Changed political times

“Seventy-five years ago Ireland experienced some flutters of fascism, with the emergence of the Blueshirts as a threat to our parliamentary democracy. It was a febrile time in Irish politics”

Second Reading
Fr Kevin Hegarty

IN the referendum on the Lisbon Treaty there were frequent references by the ‘No’ campaigners to the ‘democratic deficit’ in the European Union. I found some of the rhetoric exaggerated and inaccurate. One could be led to conclude that the institution was a malign excrescence on the body politic of Europe.
Some historical perspective is required here. The European Union is the greatest political achievement of post-war Europe. Through it, western Europe has learned to live in peace. Its social and economic achievements are equally significant.
We owe a debt to the solid statesmen who came to power in Europe after 1945. They coaxed the fragile flame of democracy from the embers of the second world war.
They had a dream of a better future and the political ability to realise it.
What a contrast with the 1930s when democracy died in Europe. The juggernauts of Communism, fascism and nazism rolled across central Europe. It was a time when, to quote Yeats, ‘mere anarchy’ was ‘loosed upon the world’ and ‘the ceremony of innocence’ was ‘drowned’.
Seventy-five years ago Ireland experienced some flutters of fascism, with the emergence of the Blueshirts as a threat to our parliamentary democracy. It was a febrile time in Irish politics. In 1932 Eamon De Valera came to power in the Irish Free State, an institution he had relentlessly disparaged for the previous decade.
This scholarly man, whose pastime was the study of abstruse mathematics, was the most controversial Irish politician of the 20th century. People were either for him or against him with equal passion.
I once heard a story of two Fine Gael supporters who called to an old man in Moygownagh. He also was a supporter of the party. They were canvassing for a rejection of the new constitution which De Valera brought before the people in 1937. The old man was somewhat confused about what the constitution meant. Eventually he cut to what was for him the heart of the matter: “Tell me,” he asked, “is Dev for it or against it?” “Oh, he is for it,” replied one of the canvassers. “Well,” the old man rejoined, “that’s my mind made up. Anything Dev is for I am against.”
A humorous poem by Brendan Kennelly encapsulates the prevailing attitude to De Valera:
“A neighbour said De Valera
Was as straight as Christ,
As spiritually strong.
The man in the next house said
’Twas a great pity
He wasn’t crucified as young.”
Like a corrosive wound, the bitterness of our civil war seeped through Irish politics in the early decades of the state. Many Fianna Fáil deputies feared that the Cumann na nGaedheal party would not recognise their victory at the polls in 1932. Fearing a coup, some of them had guns in their pockets going into the Chamber on the day the Dáil met. One Fianna Fáil deputy was even seen assembling a machine gun in a telephone booth.
William T Cosgrave, the committed democrat, who had led the State since its foundation, ceded power to De Valera gracefully. Some of his deputies feared that the new government would begin a campaign of retribution against them.
There was some substance to their fears. IRA supporters of Fianna Fáil broke up several Cumann na nGaedheal meetings. Confronted with this, De Valera nonchalantly replied that it was not his job to make the opposition popular. In order to protect their meetings, Cumann na nGaedheal set up the Army Comrades Association, later known as the Blueshirts.
Early in 1933 De Valera dismissed Eoin O’Duffy from the post of Garda Commissioner on the grounds that the Government did not have confidence in him. O’Duffy had been commissioner for the previous ten years. He was an intrepid organiser and a trenchant disciplinarian. He was a fervent admirer of the Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini. Closely associated with the Cumann na nGaedheal party, he feared De Valera’s rise to power. He even went as far as to contemplate organising a coup against him.
Dismayed by his dismissal, O’Duffy accepted an invitation to become leader of the Army Comrades Association. The organisation acquired the trappings of fascism. The blue shirt became the uniform. Its policy documents imply a disdain of parliamentary democracy. A disciplined youth movement was formed. There was much talk of racial purity. O’Duffy delighted in being called the ‘Irish Mussolini’. Its economic and social policies bore a distinct resemblance to fascist Italy.
Under O’Duffy’s leadership the membership of the Blueshirts grew rapidly, eventually reaching over 30,000. In August, 1933 O’Duffy proposed a march of 20,000 Blueshirts on Dáil Éireann to commemorate the deaths of Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins. Fearing that it might turn out to be a replica of Mussolini’s march on Rome in 1922, De Valera banned the parade.
Over the next few months the country was in turmoil. Violence between Blueshirts and Republicans was especially prevalent in Munster where civil war hatreds ran deep.
In 1934, O’Duffy became leader of Fine Gael, a new party composed of Cumann na nGaedheal and the Centre party. Fuelled by a desire for revenge against De Valera and an addiction to drink, O’Duffy’s rhetoric became very abusive. He called De Valera a ‘half-bred’, a pejorative reference to the Fianna Fáil leader’s Spanish and Irish ancestry. He implied he should be assassinated. Senior Fine Gael politicians, ashamed of the genie that they had let out of the bottle, forced his resignation as leader.
De Valera introduced emergency legislation to curb the Blueshirts and the movement began to peter out. O’Duffy, in 1937, led a battalion of supporters to fight for Franco in the Spanish civil war. He died in Dublin in 1944, harbouring hopes to the end that a Nazi invasion of Ireland would create a political role for him.
By the late 1930s, political life in Ireland had assumed a kind of normality. Fine Gael came to understand that De Valera was committed to democracy. For his part De Valera grew in an appreciation of the work of the Cumann na nGaedheal government between 1922 and 1932. He once commented: “When we got in and saw the files, they did a magnificent job.”
The only relic of the Blueshirts that remains is its use as a nickname for supporters of Fine Gael.