Two years after his failed libel action, Peadar O’Donnell enjoyed arguably the finest hour of his political life when inspiring a contingent of Belfast Protestants to attend the 1934 commemoration of Wolfe Tone at Bodenstown.
A busload from the Shankill Road among them, they were there under the umbrella of O’Donnell’s short-lived Republican Congress, formed when he and others of socialist leaning were expelled from the IRA.
On the way to Kildare, according to the next day’s Irish Press, “three dozen Protestant workers” stopped off at Arbour Hill, Dublin, to lay a wreathe in honour of James Connolly.
Presented by a “Mr G McVicar”, it read: “To the memory of Connolly and his heroic comrades of Easter Week, 1916. On to the Workers’ Republic.”
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En route to the Workers’ Republic, they then drove to Bodenstown, where the Belfast banners included one, in echo of the 1790s, proclaiming “United Irishmen 1934”.
Alas for unity, the first item on the agenda in Bodenstown was a split, or at least an expression of the split that had already forced O’Donnell and his associates out of the IRA.
The Irish Press played down the subsequent drama in a three-part headline that dwelt mainly on the event’s overall success. “17,000 in Pilgrimage to Grave of Tone”, read the top line. “Biggest Tribute Yet Paid,” read the second. Then came “Many Protestants in Six-County Group”, followed by a colon, and after the colon, ominously: “A Scene.”
The “scene” arose from the insistence of the main IRA organisers that there should be no “unauthorised banners”. That turned out to refer to the Belfast ones, including – in a bitter irony – the “United Irishmen”, as well as those of the Congress generally.
First there were angry words. Then, reported the Press, “fifty or sixty members of the Tipperary Battalion of the IRA were called upon to aid the stewards and blows were exchanged with members of the Congress Groups.
“In the course of the struggle, which lasted for several minutes, the identity scroll of the Congress and the two flags of the Belfast clubs were torn.”
Recalling the event decades later, veteran communist Michael O’Riordan, who had been there, noted that job of attacking the Northerners “was given to the Tipperary people because they were the most conservative. The Dublin IRA did not join in at all”.
O’Donnell reached a similar conclusion on the day itself. As paraphrased by the Press, he said: “The IRA leadership was afraid of the Congress, and they had used as their tools that day poor, deluded workers from the Midlands. They would not ask the Dublin workers to attack the Congress flags because [the Dubliners] were finding out their leadership.”
O’Donnell went on to suggest that along with the Belfast flags, a “mask had been torn from hypocrisy” at Bodenstown. He blamed himself and fellow Congress leader George Gilmore that it had not happened earlier: that for years, by their presence in the IRA, they had “kept this treachery from exposing itself”.
But he was optimistic now. The attack would bring “thousands more to [the Congress] banner,” he predicted. Furthermore: “The presence of their Belfast comrades that day was a momentous happening, and the laying of the foundation of unity in the future.”
Such optimism proved to be unfounded. At its first conference, held at Rathmines in September 1934, the Congress itself split over tactics, with O’Donnell and Gilmore on one side and Roddy Connolly, son of James, on the other.
Thereafter it went into steep decline, apart from a last stand fighting for the republican side in the Spanish Civil War, where both Gilmore and O’Donnell took part. Some Belfast Protestants fought in that too. But there were no more massed outings from the Shankill to Bodenstown.
Gilmore’s life was a remarkable journey in its own right. Born in Howth, Co Dublin, in 1898, he was descended from Portadown unionists. But despite a home education, he and his brothers all became republicans.
George joined Fianna Éireann as a teenager, fought in the War of Independence, took the anti-Treaty side in the Civil War and, after escaping from prison, worked as secretary for a future Fianna Fáil Taoiseach Seán Lemass.
He and Lemass helped organise a mass jailbreak from Mountjoy in 1925 and Gilmore remained close with some of the leadership of Fianna Fáil even while supporting O’Donnell’s hard-left Saor Éire (1931) and then helping lead the Republican Congress.
O’Donnell was known to complain that Éamon de Valera “took the best republicans with him into Fianna Fáil and left us with the clinkers”.
But after the Congress’s dissolution, he and Gilmore combined in organising tenant leagues, which influenced Fianna Fáil’s slum clearance and State housing programme of the 1930s.
Gilmore later stood as a socialist republican in a South Dublin byelection in 1938 and lost by only 200 votes. Thereafter, he was less prominent in Irish politics.
Both men survived to visit Bodenstown again on the 50th anniversary of the 1934 commemoration. O’Donnell was 91 by then and lived another two years. Gilmore was 86 and died 11 months later, 40 years ago this June.
