Land Annuities and Left Republicanism 1926-1932
There is now a considerable literature on both Irish socialism and republicanism in the twentieth century, yet little has been written about the agitation which attempted very clearly to link republican objectives to a major social and political issue: the movement against the payment of land annuities to England, which was launched in 1926 by Peadar O’Donnell in his native Donegal. A major reason for this neglect is, ironically, the very success of the movement which imposed itself on de Valera and the national leadership of Fianna Fáil. The Fianna Fáil victory in 1932 and its subsequent domination of Irish politics has tended to obscure the important role that left republicanism played in creating what Seán O’Faoláin referred to as ‘a distinct social flavour about de Valera-ism’.66 A related and important issue is the significance of the agitation for the understanding of the nature of social republicanism.
The early 1930s were to see one of the two major attempts since the Treaty to move the republican movement in a socialist direction, the Republican Congress of 1934. The reasons for the quick collapse of this initiative will be only partly understood if their origins in O’Donnell’s project of the 1920s are not grasped. For in his writings of the period, and particularly in An Phoblacht, O’Donnell articulated perhaps the only serious attempt since partition to create a project of social and political transformation based on a Gaelicised version of Connolly’s writings. This project of pushing republicanism to the left would exercise a continuing influence in subsequent decades and, despite its failure, it would become the unsurpassable limit of republican radicalism until the 1970s. Its intrinsic subordination to a fundamentally nationalist political project meant, however, that it would be incapable of undermining Fianna Fáil’s populist appeal.
The land annuities were those due to be paid by Irish farmers under the 1891 and 1909 Land Acts and amounted to £3 million a year.67 Under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, the new governments in Belfast and Dublin were to have retained the annuities, but this provision was held to have been superseded by the Treaty. The annuities were dealt with under the Anglo-Irish Financial Agreement of 1923, the terms of which were never published. The Irish government was to collect the annuities from the tenants and pay them into the British government’s Purchase Annuities Fund. The Irish government’s undertaking to pay the annuities was confirmed under the Ultimate Financial Settlement agreed with the British in March 1926. The political sensitivity of the issue was indicated by the fact that the Free State government did not publish details of the settlement until eight months after it had been signed.
Although the Labour Party had raised the annuities issue in the Dáil, the mainstream of anti-Treatyite Sinn Féin and later Fianna Fáil were notably slow to take up the issue. As O’Donnell explains in his own history of the agitation, he became aware of it when small farmers from his native Donegal Gaeltacht (Gaelic-speaking area) told him about the threats of legal action they had received from the Irish Land Commission for non-payment. Non-payment in parts of Donegal went back to 1918, when peasants supported by the local IRA Commander had decided to pay neither rent nor annuities. By the time Free State courts were established, some peasants had accumulated up to eight years of arrears.68 Similar situations existed in other small-farming areas in the west and south-west. For O’Donnell, the harsh economic reality that made it impossible for the small farmers to pay arrears, even if they had wanted to do so, was the most potent material symbol of the failure of the Sinn Féin revolution of 1919-21. As the manifesto of Saor Éire, which O’Donnell had a hand in drawing up, was to put it in 1931, the first Dáil in 1919,
set its face against all tendency towards direct action by the masses to recapture their inheritance … The small farmers and landless men demanded restoration of the ranches [sic] they demanded the relief of rent and in these vital issues the government betrayed them.69
After the Treaty split there was on the anti-Treaty side a slightly more sympathetic audience for the views of agrarian radicals. In May 1922 the IRA Army Council produced an agrarian policy and P.J. Ruttledge, ‘Director of Civil Administration’, issued an order to local commandants to seize certain lands and properties and hold them in trust for the Irish people. These included all lands in the possession of the Congested Districts Board, created by the British administration in the 1890s to deal with the problem of the most impoverished parts of the west of Ireland, all properties of absentee landlords and those who spent the greater part of their time abroad, and all but 100-200 acres and mansion houses of landlords residing permanently in Ireland. Divisional land courts were to be established.70 It soon became clear, however, that the leadership of the anti-Treaty side was predominantly unsympathetic to a clear identification with agrarian radicalism. Thus in his Jail Notes, Liam Mellows reminded Austin Stack that the IRA already had a land programme which should now be actualised as part of the struggle ‘if the great body of workers are to be kept on the side of Independence’.71 But as O’Donnell was to say later of de Valera, ‘He was numb rather than hostile to the working class struggle. He was as scared as Griffith [the founder of Sinn Féin in 1905] of the gospel of Fintan Lalor.’72
For O’Donnell, the anti-Treaty leadership had failed to learn the crucial lesson of the War of Independence. This he stated clearly in a polemic with the purist Mary MacSwiney in the pages of An Phoblacht. His attitude to her organisation, Sinn Féin, was the same as it was to the pre-Treaty Sinn Féin:
It is a compromise with the conquest. To attempt to define Sinn Féin as the undoing of the conquest and restoration of the common ownership of land, among other things, thus coming bang up against the order that has arisen out of the conquest – unthinkable. It would break up the ‘national’ movement.73
It was Connolly who had developed the notion that the substance of the socialist task in Ireland was the country’s ‘reconquest’ from the capitalist structures which English colonisation had imposed. This was an ambiguous notion. It could mean simply that, just as the imposition of foreign rule on Ireland had profound economic and social dimensions as well as political ones, the breaking of that foreign rule would necessarily involve equally radical economic and social transformations. However this facet of the notion was sometimes linked to a more romantic Gaelic revivalism. As David Howell has noted, Connolly’s major work, Labour in Irish History, must be placed firmly within the broad current of the Gaelic literary and cultural revival which developed from the 1880s. Connolly was particularly influenced by Alice Stopford Green’s The Making of Ireland and its Undoing, which focused on the destruction of Gaelic culture following the conquest of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was presented as a rupture which rendered subsequent developments abnormal. The liberation of Ireland required a reconnection with the older traditions.74
Such a viewpoint naturally tended to privilege those sections of the Irish population seen to be nearest to Gaelic traditions, and in the conditions of the 1920s this inevitably meant a focus on the peasantry of the western periphery. It was, of course, in these areas that the greatest concentration of small farmers was wresting a living from the poorest soils in Ireland. Agitation against annuities would inevitably have tended to focus on those areas where their burden was hardest to bear. For O’Donnell, however, there was more to the issue