QUB
historian McGarry, complementing his Irish Politics
& the Spanish Civil War, examines the life
of one of the major figures in both of these areas,
and concludes that rather than a joke, the career
of General Eoin O' Duffy should be regarded ‘a
cautionary tale’. Reactionary characters have
never earned the Irish attention given their more
radical foes, but McGarry, veteran by his previous
stint writing about Irish volunteers in Spain, has
delved into diaries and archives to examine O’Duffy
without prejudice. Eschewing jibes or cant, he sifts
through primary sources to reconstruct a careful
re-creation of a man now nearly erased from his
nation that he helped build.
The result, Eoin O’ Duffy: A Self-Made Hero
(Oxford UP, 2005, £25), is the first extended
study of a man once ranked next to Collins and Richard
Mulcahy as the key treatyite leaders of the Irish
Civil War. A brief overview of his life provides
context. Monaghan-born 1890, one of the lower middle
classes who found opportunities and idealism combined
in the Irish-Ireland cause, he moved from GAA organising
into the IRA, serving as one who knew the North
along with the rest of the island thanks to his
sports advocacy. A tough-minded, yet rather incompetent,
leader of men, he rose high into the republican
ranks. Like Gerry Adams and Eamon De Valera, he
was skilled at rewriting his role in the republican
movement when it suited his politicking and his
need to keep face before his comrades and his enemies.
He contended against Mulcahy for command after Collins’
death. Failing to do so, he moved laterally: building
the Free State’s police force. His career lasted
a dozen or so years, a long term considering the
tumultuous power shifts as the Saorstat struggled
to emerge. Resigning in the mid-1930s only after
the rise to power of his nemesis DeValera and Fianna
Fáil necessitated a leader both tougher and
more circumspect in dealing with the renewed threats
by communists, conservative malcontents, and the
irregulars to Dev’s regime. The Long Fellow
was seen to have compromised with armed republicans
he had tempted into the fold as ‘Broy’s
harriers’. O’Duffy then led the Blueshirts,
allying briefly if unforgettably with Fine Gael,
before that party out-maneouvred him to leave him
longing for a new right-wing cause, which would
soon arise with the Spanish conflict. His clumsy
posturing as El Supremo of the Irish Brigade proved
disastrous. During the Emergency, he again flirted
with entangling tiny Irish fascist and reactionary
agitators both with the conservative, pro-bombing
campaign IRA (who had broken from its left wing
back around 1936) and to the Nazis. Soon, drink
and depression brought him to an early end in 1944.
Relying upon historians Tom Garvin and R.V. Comerford
for their perspective upon an Irish nationalism
that bursts upon the early 20th century with characters
able to stir up patriotism by a narrow appeal that
first named and then selected Celtic traits and
disdained British qualities, McGarry supports recent
studies. These place such up-and-coming young men
from modest backgrounds such as O’Duffy among
those obsessed with promoting a ruralised, nativist,
and Gaelic ethos even as they moved into urban politics,
modernising schemes, and international diplomacy.
Comerford aligns such religious and linguistic correctness
within those who began as Celtic Leaguers then to
turn into powerful militants. Having kicked out
the British from most of the island, they then tore
apart each other. This ‘judgmental self-righteousness’
mars O’Duffy damningly. Internal opponents
sustained Irish-Irelanders’ revenge. Only a
return to the native could, it seemed around 1924,
save Ireland from the fate of a secularising, decadent,
and sinful Anglo-American hegemony. For instance,
when training the first Gardaí, O’Duffy
required two hours daily for study of Irish, ‘the
same amount of time as was allotted for policing
duties’. (119) It was difficult, after the
heady and brutal exercise of physical-force nationalism
for years, for both General and his new policemen
to settle down– in the phrase of one Monaghan
veteran, ‘every soldier was a little republic
of his own’. (77)
McGarry observes, touchingly, the telling detail;
at this time, the height of his influence over Irish
destinies, he sent out 300 Christmas cards yet holidayed
alone. Probably a covert homosexual (McGarry handles
this supposition intelligently and objectively),
he preached as a Pioneer against tobacco and alcohol
yet would eventually drink himself to death on brandy.
His early demise could not have been averted by
his habit of smoking eighty Sweet Aftons a day.
He sneaked self-aggrandizing comments into his diary
and his conversation. He could not stop inflating
his stature. A handsome, if bombastic and socially
awkward man as he appears in snapshots in the early
1920s, ten years later he looked twenty-five years
older. This discrepancy between a strutting youthful
public figure able to gain respect of soldiers,
police, and politicians– and a bloated, sickly
pariah who soured into delusion– portrays his
premature collapse after tension that he exerted
for quarter-century to grip his perch so high within
Irish power.
Readers of The Blanket curious about how
the republican movement has in the past managed
to jump through ideological hoops hoisted by a variety
of guest ringmasters will find McGarry’s study
of O’Duffy’s evolution from GAA to IRA
to Cumann na Gaedhael-republican to (albeit at times
more ambiguous than the stereotype of Blueshirts
has allowed for) fascist propagandist instructive.
The limits of my review do not allow an in-depth
analysis. In the second half of this biography,
McGarry traces O’Duffy’s track from the
mid-1930s into right-wing extremism by careful examinations
of the political and military pressures the State
was under, as DeValera frantically reined the government
from subversion by his bitter Civil War rivals in
Fine Gael on the right. He suppressed or co-opted
the radical left-wing of his former IRA comrades
under sway by communist factions who sought to create
a popular front against Fianna Fáil. O’Duffy’s
own threat, as represented in the Blueshirts both
alongside and then cast out by FG, is exaggerated
by historians, McGarry implies. If we remember O’Duffy
at all today, it is more as an inspiration for denigrating
FG members as ‘Blueshirts’.Yet, given
Nazi, Red, anti-British and rabidly Catholic nationalist
contingents and their overlapping allegiances, the
Free State did recognise in O’Duffy’s
attempt to rouse resentment and stir up sedition
a potential danger to the stability of an insecure
government as FF sought to represent itself as the
true heir to the ideals of 1916– and all of
those competing rivals, McGarry illustrates, shared
Dev’s claim as rebel heirs.
Separatism potentially could, McGarry avers, have
benefited the tiny band of Irish fascist subversives
more than their more prominent British counterparts.
The energy of anti-British sentiment still barely
contained beneath Saorstat normalcy served as a
reserve fuel that could have ignited a militant
uprising if not smothered. Not that the Blueshirts
could have led such a putsch. They, as shown in
damning first-hand citations by McGarry, lacked
the intelligence, the ideological foundation, and
the leadership skills that their European fellow-travellers
could rally from many more millions eager to lash
out as antisemites, anti-communists, and– often–
anti-imperialists or even anti-capitalists. The
corporatist economic philosophy, it should not be
forgotten by those who can recall the ‘Éire
Nua’ policy Provisional Sinn Féin once
promoted, took much of its idealism from concepts
similar to those preached by not only O’Duffy
but Connolly, Saor Éire, and the IRA itself–
who similar to O’Duffy contended that pre-feudal
Celtic communal administration and centralised management
of the island’s wealth had predated its continental
imitators by many centuries.
A small start to such allotment of resources, in
fact, led to dissent. Fianna Fáil proposed
to slaughter 200,000 cattle to feed beef to the
Depression’s poor. In protest against what
they regarded as state seizure of property, farmers
and ranchers withheld their rates. Unrest worsened.
Civil War antagonism fostered by FG combined with
calls for overthrow of the Saorstat by the IRA.
Blueshirts were only the most pompous and histrionic
of insurgents who berated the FF’s claim to
legitimacy. O”Duffy was not alone in furthering
anachronistic hatreds that thwarted Dev from carrying
out his plans to better life for many of Ireland’s
impoverished, and to keep hundreds of thousands
from emigrating to Britain. Such judgments may not
be popular today, but McGarry’s analyses present
a sensible case that neither exaggerates or minimises
the damage done by Blueshirts. O’Duffy does
emerge as more a symptom than a cause of much pre-WW2
extremism that rumbled as naysayers readied to undermine
the Free State.
As this threat eased slightly after O’Duffy’s
incompetence led to the rapid dwindling of an already
marginalised Blueshirt element, the sudden coup
in Spain led to the opportunistic raising of an
Irish Brigade ready to defend Catholic Spain. Even
Ken Loach’s Land & Freedom film acknowledges
ruefully (recall its Irish Loyalist recruit), what
scholars contend: the chance that the Irish would
have rallied for socialist, anarchist, syndicalist,
and/or Red manifestoes as opposed to the calls for
defense of the Church by its allied gentry was nil.
Choosing between revolutionary and reactionary action,
few Irish joined the Loyalists. But not many more
sought to aid Franco’s Nationalists. Why so
diminished a rank of mossback Irish brigadiers?
McGarry synthesises SCW research to enrich his documentation
of dilettante O’Duffy’s ineptitude. He
rarely visited his soldiers. Funds were few; the
Brigade could only afford to send about eight hundred
out of a planned five thousand to Spain. Franco
mistrusted martinet O’Duffy. When the Brigade
entered their first battle, they– suspected
as English-speakers and wearing unfamiliar uniforms–
were fired upon and returned fire. Trouble was,
they were shooting other Nationalists. This own-goal
hastened the Brigade’s demoralisation and dissipation
amidst their half-starved squalor and their realisation
about how brutal was this internecine war. The Irish
were horrified not only by Loyalist savagery against
the clergy but rampant slaughter in Ciempozeulos,
the town where the Brigade first assembled after
its citizens had been massacred by Moorish Loyalists.
Abandoned by O’Duffy, this glorious crusade
crumbled ignominiously.
He returned to Ireland, after the failure of first
the Blueshirts and then the Brigade, to dabble in
contacts with the Nazis. More for their anti-British
position than their ideology: this is the common
wisdom shared by republican apologists. The Abwehr,
German intelligence, was so lacking in leads that
they went upon arrival in Ireland to O’Duffy,
asking where the IRA could be found. O’Duffy,
familiar with many Irish malcontents who contended
for power, obliged. McGarry does assert that the
evidence contradicts O’Duffy’s tendency
to sidestep the question of how fascist he and the
shadowy Irish organisations with whom he fraternised
were. McGarry tips the balance in O’Duffy’s
case towards a pro-Nazi–as opposed to merely
anti-British– motivation. Nonetheless, O’Duffy–
characteristically– often hedged this odious
allegiance with claims that the Irish, after all,
had started this corporatist system millennia ago,
not Aryans or Romans.
As the war went on, after 1942 the Germans had to
worry more about the Eastern Front than the fantasies
of Irish sympathisers and hangers-on. For all of
their anti-British rancour, most Irish supported
Hitler’s foes. O’Duffy was discarded.
Two years later he had drunk himself to death.
This sordid story, however, holds valuable lessons
for students of Irish republicanism. It shows, if
inadvertently, how ideologies can be manipulated
by a party or faction claiming the mandate to use
force to further the people’s alleged will.
This danger to Free State stability existed in the
1930s and early 40s on the left and the right, and
by FF under Dev as he pursued both the radical and
the reactionary subversives who once had fought
together with him for independence.
Threatened, Dev lashed out and O’Duffy, in
charge of the police, could not sustain what he
saw as the Long Fellow’s hypocrisy in claiming
the republican mantle. The chief of the Gardaí
resigned, McGarry finds, but soon wearied of the
convoluted justifications of FF, the atavistic grudges
of FG, and sought to reclaim republicanism through
populist appeals. Often the 1935 Blueshirts fought
the IRA. McGarry recounts half-a-dozen deaths attributable
to republican or leftist assaults upon Blueshirts
and their purported supporters. Yet, O’Duffy
when he was out in the cold also sought, more than
once, to ally with his former rivals. He employed
nationalism as flexibly as Dev. FF opponents might
agree to another common front, O’Duffy reasoned,
with more legitimate claims than those of turncoat
Dev to continuity with those out in the Rising.
It’s tempting to chortle at the empty rhetoric
of O’Duffy and his marchers. But, after reading
this book, I recognise how heated rhetoric–
not in its substance but its style– has inspired
so many before and since who hoist the green banner
upon which is prophesised ‘a nation once again’.
As have leftists and right-wingers, first FG and
then Blueshirts insisted that they spoke for the
common man. Often they also alleged to have the
right to kill in the name of a stillborn Republic.
In retrospect, what those who fought for independence
may have shared was fear of the modern. A return
to the land, prosperity from its farmers and workers,
fluency in its native language and advocacy of its
ancient culture: these ideals Dev, Peadar O’Donnell,
Eoin O’Duffy and Richard Mulcahy all proclaimed,
despite later political and military rivalries.
They sowed an essentialist ideology rooted in the
indigenous Irish soil, resisting anglicisation,
greed, and colonialism. Their obsessions may appear
to us xenophobic or ludicrous. Yet, those who pledge
fealty to the republican movement today, in whatever
manifestation, also inherit this complex legacy.
O’Duffy like his former comrades was a diehard.
Most who took up the republican cause, as he had
early in its campaign, yearned for tricoloured dawn.
It is indicative of McGarry’s control of his
investigation that he places O’Duffy within
a more familiar Irish situation than we– inured
by his caricatured and now but dimly recalled career–
might expect to find him. He proposed sport, politics,
violence, rabble-rousing, espionage, and ranting
idiocy to further, at various periods, the Irish
cause. Somewhere, his path crosses yours. O’Duffy
cheered what you may have also urged on: perhaps
an Irish boxer born in one of six counties but fighting
for 32, GAA hurlers, a republican politician, a
policeman secretly loyal to the cause, an informer’s
execution, or a speaker demanding national security,
jobs, and wealth redistribution. In these instances,
republicans mirror their own effigy of hate, Blueshirt
O’Duffy. His frustrations would repeat in another
generation. Unfinished revolution irritated both
O’Duffy and his genteel opponents. Nobody in
the 26 Counties’ early decades anymore than
the Troubles in the 6 could be content.
The longing to unify ‘truncated’ Ireland,
as O’Duffy would reveal in 1932 in an unlikely
but symbolic setting, shows the contradictions he
and his onetime comrades and longtime enemies would
agree on, for they were all basically old IRA men.
They all languished halfway– or maybe three-quarters–
from the Sunburst. Only when republicans had been
unified against a common foe could they have agreed.
In these fratricidal skirmishes, as McGarry illustrates
by O’Duffy’s unsparing combat in Monaghan,
O’Duffy resolutely if not always reliably demonstrated,
that a cause was easier to fight for and to kill
to gain when its external if not internal enemies
were easier to mark out and hunt down, once upon
a (as yet unmythologised) pre-independence time.
One example will conclude this contentious issue,
one that readers of The Blanket also debate.
Consider this incident. O’Duffy managed Ireland’s
1932 Olympic team in Los Angeles. He refused to
have the team march behind a banner inscribed ‘Irish
Free State’. He threatened to withdraw (four
athletes and four boxers) since, in the delegation’s
phrase as recalled by O’Duffy: ‘it should
never be forgotten that without a moment’s
hesitation [the team] declared: “We refuse
to compete as representatives of a truncated Ireland.”
I asked for permission to announce on the loud speakers
this unanimous decision to the assembled 100,000
people of Irish descent.’ (qtd. 154) McGarry
may have overlooked here– in an example that
sums up his subject’s bluster, self-promotion,
and grand gestures to thousands massed– one
more instance of O’Duffy’s tendency to
fudge the facts. The Coliseum where the Games were
held can accommodate about a hundred thousand, true.
But, could all of those spectators in Los Angeles
for the opening ceremony have happened to be (and
as unanimously for the tricolour that next waved
over the eight Olympians) ‘100,000 people of
Irish descent’?
