Destiny of the Soldiers – Fianna Fáil, Irish Republicanism and the IRA, 1926–1973

The History of Ireland's Largest and Most Successful Political Party

Donnacha Ó Beacháin

• Publisher: Gill Books
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780717151660
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Irish History
• Index: History

Incisive, engaging and thought-provoking, Destiny of the Soldiers charts Fianna Fáil's political and ideological evolution from its revolutionary origins through extended periods in office. Fianna Fáil is Ireland's largest political party and one of the most successful parties in any democracy in the world. Until recent years, it has been almost constantly in government since 1932.. This fascinating volume argues that Fianna Fáil's goals, foremost among them the reunification of the national territory as a republic, became the means to bind its members together, to gain votes, and to legitimise its role in Irish society. But the official ideological goals concealed what became merely a basic desire to rule. The balance sheet, consequently, became one of votes won or lost rather than goals achieved or postponed. Destiny of the Soldiers assesses Fianna Fáil's changing attitudes towards its parent party, Sinn Féin, and the IRA, and how these changes affected Fianna Fáil's policies towards Northern Ireland. Never forgetting its republican roots, Fianna Fáil has at times been both troubled and conflicted by them. This was especially the case in the late 1960s and early 1970s when the Northern Ireland Troubles posed a challenge for all rhetorical republicans. At that time, Fianna Fáil found itself the governing party of a state whose legitimacy it had originally rejected: the consequent tensions nearly tore it apart. Destiny of the Soldiers is the first survey of the party's history which focuses on these unresolved tensions.

Destiny of the Soldiers: Table of Contents

• Legion of the Rearguard: The revolutionary origins of Fianna Fáil, 1920–23
• Removing the straitjacket of the Republic, 1923–6
• Fianna Fáil—the Republican Party
• Fianna Fáil and the Irish Free State, 1927–31
• Election Time, 1931–2
• Fianna Fáil in power, 1932–8
• Revolutionary crocodile, 1939–40
• The showdown, 1940–46
• A new republican rival, 1946–8
• Drift, 1948–59
• Approach to crisis, 1960–69
• 'The moment of truth', 1969–71
• Doomsday, 1971–3
• Conclusions: The destiny of the Soldiers

Chapter 1

LEGION OF THE REARGUARD

The revolutionary origins of Fianna Fáil, 1920–23

PARTITION

On 23 December 1920 an international boundary was constructed in Ireland by the arbitrary movement of the British imperial pen. The partition of Ireland received the British monarch’s ‘royal assent’ on that date, having been approved by Parliament the previous March.

Not only was the concept of partition inherently undemocratic, considering that 80 per cent of the Irish population favoured independence from Britain, but its execution compounded the iniquity. As Joseph Lee has noted, ‘the geographical boundaries did not attempt to follow the mental boundaries.’¹ The nationalist majorities in Cos. Fermanagh and Tyrone were greater than the unionist majorities in Cos. Derry and Armagh; and the new state included towns such as Derry and Newry, which had large nationalist majorities.

To satisfy the demands of a small regional majority, and to preserve British hegemony, a new state was established, ostensibly to protect a 20 per cent minority while simultaneously creating a new minority that made up 34 per cent of the population. In not one of the six counties was the unionist majority greater than the nationalist majority in Ireland as a whole. Taking cognisance of these facts, Lee states that the objective of partition was ‘to ensure Protestant supremacy over Catholics even in predominantly Catholic areas,’ and that it did not separate two warring peoples but actually brought them closer together.² During the principal debate on the Government of Ireland Act, David Lloyd George declared, with breathtaking honesty, that the measure conflicted with the aspirations of the great majority of the Irish people.

If you asked the people of Ireland what plan they would accept, by an emphatic majority, they would say ‘We want independence and an Irish Republic.’ There is absolutely no doubt about that. The elected representatives of Ireland, now by a clear majority, have declared in favour of independence.³

The leader of the House of Commons, Andrew Bonar Law, outlined the alternatives to the bill, one of which was ‘to give self-determination to the representatives of the Irish people: that is to create an Irish Republic’; but this option was rejected.

The undemocratic nature of the partition is clear when it is compared with the way in which the British subsequently handled the question in India.⁴ There the Muslim minority, like the Irish unionists, had sought a partitioned state for an area far larger than they were entitled to on the grounds of their numbers and demographic distribution. They were, however, confronted with a choice. Control over the desired area was dependent on the establishment of a federal relationship with the majority Hindu population. If they preferred complete separation they would be entitled only to rule those areas where they comprised an impregnable majority. However, the dissident unionist minority in Ireland were indulged to the extent that more than half the area under their control was nationalist in sentiment. But while unionists had a large appetite, they had poor digestion, and the forcible incorporation of so many nationalists in the new state merely sowed the seeds of future strife.

THE WAR OF INDEPENDENCE

Ireland was partitioned while Irish nationalists were engaged in an armed struggle against British rule. The insurrectionary spark had been struck in April 1916, when a body of men and women launched an insurrection in Dublin during which an Irish republic was proclaimed. Seven men—Patrick Pearse, Joseph Plunkett, Éamonn Ceannt, Tom Clarke, Seán Mac Diarmada, Thomas MacDonagh and James Connolly—signed the proclamation, knowing as they did so that they were also signing their death warrants, as the rebellion was doomed from the start. The bulk of insurgent arms, imported from Germany, with which Britain was locked in a ferocious world war, were seized the day before the Rising, and it was actually called off by the nominal head of the Irish Volunteers, Eoin MacNeill.⁵ A minority persisted with the rebellion, and for a week, hopelessly outnumbered, outgunned, and holding out in strategic buildings around the city, they fought the British forces. Much of Dublin city centre was destroyed, 450 people were killed and at least 2,600 wounded.⁶

After the surrender the British rounded up the insurgents and sentenced ninety of them to death. Most of these sentences were commuted to life imprisonment, including that of a 33-year-old mathematics teacher, Éamon de Valera, whose American birth proved decisive in saving him from the firing squad. But fifteen of the leaders were shot in Kilmainham Jail, Dublin, between 3 and 12 May.⁷ As any seasoned observer of Irish politics could have forecast, and certainly as the leaders had hoped, the executions turned a military debacle into a stunning political victory. The Rising, like some before it, had been spearheaded by small armed groups—in this case a minority of the Irish Volunteers (under the control of the IRB) and the Irish Citizen Army—though it represented a much larger body of opinion. Within two years the spirit of 1916 was institutionalised in a resurrected Sinn Féin, which eclipsed the moderate nationalist Irish Party that had garnered the majority of votes in Ireland for almost half a century.⁸ In so doing, the 1916 Rising reinforced the belief among republicans that the sacrifice of honest patriots, however outnumbered militarily or electorally, would be vindicated.

In modern republican and Irish politics (and for much of the time these have been synonymous) 1916 is Year 1. Before 1916 the agitation of the Irish Party in the House of Commons in London, where it regularly held the balance of power, had promised a parliament for Dublin. Two failed legislative attempts, in 1886 and 1893, to introduce a domestic legislature (albeit with limited powers) had put politics to one side for a generation, and a spectacularly vibrant cultural revival filled the void in nationalist activity.⁹ In 1910 the Irish Party once again held the balance of power, and it exacted its price for supporting the British Liberal Party: a reduction in the power of the House of Lords, and a third Government of Ireland Bill (commonly called the Home Rule Bill) to be introduced in Parliament.

By 1914 it seemed that the Irish Party had finally achieved a parliament for Dublin; but the outbreak of war meant that no such parliament would be established until the conflict had subsided. Eager to curry favour with the British elite (the better to secure generous terms for a Dublin parliament) and to compete with the Ulster unionists in demonstrating loyalty to the Crown, the leader of the Irish Party, John Redmond, urged Irishmen to join the British forces to fight in Europe. As the war dragged on and the British political elite seemed disinclined to resist unionist demands for separate treatment, the moment seemed ripe to some revolutionaries in the IRB for staging a rebellion.

The Irish Republican Brotherhood represented a different tradition of political agitation. Declaring itself the heir of the United Irishmen¹⁰ and the Young Irelanders,¹¹ the IRB was a secret revolutionary organisation founded in 1858 by Irish exiles in New York.¹² Active throughout the latter part of the nineteenth century, it had co-existed, competed and co-operated with the Irish Party when it was led by the formidable Charles Stewart Parnell, and some prominent home-rule MPs were also members of the IRB. (Joseph Beggar, for example, was a member of the Supreme Council.)

With Parnell’s demise the paths of the IRB and the Irish Party increasingly diverged.¹³ Each organised and waited patiently, the Irish Party for British parliamentary arithmetic and wisdom to recognise the necessity of Irish home rule, the IRB for British vulnerability and Irish revolutionary consciousness to be exploited for achieving an independent republic. Home-rulers had confidently expected to be the leaders of a new legislature in Ireland—just reward for two generations of patient endeavour. But while thousands of Irishmen died in the First World War, 1916 was not to be the year remembered mainly for the slaughter of the Somme: it was to be for the defence of the General Post Office in Dublin by a few hundred republicans. Quite simply, what happened between 1916 and 1921 was a revolution.

In the two years following the 1916 Rising, Sinn Féin won a string of by-elections. In North Roscommon on 3 February 1917 George Plunkett became the first Sinn Féin member of the British Parliament, though, like all other Sinn Féin MPs who were to follow him, he refused to take his seat.¹⁴ The election of Plunkett, the father of one of the seven signatories of the 1916 proclamation, represented a clear electoral endorsement of the actions and ideals of the 1916 rebels. Equally symbolic was the victory of the only surviving 1916 commandant, Éamon de Valera, who was elected MP for East Clare in July 1917.¹⁵

The election had been called to fill the vacancy occasioned by the death of Willie Redmond (brother of John Redmond), who had died fighting in the British army with the vain hope that his exertions might further the cause of home rule. De Valera’s annihilation of Redmond’s nominated successor, Patrick Lynch, indicated that the hegemonic grip of the Irish Party on the nationalist electorate was coming to an end. As the British army was killing off the last of the 1916 rebels sentenced to death, John Dillon, the last leader of the Irish Party, had made an impassioned plea to the House of Commons for the executions to stop, saying, ‘You are washing out our whole life’s work in a sea of blood.’¹⁶ The tidal wave that the Irish Party expected engulfed it during the 1918 general election. It was the first election held since 1911, and the Representation of the People Act (1918) enfranchised all men over twenty-one and all women over thirty, thus tripling the Irish electorate.

The Irish Party did not bother to contest twenty-six constituencies, but the scale of Sinn Féin’s victory still came as a shock to the British government and conservative elements in Ireland. Of the 105 Irish seats the republican party took 73, the unionist party 26 (including those in the rotten-borough university seats), and the once-mighty Irish Party was reduced to a mere 6 seats, 4 of which were obtained through a pre-election pact that had divided eight Ulster seats with Sinn Féin. Britain refused to acknowledge that Sinn Féin’s sweeping victory, fought on the platform of securing an independent Irish republic, necessitated discussing a new constitutional framework with republicans.

Sinn Féin resolved to act as if it had already secured a republic. A parliament, to be called Dáil Éireann, was established in January 1919. Membership was open to all Irish MPs elected in 1918, but as the unionists and home-rulers continued to attend the House of Commons in London, and as a majority of the Sinn Féin deputies were in prison, most members did not attend. Still, the new parliament opened in the Mansion House in Dublin amid great ceremony and pomp. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic (1916) was reaffirmed, and British forces were ordered to leave the country. The assembly adopted a Declaration of Independence and an Address to the Free Nations of the World, calling for support for the new republic. Alternative structures of government were established to compete with existing British institutions. A judicial system, commonly called Dáil courts, was established throughout the country. These achieved considerable support, not least because many parts of the country were not under British control, as the Royal Irish Constabulary was forced to withdraw from four hundred rural police stations during the war.¹⁷ Moreover, having won control of twenty-eight out of Ireland’s thirty-two county councils in the 1920 local elections, Sinn Féin was now entitled to receive and spend revenues throughout the country.

The exact nature of Sinn Féin’s and Dáil Éireann’s relationship with the IRA was a vexed question during the struggle for independence. The IRA’s shooting of two members of the RIC at Solloghodbeg, Co. Tipperar...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1: Legion of the Rearguard
• Chapter 2: Removing the Straitjacket of the Republic, 1923–6
• Chapter 3: Fianna Fáil—The Republican Party
• Chapter 4: Fianna Fáil and the Irish Free State, 1927–31
• Chapter 5: Election Time, 1931–2
• Chapter 6: Fianna Fáil in Power, 1932–8
• Chapter 7: Revolutionary Crocodile, 1939–40
• Chapter 8: The Showdown, 1940–46
• Chapter 9: A New Republican Rival, 1946–8
• Chapter 10: Drift, 1948–59
• Chapter 11: Approach to Crisis, 1960–69
• Chapter 12: ‘The Moment of Truth,’ 1969–71
• Chapter 13: Doomsday, 1971–3
• Chapter 14: Conclusions: The Destiny of the Soldiers
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Acknowledgements
• Copyright
• About the Author
• About Gill & Macmillan