Blueshirts
Army Comrades Association | |
---|---|
Also known as | Blueshirts |
Leader | Ned Cronin[1] Eoin O'Duffy[2] Thomas F. O'Higgins Ernest Blythe |
Foundation | 9 February 1932 |
Dissolved | 1935 |
Merged into | Fine Gael (pro-Cronin faction) |
Country | Irish Free State |
Newspaper | The Nation |
Ideology | Irish nationalism Integral nationalism Corporate statism[3] National Catholicism[4] |
Political position | Far-right[5] |
Size | 8,337 (October 1932) 38,000 (March 1934) 48,000 (peak; August 1934) 4,000 (September 1935)[6] |
Flag | |
The Army Comrades Association (ACA), later the National Guard, then Young Ireland[a] and finally League of Youth, but best known by the nickname the Blueshirts (Irish: Na Léinte Gorma), was a paramilitary organisation in the Irish Free State, founded as the Army Comrades Association in Dublin on 9 February 1932.[7] The group provided physical protection for political groups such as Cumann na nGaedheal from intimidation and attacks by the IRA.[8] Some former members went on to fight for the Nationalists in the Spanish Civil War after the group had been dissolved.
Most of the political parties whose meetings the Blueshirts protected would merge to become Fine Gael, and members of that party are still sometimes nicknamed "Blueshirts".[9] There has been considerable debate in Irish historiography over whether or not it is accurate to describe the Blueshirts as fascists.[9]
History
Origins and early history
In February 1932, the
Eoin O'Duffy becomes leader
In January 1933, the Fianna Fáil government called a surprise election, which the government won comfortably. The election campaign saw a serious escalation of rioting between IRA and ACA supporters. In April 1933, the ACA began wearing the distinctive blueshirt uniform. Eoin O'Duffy was a guerrilla leader in the IRA in the Irish War of Independence, a National Army general in the Irish Civil War, and the Garda Síochána police commissioner in the Irish Free State from 1922 to 1933. After Fianna Fáil's re-election in February 1933, President of the Executive Council Éamon de Valera dismissed O'Duffy as commissioner after learning O'Duffy had considered staging a coup d'état to remove him from power. [15] That July, O'Duffy was offered and accepted leadership of the ACA and renamed it the National Guard. He re-modelled the organisation, adopting elements of European fascism, such as the straight-arm Roman salute, the wearing of uniforms and huge rallies. Membership of the new organisation became limited to people who were Irish or whose parents "profess the Christian faith". O'Duffy was an admirer of Benito Mussolini, and the Blueshirts adopted corporatism as a chief political aim. According to the constitution he adopted, the organisation was to have the following objectives:[16]
- To promote the re-union of Ireland.
- To oppose Communism and alien control and influence in national affairs and to uphold Christian principles in every sphere of public activity.
- To promote and maintain social order.
- To make organised and disciplined voluntary public service a permanent and accepted feature of our political life and to lead the youth of Ireland in a movement of constructive national action.
- To promote the formation of co-ordinated national organisations of employers and employed, which, with the aid of judicial tribunals, will effectively prevent strikes and lock-outs and harmoniously compose industrial influences.
- To co-operate with the official agencies of the state for the solution of such pressing social problems as the provision of useful and economic public employment for those whom private enterprise cannot absorb.
- To secure the creation of a representative national statutory organisation of farmers, with rights and status sufficient to secure the safeguarding of agricultural interests, in all revisions of agricultural and political policy.
- To expose and prevent corruption and victimisation in national and local administration.
- To awaken throughout the country a spirit of combination, discipline, zeal and patriotic realism which will put the state in a position to serve the people efficiently in the economic and social spheres.
March on Dublin
The National Guard planned to hold a parade in Dublin in August 1933. It was to proceed to Glasnevin Cemetery, stopping briefly on Leinster lawn in front of the Irish parliament, where speeches were to be held. The goal of the parade was to commemorate Irish leaders Arthur Griffith, Michael Collins and Kevin O'Higgins. It is clear that the IRA and other fringe groups representing various socialists intended to confront the Blueshirts if they marched in Dublin.
On 22 August 1933 the Fianna Fáil government, remembering Mussolini's March on Rome, and fearing a coup d'état, invoked article 2A of the constitution and banned the parade.[9] Decades later, de Valera told Fianna Fáil politicians that in late summer 1933 he was unsure whether the Irish Army would obey his orders to suppress the perceived threat, or whether the soldiers would support the Blueshirts (who included many ex-soldiers). O'Duffy accepted the ban and insisted that he was committed to upholding the law. Instead, several provincial parades took place to commemorate the deaths of Griffith, O'Higgins and Collins. De Valera saw this move as defying his ban, and the Blueshirts were declared an illegal organisation.[9]
Merging with Cumann na nGaedhael and the National Centre Party to form Fine Gael
In response to the banning of the National Guard,
In March 1934 the Minister for Justice
The
Following disagreements with his Fine Gael colleagues, O'Duffy left the party in September 1934, although most of the Blueshirts stayed in Fine Gael. Following O'Duffy's ascent to leadership of Fine Gael, control of the Blueshirts had been left to original Blueshirt founder Ned Cronin. When O'Duffy left Fine Gael, he attempted to resume this position, however, Cronin resisted, resulting in the Blueshirts splitting into pro-O'Duffy and pro-Cronin factions. Cronin and his faction wished to remain within Fine Gael while O'Duffy's faction left entirely. Cronin's faction seemed to have been the majority of the membership.[20]
In December 1934, O'Duffy attended the Montreux Fascist conference in Switzerland. He then founded the National Corporate Party, and later raised an Irish Brigade that took General Francisco Franco's side in the Spanish Civil War, with disastrous results.[21] Meanwhile, Fine Gael was brought back under the leadership of WT Cosgrove who had previously led Cumann na nGaedhael. Now acting as Deputy Leader was James Dillon, formerly of the National Centre Party, who helped reinforce pro-democratic views into the party. Dillon was a staunch defender of liberal democracy[22] who in later years denounced Nazism as "the devil himself with twentieth-century efficiency".[23] He resigned from Fine Gael in 1942 due to his belief that Ireland should break neutrality and join the Allies to fight against Hitler.[24] He later rejoined the party and became its leader after Richard Mulcahy.
Legacy
As a rule, the modern Fine Gael party strenuously avoids referring to the Blueshirts as having been a part of the founding of the party, although it is happy to acknowledge the lineage of Cumann na nGaedhael and the National Centre Party, as well as to draw a lineage back to
Fascism debate
Considerable debate has been held in Irish society across many decades over whether or not it is accurate to describe the Blueshirts as fascists.[9][27]
Stanley G. Payne has argued that the Blueshirts "really was never a fascist organization at all".[28] Maurice Manning also did not consider them fascists, with their mixture of patriotic conservatism, militia activities and corporatism amounting "to no more than a kind of Celtic Croix-de-Feu",[29] and that ultimately the Blueshirts "had much of the appearance but little enough of the substance of Fascism".[30] Historians are divided on the extent to which the Blueshirts took a lead from Mussolini and his many imitators at that time.[31][32] Some of the Blueshirts later went to fight for Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War because of his anti-communism. They imitated some aspects of the Mussolini movement, such as the coloured-shirt uniform, Roman salute and the March on Rome; however, Historian R. M. Douglas has opined that it is incorrect to portray them as an "Irish manifestation of fascism".[33]
Mike Cronin, an academic specialising in Irish political and cultural history, also concludes that the Blueshirts "undoubtedly possessed certain fascist traits, but they were not fascists in the German or Italian sense". Instead, Cronin suggests the term "Para-fascists" is more appropriate, indicating that while they took on the outward trapping of fascism, they did not commit to the more radical elements. Cronin contends that while certain members of the Blueshirts did hold fascist views, they were effectively "drowned out" by the number of traditionally conservative members, particularly after the merger into Fine Gael. Nonetheless, Cronin also notes that the Blueshirts' potential for outright fascism should not be dismissed either.[34]
Fearghal McGarry of Queen’s University, Belfast, has suggested that while O'Duffy can be thought of as a genuine fascist, despite his role as the leader he was not representative of the bulk of the blueshirt membership, and that the degree to which the Blueshirts should be thought of as fascists has been overemphasised by Irish Republicans in order to reinforce their anti-fascist credentials during the interwar period. McGarry has said the danger from the Blueshirts was not that they would turn Ireland into Fascist Italy, but into the Portuguese dictatorship that existed under Salazar at the time.[35]
In the aftermath of O'Duffy's departure from Fine Gael, most of the party settled back into "traditional" conservatism under the leadership of WT Cosgrove and James Dillon. However, this was not true of all of the membership. Ernest Blythe, the Cumann na nGaedhael minister who had been an enthusiastic member of the Blueshirts and heavily supported its gravitation towards corporatism, continued to support fascist causes in Ireland many years after the Blueshirts' demise. Blythe retired from public life in 1936 after the abolishment of the Senate but he continued to engage in politics. During the 1940s he supported and aided the openly fascist Ailtirí na hAiséirghe.[40] Blythe advised Ailtirí na hAiséirghe's leader Gearóid Ó Cuinneagáin on the drafting of the party's constitution, gave it backing in its journal The Leader, as well as making financial contributions towards the party.[41] During the 1940s Blythe's activities alarmed Ireland's secret intelligence agency G2, whose intelligence files referred to him as a potential "Irish Quisling" and “100 per cent Nazi”.[42]
Some commentators have suggested that rather than view the conflict between the Blueshirts and the IRA through the prism of fascism vs anti-fascism, in reality, the conflict should be seen as more akin to a political rehashing of the Irish Civil War that began against the backdrop of Fianna Fáil entering into government for the first time.[43]
See also
- Ailtirí na hAiséirghe - A 1940s Irish political party whose Fascism is not disputed
- Irish Christian Front - A mid-1930s pro-Franco group in Ireland
- Greenshirts- O'Duffy's successor party to the Blueshirts
Notes
- ^ Young Ireland was historically the name of a 19th Century Irish revolutionary movement. There is, however, no organizational continuity - and little ideological similarity - between it and the 20th century movement.
References
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[...] fascist Italy [...] developed a state structure known as the corporate state with the ruling party acting as a mediator between 'corporations' making up the body of the nation. Similar designs were quite popular elsewhere in the 1930s. The most prominent examples were Estado Novo in Portugal (1932-1968) and Brazil (1937-1945), the Austrian Standestaat (1933-1938), and authoritarian experiments in Estonia, Romania, and some other countries of East and East-Central Europe,
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- ^ a b Mark Tierney, OSB, MA "Modern Ireland", Gill & Macmillan, 1972 p 175-182
- ^ McAuliffe, Mary (15 December 2023). "You've heard of the Blueshirts but who were Ireland's Blue Blouses?". RTÉ Brainstorm. RTÉ. Retrieved 16 December 2023.
- ^ "Meet the Fascist Who Wanted to Become Ireland's Mussolini". 22 May 2021.
- ^ Maurice Manning, "The Blueshirts", Dublin, 1970
- ^ Fearghal McGarry, Eoin O'Duffy: A Self-Made Hero Archived 19 June 2018 at the Wayback Machine, OUP Oxford, 2005, page 222
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This pattern is also replicated in popular memory of the period, with "Blueshirt" persisting as a pejorative term for supporters of Fine Gael up to the present day.
- ^ Farrell, Mel (26 May 2020). "Fine Gael and Fianna Fáil: 'Civil War' Parties?". Archived from the original on 10 May 2021.
The nature of 'Blueshirtism', 1933-36 remains a subject of controversy and there is unlikely to ever be a consensus as to what it constituted. While its growth in 1933 was linked to the Economic War, O'Duffy and other leading members were admirers of continental fascism. Most Blueshirts appear to have been motivated by a mixture of Civil War legacies and the controversies of the early 1930s
- ^ Stanley G. Payne, 'Fascism in Western Europe' in Walter Laqueur (ed.), Fascism: A Reader's Guide. Analyses, Interpretations, Bibliography (Pelican Books, 1979), p. 310.
- ^ Payne, p. 310.
- ^ McMahon, Cian (12 February 2013). "Eoin O'Duffy's Blueshirts and the Abyssinian crisis". Archived from the original on 24 January 2021. Retrieved 6 January 2021.
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- Irish Times. Archivedfrom the original on 4 September 2019. Retrieved 7 January 2021.
- ^ Dorney, John (18 May 2012). "The Blueshirts – fascism in Ireland?". Archived from the original on 23 January 2021. Retrieved 6 January 2021.
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