3 In de Valera’s Shadow
For almost thirty years after the collapse of the Republican Congress, physical force separatism was the overwhelmingly dominant form of republican activity. The Congress’s debacle was used to reinforce traditionalist nostrums concerning the futility of ‘politicisation’, while in reality the leadership of the IRA was content to accept de Valera’s objectives as legitimate, reserving a continued role for the IRA simply by emphasising the need for an intransigent point of pressure to ensure that the risks of Fianna Fáil vacillation were minimised.
But as de Valera pressed ahead with creating a state that would satisfy the republican aspirations of broad swathes of the population, the IRA’s pretensions to the status of an alternative leadership became increasingly ludicrous. Membership of the IRA, which had soared in 1931-32, fell to 7,358 in 1935 and 3,844 a year later. In the same period the membership in Dublin almost disappeared, falling from 490 in 1934 to 93 in 1936.193 The collapse in the Dublin membership reflected the specific effects of an increasingly hard government line against the last vestiges of IRA ‘radicalism’ – its intervention in a transport strike in Dublin in March 1935, when volunteers sniped at army lorries used to replace trams, and shot policemen.194 As the situation in Spain moved towards civil war, a wave of anti-communist feeling developed in Catholic Ireland, with Dublin most liable to its irruptions. At the 1936 Easter commemoration march, contingents from the Communist Party and the remnants of the Republican Congress were stoned by the crowd.195 A substantial number of left-wing IRA men were among the 400 or so Irish who fought for the Republic in Spain.196
The IRA leadership was increasingly dominated by those who saw the key to the ‘Republic’ in a military campaign in either Northern Ireland, Britain or in both. Fianna Fáil would be forced to complete the national revolution, not, as the Congress had predicted, through the activation of a grass-roots radical coalition but by armed action which would rekindle popular nationalist sentiment and force a confrontation with Britain. In part, of course, the IRA had little choice. Its very existence required at least the prospect of action. By 1936 it was clear that military activity in the south would invite a quick and predictable response from de Valera. After a number of IRA armed attacks on opponents, culminating in the murders of a retired Vice-Admiral in Cork in March 1936 and a policeman in April, the government proscribed the IRA and arrested many of its leaders, including the Chief of Staff, Moss Twomey.197 For one of Twomey’s successors, Sean Russell, an archetypal anti-political republican, there was no feasible way of shaking Fianna Fáil and the Treaty settlement except through exemplary violence outside the Free State, which he mistakenly assumed de Valera would have more difficulty in repressing.
In 1937 Sean MacBride, Chief of Staff and the main political intelligence remaining in the leadership after the Congress schism, accepted de Valera’s new constitution with its ‘de jure’ claim to jurisdiction over the 32 counties as fulfilling most of the republicans’ objectives. Any remaining national goals could be achieved peacefully, and therefore, he declared, the IRA had no further role.198 In marked contrast was the bitter denunciation uttered by the Irish Democrat, a paper produced by the remnants of the Republican Congress: ‘De Valera has sanctified the property system arising from the Elizabethan, Cromwellian and Wilhamite Conquest with religious phrases.’ But still O’Donnell and another prominent social republican, Frank Ryan, who had returned temporarily from the war in Spain, counterposed to Fianna Fáil conservatism an abstract appeal for an all-Ireland conference of ‘Separatists and Labour bodies’ to restore the unity destroyed by the Treaty. This coalescence of an appeal to nation and class had as its premiss a real popular commitment to a progressive 32-county republic: ‘We accuse the Fianna Fáil government of this in a time of trial for the Nation, they ask less of the people than the people are eager and able to achieve.’199
That there was considerable and growing dissatisfaction with the limits of the post-1932 reforms, particularly in the countryside, would very soon become clear. But this dissatisfaction, while it might hold out possibilities of changing political alignments within the southern state, could not shake the broad popular sympathy for de Valera’s movement towards a truncated but nevertheless effective form of sovereignty.
Popular aspirations for a full 32-county republic and a more egalitarian economic and social order may well have existed, although it was undoubtedly an exaggeration to claim that, ‘The 1916 Proclamation was always read to promise a triumph of the poor over the small group of rich men who trafficked in their misery.’200 But such aspirations could not easily be made the basis for an alternative national strategy to that of Fianna Fáil. This was not simply because, as essentially Irish Catholic aspirations, they had no appeal to the obdurate Protestants of Ulster; more fundamentally, they shared with Fianna Fáil the assumption that the attainment of full political sovereignty made the economic and social regeneration of Ireland a simple matter of governmental will. This ingrained nationalist commonplace linked de Valera and many of his most bitter critics. By the end of the 1930s the limits of Fianna Fáil policies for economic and social regeneration were becoming clear:
The great leap forward did not materialise. Emigration and rural depopulation were not halted. The link with sterling was maintained. The free flow of capital and labour between Ireland and Britain was not interfered with. Full-blooded protectionism was being strongly diluted by the late thirties. Between the Coal-Cattle Pact of 1936 and the Anglo-Irish agreement of 1938 Ireland’s trade pattern was returning to ‘normal’; that is to say the economy of the Irish state was being reintegrated into the larger trading economy of the neighbouring state.201
But just as the IRA militarists were trapped in a prison-house of assumptions centring on the notion that the two states had evolved from ‘betrayal’ – from the twists and turns of human desires and weaknesses rather than any factors of a more structural nature – the remnants of social republicanism were trapped in the assumption that the manifest inequalities and oppressions of Irish life could be cured through a more radical, nationalist, political coalition, using the state to institute the socialist republic they claimed was implicit in 1916.
A striking characteristic of both the IRA and social republicanism throughout this period is that, whether ‘left’ or ‘right’, its focus was on completing the revolution by action, military or agitational, that would impose itself on the state governed by Fianna Fáil. In the dispute over whether a military campaign should be aimed at Britain or Northern Ireland, the proposal for a northern focus came from Tom Barry, a veteran IRA leader from Cork. He proposed an attack across the border to seize a northern town, hold it as long as possible and withdraw, having, it was hoped, roused the population and forced the issue of partition upon a reluctant de Valera.202 The rejection of this plan, which led to Barry’s withdrawal from the IRA, had nothing at all to do with arguments against it from the IRA in Northern Ireland. As Bowyer Bell has noted of the IRA leadership from the 1920s to the 1940s:
Despite the size and enthusiasm of the IRA in the Six Counties, the north had played only a minimal part in the leadership of the IRA. Rarely had a northerner served on GHQ [General Headquarters Staff] much less the Army Council, and rarely had the Dublin leadership given consideration to the problems of the north.203
Just as, for a brief period, an exaggerated view of the effects of the Great Depression on the Protestant working class had led the social republicans to accord the north a privileged place in their strategy for ‘reconquest’ of Ireland as a whole, so now a military campaign in Northern Ireland was proposed on the basis of little interest in, or knowledge of, conditions in the North, for what was essentially a southern purpose. The defeat of Barry’s proposal