War and Propaganda
Secret History: Irish Fascists
Abstract
Can we Trust Our Leaders? Shameful History
Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.George Santayana
Original articles lightly edited. Freely distribute
Contents Updated: Tuesday, 26 September 2006, Friday, 2 October 2009
The Irish Fascists
The Fascist movement in Ireland, though usually omitted from general accounts of European Fascism in the 1930s, attracted a mass following. It was more formidable in the politics of Ireland than Mosleyism ever was in England. The Fascists became the chief opposition party in Irish politics when the conditions for the appearance of extreme nationalistic parties were strong.
The first 10 years of independence in Southern Ireland had been presided over by Cosgrave’s Free State government, but in the 1932 general election its leading Republican opponent, Eamon de Valera, triumphed at the polls. He promptly released the IRA detainees and these at once began a campaign of intimidation against Cosgrave’s Free Staters. Meetings of Cosgrave’s party were broken up by force. Threats were made against the lives of its members.
An anti-communist scare also gripped Ireland in 1932 and 1933. There were not actually many real communists in the country, but a large section of the IRA was sympathetic to Marxism. An IRA delegation had actually visited Moscow, in 1925, seeking aid for the overthrow of the Free State government. So against the European background it was not difficult for some in Ireland to exaggerate the threat to internal order from what they imagined was the Irish agency of international communism.
The increasing violence of Irish politics in the early thirties was also assisted by the start of a sharp depression of the economy in 1932. Irish exports dropped by half in one year, caused by de Valera’s policy of economic warfare against Britain. The small-farming class, the backbone of Irish political life, was the worst hit. Hardship and unemployment soon extended to the poor of the Irish cities.
The growth of fascism in Ireland exactly corresponded to these conditions. The movement originated in an Army Comrades Association set up in 1932, just prior to the general election. In August of that year, after de Valera’s success, the Association first revealed its political potential—it declared its aim to guarantee free speech by creating a “volunteer force”. The movement then grew rapidly. By the end of the year it claimed 30,000 active members. They wore blue shirts, like the shirted movements familiar in contemporary Europe. They drilled and marched and saluted in the extended arm Fascist manner.
For their leader the Blueshirts turned to the Chief of Police under the Free State government, General Eoin O’Duffy, who had just been dismissed by de Valera. O’Duffy had been fascinated by Mussolini’s Italy during a visit in 1929. His admiration for Mussolini and Hitler was undisguised. On various occasions, he described both as the greatest leaders Europe had ever known. He looked to the end of parliamentary democracy, and to the construction of a corporate state intended to embody the National Will. O’Duffy denounced parliamentary democracy as an English invention. Party politics were to be brought to an end.
In 1934, he encouraged contacts between Ireland and European fascists. A delegate from the Norwegian fascists was received in Dublin. In the same year, O’Duffy represented Ireland at the International Fascist Congress in Montreux. He supported the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and headed an Irish brigade which fought for Franco in the Spanish Civil War. He was a practical man, politically inept and overwhelmed by the dramatic value of fascist ideals which he did not understand.
Because de Valera’s government kept trying to suppress the Blueshirts, it kept emerging in different political incarnations. In July 1933, the Army Comrades Association turned itself into the National Guard and at the same time tightened its political creed, now aiming at the overthrow of Communism “and alien control and influence in public affairs”, as its constitution put it. The Blueshirts also intended to outlaw industrial strikes and replace trades unions and political parties by state corporations representing vocational groups.
Its membership was open only to those “of Irish birth or parentage who profess the Christian faith”. Seemingly Irish Catholic piety, it was really anti-Semitic. The Blueshirts were not overtly anti-Semitic, but, though there were very few Jews in Ireland at the time, the culture of anti-Semitism was evident in Ireland. Its sharpest statement came in The Kingship of Christ, a book published in 1931 by a Roman Catholic priest, Fr Denis Fahey. This work elaborated for Irish readers the thesis that Christian civilisation was threatened by an international conspiracy of Jews and Freemasons. It was one of the most popular and widely-read books in Ireland of the day. John Charles McQuaid, later to become Catholic Archbishop of Dublin and Primate of Ireland, wrote a preface to the first edition.
The National Guard was banned at once by the government of Northern Ireland, and at the end of August 1933 it was banned by Dublin, too. The Blueshirts were at that moment negotiating an alliance with the political leaders of the former Free State government. The result, declared in September, was a new opposition party, the United Ireland Party—or Fine Gael. Cosgrave had entered this union with ponderous reluctance, but his fear that de Valera was out to create a single-party state of his own had tipped the balance of his judgment. The new party incorporated the forces of the banned National Guard. Clashes between the IRA and the Blueshirts sharply increased.
In December, de Valera tried again to outlaw the Blueshirts, who once again, in Irish fashion, changed the name of their political organization to escape the ban. They became known as the League of Youth. In the following year the military courts, set up by the government, imprisoned 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA officers, for de Valera had come to recognize them also as a threat to the survival of his government. By then the number of deaths resulting from clashes between the Blueshirts and the IRA had begun to rise. Violence was the wrong cohesive to sustain the fragile alliance of the fascists and Cosgrave, and, in 1934, they drifted apart.
In June 1935, O’Duffy formalized the split by setting up his own Blueshirt party, the National Corporate Party, with frankly fascist ideals. One of their major aims was to establish an all Ireland Corporate State. Under O’Duffy’s erratic leadership this body slowly evaporated as the political climate changed. A two-party arrangement returned to Dublin. The government’s continuing arrest of IRA leaders removed the apparent threat to public order, and by 1938 the end of de Valera’s economic warfare with Britain had diminished the hardships of the depression.
The Irish Blueshirt movement had echoed the doctrines of blood sacrifice and race purity enunciated by Pearse, the leader of the 1916 Easter Rising. It also embodied much of the Catholic social teaching of the time, including the corporatist overtones of the Papal Encyclical, Quadragessimo Anno, teachings whose sympathy with Irish ideals received a clear confirmation when they were in part written into de Valera’s Eire Constitution of 1937. The Blueshirts had the support of those who watched over Ireland’s culture. Yeats was a firm supporter.
in The Observer supplement, May 1972.
