Democracy in Peril

In 1932, Eamon de Valera, freshly elected as premier of the Irish Free State, 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, Sean 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.

And 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 guards 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 a march 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 made swoops on the homes of Blueshirts leaders and found weapons in some of them. The Guards recruited a new special force. Uniformed police swamped the area around Leinster House. Finally, the government banned the march and O’Duffy called it off…a bit of anti-climax, really, since O’Duffy aspired to be Ireland’s Duce.
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 which involved

…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, 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 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 using 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 window of 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 name 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 Cobh.
Neither the 1937 Constitution nor the Agreement of 1938 were to the liking of the Northern Ireland government.