The Cedar Lounge Revolution

Architects of the Resurrection: Ailtirí na hAiséirghe and the fascist ‘new order’ in Ireland – And some useful questions raised about democracy in Ireland in the early 20th century. September 10, 2009

I know, I know. There’s another book out on the history of an Irish political party which is central to the interests of many of us here, but… it might be worth doing an appraisal of R.M. Douglas’s book on Ailtirí na hAiséirghe which is certainly one of the most interesting and thought-provoking histories I’ve read in quite a while.

For those unfamiliar with Ailtirí na hAiséirghe they were an essentially fascist party that was established during the early 1940s at a time when such movements were, perhaps, a little more popular and profitable than they might be later. They become remarkably popular and in 1945 gained seats at the local government elections. But, then tellingly following the foundation of Clann na Poblachta found their gains reversed. That alone is a fascinating history in and of itself and I’ll return, I hope, at a later date to discuss the book in general.

One issue raised by Douglas in the introduction is crucial to an understanding not merely of Ailtirí na hAiséirghe but also of the histories of the Emergency period, and that is that this is ‘the most under-researched and poorly understood period in modern Irish history’.

And as he notes, far from this being a ‘sclerotic’ time politically and culturally, it was by contrast a period of ferment.

This curious level of ignorance as regards Ireland during the 1940s has led to Ailtirí na hAiséirghe being all but written out of the histories. Indeed I first came across mention of the organisation in the very early 1980s while reading… Political Parties in Ireland which noted that it had some bizarre cultural and political philosophies but did not, as I recall, absolutely place it within the fascist camp.

But he also makes a point which I think is vitally important in its implications for Irish history of the early to mid-20th century, which is that ‘Anglophone historians have consistently de-emphasised, or more often entirely ignored, those political organisations that conducted their business in the Irish language, concentrating on more accessible movements like the Blueshirts that used English as their lingua franca. This omission is no doubt explained by the fact that, for entirely understandable reasons, few scholars in the field of European fascist studies have found it necessary to acquire a reading knowledge of Irish. In light of the strong correlation of cultural and political nationalism, however,the consequence has always been that the milieu out of which an authentically Irish fascism was always more likely to arise has been precisely the one that has received the least attention.

This reminds me of a conference I was at where the issue of bilingualism in the public space in the wake of immigration was raised. How would we deal with it in signage, public announcements and such like. It took a few moments before the point was made that Ireland was already bilingual.

One can be excused, I think, for a degree of concern as to what is already lost to us due to such a lack of appreciation and a working knowledge of the language. And there is no question but that this has closed off an understanding of sections of the society in a way which has been unhelpful, to put it mildly, in constructing useful histories.

There’s some way yet to go there one could also reasonably posit.

But, I’d like to point to what I think is one of the strongest aspects of the book which is the first chapter, entitled Anti-democratic influences in Ireland, 1919 – 39. This neatly engages with any number of myths about the nature of the society both before independence and in its wake, and as Douglas argues in the introduction ‘Aiséirghe’s history challenges a number of prevalent assumptions about Irish politics and society in the middle of the twentieth century. The first of these is the belief that independent Ireland was virtually predestined to become and to remain, a member of the family of Western liberal-democratic states’.

This is a theme he expands upon further. He notes that the Dáil was only able to convene twelve times during the War of Independence, but lest that seem like some form of original sin, he notes that the dispensation that arrived at the end of the conflict and subsequent to that… ‘because there never had been a negotiated settlement to the Civil War, [the] real possibility remained that hostilities would be renewed at some future stage’. And this led to very negative outcomes, although ‘institutions of state – many of them facsimiles of their British predecessors – were established… little effort was made to heal the festering wounds of the Civil War, or to seek even the smallest measure of common ground with the defeated republican element; rather in governmental circles a tone of triumphalism tinged with paranoia prevailed’.

And he points to a poverty of imagination that has much more contemporary resonances…

Fiscal orthodoxy of the most rigid and unimaginative kind frustrated any attempt to address the structural deficicencies of the Irish economy. The result was to deprive those at the bottom of the socail ladder not merely of the means of subsistence, but of any real hope for the future. Patrick McGiligan, Minister of Industry and Commerce encapsulated Cumann na nGaedhael’s take-no-prisoners approach to economic policy when he declared in 1924 before the Dáil that rather than face the prospect of an unbalanced budget, ‘[p]eople my have to die in this country and may have to die through starvation‘ – perhaps the most comprehensively asinine statement ever made by an Irish public representative.

Yet Douglas is not ungenerous as regards the change of government between Cumann na nGaedhael and Fianna Fáil barely a decade after the Civil War. That was, without doubt, a pivotal moment for the state – and its people and Douglas regards CnaG as demonstrating both ‘integrity and courage’. Yet he points to the way in which that transition led to expressions of anti-democratic feeling in terms of the Blueshirts. While no means as kind as Maurice Manning has been in terms of exculpating the Blueshirts of fascist tendencies he notes that the membership was largely free of same, unlike elements of the leadership. But in fairness Fine Gael rapidly recognised the dangers of this slightly extra-parliamentary oppositional force and O’Duffy was sidelined.

If original sin there was he implies that it existed further back – and this is an analysis to give pause for thought for those who tend towards the idea that 1916 was an alien and anti-democratic irruption in the Irish body politic. For Douglas dismisses the rosy notion that Ireland was pre-schooled in democracy during its experience of British rule. Indeed he argues that quite the opposite conclusion can be taken from a reading of that history.

Notwithstanding Basil Chubb’s assertion that the era of British rule under the Union served to inculcate the irish people with democratic habits and practices, and Brian Farrell’s related argument that the constitutional nationalist struggle was a school of democracy that left a lasting impression even on the republican militants who founded the first Dáil in 1919, other scholars have called into question the degree to which a meaningful conceptual distinction can be considered to exist between proponents of ‘moral’ and ‘physical’ force in the nineteenth century. One may further legitimately inquire as to the precise nature of the ‘lessons’ imparted by political activism in ireland under the Union. In the mid-nineteenth century, as Jonathan Sperber reminds us, Ireland represented the closest approximation in all of Europe to a ‘police state’, with fourteen times as many armed policemen per capital as in ‘absolutist’ Prussia.

And he points to how ‘it is important to bear in mind how very frequently in modern Irish history the evolution of democratic processes was retarded, frustrated or undermined by state policy… the disenfranchisement of the ‘forty-shilling freeholders’ in 1829, seemingly as a collective punishment for their having voted in excessive numbers in support of Daniel O’Connell’s Catholic Association, represented merely the most glaring example of a tendency throughout the 19th century to countenance the operation of democratic principles only to the extent that it did not conflict with executive authority. In the same category can be included the vetoing of the expressed will of the Irish majority on the Home Rule question, first by the House of Commons in 1886 and then by the unelected House of Lords in 1893, the denial to Ireland of a system of local government until 1898; and the passage of more than 100 so-called ‘coercion acts’ granting emergency powers to the executive between 1800 and 1921.

This background noise built up into a profound rupture between state and subject. As he notes, ‘…no scholar to date has systematically examined the impact of these laws in eroding public confidence in the impartiality of the state and the responsiveness of nominally democratic systems to popular concerns’.

Indeed this entirely belies the idea that somehow Ireland was already on a trajectory to normalisation within a broader and embracing British polity. At every point where such a normalisation could feasibly (although I have to admit, not to my satisfaction as an outcome) occur, potentially in the 1910 – 1914 period the actualities of Irish socio-political life generated crucial paradoxes and contradictions that the record demonstrates the British were unable and unwilling to act in a fashion that would have placated the extant sentiment that remained favourable to their project.

Similarly, the immensely turbulent decade 1913-23 which witnessed the eventual rupture of the Union can have done little to reinforce the confidence of Irish citizens in the efficacy or sanctity of parliamentary procedures. As David Fitzpatrick observes of the immediate pre-Great War period, a ‘private army ruled in Ulster with the acquiescence of the state’. Of this organisation, the UVF, one Protestant Ulsterman in three was a member; across the entire island the comparable figure among Catholics for its nationalist counterpart the INV, was one in eight. The UVF’s attempt, with the connivance and, in some cases, the active assistance, of leading figures in British military and political circles to overturn a parliamentary majority in favour of Home Rule for Ireland by the threat of force has been described as constituting ‘the most devastating blow struck against constitutional democracy in modern Ireland or Britain, the most notorious case of running off the pitch with the ball when losing the game’. Whether or not this is so, the ease with which democratic procedures could be defeated by armed miniorities was carefully noted by members of both communities.

In such a context perhaps the truth is that the truly remarkable outcome is that the independent part of the island developed a relatively flexible and democratic polity rather than the opposite. Certainly the omens were far from good. And given that the British state was itself in many respects only partially democratic it seems almost perverse that such weight should be given to institutions and practices which were only adhered to under the most favourable conditions. There is no small degree of optimism in the belief that their application beyond their geographic boundaries would be as complete as some protest.

Obviously Douglas uses this to explain how anti-democratic currents ran through Irish life, but in doing so I suspect he does a great service in underlining the delicate nature of democracy on the island both before and after partition and how the obvious contradictions between rhetoric and reality in relation in particular to state and political actors undermined any hope that a simple, straightforward and coherent narrative could be constructed as regards the nature of the polity and democracy.

And occasionally, as with the Blueshirts, or indeed their Republican opponents this came to be couched in the language of freedom, particularly of speech. Another element of the overall dynamic was religions. Douglas has an illuminating couple of pages on the Rosary Riots, where mobs – encouraged rhetorically by some sections of the clergy – attacked Connolly House (and this sort of activity was directed at communists and socialists). Far from this demonstrating a passive and acquiescent, almost ‘beaten’ society, in the wake of the tribulations of the early 1920s by contrast this seems to point to a society that was seething, perhaps at the scale of those tribulations and their eventual ramifications. Douglas argues that in Ailtirí na hAiséirghe itself we see an expression of a sort of nascent youth culture that perhaps was subsumed in later decades into more banal cultural forms. But I’d wonder if it doesn’t go beyond that into a sort of existential angst on the part of the society as a whole, or at least the evidence of profound fractures within the society.

This relationship between the polity and democracy was central to political endeavour. From the Blueshirts who couched their efforts in a strongly republican language as regards the North (and in that they were but an echo of the arguments that surrounded the Army Mutiny in 1924) to an IRA which in the 1920s and thereafter saw itself as the legitimate and sole inheritor and expression of the Dáil to a Fianna Fáil that regarded itself as the national movement and a Fine Gael that in a neat reflection believed it was the only fit party of government this relationship took more or less pernicious and/or absurd forms.

There’s much more than this and as well worth returning to again. I can think of two books on Irish history that are worth looking at this month. This should – in my opinion – be one of them.