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Irish Times
15-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Disunited Irishmen - Frank McNally on the year Shankill Road protestants paid tribute in Bodenstown and were attacked by the IRA
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.' READ MORE 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.
Irish Times
14-05-2025
- Politics
- Irish Times
Red into the record – Frank McNally on Peadar O'Donnell's libel case against the Irish Rosary magazine
The cases involving Oscar Wilde (1895) and Patrick Kavanagh (1954) are landmarks in Irish literary history. Much less well remembered, by contrast, is a libel trial of 1932, in which literature was also a major subplot. The complainant on that occasion was Peadar O'Donnell, Donegal-born socialist, republican and writer. The defendant was the Irish Rosary, a monthly journal of the Dominican order. The Irish Rosary trial had its origins in the 'Red Scare' general election of 1932 and in emergency legislation introduced by the soon-to-be-outgoing Cumann na nGaedheal government. That would have allowed special military tribunals to deal with radical opposition to the State. And pushing it through the Dáil, the Government cited the discovery of an arms dump in the Dublin Mountains, including documents linking the IRA with communist Russia. READ MORE Those were said to show that O'Donnell – a leading figure in anti-Treaty republican circles – had organised a group of students to visit the Lenin School in Moscow in 1929, where he and they studied Bolshevik revolutionary techniques. When this claim was repeated, without Dáil privilege, in an Irish Rosary editorial, O'Donnell sued the magazine, its printers, and the distributors. The editorial's author, the Very Reverend H V Casey, O P, accused O'Donnell and other socialist republicans of wishing to set up an 'anti-God State'. He also referred readers to a separate pamphlet in which the Society Union was alleged to be promoting 'free love' and other forms of decadence. So as well as denying that he had ever been to Russia, O'Donnell's defence included protestations of his own Catholicism and clean living: 'I have never thought nor inculcated blasphemy,' he wrote in an affidavit. 'I have never closed, nor have I attempted to close churches. I have never melted church bells; I have never encouraged drunkenness either among the youth or the adult population of this or any other country. I am a strict teetotaller, and regard alcoholic excess and the evils that attend it as a great obstacle to the achievement of the political and economic freedom of this country and the conquering of poverty ...' Countering this, defence lawyers scoured the several novels he had written already for incriminating evidence, even in the mouths of fictional protagonists. A line from The Knife (1930), in which a character complains about the bishops' directive to refuse absolution for republicans, proved useful, referring as it did to how 'the anti-Christs in Maynooth made a new religion to back the Treaty and because we won't give up the Republic ... they won't let a priest near us except gligíns like themselves'. The most notable witness for the plaintiff, meanwhile, was WB Yeats . This was the fruit of an odd friendship between the elderly poet and the young radical, dating from O'Donnell's attempt to write his first play, Wrack. Encouraged by Yeats's attention, O'Donnell nevertheless took advantage of it by asking in passing if he could book the Abbey for a forthcoming event. That event was to be the launch of Saor Éire, a hard-left organisation that would be banned almost immediately. Yeats had to cancel it at the last moment, explaining that during his conversation with O'Donnell he had been distracted by literature: 'I came away with a vague memory that he had said something about just hiring the Abbey for a meeting or a convention. However, my mind was on [the novel] 'Ardrigoole' and I thought nothing more of the matter until next day when a fellow director came round with the advertisement of a revolutionary meeting ...' The misunderstanding was put aside in court, where Yeats described O'Donnell as a 'a novelist of great promise', and hoped he would join him in a planned Irish Academy of Letters. This did not mean they shared political ideas. On the contrary, Yeats had always supported Cumann na nGaedheal. As paraphrased by one court report: 'he wished very much that Mr O'Donnell would devote his interest entirely to his novels and leave politics for a pastime in his old age (laughter).' To which a defence lawyer replied: 'If you can get him to do that you will be doing him a great service.' Yeats risked some reputational damage himself in appearing for O'Donnell. But then the cause of literature was at stake too. And as Niall Carson, a Liverpool University academic who will have an essay on the subject in the Irish University Review later this year (and to whom I am indebted for much of the foregoing) argues, the relationship may have been mutually transformative. The jury ultimately found in favour of Irish Rosary, rejecting the libel claims. But although the failed plaintiff would continue to be a political radical, his reputation as a threat to social order seems to have peaked then and there. As with Yeats, Carson writes, the trial marked a shift in O'Donnell's direction too, with literature 'taking a more prominent role in his life as the decade proceeded'.
