Читать книгу The Politics of Illusion - Henry Patterson - Страница 9

O’Donnell later noted how the international situation helped his campaign to change the IRA:

By the end of the 1920s the world economic crisis had made itself felt so sharply in Ireland as an agricultural crisis that middle and even bigger farmers found the current annuity an embarrassment, and suddenly our movement became self-propelled.¹⁰⁶

One of O’Donnell’s motives in instigating the IRA’s break with Sinn Féin and the Second Dáil in 1925 had been to get the IRA involved in social agitations, but he admits that he was to be relatively unsuccessful. Although a member of both the Executive Council and the Army Council and editor of An Phoblacht, he had been unable to involve the IRA as a body in the annuities agitation.¹⁰⁷ His use of An Phoblacht to publicise the annuities issue was a source of conflict in republican ranks:

Quite good-intentioned fellows are sizzling with anger against me for using An Phoblacht to push my own set of activities in republican groups in the country. The working-class note will split the compactness of the ‘real republic’ I am threatened … It is my firm conviction that it is by making the working-class ideals active and dominant within the Republican movement that good can come to the revolutionary movement in the country.¹⁰⁸

In January 1929 a proposal by O’Donnell and a small group of left-wing IRA men to found a radical political organisation tentatively called Saor Éire (Free Ireland) was rejected by the Army Convention. Instead, volunteers were permitted to join a new political organisation, Comhairle na Poblachta, which was designed as a united front of non-Fianna Fáil republicans.¹⁰⁹ The first statement of the new organisation on Irish unity reflected the attitudes of IRA Chief of Staff, Moss Twomey, ‘a dedicated right-wing Fenian, scrupulous in his religious observance’,¹¹⁰ rather than those on the left:

[Irish unity] has become an absolute necessity if Ireland is to remain a Christian entity in a world rapidly becoming pagan … to get the clean, Gaelic, Christian mind of Ireland in revolt against the beastliness of English Imperial paganism should be the task of every right-minded citizen of Ireland.¹¹¹

But as the 1929 slump cut off emigration outlets in the USA (between 1926 and 1930 over 90,000 had emigrated there¹¹²), there was a major decline in the remittances which had helped many small farmers eke out their living. The deteriorating economic and social conditions gave a new immediacy and attractiveness to O’Donnell’s ideas. He was later to claim that it was the inadequate response of the IRA leadership which prevented a revolutionary resolution of the crisis and benefited Fianna Fáil:

There was no political face to this mass unrest … it was a great lurch to the left on definite terms … As it became clear that the government had in mind to subject the IRA to a mounting system of police thuggery, the possibility of another armed clash forced itself into Republican discussions and with it came talk of the need for a Republican policy. We were back to Mellows. At any time the IRA chose, it could have put itself at the head of the whole Republican movement, pushing past Fianna Fáil, de Valera and all, to reach the 1919 position at one stride, by releasing its members into the land annuities agitation.¹¹³

However the essential ambiguities of social republicanism are apparent in the fact that, a few pages later in his account of this period, O’Donnell gives a very different evaluation of the possibilities. What he now appears to have desired was active IRA involvement in the annuities movement as a means of returning a Fianna Fáil government of a particular type, one forced by popular pressure to adopt agrarian and other economic policies considerably to the left of what they were committed to:

Facing a general election we believed we could add enough push to de Valera’s campaign to over-run the government party … de Valera and those round him wore no halos for us … These men would be incapable of the comprehensive, state-sponsored schemes, which alone could reach out to the small farm countryside, expand industry … National leadership was not the challenge facing us … Our task was to give coherence to the Fenian radicalism that characterised the crisis. The way to do that would be to put forward a short list of candidates to serve as a rallying point for second tier leadership to impose this militancy on the Fianna Fáil Executive.¹¹⁴

This essential lack of clarity as to what was possible in 1931-32 reflects the fundamental strategic void at the heart of physical force republicanism, whatever its ideological complexion. Its alternative to Fianna Fáil populism was either the ideal ‘Republic’ to be brought about by another attempt at the forcible overthrow of the Free State or an equally abstract social republicanism. Although the latter was prepared to dirty its hands with material grievances, it would seek to direct them to an objective which, for all its Marxist coloration, was effectively as detached from the possibilities of the situation as the ‘Republic’ of purist dreams.

The apparent radicalisation of the IRA leadership in the two years after the rejection of the Saor Éire proposal represented a desperate attempt to staunch what Bowyer Bell has described as the ‘wholesale desertion’ of its members to Fianna Fáil as it moved towards power.¹¹⁵ A movement estimated to have 20-25,000 members in 1926 had declined to a hard core of about 5,000 at the beginning of 1929, although even then its paper An Phoblacht sold 8,000 copies while the Fianna Fáil weekly, the Nation, sold 6,000.¹¹⁶ John McHugh has suggested that in the late 1920s there were three main elements in the IRA – the left, led by people like O’Donnell and George Gilmore, which was a definite minority but with disproportionate influence through its effective control of An Phoblacht; a strong bloc of apolitical militarists, well represented by the Chief of Staff, Twomey; and another relatively small group which adhered to Catholic social doctrines.¹¹⁷ The largest group which, like the bulk of the ordinary volunteers was drawn from small farmers, landless labourers and urban workers, was not unsympathetic to the left. Its own conditions and experiences were reflected in a diffuse social-radical variation on traditional republicanism. The further attraction of social republicanism was that it offered volunteers a deeper rationale for refusing incorporation in constitutional politics through the blandishments of Fianna Fáil.

But while the language of publications and meetings would be increasingly affected by borrowings from the Communist International, and a few republicans like O’Donnell would have close and friendly relations with the tiny coterie of Irish Communists, the substance of the relationship was largely instrumental. Here was a declining movement in desperate need of the issues and language to justify its continued existence. One of the police reports which the Cumann na nGaedheal government was using in an effort to alert the Catholic hierarchy to an approaching ‘red’ threat that included the IRA, gave an astringent estimate of the actual relationship between the IRA and social radicalism:

There can be little doubt that there are in the IRA men who dislike Communism and similarly in Communist circles men who regard the IRA as merely sentimental, old-fashioned patriots, but a union has evidently been arranged on the basis that both parties will do their best to destroy the present order of things. The value of this from the IRA point of view is obvious, every unemployed man, every small farmer who has to pay a Land Commission annuity, every struggling small trader, every discontented worker, will now be told that the IRA is his ally … The depression in agriculture and the repercussions here of the world-wide industrial slump will thus be turned into motive power for the IRA. It was fairly clear that the IRA could not continue to live on its original base. The number of people who are prepared to imperil their lives and fortunes for the difference between the existing state on the one hand and a Republic such as the USA or France on the other hand is negligible. That a civil war – even a short one – was fought even partly on such a basis was due to purely temporary and personal causes which have already lost much of their force. The men who wished to keep the IRA alive had therefore to look around for support springing from some other motives than the traditions of Irish independence and they found support in the widespread movement against the system of private property and private enterprise.¹¹⁸

Undoubtedly the predominant tendency in the IRA looked to the annuities movement and to the intensification of problems of unemployment and agricultural depression as the material from which a ‘second round’ could be engineered. The intense problems of the small farmer in the west, exacerbated by depression and the effective closure of emigration outlets, produced optimum conditions for a recrudescence of a form of republican intransigence which can be identified primarily as a form of traditional rural resistance to an ‘oppressor’ state. It was in many ways a land war disguised as a national struggle.

O’Donnell, who attended a congress of the Communist International’s European Peasant Committee (the Krestintern), was eager to give his annuities agitation an ‘internationalist’ flavour, and in March 1930 the Anti-Tribute League was transformed into the Irish Working Farmers Congress, which met in Galway. The rhetoric of the meeting did much to convince the police and the government of the reality of a ‘red’ menace:

This Congress accepts the platform and programme of the European Peasant Congress … by fighting on this platform, in alliance with town workers for the common interest of all toilers against capitalist exploitation, against land annuities ... the working farmers are at the same time fighting for the complete independence of our country.¹¹⁹

In fact, the alliance with urban workers was as speculative a construction as the link between the farmers’ struggles against annuities and the fight for ‘complete independence’. The substantial reality was a widespread spirit of lawlessness in many rural areas. At the centre of this was the inability of tens of thousands of farmers to pay annuities, the growth of arrears and the resultant action by the Land Commission to recover them, which could take the form of seizure of animals and even of the land itself. O’Donnell had always seen in the occasions of conflict between bailiffs and farmers the opportunity to demonstrate the ‘imperialist’ nature of the Free State and the possibility of a new republican offensive which, unlike the usual IRA military activities of the period – arms aids, the shooting of policemen and intimidation of jurors – would not leave the masses cold or hostile.

By 1931, as the police complained of a ‘growing feeling against payment of debts and against private property’,¹²⁰ and the government adopted an increasingly repressive demeanour, the IRA’s secret paper commented on ‘an amazing resurgence of feeling throughout the country during the present year … Several companies and battalions have doubled and trebled their strength.’¹²¹ This ‘Fenian Radicalism’, as O’Donnell termed it, drew its strength predominantly from the areas with a history of participation in the annuities agitation. According to the police, the areas most disturbed by illegal drilling and other forms of ‘irregularism’ were Tipperary, Kerry, Leitrim and Donegal.¹²² These were also often areas with strong traditions of agrarian agitation and anti-Treatyism. There was in many parts of the western periphery a potent mixture of present economic grievance and an abiding ideological tradition which the Department of Justice characterised thus: ‘For generations there has been in Ireland the tradition of opposition to the state – a readiness in word and action, to question the authority of its institutions.’¹²³

For the mainstream of the IRA leadership and much of its membership, the Saor Éire radicalisation was opportunistic. It held out the prospect of using material grievances to launch a new campaign. For them, O’Donnell’s re-coding of republicanism in the language of class struggle held out the possibility of enlisting new masses for traditional objectives. The ambiguities of social republicanism were apparent in O’Donnell’s address to a massive republican gathering 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