The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson
at Bodenstown in June 1931:
What is the state machine? To understand the machine it is necessary to see that the British ruling class pushed in here, not just to place soldiers in Dublin, Cork and Belfast but to enrich themselves by the order of life they would establish here … Every struggle that arises, every strike in the cities, every fight on the land must be interpreted in this light so that the mass of the people may be led into revolt against the machinery of the state … not merely against the police.124
One interpretation of O’Donnell’s speech is as a restatement of Connolly’s identification of the conquest with imposed capitalism and of real freedom with socialism. This was probably O’Donnell’s intended meaning. However, articulated at the grave of Wolfe Tone to a gathering of republicans, most of whose knowledge of Connolly’s writings would have been minimal, its actual significance was different.125 It was an invitation to republicans to reinterpret concrete economic and social grievances and struggles as part of the national struggle. While this may have had the temporary advantage of raising IRA morale by apparently opening up new opportunities, it also had the effect of interpreting the ‘class struggle’ in Ireland in terms of fundamentally nationalist objectives. For most republican supporters – the small farmers and workers – the most appropriate mixture of social objectives and nationalism would be that provided by Fianna Fáil. In 1930 and 1931, for many of those in the IRA, the growth of social tension, the increasingly repressive response of the government and the radical noises of even the Fianna Fáil leadership presaged a massive attack on the whole Treaty settlement, in which the IRA would be able once again to become a popular force. In one sense, therefore, a move to the left also appealed, as holding out the possibility of intensified state repression and, in response, a non-parliamentary break with the institutions of the Free State. For a brief period this appeared to be a possible outcome. But the IRA, too narrowly entrenched in the traditional redoubts of rural resistance, underestimated the urban and rural appeal of Fianna Fáil’s mild social reformism and pacific, gradualist dismantling of the Treaty settlement.
The IRA’s General Army Convention meeting in Glendalough in April 1931 had adopted the Saor Éire programme. Its goal was now apparently ‘to achieve an independent revolutionary leadership of the working class and working farmers towards the overthrow in Ireland of British Imperialism and its ally, Irish Capitalism’.126 The initial public manifestation of the new programme was its first congress in Dublin attended by over 150 delegates in September. Not surprisingly, An Phoblacht hailed it: ‘Saor Éire gives a lead which, if acted upon, will achieve the Reconquest.’127 Claiming continuity with the 1916 Proclamation, the manifesto attacked the First Dáil for opposing ‘the direct action of the masses’ and denounced Fianna Fáil as
the party of the Irish middle class … [By] retaining much of the phraseology of their more robust days, Fianna Fáil ties up to their party a strong backing among the National population. They promise a higher tariff wall, so they get the small manufacturer and delude a section of workers in Irish industry; they promise to prevent the shipment of land annuities to England and make that, with derating, a gesture towards farmers. But the crisis is exposing them. They fail to campaign for the maintenance of the unemployed; they fail to support workers against wage cuts; they are unable to support the campaign against forced sales; they oppose the slogan ‘No Rent’, they refuse to support the demand for the overthrow of the land monopoly without compensation and to the consternation of their own youth they condemn rising IRA activity.128
This denunciation implicitly recognises the real ideological and material appeal of Fianna Fáil policies to both workers and small farmers, but then blithely denies it, either classifying it as illusory or simply raising more ‘leftist’ demands for which there was in fact no substantial constituency.
The shallowness of this attempt to overtake Fianna Fáil by windy appeals to ‘organised committees of action amongst industrial and agricultural workers’ was apparent even at the time, as were some of the more ludicrous aspects of the attacks on de Valera’s party. Sean Hayes, who presided at the conference and was a veteran of the annuities campaign, was a Fianna Fáil county councillor and would soon be a TD for the party.129 The links of personality, ideology and outlook between many in the IRA and Fianna Fáil made the Saor Éire denunciations distinctly unimpressive. Even more demoralising for the minority of serious leftists in the IRA was the shallowness of the new commitments. O’Donnell was later to criticise Saor Éire as ‘evasive action’, the adoption of a social programme as an alternative to active involvement in popular struggles.130 And a more forthright dismissal of the whole venture came from Frank Edwards, a member of the IRA in Waterford city and later an International Brigader in Spain:
It was a most undemocratic way to send out invitations [to the Saor Éire Congress], just the Commandant and the Adjutant. It was IRA through and through. They got a county council member from Clare [Hayes] as chairman … He startled everybody by commencing with a religious invocation. Then to cap it all Fionan Breathnach stood up later and said we should adjourn the meeting as some wished to attend the All Ireland in Croke Park that afternoon. It showed you how seriously they were taking their socialism.131
A convinced socialist who was selling 600 copies of An Phoblacht a week at the time, Edwards emphasises that, for all its proclaimed leftism, the IRA effectively functioned not as the scourge but rather as the left wing of Fianna Fáil. Of An Phoblacht’s readers, he concludes disconsolately: ‘I suppose it was the people who voted for Fianna Fáil afterwards who bought them. We republicans had nothing to offer them politically.’132
The Republican Congress Minus Workers and Protestants
The Catholic bishops received their copies of the Department of Justice memorandum on ‘subversive teachings and activities’ and duly responded in a joint pastoral letter on 18 October 1931. Saor Éire was condemned as a ‘frankly communistic organisation’ trying to ‘impose upon the Catholic people of Ireland the same materialistic regime, with its fanatical hatred of God, as now dominates Russia and threatens to dominate Spain’.133 The government introduced new Public Safety legislation under which twelve organisations including Saor Éire, the IRA and the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups (precursors of the Communist Party of Ireland, whose earlier incarnation had been dissolved) were banned, military tribunals were introduced and hundreds were arrested.
Seán Cronin claims that the church-state offensive took the IRA by surprise: ‘They had moved out of the shelter of “national rights” into the exposed ground of “social rights” and were bombarded by everyone.’134 The Catholic Church’s offensive certainly demonstrated the clear ideological constraints on the agrarian radicalism of which people like O’Donnell had such high hopes. The Mayo News, which, as a militant supporter of small farmer agitation, had published one of O’Donnell’s pamphlets,135 made its position on Saor Éire very clear. Reprinting the manifesto in full, it then attacked it at length, particularly for its claim to continuity with 1916:
Patrick Pearse and his co-signatories of 1916 placed ‘the cause of the Irish Republic under the protection of the Most High God’. The engineers of the new Workers’ Republic at their first conference sent fraternal greetings to the Russian Soviets whose proclaimed policy is anti-God, who excel in obscene caricatures of the Blessed Virgin. The proclamation on which Saor Éire takes its stand, was drafted not by Patrick Pearse, but by Mr Stalin in Moscow. The whole programme is foreign as well as anti-Christian, it is against every tradition and principle of Irish nationality … [If] the mask of Republicanism under which it is masquerading were torn off this face, it would show itself in all its anti-National and anti-Christian ugliness.136
The response of the bulk of republicans was to discard the Saor Éire programme and forcibly assert their fidelity to nation and Catholicism. The remnants of Sinn Féin were produced to vouch for the soundness of those who had unfortunately produced a ‘misguided’ social programme. Mary MacSwiney, while opposing Saor Éire (‘It is a bad national policy to divide the people on a class basis’), claimed that of those who produced the policy, ‘Most … are practising Catholics and not one single