The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson

in Belfast. Given the barrenness of the strategy that was decided upon, however, this appears doubtful. Rather, the debate over the objectives of the military campaign illustrates that the leadership regarded itself as still being potentially a major force in Irish political life. It had failed utterly to understand de Valera’s effective closure of anti-Treaty aspirations.

      Throughout the 1940s and 50s, the attempt to relate republicanism to the realities of Irish life went on outside the IRA. Absorbing the remaining members of the ‘government’ of the Second Dáil in 1938,²⁰⁴ the IRA under Sean Russell’s leadership ‘declared war’ on England and launched a campaign of sabotage and terror which confirmed its increasing marginalisation in Ireland where, buttressed by the massive popularity of his policy of neutrality, de Valera could take stringent measures to repress the IRA with little fear of popular repercussions. Military courts, internment and a small number of executions and deaths from hunger strikes, together with the predictable internal bickerings and charges of ‘betrayal’ born of patent failure, had effectively destroyed much of the organisation by 1945. In February 1939 Russell had established contact with the German intelligence organisation, Abwehr II, which was to send agents to Ireland to encourage IRA activity in the north aimed at disrupting the British war effort. In May 1940 he arrived in Berlin, where he met prominent Nazis including Joachim von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, and received training in sabotage. He was being transported back to Ireland by submarine when he took ill and died. Russell’s intrigues with Germany, which came to nothing, were not uniformly popular in the south, where some IRA men looked askance at contacts with the Nazis.²⁰⁵ In the north, the dominant response was to welcome anything that might lead to British defeat. Those few Belfast IRA men who had been touched by the radicalism of the 1930s could only look on in amused contempt as their comrades in jail jubilantly plotted the eastward march of the German army into the Soviet Union.²⁰⁶

      Towards a Border War

      Defeat and marginalisation would teach no lessons. Neither would the increasing evidence of rural and urban discontent with the de Valera dispensation. Dissatisfaction with the limited nature of Fianna Fáil agrarian reforms and their failure to deal seriously with the continuing problems of under-employment and emigration in the west was expressed in the temporary success of a western peasants’ party, Clann na Talmhan (Children of the Land) founded in 1938. It won 11 per cent of the vote and fourteen seats in the Dáil election of 1943. The limits of the industrial policies of tariff protection and job creation were also clear by the 1940s, and in the 1943 election the Irish Labour Party substantially increased its vote – from 10 to 15 per cent, almost doubling its Dáil representation from nine to seventeen.²⁰⁷ Although this advance would be soon checked by a major split, fuelled by nationalism, antagonism to British-based unions and anti-communism in both the Labour Party and the Irish TUC, there was clear evidence that the material existed for a radical attack on Fianna Fáil.²⁰⁸

      When this came, it was led by the ex-IRA leader Sean MacBride, who founded a new party, Clann na Poblachta (Family of the Republic) in 1946. Rumpf and Hepburn summed up its fundamental dynamics as expressing

      the dissatisfaction of the more constructive members of the younger generation of Republicans, both with the growing conservatism and machine politics of Fianna Fáil and with the arid brutality which had characterised the IRA.²⁰⁹

      Its specific policies on the economy – repatriation of Irish capital invested abroad, breaking of the monetary link with sterling, substantial government investment to stimulate a depressed economy – resembled a revamped radical Fianna Fáil platform of the 1920s. Its achievement of 13 per cent of the vote and ten seats in the Dáil in 1948 was a central factor in displacing Fianna Fáil from office for the first time since 1932. However its acceptance of places in a coalition government that included the anti-republican Fine Gael only alienated many of its supporters. More fundamentally, it demonstrated the problems for any political party in the southern state which combined its appeal to social radicalism with an inchoate hope that, just as it was possible for a Dublin government to take a more active role in dealing with unemployment, poverty and disease, so it was open to it by a simple act of will also to ‘solve’ the national question.

      The result of MacBride’s brief irruption into mainstream politics was a self-interested scramble for nationalist credentials between the coalition parties and Fianna Fáil, manifested in the declaration of a Republic in 1948 and the launching of an all-party Anti-Partition Campaign. This campaign, with its origins in the dynamics of inter-party competition in the south, highlighted the ‘affront’ of partition in an intense propaganda onslaught in Ireland and abroad, but failed miserably, though predictably, to alter the situation. Its effect on the IRA, however, was substantial.

      The initial success of Clann na Poblachta encouraged the remnants of the IRA (in 1948 the ‘General Headquarters Staff’ estimated that the organisation had 200 activists and some hundreds of sympathisers²¹⁰) to equip themselves with a political arm by re-establishing the link with Sinn Féin – by taking over the moribund organisation. This politicisation had two notable characteristics. The first and more important was to be the clear subordination of the political organisation to the IRA Army Council. At an Army Convention in 1949 a resolution was passed instructing the IRA to infiltrate and take control of Sinn Féin.²¹¹ The second was the staggering backwardness of its economic and social programme.

      Sinn Féin’s ‘National Unity and Independence Programme’ referred to a ‘reign of social justice based on Christian principles’. These were the corporatist vocational principles which had so enamoured the Blueshirts and the Catholic hierarchy in the 1930s and which Fianna Fáil, to its credit, eventually rejected.²¹² In the late 1940s they had been narrowed down to the matter of intense Church opposition to any attempt to ‘import’ the ‘socialistic’ welfare state from the United Kingdom. It was the attempt by the radical Minister of Health, Noel Browne of Clann na Poblachta, to provide free health care for pregnant women and nursing mothers which would destroy the coalition and MacBride’s new party.²¹³ In this crucial conflict between a government minister and the Catholic hierarchy, the republican movement’s position was an implicitly miserable one. While the Unionist government in the north was able to use the ‘Mother and Child’ affair to intensify its depiction of the Republic as priest-ridden and backward, Sinn Féin, now the mouthpiece for an organisation which had decided in 1948 to prepare for a military campaign against the ‘occupied Six Counties’,²¹⁴ declared itself for vocational principles and against the welfare state.²¹⁵ Sinn Féin’s new monthly paper, the United Irishman, swore its fidelity to the republican saint Wolfe Tone and his objective of destroying English rule by ‘unity of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. At the same time, however, it persisted in the characteristic Catholic nationalist fixation with the supposed power of southern Freemasonry²¹⁶ and was content to reject blithely such manifestations of the ‘British link’ as the welfare state, which was massively popular with the Protestant working class.

      Most IRA members were, of course, little interested in social philosophy, Marxist, Catholic or otherwise. Most would have been practising Catholics with no time for politics, particularly if they were tainted by ‘communism’ (a capacious term in post-war Ireland). Like their Chief of Staff, Tony Magan, they were dedicated to a republican ideal narrowed down to reunification by physical force. There were exceptions to this general rule, and some of these would play a key role in the 1960s. In a book that recalls one of the IRA’s darkest and most and periods – the 1939-1940 bombing campaign in England – Brendan Behan claims to have declared to his captors that he had come over ‘to fight for the Irish Workers and Small Farmers Republic’.²¹⁷ He typically differentiated his own variety of republicanism from those of

      your wrap-the-green-flag-round-me junior civil servants that came into the IRA from the Gaelic League, and were ready to die for their country any day of the week, purity in their hearts, truth on their lips, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.²¹⁸

      Behan’s working-class background in north Dublin was shared with a friend, Cathal Goulding, who had joined Fianna Éireann, the junior wing of the IRA, in 1937 at the age of eleven. Goulding’s