A History of Ireland in 250 Episodes – Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About Irish History: Fascinating Snippets of Irish History from the Ice Age to the Peace Process

by Jonathan Bardon

  W. T. Cosgrave headed the governing pro-Treaty party, Cumann na nGaedheal, which means ‘club (or party) of the Irish’. Anti-Treaty Sinn Féin formed the second-largest party. But its deputies refused to sit in the Dáil because, thanks to the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, they would have to take an oath of fidelity to the king. De Valera, released from prison, became certain that abstention was self-defeating. On 16 May 1926 in Dublin’s La Scala Theatre he formed a new political party, Fianna Fáil, literally the ‘Soldiers of Destiny’. It differed from Sinn Féin in that it accepted the legitimacy of the Free State and forsook violence as a means of achieving its aims. It was slightly worrying, however, that Seán Lemass approvingly described Fianna Fáil as ‘a slightly constitutional party’. At first only twenty-one of the abstentionist TDs joined de Valera.

  Then in the general election of June 1927 Fianna Fáil won 44 seats, leaving hardline Sinn Féin with only five. Clearly the anti-Treaty electorate preferred de Valera’s approach. Cumann na nGaedheal, with 47 seats, urgently needed the support of smaller parties and independents to stay in power. De Valera and his supporters had been prepared to embark on a civil war in 1922 in preference to accepting an oath to the crown. Now what was he to do? Hardline republican militants in effect decided the issue. On 10 July 1927 three gunmen shot and mortally wounded Kevin O’Higgins, now the Minister for Justice and External Affairs, as he walked to Mass in Booterstown, Co. Dublin.

  Cosgrave, in response, pushed through legislation to make it easier to act against fringe republican militants. He also got support for a bill under which all Dáil candidates would have to swear to take their seats if elected. After much agonising, but no doubt tempted by the prospect of power, de Valera announced that Fianna Fáil deputies would fulfil the constitutional formalities, but only because the oath was, in his words, ‘an empty political formula’. But if it had been an empty formula, many asked, why had republicans gone to war in 1922 rather than take it?

  On 11 August 1927 Fianna Fáil deputies arrived at the Dáil in a body. Revolvers bulged in their pockets, and in a phone box one TD assembled a tommy gun, but there was no violence. And what about the oath? When presented with it, de Valera put a blank piece of paper over the oath, signed it, and said to the clerk: ‘Remember, I have signed no oath.’

  However unconvincing de Valera’s tortuous thinking, he and his supporters had taken a crucial step towards the preservation of democracy in Ireland. Cosgrave, now staying in power with a perilously thin majority, deserves at least as much credit for allowing irreconcilable opponents he had defeated in a civil war the opportunity to become a government in the future.

  Between 1918 and 1923 Ireland had undergone a revolution. So had many other European countries at the same time. But in Ireland this was a political revolution only, not a social one. The Irish revolution had swept away not only the British ruling elite but also the men of the Irish Parliamentary Party who had, until 1918, fully expected to become the government of the country. The new elite, veterans of the Easter Rising and the War of Independence, and thankful that Ireland had survived civil war, had no desire to turn Irish society upside down. This was particularly true of the members of Cumann na nGaedheal.

  Episode 237

  THE ECONOMIC WAR

  During the summer of 1929 crowds from all over Ireland flocked to Co. Clare to see the great hydroelectric scheme at Ardnacrusha reach completion. Over four years a huge labour force, working from four special camps, had been busy building concrete weirs, bridges and dams to harness the power of the River Shannon. The contractor, Siemens-Schuckert, proudly displayed over 5,000 photographs of its prestige development back in Germany.

  The ‘scheme’—as everyone called it—provided a striking indication of the extent to which the Irish Free State had settled down since the Civil War of 1922–3. The ruling party, Cumann na nGaedheal, was understandably proud of its achievements. The President of the Executive Council, W. T. Cosgrave, and his colleagues aimed, above all, at stability. They had no intention of promoting sweeping changes in Irish society. Cosgrave’s deputy, Kevin O’Higgins, said before being murdered by the IRA in 1927 that he and his colleagues were ‘the most conservative revolutionaries that ever put through a successful revolution’.

  The Shannon Scheme, which by 1937 supplied 87 per cent of the state’s electricity needs, proved to be the only adventurous economic step taken by the Cumann na nGaedheal government. Aware that Britain took around 90 per cent of the Free State’s exports, ministers had no wish to antagonise the former ruler by imposing irritating import duties. Taxes remained low, and welfare services were pared back to a bare minimum. All this suited the largely middle-class and mainly conservative Protestant minority; indeed, Cosgrave went out of his way to attend functions organised by men who had so recently been Unionists.

  Then in October 1929, the same month that the Shannon Scheme began generating electricity for sale, the Wall Street stock market crashed. As the numbers of unemployed leaped alarmingly, the Cosgrave administration’s knee-jerk response—like Brüning’s government in Germany—was to cut the pay of the police, civil servants and teachers and to reduce old age pensions.

  Cosgrave called a general election in February 1932. The number out of work had now risen to over 100,000. Election posters proclaimed:

  WE WANT NO ‘REDS’ HERE! KEEP THEIR COLOUR OFF YOUR FLAG!

  Vote for Cumann na nGaedheal

  The almost hysterical government campaign against ‘Reds’, in a conservative state where support for communism and left-wing socialism was probably weaker than anywhere else in Europe, seemed a poor response to an economic crisis.

  The government lost the election. Eamon de Valera took office, forming a Fianna Fáil administration with the support of the Labour deputies. It could be said that Cosgrave’s greatest achievement was the impeccable manner in which he accepted loss of office and encouraged the civil service, the army and the Gardaí to work on loyally for men he had fought and imprisoned during the Civil War.

  De Valera brought some improvement to the state’s infant social services, subsidised council house building and raised payments to the unemployed. Socially, he proved to be just a little less conservative than Cumann na nGaedheal. Politically, however, de Valera was a radical. He had taken the republican side in the civil war in 1922 in opposition to the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty. Now he set about dismantling that Treaty.

  In April 1932 de Valera removed the oath of allegiance to the crown from the constitution. Then in July he withheld the land annuities from Britain—these were repayments made by farmers for money lent to them by previous British governments to buy out their landlords. The United Kingdom responded by slapping a 20 per cent duty on two-thirds of the Free State’s exports. De Valera in turn retaliated by imposing heavy import duties on British imports and by erecting a high tariff barrier behind which he hoped native Irish industries would flourish. The so-called ‘Economic War’ had begun.

  These developments swiftly led to further dislocation of the Free State economy. Angry farmers, businessmen and workers, injured by the interruption of trade, began to organise in opposition to the Fianna Fáil government. The Army Comrades’ Association, formed by ex-servicemen in February 1932, now attracted recruits with dizzying speed. Members paraded in blue shirts and adopted the fascist salute.

  After a snap election de Valera returned to office, this time with an overall Fianna Fáil majority, on 24 January 1933. Six days later Adolf Hitler took power in Germany. In all of central and eastern Europe just one democracy, Czecho-Slovakia, remained alive. Fascist leagues rampaged through the streets of Paris, Brussels, Madrid, Lisbon and Oslo.

  In the Irish Free State democratic institutions came under perilous attack from two opposite directions. On one side was the IRA, its members freed from imprisonment by de Valera in 1932 and now flexing their muscles with knuckledusters and revolvers; and on the other was the fascist-saluting and club-wielding Blueshirts, now led by Eoin O’
Duffy, recently dismissed as Garda Commissioner by de Valera.

  Episode 238

  DEMOCRACY IN PERIL

  In 1932 Eamon de Valera, freshly elected as President of the Executive Council, lifted the previous government’s ban on the IRA and released IRA prisoners. Members of the IRA showed de Valera little gratitude. Openly brandishing arms, they intimidated shopkeepers who sold children sweets imported from England; attacked vans carrying Cadbury’s cocoa; smashed open hundreds of barrels of Bass beer because it was British brewed; and, with the slogan ‘no free speech for traitors’, violently broke up meetings held by their political opponents. Their Chief of Staff and future Nobel Peace Prize winner, Seán MacBride, declared his opposition to democratic institutions: ‘I have very little faith in the mass of constitutional republicans nor in the opinion of the mass of the people.’

  On the other side of the political divide were the IRA’s most hated opponents, the Blueshirts. Adopting the uniform style and straight-armed salute of fascists overseas, the Blueshirts claimed to be protecting the state from extremists. De Valera feared that they were infiltrating the army and the Gardaí and plotting to seize power by force. We now know that the Blueshirt leader, Eoin O’Duffy, when still Commissioner of the Garda Síochána, certainly had plotted a coup d’état in 1932 to prevent Fianna Fáil from coming to power.

  In July 1933 O’Duffy announced that a march would take place in the following month to the front of Leinster House. Was this to overawe the Dáil, to take power by force, as Mussolini had by marching on Rome in 1922? De Valera acted quickly. Police carried out raids on the homes of Blueshirt leaders and found weapons in some of them. The Gardaí recruited a new special force. Uniformed police swamped the area around Leinster House. Finally the government banned the march and O’Duffy—hardly acting in the manner of a potential Duce—called it off.

  Meanwhile Cumann na nGaedheal, which had governed Ireland for ten years, joined forces with the small Centre Party and—more ominously—with the Blueshirts. The name assumed by the new party was ‘Fine Gael’, meaning the ‘Family of the Irish’. Shocked by de Valera’s political and economic confrontation with the United Kingdom, some in Fine Gael were deeply attracted now to anti-democratic ideas. Ernest Blythe, an Ulster Presbyterian Irish-language enthusiast and a former Cumann na nGaedheal minister, urged that parliamentary democracy be replaced by a corporate body, an arrangement which would involve ‘a drastic limitation of the powers of parliament, and the creation of a voluntary disciplined public service organisation’.

  Most politicians in Fine Gael, however, observed with alarm how O’Duffy toured the country making wild speeches, usually under the influence of drink, and provoking riots and disturbances wherever he went. One Fine Gael TD, James Dillon, stood behind O’Duffy on a platform in west Cork:

  He was speaking very rapidly. It dawned on me that they were hanging on his words in a kind of obsessed way and I suddenly realized that he was speaking without any verbs…. It dawned on me that if this fellah told them to go and burn the town, they’d do it. I thought: ‘We’ve got to get rid of this man—he could be dangerous.’ I remembered Hitler.

  Fortunately for Fine Gael, O’Duffy quarrelled incessantly and resigned in September 1934 to set up his own party. Ferocious battles between Blueshirts and the IRA continued, but the fascist threat to Irish democracy, such as it was, faded rapidly.

  Then de Valera, somewhat belatedly, turned his full attention to the IRA. Some squalid IRA murders—including that of the elderly Vice-Admiral Henry Boyle Somerville who had committed the crime of writing references for boys in west Cork applying to join the Royal Navy—gave de Valera his opportunity. He banned the IRA in 1936, imprisoned activists under the 1931 Public Safety Act, and—when the IRA began a bombing campaign in England in January 1939—he adopted further draconian powers.

  By 1937 de Valera had reduced the original 1922 Free State constitution to tatters. The abdication of Edward VIII created a useful opportunity for the drafting of a new constitution, ‘Bunreacht na hÉireann’. Approved by referendum by an uncomfortably small majority, the 1937 constitution changed the name of the state to Éire and the title of the premier to Taoiseach.

  De Valera also ended the destructive economic war with Britain in the 1938 Anglo-Irish Agreement. Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, worried by developments in central Europe, proved eager to end all disputes with his western neighbour. For de Valera, this agreement was a triumph. Britain dropped the retaliatory duties; the dispute over land annuities was settled by an Irish lump-sum payment of £10 million; and the Royal Navy gave up its bases at Berehaven, Lough Swilly and Cóbh.

  Neither the 1937 constitution nor the agreement of 1938 were to the liking of the Northern Ireland government.

  Episode 239

  ‘FORGET THE UNHAPPY PAST’

  Devalery had a canary

  Up the leg of his drawers

  And when it got down

  It sat on the ground

  And whistled ‘The Protestant Boys’.

  Eamon de Valera, taking office in the south in February 1932, caused much alarm in the northern Unionist camp. Intercommunal tension mounted. And an observation by Cardinal Joseph MacRory did not help. When the Church of Ireland announced plans to celebrate the coming of St Patrick 1,500 years before, the cardinal publicly declared:

  The Protestant Church in Ireland—and the same is true of the Protestant Church anywhere else—is not only not the rightful representative of the early Irish Church, but it is not even a part of the Church of Christ.

  In June 1932 special trains and buses returning with Catholic pilgrims from the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin came under loyalist attack at Loughbrickland, Portadown, Kilkeel, Lisburn and Belfast. Tension increased as the marching season got under way. Resolutions included denunciations of ‘the unchanging bigotry of Rome’ and ‘the arrogant, the intolerant and un-Christian pretensions fulminated by Cardinal MacRory’.

  During the autumn of 1932 unemployed Protestants and Catholics in Belfast united in massive demonstrations against the infamous ‘outdoor relief’ system. But sectarian feeling rapidly reappeared thereafter. The Twelfth demonstrations of 1933 provided more opportunities for divisive speeches. As reported in the Fermanagh Times, this is what Sir Basil Brooke, the Minister of Agriculture, said at Newtownbutler:

  There were a great number of Protestants and Orangemen who employed Roman Catholics. He felt he could speak freely on this subject as he had not a Roman Catholic about his place…. He would point out that the Roman Catholics were endeavouring to get in everywhere…. He would appeal to Loyalists, therefore, wherever possible, to employ Protestant lads and lassies.

  Brooke’s neighbour, Captain T. T. Verschoyle, a prominent Co. Fermanagh landlord, condemned the speech: ‘He who sows the wind shall reap the whirlwind…. It remains to be seen whether the Colebrooke Hitler will receive a well-merited rebuke from a responsible member of the government.’

  There was no rebuke. When the Nationalist MP Cahir Healy raised the issue of Brooke’s speech at Stormont, Craigavon replied: ‘There is not one of my colleagues who does not entirely agree with him, and I would not ask him to withdraw one word.’ He added:

  I have always said I am an Orangeman first and a politician and Member of this Parliament afterwards…. The Hon. Member must remember that in the South they boasted of a Catholic State…. All I boast is that we are a Protestant Parliament and a Protestant State.

  In 1935 feelings ran high again. Dr John MacNeice, Church of Ireland Bishop of Down and Connor, made this appeal on the eve of the Twelfth:

  Forget the things that are behind. Forget the unhappy past. Forget the stories of the old feuds, the old triumphs, the old humiliations.

  At the Belmont ‘Field’, Grand Master Sir Joseph Davison referred directly to the bishop’s appeal:

  Are we to forget that the flag of Empire is described as a foreign flag and our beloved King insulted by Mr De Valera? Are we to forget th
at the aim of these people is to establish an all-Ireland Roman Catholic State, in which Protestantism will be crushed out of existence?

  That night, as the procession returned, fierce fighting broke out in York Street in Belfast. The violence continued, and the army had to be called in. It was nearly the end of August before the rioting ceased, by which time eight Protestants and five Catholics had been killed, and over 2,000 Catholics had been driven from their homes.

  In de Valera’s 1937 constitution, Articles 2 and 3 claimed the constitutional right of the Dublin government to exercise jurisdiction over the whole of Ireland. Numerous clauses were bound to be repugnant to Protestants. Article 44 recognised the main Protestant churches, the Jewish congregation and other denominations, but gave ‘special’ recognition to the Catholic Church. Other articles enshrined Catholic social teaching on the family and made divorce, contraception and the publication of immoral literature not only illegal but unconstitutional.

  Craigavon called a general election in February 1938 to show his contempt for de Valera’s Ireland. The contest was fiercest in the constituency of Dock in Belfast, where the sitting Labour MP, Harry Midgley, championed the Popular Front in the Spanish Civil War then raging. The Nationalist candidate, James Collins, vociferously backed Franco and was denounced by Midgley as ‘a killer of babies’. Feelings ran high: