Their deaths caused serious problems in the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party and demonstrated just how strong the mystique of self-styled ‘republicanism’ was in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s. As Dermot Keogh has noted, South and O’Hanlon enjoyed the status of popular martyrs and were viewed by many, including many traditional Fianna Fáilers, as part of the ‘purer, unsullied “republican” tradition which was contrasted with politicians caught up in the materialist world of Yeats’ “greasy till”’.15 A founding member of Fianna Fáil and TD for Roscommon, Gerry Boland later eloquently described this mindset which inspired the Irish nationalist community with a ‘philosophy of death rather than life’.16
The funerals of South and O’Hanlon were a public relations coup for the IRA. Their coffins, draped with the Tricolour once they crossed the border, were removed from Enniskillen to St Macartan’s cathedral, Monaghan.17 At the funeral emotional speeches were made, with the wholehearted participation of a number of clergymen in support of ‘Volunteer Fergal O’Hanlon’.18 Thousands of people lined the streets of Drogheda, Dundalk and Dublin to pay their last respects as the remains of South made their way to his native city and his funeral in Limerick on 5 January was a huge affair. The funeral pictures in the Irish Press spoke for themselves, reflecting a clear ambivalence in Irish society about the use of violence.19
The public reaction to the two young men’s deaths forced Taoiseach John Costello to make a radio broadcast that doggedly refuted accusations that the IRA border campaign had the support of the Irish government;20 the public statement was supported by de Valera.21 The widespread public outburst of sympathy for the two dead ‘Volunteers’ was apparent at numerous meetings of county councils throughout the country. In Dublin city council and Clare county council there were differences of opinion when some councillors appealed for an ‘unqualified vote of sympathy’ for the relatives of the dead men.22 In Clare, Councillor Vincent McHugh remarked that it was not a ‘regrettable thing to find young men ready to fight the common enemy’.23
In January 1957 the Seán MacDermott cumann [party branch], Dublin North-East, wrote to party headquarters – and the letter reached Lemass – advising that they had passed a resolution by majority vote in ‘adoration of the courage and selflessness of Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon in fighting for Ireland and giving their lives in the cause’.24 The resolution expressed a desire for ‘a leadership that will not hesitate to adopt the most radical measures to secure the re-unification of our Country’.25 Referring to the increased support for recent IRA activities, the resolution stated that ‘it was not surprising that the youth of Ireland, sick of platitudes and hungering for a new more visile [sic] leadership should turn to the IRA’.26
Evidently, some in Fianna Fáil had followed party policy only as long as it proved effective. For many, the partition of Ireland looked like ‘unfinished business’ and, while condemning the use of force as ill-advised, they were reluctant to regard it as immoral.27 Indeed, the very fact that local representatives agreed that a vote of sympathy should be passed by their county council was a worrying development. Lionel Booth, in a letter to the Irish Press, objected to any vote of sympathy for anyone who did not recognise the authority of the Oireachtas and was a member of an illegal organisation. Booth put it in a refreshingly simple way:
If these two men had survived, they would, if found by the Gardaí, have now been under arrest on a criminal charge ... anyone, therefore, who attempts to glorify the actions of this illegal organisation is joining in the present defiance of our Constitutional Government.28
Booth’s comments caused offence among many in his own constituency of Dún Laoghaire-Rathdown, as two cumainn threatened to resign from the party.29 The Meaghen Neary cumann and Joseph Hudson cumann, Sallynoggin, wrote to Fianna Fáil headquarters to protest that Booth had ‘shown that he is not a loyal member of Fianna Fáil’.30 Lemass, however, fully supported Booth, having similarly remarked that the passing of a vote of sympathy by public representatives would ‘only do more harm’.31 He advised that such expressions of sympathy should be voiced so ‘as to make clear beyond doubt or ambiguity that Fianna Fáil did not endorse the IRA’s actions’.32 Seán Moylan, the frontbench Fianna Fáil TD for Cork North, sullenly remarked that if party members accepted ‘speeches made at those gravesides, as future policy’ there was no future for the party.33
In early January 1957, Donogh O’Malley, Fianna Fáil Limerick East TD and future cabinet minister, wrote to de Valera suggesting that, since many party representatives had been ‘making goats of themselves’ and showing the party in a ‘bad light’, a meeting of the parliamentary party should be held so as to make sure that any votes that were passed in local county councils were in accordance with official party policy.34 The Fianna Fáil TD for Clare and future president of Ireland, Patrick Hillery, recalled that many Fianna Fáil deputies, including himself, were coming under pressure in their constituencies because of the renewed IRA campaign, and urged that the Fianna Fáil government clarify its position against the use of violence in the national drive to end partition.35
The increasing disquiet among Fianna Fáil members, as noted by John Bowman, showed that many of those originally recruited to the party were only ‘conditional constitutionalists’.36 Though the majority of party members understood the futility of violence, a small number of supporters still had an ‘each way bet’ on the use of force.37 The recent events highlighted the difference between policy and ideology, a difference that was central to the Fianna Fáil position on Irish unity. Matthew Feehan, a member of the Fianna Fáil national executive, wisely explained that the ‘young generation is unable to distinguish between the physical force tradition and the national tradition ... Fianna Fáil as the true “Republican Party” must endeavour to win over the young IRA’.38
In an effort to restate official Fianna Fáil policy on the use of force and to prevent a possible backbench revolt, de Valera scheduled a meeting of the parliamentary party for 15 January 1957. It lasted an unprecedented eight hours.39 John Horgan notes that during the meeting, at a critical juncture, one TD suggested that peaceful methods had failed. At this, Lemass, ‘in a quite untypical display of emotion, erupted’. The problem with peaceful methods, he told the meeting, was they had not been tried. He explained that ‘every time there was the prospect of some advance in North–South relations, the IRA surfaced to blow it out of the water’.40
Lemass was himself an ex-revolutionary and his passionate words on the futility of armed struggle would have most certainly resonated among his fellow deputies. His intervention, in both form and timing, helped de Valera significantly in his task of stiffening the resolve of the parliamentary party at a difficult time.41 Lemass believed the party should not ‘pussyfoot about’ and should instead focus its attention on practical ways to end partition.42 As a public representative his job was to ‘lead public opinion and not to follow it slavishly’.43
During the meeting, the majority of party deputies present contributed to the debate on the recent raids in Northern Ireland. It was decided that ‘there could be no armed force here except under the control and direction of the government’ and that the ‘employment of force at any time in the foreseeable future would be undesirable and likely to be futile’.44 Patrick Hillery remembered that, while it was a ‘decision not easily arrived at’, party members had ‘definitely’ agreed that ‘whatever happens in the North we’re not going in there’.45 His recollection was, however, at variance with the official minutes of the meeting, which recorded that ‘concerning the feasibility of the use of force by any future government as a means of solving partition ... no definite decision was taken’.46 It is apparent, therefore, that at the conclusion of the meeting de Valera had failed to secure agreement from those present that the use of physical force to secure Irish unity was not a legitimate objective – if in the future the suitable circumstance arose. This was interesting, not least because the meeting had lasted over eight hours.
In an attempt to present a united front in the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party at the close of the meeting, a frontal assault was made by leading members of the front bench to remind both the general public and party supporters that the use of force was not Fianna Fáil policy. Gerry Boland remarked that ‘it was the height of folly to think that we in the Twenty-Six Counties had force enough, if we wished to use it, to compel the Six Counties to join our State’.48 Seán Moylan announced that he could ‘see no possible value for the nation in the policy of the use of force in the Six Counties’.49 Indeed, de Valera’s son, Vivian de Valera, speaking in January 1957 during the general election campaign, which Fianna Fáil won, stressed that the young men of the IRA needed ‘friendly sympathy and advice’ to desist from violence.50
Fianna Fáil’s return to government in February 1957 was a defining moment for the party’s policy on both the IRA and the use of physical force to secure Irish unity. Guided by de Valera, the party hierarchy sought once again to dispel the general misconception that Irish unity was a realistic short-term aim. The Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, and the Minister for Health, Seán MacEntee, acknowledged it would be naive to say that partition would be ended in their lifetime.51 The new Fianna Fáil deputy for Dublin County and Minister for Defence, Kevin Boland, later conceded that on the party’s return in 1957 it was obvious that a solution to partition was ‘not being undertaken with any degree of urgency’.52
Publicly, de Valera conceded that there was ‘no clear way’ to end partition and said that ‘the man or men that would solve partition would deserve an outstanding place in Irish history’.53 Such public declarations, although logical, were viewed by a vocal minority of the party grass-roots as acts of treachery. A representative of the Fianna Fáil cumann in Mountmellick, County Laois, accused de Valera and his cabinet colleagues of ‘not giv[ing] an answer to the question of partition’.54 Under the current Fianna Fáil government, a dejected supporter from Nenagh, County Tipperary, complained, ‘any ray of hope in the quest to find a solution to the problem had lapsed’.55
The first signs of a rift between the new Fianna Fáil government and the rank-and-file surfaced when de Valera decided to enact the Offences Against the State Act in July 1957 in response to renewed IRA violence in Northern Ireland. His action led to the imprisonment of most of the republican leadership, the Sinn Féin Ard Comhairle, the IRA army council and the GHQ staff of the IRA.56 De Valera viewed the IRA campaign as undermining the government’s official approach to partition and seriously threatening the stability of the Irish state, and this justified the heavy-handed approach taken by the Fianna Fáil government.
On the same day that the legislation was enacted, 25 July 1957, de Valera issued a public statement on the recent wave of IRA violence and maintained that the arrest of Sinn Féin activists was because they were believed to be members of the IRA.57 He explained that a Fianna Fáil government could not tolerate a secret army which denied the legitimacy of the state and undermined the authority of the cabinet and the Dáil. The Taoiseach was widely praised for his ‘no nonsense’ stand against the IRA.58 The British Secretary of State for Commonwealth Relations, Lord Home, described de Valera’s actions as ‘extremely courageous’.59 For the vast majority of the Irish public, it was the constitutional, gradualist pragmatism of Fianna Fáil, rather than the vanguardist violence of the IRA, that proved more appealing.60 The party offered an avenue of expression for those Irish nationalists who were no longer willing to endorse physical force; the significant factor in the party’s success and endurance was that it offered a credible alternative to hard-line republicanism – ‘if militant republicans were anti-partitionist, comradely, ethnically rooted, cultural and historical nationalists, with a sense of moral superiority and an implicit exclusivism, then so too were Fianna Fáilers’.61
However, de Valera’s actions were greeted with resistance from a small section of Fianna Fáil. At a meeting of Cork county council in late July 1957, the vocal anti-partitionist Fianna Fáil TD for Cork South, Seán McCarthy, spoke in defence of a Sinn Féin councillor, Tomás Mac Curtáin, who had been arrested as part of the government crackdown on IRA activity.62 In late December 1957 at a meeting of Dublin county council, some Fianna Fáil councillors were said to have supported a motion demanding that all persons imprisoned under the ‘Provisions of the Offences Against the State Act’ should be accorded the status of political prisoners.63 In the same month, in the border county of Monaghan, at a meeting of Clones urban council, Councillor S. O’Connor unsuccessfully proposed a resolution calling for the immediate release of IRA internees from the Curragh.64
Given such public displays of sympathy for the IRA campaign by elected representatives, de Valera realised that recent events could have a destabilising effect on Fianna Fáil – as had been the case in January 1957 following the deaths of the IRA activists Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon. Therefore, in April 1958, de Valera scheduled a meeting of the Fianna Fáil parliamentary party to re-affirm government policy. In response to the Cork deputy McCarthy’s defiance in July 1957, de Valera warned all those present at the parliamentary meeting that any deputy who wished to disagree with government policy on the IRA ‘could resign from Fianna Fáil’.65 During de Valera’s remaining years as Taoiseach, at meetings of the parliamentary party and national executive, the Fianna Fáil leadership – working closely with a small group of cabinet ministers including Frank Aiken, Oscar Traynor (TD for Dublin North-East) and Jack Lynch (TD for Cork Borough) – pleaded with party TDs to adhere to government policy on the IRA, because to do otherwise would result in the ‘loss of everything that has hitherto been gained’.66 Local party canvassers also received instructions from party headquarters to notify grass-roots supporters that official Fianna Fáil policy was resolutely against the use of private armies and that if ‘the use of force were desirable, only the government would be entitled to employ it’.67
Speaking in 1959, on the eve of his retirement from active politics, de Valera again appealed to party supporters to realise that the alternative to non-violence was ‘anarchy and national frustration’.68 Indeed, de Valera’s final years as Taoiseach can be characterised as an almost relentless campaign in his lectures to the Dáil and the annual Fianna Fáil Ard Fheiseanna against the ‘useless sacrifices’ of the IRA.69 His efforts, however, failed: a small number of Fianna Fáil elected representatives still publicly sympathised with the IRA campaign, Counties Tipperary and Cavan being most inclined this way. At meetings of their county councils in late 1958 and early 1959, Fianna Fáil councillors voted in favour of resolutions calling for the release of IRA internees.70
During a meeting of the South Tipperary county council in early January 1958, six Fianna Fáil councillors voted in support of, and four other party councillors abstained from, a motion calling on de Valera to grant a political amnesty for IRA internees.71 The successful motion was proposed by the prominent Fianna Fáil activist John Ahessy and seconded by his party colleague T. Duggan.72 Abuse was hurled across the council floor against those opposing the motion, in particular against William Ryan, Fianna Fáil councillor and future party member of the Seanad. In bitter scenes not witnessed in intensity since the Treaty debates in 1921, Ahessy, who had previously spent time in gaol and on hunger strike, labelled his fellow party representative, Ryan, an ‘Armchair Republican’.73
De Valera received criticism for his handling of partition and his firm stance against the IRA. In early February 1958 an outraged grass-roots Fianna Fáil member from County Tipperary
wrote to the Kerryman accusing de Valera of helping to ‘openly maintain partition’.74 In July 1958, an irate Kerry native living in Derbyshire, England, wrote to de Valera personally to express his ‘amazement, regret and disgust at the Fianna Fáil government’s shameful treatment of patriotic’ IRA men. Comparing the government tactics to those of the Gestapo, he warned de Valera that ‘back in Kerry’ many prominent Fianna Fáil supporters were ‘outraged and disgusted at their Party’s persecution of Republicans’.75
On hearing of the unrest locally de Valera immediately instructed that copies of his Dáil statement, originally issued in July 1957, be sent to every registered Comhairle Ceantair and Comhairle Dáilcheantair throughout the Republic of Ireland. Attached to the statement was a cover letter that gave details of an amendment that could be used by Fianna Fáil councillors if a resolution in defence of internees was moved at any future local county council meeting.76 However, the situation was perceived to have become so unstable in south Tipperary that in early 1959 de Valera arranged secret meetings with the three local party TDs, Daniel Breen, Michael J. Davern and Francis Loughman.77
Seán Lemass’ succession as Fianna Fáil president and Taoiseach in the summer of 1959 was widely welcomed by party supporters. During his first term in government (1959–61) the IRA was relatively inactive, allowing Lemass the comfort of not clashing with the grass-roots over the party’s official policy on the IRA. This drastically changed when Lemass began his second term as Taoiseach (1962–5). Within weeks of assuming power, he announced that the major objective of Fianna Fáil’s term in office was the crushing of the IRA. Led by Lemass’ son-in-law, the Minister for Justice, Charles Haughey, Dublin waged a campaign against the IRA leadership.78 Haughey re-activated the special criminal courts and, working closely with Lemass and Aiken, mounted a publicity campaign which sought to portray the IRA as an illegal organisation which did not ‘serve the cause of national unity’.79
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