Sustaining faith in the idea of an Irish Republic was a troubling challenge after the end of the Civil War in 1923. Many defeated anti-Treaty IRA members faced a bleak vista, and up to 600 of them had emigrated by 1924, referred to as a “lost legion” by the writer Frank O’Connor. His fellow writer Seán O’Faoláin elaborated meanly on their dejection: “these febrile, fractious, bitter, hungry-eyed ex freedom fighters were now in every sense out of a job”.
Even during the Civil War, Éamon de Valera struggled with the faith; he told Cork republican Mary MacSwiney in 1922: “reason rather than faith has been my master ... I have felt for some time that this doctrine of mine ill fitted me to be leader of the republican party”.
That description – “republican party” – was the preferred option of Seán Lemass for the new party, Fianna Fáil, which emerged a century ago, after de Valera resigned the presidency of Sinn Féin to remove himself from what he perceived as a political cul de sac. De Valera preferred “Fianna Fáil”; it had the advantage, he later recalled, of being difficult to translate; exactitude was not in his interests at that stage. Evoking the legend of Fionn Mac Cumhaill was preferred, with the added appeal that the initials FF (“the legendary first standing army of Ireland”) were on the cap badge of the uniform of the Irish Volunteers established in 1913. To address the concerns of Lemass, as also recounted by de Valera, “we put the name ‘Republican Party’ in brackets”.
Lemass had little interest in legend; he had brought his own typical clarity to the dilemma facing Sinn Féin in January 1926: “There are some who would have us sit by the roadside and debate abstruse points about a de jure this and a de facto that, but the reality we want is away in the distance – and we cannot get there unless we move.”
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The main stumbling block to the embrace of constitutional politics by the Treaty’s opponents was the oath of allegiance to the British crown, but if that was removed, averred de Valera, “it becomes a question not of principle but of policy” whether or not republicans took their seats in the Dáil. He also denied, at the inaugural meeting of Fianna Fáil, that “entering a 26-county assembly would be an acceptance of partition ... to recognise the existence of facts, as we must, is not to acquiesce in them”.
This was an elaborate process of squaring circles, of which de Valera became a master. In doing so, he was in the business of ironically proving the veracity of the claim of supporters of the Treaty, most famously Michael Collins, that the Treaty could be a stepping stone to further independence.
The day after he resigned the presidency of Sinn Féin, de Valera wrote to his Irish American confidante Joe McGarrity, arguing that Sinn Féin’s refusal to recognise the Free State “would not win the people in the present conditions. It was too high and too sweeping. The [abolition of the] oath on the other hand is a definite objective within reasonable striking distance”. The danger, he suggested, was a Dáil that might be composed of “class interests”, as “the national interest as a whole will be submerged in the clashing of the rival economic groups”.
In the twilight of his political career, de Valera told The Irish Times journalist Michael McInerney that the new party depended on “the workers of the town”, but “small farmers most of all”, and “we might be regarded as a labour party as we were trying to improve social conditions ... in those days I believe we could be called socialists but not communists”.
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For others leaving the inaugural meeting of the party in Dublin in 1926, according to Kevin Boland, whose father Gerald was one of the party’s founding members, their mission was “to light the flame in their own parishes and pave the way for the writing of Emmet’s epitaph”. Hope, it seemed, for the “hungry-eyed ex freedom fighters”.
This week, launching the events programme to mark the centenary of Fianna Fáil, Taoiseach Micheál Martin emphasised the shortcomings of a historical analysis of 1926 that relies solely on the prism of the Civil War: “so many people changed their allegiance ... that this State evolved dramatically”. He is correct that the appetite for pragmatism and adjustment was significant, and apparent early.
Trickier for Fianna Fáil in its centenary year might be the ammunition its founding aims provide for its political opponents. As outlined in 1926, these included: “Securing the political independence of a united Ireland as a republic”, a social system offering “equal opportunity” to all citizens, and “the distribution of the land of Ireland so as to get the greatest number possible of Irish families rooted in the soil of Ireland”.
