Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 8

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the new governments in Belfast and Dublin were to have retained the annuities, but this provision was held to have been superseded by the Treaty.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 than material conditions in these areas. He believed that the annuities issue enabled him to give the crucial material and class dimension to the republican struggle against the ‘imperialist’ Free State regime:

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 masses … a tiredness, a distrust, a cynicism’, and of the feeling that the peasantry were ‘a hard, mean, clutching, self-centred, self-seeking lot who really want to pay out nothing’.⁸⁸ It was symptomatic of the large element of idealism that remained in even so ‘materialist’ a republican as O’Donnell that suspicion of the peasantry is explained by factors like ‘tiredness’ and ‘cynicism’. Urban working-class lack of interest in the annuities issue reflected the failure of even radical republicans to link it to a broader strategy of economic and social change. O’Donnell saw in the annuities issue a symbol of the continuing imperialist burden which the Free State government was prepared to impose upon a large section of the Irish people. This approach assumed that in the struggle against this burden an effective radical alliance could be built between ‘peasants’ and workers. As we shall see, the social republicans’ grasp of the political possibilities in urban Ireland was a tenuous one, but even their rural strategy failed to appreciate the complexity of rural class structure. It was this failure which ensured Fianna Fáil’s easy capture of the issue.

The situation of peripheral isolation encouraged a move towards Fianna Fáil and this was facilitated by an approach from Colonel Maurice Moore, a member of the Free State Senate who had been waging a campaign against the legality of the continued payment of annuities to England. Moore had produced a pamphlet, British Plunder and Irish Blunder, which he wished O’Donnell to serialise. Until then An Phoblacht had taken little notice of his speeches because, as O’Donnell admitted, ‘It would not occur to me to link up with a Free State Senator who could invoke no better argument than British Acts of Parliament.’⁸⁹ However Moore was now a member of Fianna Fáil and on its executive was able to put his case strongly to de Valera. Association with Moore made it easier to go about the task of getting Fianna Fáil TDs onto annuities platforms: de Valera had banned them from appearing on platforms with O’Donnell. In February 1928 a national anti-annuities campaign was launched at a meeting presided over by Moore in the Rotunda, Dublin. O’Donnell shared the platform with three Fianna Fáil TDs, Gerry Boland, Dr Jim Ryan and Patrick Ruttledge, one of the foremost agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil, whose frequent speeches on the poverty and unemployment in Mayo were well received in An Phoblacht. In his speech, O’Donnell raised the ‘Call off the Bailiffs’ and ‘No Rent’ slogans which continued to embarrass de Valera, and Ruttledge made the point that while

the platform held people who did not agree on some points … on this matter of ending the payment of an illegal and immoral tax to England, they could agree and work in harmony, maybe opening the way to big things in the future.⁹⁰

A national ‘Anti-Tribute League’ was created, with a leadership dominated by western radicals who personified the very close links – both ideological and familial – that still remained between the IRA and Fianna Fáil. Its chairman was Frank Barrett, chairman of Clare County Council. An ex-member of the Army Council whose brother was still in the IRA, he was now a leading member of Fianna Fáil.⁹¹ The vice-chairman was Eamonn Corbett, an IRA comrade of Mellows, who was now chairman of Galway County Council.⁹² The campaign attempted to get county councils in areas where annuities agitations existed to pass resolutions against the payment of the annuities to England and also demanding the suspension of legal action for arrears. By the end of the year such resolutions had been passed by Clare, Galway, Kerry and Leitrim county councils and the campaign was getting good publicity and support from the Mayo News and other western tribunes of agrarian radicalism.⁹³ But the radicalism articulated by the Mayo News represented only one strand, however, and, for all its importance, a minority strand in Fianna Fáil. As de Valera’s semi-official biographers have noted, one of the major problems facing the new party was the fear amongst sections of the public of its supposed radicalism. In drafting an election address in 1927, de Valera protested that,

The sinister design of aiming at bringing about a sudden revolutionary upheaval, with which our opponents choose to credit us, is altogether foreign to our purpose and programme.⁹⁴

The linking of the annuities issue directly to the conditions and needs of the small farmers, the anti-big farmer ethos of the campaign and its aura and rhetoric of direct action to resist the bailiffs were not the forms in which de Valera wanted the issue to be articulated. The increasing involvement of the Fianna Fáil leadership in the annuities question was associated with a sustained attempt to drain it of any specific class dimension. Thus the Nation began to publish articles by lawyers proving the illegality of the payments to England. If they made any appeal to history, it was done in such a way as to include the majority of the agricultural population. In a typical article by a lawyer, the regional and class dimensions of O’Donnell’s revivalism is obliterated in a simple identification of ‘historic struggles’ and ‘the farmer’:

As a matter of political economy, the need to help the agricultural industry requires no emphasis. But the farmer has surely other claims that go nearer to the hearts of his countrymen. He, above all, is the Gael of age long tradition. Far away in the dawn of history, he it was who tilled the land, built up its traditions and fought the battles for the liberty of our country.⁹⁵

The secretary’s report to the 1929 Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis could report on the party’s

vigorous pursuit of the campaign for the retention of the land annuities. No question, in recent times, has aroused such widespread interest among the people, as is evidenced by attendance at public meetings and the demand for literature on the subject.⁹⁶

In February of that year, however, the National Executive had already adopted a resolution committing the future Fianna Fáil government to use the retained annuities for the abolition of rates on agricultural land. The conservatism of this proposal was clear to many western radicals. As the Connaught Telegraph noted:

What affiliation have the congests of the west with the Farmers’ Union which is composed of the men monopolising the grazing ranches of the country? How will de-rating affect the thousands of congests in Mayo with the 14/- worth of land as compared with the grazing farmers having hundreds of acres of which he tills not a sod?⁹⁷

Such an approach was clearly radically different from O’Donnell’s, although he accepted that after the repudiation of the payments to England the peasants would continue to make some payment. However all arrears were to be cancelled, something against which de Valera had set his face; the payment was to be not in excess of half the present annuity, and the money was to be used for agricultural credit and for the financing of co-operative enterprises.⁹⁸ But as the world depression hit Ireland in 1929, O’Donnell began to predict confidently that a tide of radicalism would force Fianna Fáil to the left if it wanted to survive.

Fianna Fáil strove, with some difficulty, to adapt and mould the themes of the annuities campaign to other pre-existing themes of its discourse on the land question. The object was to create an agrarian stance sufficiently radical to consolidate its support amongst the small farmers of the west but not liable to alienate the more solid members of the farming community. Thus while the republicans under O’Donnell’s influence might agitate against payment of the annuities, de Valera’s approach was to emphasise that annuities would continue to be paid but then retained in Dublin. To make this more palatable, he promised that while some of the money would be used for de-rating, it would also be used to speed the process of land purchase and redistribution, particularly in the Gaeltachts and Congested Districts.⁹⁹

From 1929 to the election of 1932, An Phoblacht and O’Donnell formed a bloc with the agrarian radicals in Fianna Fáil in an intense assault on the ‘imperialist’ Free State regime and its main internal class support – the ‘ranchers’. The basic assumptions of the agrarian radicals were clear enough. Of 378,000 Irish agricultural holdings, some 255,000 or 67.5 per cent were valued at under £15 per year. These were the small men of rural Ireland: the total valuation of all these holdings did not reach £2 million, whereas the total valuation of all the holdings together exceeded £9.5 million. It took 315,000 of the smaller holdings, or 92 per cent of the whole, to reach a valuation of half of the Free State, while the remaining half was accounted for by 33,000 holdings (sometimes non-residential and ranching) or a little over 8 per cent.¹⁰⁰ For the radicals the political implication was obvious: the lands valued at £5.5 million should be divided and peopled by agriculturalists on holdings from £20 to £50 pounds in valuation. Thus the Mayo News declared:

The spoken and written statements of Eamon de Valera our great chief, openly and candidly convey to the ranchers that this state of things which keeps our people in poverty must end, as a consequence they are putting forth every effort to defeat him. Those men who lock up God’s storehouse have the acres, but they have not the votes.¹⁰¹

The Mayo News was typically blasé about the major obstacles to such radicalism:

Roughly we have agriculturalists living on land valued at two million pounds. They are our only originating source of wealth, and all other classes in the community are directly or indirectly deriving their income from them. They are a small number of men occupying land of the valuation of £5,500,000 whose sole occupation is, as the late Michael Davitt put it, watching cows’ tails growing. They confine the land to growing blades of grass. They are practically worthless as an originating source of wealth to the community. The loss to the community per acre of such land is the difference between the life-sustaining capacity of an acre of tilled land and an acre of grass.¹⁰²

A typical rural radical dismissal of any productive role for urban social classes, and displaying the moralistic ‘tillage’ mentality which blithely dismissed meat, the mainstay of Ireland’s exports, as ‘practically worthless’, this passage ignores important political realities. It was one thing to put the top 8 per cent as ‘enemies of the people’, but quite another to put the top 32.5 per cent in this category. Yet this article implicitly identified Fianna Fáil with 67.5 per cent of Irish farmers and against the 32.5 per cent at the top. However much some western radicals might like such an approach, the Fianna Fáil leadership attempted to avoid it; their adoption of agricultural de-rating was a sign of their willingness to compromise with larger farmers.

Nevertheless, the weight of the western small farmer and landless labourer component in the party’s support base, together with the undoubted influence of the annuities agitation in giving a national political focus to intensifying agrarian unrest from 1929 onwards, forced even de Valera to sound a radical note. Thus at a meeting in Irishtown, County Mayo, where the Land League had been launched in 1879, he presented Fianna Fáil in terms of a utopian rural radicalism:

The Ireland his party stood for was the Ireland of Fintan Lalor – an Ireland which still was their own from sod to sky … with the country’s resources fully developed, employment and the means of existence for a population of 20 million could easily be supplied.¹⁰³

In the 1932 election campaign he seemed to be willing to contemplate a much more radical attack on the large farmers:

What about the rich lands? Have they been divided? In Meath, the richest land in Ireland, 5 per cent of farmers own 41 per cent of the land. These are the farmers who own 200 acres each; 631 persons own 234,575 acres: 631 own practically a quarter of a million acres of the best land in Ireland … In Tipperary 485 persons own 200,000 acres and in Kildare 6 per cent of farmers own over 172,000.¹⁰⁴

In office, Fianna Fáil would disappoint many of its rural supporters, but its first years of power nevertheless witnessed a considerable increase in the pace of land redistribution. The Land Act of 1933 was crucial here under it, the Land Commission was empowered to expropriate, with compensation, any property that seemed suitable and distribute it among small farmers and the landless. This was coupled with the withholding of the land annuities which precipitated English tariff reprisals on Irish exports and brought the dislocation of the crucial cattle export trade. A brief irruption of Irish fascism in the form of the Blueshirt movement was the intense and fevered reaction of the large farmers, who saw the Fianna Fáil victory as a form of agrarian ‘Bolshevism’.

The radical element in Fianna Fáil’s appeal in 1932 was heavily influenced by the pressure of social republicanism. The annuities campaign had developed in a way that appeared to vindicate O’Donnell’s line inside the IRA. He put this forward very clearly in an exchange with Mary MacSwiney, who opposed the introduction of class issues into republican discourse:

My method of influencing an organisation is to raise issues behind it and force it either to adjust itself so as to ride the tidal wave or get swamped … If we wake up the country Fianna Fáil would either have to rearrange itself to stand for the people’s demand or it would be swept as wreckage around the steps of the Viceregal Lodge.¹⁰⁵

Implicit in this was the idea that, although Fianna Fáil had forsaken the pure ground of the Republic, it was still a party that could be forced in a progressive and anti-imperialist direction. For O’Donnell, the conversion of the IRA to social republicanism was an essential prerequisite for a reconstitution of anti-Treatyism through the transformation of Fianna Fáil or, if that proved impossible, a new united front of ‘anti-imperialist’ forces. Ironically, he was to have more success in pushing Fianna Fáil in a radical, autarkic nationalist direction than in transforming the IRA.