdrew. O’Donnell and George Gilmore then proposed a resolution that the IRA should mobilise a ‘united front’ campaign for a Republican Congress, a rallying of republican opinion which ‘would wrest the leadership of the National Struggle from Irish Capitalism’.157 A majority of the delegates supported the resolution, but the vote of the leadership ensured its defeat and O’Donnell and his supporters left the IRA.
The Congress supporters established a newspaper and local groups in preparation for a national conference to launch the united front. The almost immediate collapse of the project when the conference met in Rathmines in September 1934 demonstrated the strict limitations of even the most radical forms of social republicanism. The immediate cause of the split was a division between those who wanted a commitment to the slogan of a Workers’ Republic and those, led by O’Donnell and Gilmore, who wished the Congress to mobilise around the struggle for the Republic, which Fianna Fáil was incapable of leading to a successful conclusion.158 The O’Donnell position, which had a pyrrhic victory, was consistent with the dominant tendency of social republicanism since the annuities campaign. It aimed at a united front of IRA members, rank-and-file Fianna Fáilers, Labour Party members and workers and small farmers, who would be appealed to with a combination of national and social issues. Within this combination, the nationalist inflection was quite systematic.
The first issue of the Congress’s paper had defined the main task as the struggle against the Blueshirts: ‘Above all else, an organ of mass struggle against fascism that must be the slogan of every committee working towards the Republican Congress’.159 But fascism was portrayed as a stalking horse for the traditional enemy:
Once in power, British backing beyond anything given those that played England’s game in 1922 would be given. For, Britain seeks to have Ireland in chains before adventuring into the war for which she is feverishly preparing.160
Like the annuities campaign, anti-fascism was to provide material for a popular upsurge to ‘complete’ the national revolution. Fianna Fáil’s alleged inability to deal with the Blueshirts was traced to its unwillingness to challenge the ‘conquest’ in rural Ireland by expropriating the ranchers without compensation and redistributing their land to the small farmers and the landless. In a pamphlet written at the beginning of the Economic War, O’Donnell had argued that the anti-rancher policy was the central task in completing the national revolution:
The thinning down of the rural life and the organised dependence on Britain was the economic organising of our national enslavement. It is the national issue that is in the forefront in breaking down that dependence and increasing rural employment. This rancher-based cattle trade versus tillage fight is now primarily a fight on the national issue.161
Large-farmer and rancher support for fascism appeared greatly to strengthen the social republican case against Fianna Fail policies. In fact, there was not a lot of evidence that small farmers were as yet dissatisfied with the pace of the government’s agrarian reforms, and, more significantly, even the Congress’s paper had to record serious rural unease with the radical tone of social republicanism. A supporter from Tipperary reported, ‘Very few people in the country districts know anything about James Connolly. There is a prejudice against his policy.’162 More specifically, another supporter complained that the slogan ‘Seize the ranches’ was not well received and served to generate much confusion:
The words ‘confiscation’ and ‘communism’ and all sorts of other -isms are thrown at those who use it and unfortunately some small farmers believe that the adoption of such a policy will lead to the seizure of their little farm.163
If the fascist threat to the government and its agrarian reforms had been as substantial as the Congress supporters claimed, there would perhaps have been some hope for its strategy of arousing the countryside.
The Congress analysis of Fianna Fáil’s supposed weakness in the face of the Blueshirts directly followed Marx’s diatribe against the failure of European bourgeoisies to carry through the revolutions of 1848:
Fianna Fáil cannot fight Fascism. Irish Capitalism is caught between two threats – the threat of Imperialist dictatorship on the one hand and the fear of the roused working class and small farmer population on the other. This is the secret of Fianna Fáil’s hesitation.164
In fact, the 1934 local government elections in Mayo, in which O’Duffy had been predicting a major victory, represented a substantial defeat for his movement – as the Mayo News commented: ‘The county council and municipal elections in the Irish Free State have pricked and deflated the ‘Blueshirt balloon’.165 The mainstream IRA, which had consistently refused to accept the Congress analysis of the fascist threat, noted that the election ‘proved conclusively that the Imperialist-Fascist organisation commands the support of only a minority of the people’.166 No doubt the IRA leadership was pleased to see the main mobilising efforts of the Congress so quickly deflected. The Rathmines split would reveal the other strategic weaknesses of social republicanism.
The initial statement of the Congress group had declared that the way to make ‘the Republic a main issue dominating the whole political field’ was to identify it with the workers and small farmers: ‘A Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle