To talk of nationhood as something outside the people on which they are to rivet their eyes and struggle towards is wrong … organisation will only come from the struggles of the hard-pressed to drive hunger out of their lives. I am convinced that the hard-pressed peasantry and the famishing workless are the point of assembly.75
The small farmers of the western periphery were crucial to his project for reasons that went beyond any strategic calculations of their conditions or class interests. O’Donnell in fact gave them a privileged role in the anti-imperialist struggle. As he plainly stated in his introduction to Brian O’Neill’s The War for the Land in Ireland:
In my opinion the relationship between the social rights of the toilers and the fight for national independence has been more persistently maintained by the small farmer population, even than by the industrial workers in the south.76
This valuation of the peasantry owed more to Gaelic revivalism than to socialist ideology. As Terence Brown has pointed out, the 1920s saw the confirmation of the west and of the Gaeltachts as the main locus of Irish nationalist cultural aspiration. The acutely depressed conditions in rural Ireland in this period, manifested in high levels of unemployment and emigration, weighed particularly heavily on the Gaeltacht areas, and for a central tendency in nationalism this became a critical issue. Brown quotes Douglas Hyde, the Irish Protestant co-founder of the Gaelic League, commenting on a recently published report of the Gaeltacht Commission in 1926:
Remember that the best of our people were driven by Cromwell to hell or Connacht. Many of our race are living on the seaboard. They are men and women of the toughest fibre. They have been for generations fighting with the sea, fighting with the weather, fighting with the mountains. They are indeed the survival of the fittest. Give them but half a chance and they are the seeds of a great race … it will save the historical Irish nation for it will preserve for all time the fountain source from which future generations can draw for ever.77
O’Donnell made clear his fealty to an ultra-Gaelic version of Connolly’s ‘reconquest’ when he specified that his objective was ‘not merely to set up a Republic but to restore the old Gaelic civilisation on the ruins of the capitalist state foisted on us by Imperialism’.78 Clearly this meant that the preservation of the Gaeltacht areas was crucial, for their peasantries were the least corrupted bearers of Gaelic and anti-capitalist values. When decrees for non-payment of annuities were issued against peasants in the Tirconail Gaeltacht in Donegal, where the agitation had begun, O’Donnell responded in a typically revivalist way:
Are the remnants of Gaelic stock to be sought out among the rocks and stripped naked under a cruel winter? Are these homes stamped unmistakably with the personality of these Gaelic folk – and they are as yet a vital, unbroken set of people – to be razed because tribute to England is not being paid?79
Thus Gaelicised, the annuities were an issue that had significant potential for Fianna Fáil. In April 1927 the desperate state of some small farmers was tragically revealed in the Gaeltacht area in west Cork with the death from starvation of a farmer, his wife and two of their five children. (O’Donnell took the name of their village, Adrigoole, as the title of a novel published in 1929.) The Nation, a weekly newspaper supporting Fianna Fáil, took up the issue in a way broadly similar to the approach of An Phoblacht:
The policy of our efficient Minister of Agriculture is having unexpected success. He informed the country recently that as far as he was concerned, help would be given only to those farmers who can help themselves … The Berehaven man, with his uneconomic holding could not help himself, and went to the devil … If he had been one of the rich farmers he could have helped himself out of public funds. But unhappily for him and his kind he belonged to the Celtic fringe, he is a remnant of the old Irish that were driven by the invaders to the bogs and mountains … Last year, 30,000 people, mainly from the Celtic fringe, left Ireland in order to escape the fate that awaits the landholder along the coast. Yet the grass is growing on the empty plains of Meath.80
There was a hint of the traditional agrarian radical demand for the break up of the grazing ranches But the Nation’s main advice to its readers was, if they wanted to ‘save the Gael’, to vote Fianna Fáil in the forthcoming election. At this time Fianna Fáil had no concrete agrarian policy; although there was some sympathy for O’Donnell’s campaign,81 the position of the national leadership and of de Valera in particular was much more cautious.
It was the potentially divisive nature of the campaign which obviously worried de Valera. Soon after the extraordinary Sinn Féin Árd Fheis in 1926 and the subsequent decision to set up the new party, de Valera wrote to Joseph McGarrity, the leading figure in the Irish-American republican support group, Clan na Gael, explaining the decision:
You will perhaps wonder why I did not wait any longer. It is vital that the Free State be shaken at the next general election, for if an opportunity be given it to consolidate itself further as an institution – if the present Free State members are replaced by Farmers and Labourers and other class interests, the national interest as a whole will be submerged in the clashing of rival economic groups.82
This clear avowal of the need to preserve Ireland from the dangers of class politics helps to explain much of the tortuous legalism which characterised de Valera’s position on the annuities. In July 1927 he dealt with the issue in an interview with the Manchester Guardian:
Our farmers ought certainly to pay something for the privilege of using the land. But perhaps what they pay should not be annuities calculated to compensate the landlord for his legal claim to rent but rather a land tax which could be graduated more justly and scaled down in accordance with the farmers’ ability to pay. Still I do not assert that those who advanced the money which the British Treasury used to buy out the landlords should not be repaid. But the question, by whom their money should be repaid, has still to be settled. I am not for a repudiation of debt. A future Republican government could not ignore all the acts of its predecessor, but the financial settlement which Cosgrave has made with England is absurd and will be reopened.83
At the 1927 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis a resolution proposed by a priest from South Mayo was passed calling on the Land Commission ‘in urgent cases where writs have been issued and seizure or sale is imminent’ not to take legal action where a farmer was able to pay the current annuity and was prepared to pay arrears by instalment.84 There was a considerable distance between this and O’Donnell’s campaign in Donegal, where the peasants had been organised to withhold annuities and resist seizures and sales. The conference’s decision to set up a special policy committee on the issue showed a determination that the party should benefit from it, but the report clearly demonstrated that the issue would be presented as a national grievance against England with the minimum possible social content. The basic argument was to be the legal one that the continued payment of annuities was contrary to the Government of Ireland Act and the Treaty. In power, Fianna Fáil would reopen the question with Britain and uphold the right of the Free State to retain the annuities. The funds so retained would be used ‘to help tenant farmers and to facilitate the purchase and distribution of land under the 1923 Act with special reference to the Gaeltachts and the Congested Districts’.85 Legalistic appeals to British legislation had little attraction for either agrarian radicals or republican purists. Discussing the annuities issue at Sinn Féin’s Árd Fheis, the party president, J. J O’Kelly, ‘referred to the means by which the lands of Ireland were confiscated by alien adventurers … His advice to Irish farmers was not to pay another penny in way of land annuities.’86
As O’Donnell admitted, however, by the end of 1927 there was a great danger of the agitation collapsing in its original areas of support: ‘I was desperately in need of some help to widen the area of struggle and to bring new voices onto the land annuities platform.’87 In a significant article, he implicitly recognised the limits of a strategy too closely tied to the peasant periphery. He spoke of ‘a quivering uneasiness in the collective mind of the working