The Blueshirts was the nickname of a quasi-fascist organisation in Ireland whose emergence in the early 1930s reflected the turbulent early years of the infant Free State. They adopted the distinguishing characteristics of European fascist parties, including distinctive coloured shirts (in their case blue, hence the nickname) and the straight-armed fascist salute. Although attempts were made to give them a certain intellectual legitimacy they lacked both the vision and genuine leadership to create a political movement capable of shaking the established political order.
Origins and organisation
Formally known as The Army Comrades’ Association (ACA), their emergence coincided with Fianna Fáil’s surprise election victory in March 1932 and deliberately played on fears that the new government headed by Éamon de Valera would fail to provide their political opponents with protection against IRA violence. The fact that one of Fianna Fáil’s first acts upon taking power was to release imprisoned IRA men did nothing to allay these concerns.
When a snap election in January 1933 increased Fianna Fáil’s hold on power, the ACA’s political complexion started to mimic European fascist groups. With their ranks swelled by former supporters of the Cumann na nGaedheal party which lost power in 1932, the ACA – now firmly recognisable as the Blueshirts – established a network of sympathisers across Ireland, including women's and children's groups, many of whom were attracted by the strong recreational element to Blueshirts gatherings, whether through dances, picnics, Gaelic football or cycling. Its membership was open only to those "of Irish birth or parentage who profess the Christian faith". W.B. Yeats pledged his support.
Exact membership numbers of the Blueshirts is difficult to gauge but at its peak (c.1934) popular estimates suggest between thirty and forty thousand. The Blueshirts also exploited unrest in the farming community over the hardships imposed by Fianna Fáil’s economic war with Britain. A campaign organised by the Blueshirts to prevent the collection of land annuities led to violent clashes with republicans.
Eoin O’Duffy
In July 1933 leadership of the Blueshirts fell into the hands of Eoin O’Duffy, a former Gárda commissioner sacked by de Valera in February 1933. Headstrong and bombastic, O’Duffy praised Hitler and Mussolini to the skies. Parliamentary democracy, he declared, was an English sham. Although O'Duffy became the figure synonymous with the Blueshirts, others helped shape the thinking of an organisation now grandly calling itself The National Guard. Catholic academics such as Alfred O’Rahilly, Michael Tierney and James Hogan (author of Could Ireland Become Communist ?) emphasised the less-menacing traits of European fascism and drew inspiration from papal encyclicals critical of state centralisation. However, disputes about the Blueshirts’ methods and goals sapped their capacity to project lucid solutions to Ireland's economic malaise.
O’Duffy’s noisy exhibitionism was promptly neutralised by de Valera's government. A proposed march on the Dáil (parliament) in August 1933 was banned and the National Guard (or Blueshirts) declared illegal. Undeterred, O'Duffy, over the course of the next two years, re-invented the Blueshirts under the guise of different names (The League of Youth, The National Corporate Party) to try and escape the ban. Neither ruse worked. Their patience tested further by the bloody vendettas between the Blueshirts and the IRA, the government brought in military courts. 349 Blueshirts and 102 IRA men were imprisoned.
Shortly after de Valera's suppression of the National Guard O'Duffy found another platform as president of a new opposition party, the United Ireland Party - or Fine Gael. Here again O’Duffy’s strident anti-government strictures brought him into collision with his colleagues, and in September 1934, to the barely suppressed glee of Fine Gael’s moderate elements, he resigned. In 1936. O’Duffy surfaced again as leader of an Irish brigade which travelled to Spain to support pro-Franco nationalist forces in the Civil War. Poor training and discipline, exacerbated by O’Duffy’s fractious relationship with his officers, rendered this enterprise devoid of any military significance. Many of this brigade contented themselves by drinking copious amounts of alcohol at the Gran Hotel in Salamanca. O’Duffy himself was a chronic alcoholic. Never before in the history armed conflict, the playwright Brendan Behan wryly remarked, had a group of fighting men returned from war with more men than they went out with.
The Blueshirts in retrospect
Despite their fascist affectations the Blueshirts were not fascists in the literal meaning of the term. Historian Joe Bell wrote that ‘fascism was too intellectually demanding for the bulk of the Blueshirts. They were simply traditional conservatives, decked out in fashionable but ideologically ill-fitting continental garb.’
By this interpretation the vast majority of the Blueshirts were not motivated by abstract theories in the regulation of state and society; the organisation was primarily a rallying point for anti-IRA and anti-de Valera feeling, combined with a morbid distrust of 'godless communism'. This is reinforced by the powerful pro-Franco sentiment in Ireland during the Spanish Civil War, which was inspired less by the communist flavouring to the anti-Franco movement than by the violent attacks on Catholic churches and clergy. Of the 900 Irish people who took part in the Spanish Civil War at least two-thirds supported Franco’s nationalists, in huge contrast to the British ratio which was overwhelmingly anti-Franco. ‘Most Irish people rejected communism as atheistic’, concludes Joe Bell. ‘They did not trouble themselves unduly about the dialectic.’
Bell stresses that the appeal of the Blueshirts was also blunted by Fianna Fáil’s wide popularity across Irish society. Fianna Fáil were the classic ‘catch-all’ party, reminiscent of Charles Stewart Parnell’s National Land League of the late 19th century. They gained the support of urban workers as well as small farmers, trade unionists as well as successful capitalists. In short, Fianna Fáil had something for everyone - even O’Duffy’s proto-fascists. Indeed some of Fianna Fáil’s ideas on economic self-sufficiency would not have looked out of place in the milder fascist literature. Moreover, says Bell, ‘Fianna Fáil succeeded in capturing the market for the emotional resentment of the excluded underdog, who felt that the political ‘system’ was fixed against him.’ Bolstered by a charismatic leader in de Valera, they were almost unassailable as an electoral force.
Nevertheless, Bell stops short of dismissing altogether the idea that Irish democracy in the frenzied atmosphere of the 1930s was immune to all danger. If Fianna Fáil had lost the 1932 election it is possible that some elements would have turned aggressively anti-government. An alliance between them and disaffected Fine Gael members could have resulted in something more sinister and threatening to Ireland’s fledgling state. De Valera, it should be noted, banned the Blueshirts because he feared a coup d’état. In hindsight the threat to parliamentary democracy seems exaggerated out of proportion, but in the feverish climate of the times those of a sensitive disposition could hardly be criticised for imagining that the margins were uncomfortably close for comfort.
In the end the Blueshirts represented something of a gift to de Valera's Fianna Fáil. Their swift crackdown on O’Duffy and his disciples, followed by the outlawing of the IRA in 1936, allowed a party which only six years before had described themselves as ‘slightly constitutional’, to pose convincingly as trusted custodians of the state.
Sources:
Lee, J.J. Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999
Ferriter, D. The Transformation of Ireland 1900-2000. London: Profile Books, 2004
Alan Kinghorn - Alan is a freelance writer and researcher.
