The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson

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СКАЧАТЬ by the 1940s, and in the 1943 election the Irish Labour Party substantially increased its vote – from 10 to 15 per cent, almost doubling its Dáil representation from nine to seventeen.²⁰⁷ Although this advance would be soon checked by a major split, fuelled by nationalism, antagonism to British-based unions and anti-communism in both the Labour Party and the Irish TUC, there was clear evidence that the material existed for a radical attack on Fianna Fáil.²⁰⁸

      When this came, it was led by the ex-IRA leader Sean MacBride, who founded a new party, Clann na Poblachta (Family of the Republic) in 1946. Rumpf and Hepburn summed up its fundamental dynamics as expressing

      the dissatisfaction of the more constructive members of the younger generation of Republicans, both with the growing conservatism and machine politics of Fianna Fáil and with the arid brutality which had characterised the IRA.²⁰⁹

      Its specific policies on the economy – repatriation of Irish capital invested abroad, breaking of the monetary link with sterling, substantial government investment to stimulate a depressed economy – resembled a revamped radical Fianna Fáil platform of the 1920s. Its achievement of 13 per cent of the vote and ten seats in the Dáil in 1948 was a central factor in displacing Fianna Fáil from office for the first time since 1932. However its acceptance of places in a coalition government that included the anti-republican Fine Gael only alienated many of its supporters. More fundamentally, it demonstrated the problems for any political party in the southern state which combined its appeal to social radicalism with an inchoate hope that, just as it was possible for a Dublin government to take a more active role in dealing with unemployment, poverty and disease, so it was open to it by a simple act of will also to ‘solve’ the national question.

      The result of MacBride’s brief irruption into mainstream politics was a self-interested scramble for nationalist credentials between the coalition parties and Fianna Fáil, manifested in the declaration of a Republic in 1948 and the launching of an all-party Anti-Partition Campaign. This campaign, with its origins in the dynamics of inter-party competition in the south, highlighted the ‘affront’ of partition in an intense propaganda onslaught in Ireland and abroad, but failed miserably, though predictably, to alter the situation. Its effect on the IRA, however, was substantial.

      The initial success of Clann na Poblachta encouraged the remnants of the IRA (in 1948 the ‘General Headquarters Staff’ estimated that the organisation had 200 activists and some hundreds of sympathisers²¹⁰) to equip themselves with a political arm by re-establishing the link with Sinn Féin – by taking over the moribund organisation. This politicisation had two notable characteristics. The first and more important was to be the clear subordination of the political organisation to the IRA Army Council. At an Army Convention in 1949 a resolution was passed instructing the IRA to infiltrate and take control of Sinn Féin.²¹¹ The second was the staggering backwardness of its economic and social programme.

      Sinn Féin’s ‘National Unity and Independence Programme’ referred to a ‘reign of social justice based on Christian principles’. These were the corporatist vocational principles which had so enamoured the Blueshirts and the Catholic hierarchy in the 1930s and which Fianna Fáil, to its credit, eventually rejected.²¹² In the late 1940s they had been narrowed down to the matter of intense Church opposition to any attempt to ‘import’ the ‘socialistic’ welfare state from the United Kingdom. It was the attempt by the radical Minister of Health, Noel Browne of Clann na Poblachta, to provide free health care for pregnant women and nursing mothers which would destroy the coalition and MacBride’s new party.²¹³ In this crucial conflict between a government minister and the Catholic hierarchy, the republican movement’s position was an implicitly miserable one. While the Unionist government in the north was able to use the ‘Mother and Child’ affair to intensify its depiction of the Republic as priest-ridden and backward, Sinn Féin, now the mouthpiece for an organisation which had decided in 1948 to prepare for a military campaign against the ‘occupied Six Counties’,²¹⁴ declared itself for vocational principles and against the welfare state.²¹⁵ Sinn Féin’s new monthly paper, the United Irishman, swore its fidelity to the republican saint Wolfe Tone and his objective of destroying English rule by ‘unity of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter’. At the same time, however, it persisted in the characteristic Catholic nationalist fixation with the supposed power of southern Freemasonry²¹⁶ and was content to reject blithely such manifestations of the ‘British link’ as the welfare state, which was massively popular with the Protestant working class.

      Most IRA members were, of course, little interested in social philosophy, Marxist, Catholic or otherwise. Most would have been practising Catholics with no time for politics, particularly if they were tainted by ‘communism’ (a capacious term in post-war Ireland). Like their Chief of Staff, Tony Magan, they were dedicated to a republican ideal narrowed down to reunification by physical force. There were exceptions to this general rule, and some of these would play a key role in the 1960s. In a book that recalls one of the IRA’s darkest and most and periods – the 1939-1940 bombing campaign in England – Brendan Behan claims to have declared to his captors that he had come over ‘to fight for the Irish Workers and Small Farmers Republic’.²¹⁷ He typically differentiated his own variety of republicanism from those of

      your wrap-the-green-flag-round-me junior civil servants that came into the IRA from the Gaelic League, and were ready to die for their country any day of the week, purity in their hearts, truth on their lips, for the glory of God and the honour of Ireland.²¹⁸

      Behan’s working-class background in north Dublin was shared with a friend, Cathal Goulding, who had joined Fianna Éireann, the junior wing of the IRA, in 1937 at the age of eleven. Goulding’s grandfather had been a member of the Invincibles – the group responsible for the murder of the two most senior British officials in Ireland in 1882 – and his father and uncle had both been in the IRA. His father was a house-painter who, like many anti-Treatyites, found it extremely difficult to get work in the aftermath of the Civil War because of the hostility of many employers. He set himself up as a self-employed contractor and his son would combine work as a painter and active membership of the IRA. Both his parents had been sympathetic to social republicanism, and Austin Stack’s pamphlet ‘The Constructive Work of Dáil Éireann’, outlining the ‘responsible’ attitude taken by the First Dáil to divisive land and labour issues, was used as a primer on the dangers of reactionary degeneration within the republican movement.²¹⁹

      Class consciousness, however, was not to act for Goulding as a solvent of republican intransigence and militarism until the collapse of the IRA’s next military campaign. In Dublin, at least, it was possible for traditions of working-class militancy to influence some members of the IRA, even in its most militarist and reactionary period. In Goulding’s north Dublin, James Larkin, the charismatic leader of the 1913 lock-out, had been elected to the Dáil in 1928 with over 8,000 votes as a candidate of the Irish Workers’ League, which he had founded as the Irish section of the Communist Third International.²²⁰ Yet such class consciousness tended to be sublimated into a militaristic intransigence and self-justifying belief that the fundamental mistake of people like O’Donnell and Gilmore was to take action that put them outside the ‘army’, and that ultimately the task was to win the IRA to radical politics. This formidable task was made no easier by the fact that these faint echoes of the Congress debates were soon drowned out by strident anti-partitionism.

      In the late 1930s and the 1940s the IRA was composed predominantly of people whose focus was still on the Civil War and the subsequent divisions and redivisions of anti-Treatyism. For all its often barren bitterness, it still had a capacity, especially in its urban form, to express a deep, intransigent opposition to the Irish state. From 1949 onwards, as the anti-partition campaign dominated public life in the south, a new generation of IRA members emerged whose focus was largely an extreme variant of official propaganda. The new members who flocked into Sinn Féin, and thence to the IRA, had received their formative political education not from the stock republican litanies of the evils СКАЧАТЬ