Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 7

The Civil War ended in April 1923 with a ceasefire signed by de Valera as president of the ‘Government of the Republic of Ireland’ and Frank Aiken as Chief of Staff of the IRA.⁵³ The declaration contained an ambiguous but significant clause:

That the ultimate Court of Appeal for deciding disputed questions of national expediency and policy is the people of Ireland, the judgement being by majority vote of the adult citizenry, and the decision to be submitted to, and resistance by violence excluded, not because the decision is necessary, right or just or permanent, but because acceptance of this rule makes for peace, order and unity in national action and is the democratic alternative to arbitrament by force.⁵⁴

For many of the defeated republicans, of whom over 12,000 were imprisoned at the time of the ceasefire,⁵⁵ democratic criteria would come into play only after the overthrow of the whole Treaty settlement – the ‘people of Ireland’ could not be truly represented through ‘corrupt’ institutions like the Free State and the Northern Ireland state. There were many in the IRA who regarded physical force as crucial in bringing about change, and who saw ‘politicians’ above all as an unnecessary evil. The military front in the War of Independence had been opened independently of the Dáil and the government of the Republic, and during the war the military men showed increasing contempt for the politicians.⁵⁶ After the Treaty, the tendency to effective IRA autonomy developed to a high degree, and although the IRA had taken an oath of loyalty to the Dáil during the War of Independence, the anti-Treaty IRA was largely independent of control by de Valera as president of the notional republic.

However military defeat gave the politicians an opportunity to reassert themselves. De Valera successfully urged participation in the general election of August 1923 and, although the republicans did unexpectedly well, given the imprisonment of many candidates and election workers, the result inevitably stirred up the suspicions of some in the IRA that Sinn Féin was destined for incorporation in the Free State.⁵⁷ It certainly became difficult to ignore the fact that, while the Free State government lacked massive popularity and although there was still substantial republican support, it was the support of a minority: a clear majority had voted for candidates who accepted the Treaty. The maintenance of a purist abstentionism held out little prospect of increasing Sinn Féin support against a state which could rely on popular memories and revulsion at the Civil War to isolate republicans so long as it seemed that they were simply preparing for a ‘second round’.

By 1925, with more and more evidence that abstentionism was depleting popular support, de Valera and a substantial section of the Sinn Féin leadership had decided that the road to the ‘Republic’ lay in a long march through the institutions of the Free State and that this meant entering the Dáil. A pivotal role would be played by the Dublin-based Sinn Féin leader, Seán Lemass, soon to emerge as the economic strategist of the new party and the architect of its hegemony over the urban working class. Lemass was an abrasive critic of those in Sinn Féin whose idealist insistence on the ‘de jure’ republic of 1919 prevented them from acknowledging current realities:

There are some who would have us sit by the roadside and debate abstruse points about ‘de jure’ this and ‘de facto’ that, but the reality we want is away in the distance and we cannot get there unless we move.⁵⁸

The split in Sinn Féin came in March 1926 at a special Árd Fheis to consider de Valera’s proposal that, once the oath of allegiance was removed, ‘It becomes a question not of principle but of policy whether or not republican representatives enter the Dáil.’ The proposal was narrowly rejected and de Valera and his lieutenants moved quickly to begin the process of organising a new political formation – Fianna Fáil (Soldiers of Destiny) – which would rapidly consign the idealist intransigents of Sinn Féin to the margins of Irish political life. The relation of the new party with the IRA would be a complex and ambiguous one.

At the General Army Convention of the IRA in November 1925, Frank Aiken – the Chief of Staff and a de Valera supporter – admitted that some members of the ‘government of the Republic’ were discussing the possibility of entering the Dáil. He provoked substantial and angry support for a resolution from the Tirconail battalion in Donegal, calling on the IRA to sever its connection with the ‘shadow’ republican government composed of the Sinn Féin members of the second Dáil. The resolution was stridently anti-political:

That in view of the fact that the Government has developed into a mere political party and has lost sight of the fact that all our energies should be devoted to the all-important work of making the Army efficient so that the renegades who, through a coup d’état, assumed governmental powers in this country, be dealt with at the earliest opportunity, the Army of the Republic sever its connection with the Dáil, and act under an independent Executive, such Executive be given the power to declare war when, in its opinion, a suitable opportunity arises to rid the Republic of its enemies and maintain it in accordance with the proclamation of 1916.⁵⁹

This motion was proposed by Peadar O’Donnell, who would soon personify social republicanism and would play a crucial role in republican political development in the inter-war period. O’Donnell saw himself as the link with the legacy of Mellows and set out self-consciously to politicise the IRA.

Born in 1893 into a small farming family in Meenmore near Dungloe in Donegal, Peadar O’Donnell trained as a teacher before the war. Radicalised in part by an uncle who returned from the United States where he had been a ‘Wobbly’ (a member of the syndicalist Industrial Workers of the World), he was crucially influenced by a trip to Scotland, on which he had been sent by the people of Aranmore island off the Donegal coast, where he was teaching. He was to report on an agricultural strike that was affecting the seasonal earnings so crucial to the economy of the island, as to many other parts of the Donegal seaboard where tiny holdings of poor land could not provide for large families. Emigration to the United States was a structured necessity for such families – five of O’Donnell’s eight brothers and sisters emigrated. For those who remained, seasonal work as migrant harvesters in Scotland was commonplace.⁶⁰ It was in Scotland that his radicalism was given a distinct socialist inflection: ‘Glasgow was my doorway to the world of working-class struggle. There was no turning back for me.’⁶¹

O’Donnell left school-teaching in 1917 to become a full-time organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, now entering a period of rapid expansion, but his own priorities were soon apparent as he became involved in the IRA in 1919 and resigned from the union job in 1920 to devote himself full-time to IRA activities. By the time of the Treaty he was in command of the 2nd brigade of the IRA’s Northern Division.⁶² He opposed the Treaty, was captured in the battle for the Four Courts in June 1922 and imprisoned until his escape in March 1924.

Like Mellows, whom he got to know in Mountjoy Jail, O’Donnell became convinced that the anti-Treaty leadership would go down to defeat because of its lack of a radical social programme to win the masses to the ‘Republic’:

The IRA, apart from himself, George Gilmore, Paddy Ruttledge, perhaps Seán Lemass, Seán Moylan and Tommy Mullins, were just as conservative as the First and Second Dáil governments.⁶³

In a subsequent interview, he summed up the central inadequacy of the existing republican leadership:

Very dedicated men, almost religious men … All they stood for was that they would not accept the Treaty, they had no alternative programme. They were the stuff that martyrs are made of, but not revolutionaries … We had a pretty barren mind socially, many on the Republican side were against change. Had we won, I would agree that the end results might not have been much different from what one sees today. ⁶⁴

However he saw his approach as more developed than that of Mellows, whom he saw – not like some on the left – as a socialist republican, but rather as ‘a great Fenian [the Gaelic name for the insurrectionary nationalists of the IRB, associated particularly with their failed rising in 1867] who saw the poor as the freedom force of the nation; as Tone did’.⁶⁵ For O’Donnell, social discontent was not something that an existing republican leadership could use for its own purposes; rather it demanded a transformation in republicanism, which would become a broad popular alliance capable of ‘completing’ the national revolution in a socially and economically radical way.

As a leading member of the IRA after the Civil War – he was on the Army executive of twelve elected by the Army Convention and on the seven-man Army Council – he was in a strong position to attempt to socialise republicanism. He was helped by his own significant literary talents – he wrote four novels between 1925 and 1930 and would produce major works of autobiography and contemporary historical analysis. As editor of An Phoblacht, the IRA’s weekly newspaper, from 1926 to 1930, he would use his position to help usher in a period of energetic if amorphous and contradictory republican leftism in an attempt to maintain a continuing and vital role for the IRA. This was all the more necessary given the increasing appeal of Fianna Fáil to many IRA members disillusioned with Sinn Féin’s post-1923 impasse. Fianna Fáil organisers who toured the country to build the new organisation could often rely on local IRA commanders to bring their membership into the new party – numerous IRA companies were transformed into Fianna Fáil cumainn or branches. The skilful ambiguities through which the Fianna Fáil leadership expressed the party’s own relationship to the physical force tradition allowed many such republicans to join Fianna Fáil without breaking their link with the IRA. It would be this ambiguous symbiosis that initially encouraged the social republican project and ultimately absorbed it.