The Irish Counter-Revolution 1921 -1936 by John M. Regan. Gill & Macmillan, Paperback 2001 Reviewed by David Coen Fianna Fail in English means "soldiers of destiny". In the late 1950s economic crisis, with hundreds of thousands emigrating, they became known as the "Fine Failures". So serious was the crisis that some sections of the ruling class began openly to question whether the country was economically viable or whether it wouldn't have been better to remain part of Britain.
Caught between problems at home and US pressure for free trade from abroad, the Dublin ruling class abandoned its previous policy of protection of native industry and opened the economy to foreign capital. Economic nationalism was dead: in fact bourgeois economists and historians identify 1958 as the turning point in the development of the now sickly Celtic tiger.
Attracting foreign capital became the new policy and workers were taxed heavily in order to give incentives to transnationals to move in. The one time "frugality" of Fianna Fail gave way to a feeding frenzy of crony capitalism which a succession of tribunals have spent the last few years appearing to Investigate John Regan's book suggests that the roots of the complete about turn in Fianna Fail in the late 1950s can be traced back the 1921-23 Civil War. Regan is no Marxist (he's a liberal historian) and he works from the position that in every revolution a point is reached where: "An attempt has to be made to turn aspirations into realities and in that process compromises have to be struck, dissenters abandoned, opponents suppressed"
But he can't avoid pointing out that the outcome of the civil war was not merely a consolidation of the revolution but a counter-revolution. The victorious proTreaty side represented the large farming and financial interests who relied on the link with Britain. The defeated republicans were the small farmers, small town bourgeoisie and sections of the working class who had done most of the fighting and were disappointed by the partitionist deal imposed by the British in 1921.
At best, the outcome of the 1919-1921 War of Independence was a stalemate - echoes of the most recent "peace agreement". Neither wing of the bourgeoisie in the South (both represented within Sinn Fein) was strong enough to impose its solution to the economic and political crisis of the new state.
The Treatyites had to get heavy weapons from the British to attack the Four Courts and the anti-Treaty forces were both reluctant and incapable of mobilising the mass of the people against Partition and neo-colonial status. Not alone was the southern ruling class divided among itself, it was also divided from its natural allies, the Unionists in the Six Counties. The working class was similarly divided and politically weaker. If there was the diversion away from class politics it was because the working class in both parts of Ireland allowed itself to be divided and dominated by the bourgeoisie through the carnival of orange and catholic reaction foretold by James Connolly. The first post independence regime lasted from 1922 to 1932. Despite Regan's obvious its opponents in the Civil War. Counties. king. for free trade in the late 1950s. better known as the "Blueshirts".
sympathy with some of its leaders, for example Kevin O'Higgins, he acknowledges (excuses?) the brutality of its suppression of Afterwards there was the free use of repressive legislation, a rigid economic policy following the line set in the British Treasury and a harsh Catholic social policy, which mirrored the Orange State in the Six tion.
Having split over the Treaty, Sinn Fein split again in 1926 with the majority following de Valera into the Parliament they had thought illegitimate and which involved swearing an oath of allegiance to the British Majority In 1932 de Valera was able to form a government with the help of Labour and early the following year won an overall majority. Fianna Fail, which remained in power until 1973 with two brief interruptions, implemented the original Sinn Fein policy of protection until it ran into the US led demands Regan devotes a section of the book to the reaction of the outgoing Cumann na nGaedheal party to Fianna Fail's election victory. Having failed with a vicious redbaiting campaign, there were rumours of an army mutiny. More seriously, in 1933 General Eoin O'Duffy, recently dismissed Chief of Police, took over as leader of the Army Comrades Association, an organisation comprising former Treatyite soldiers and Modelled on Mussolini's Blackshirts with a fascist-type salute, it was committed to "opposing communism". For a while it threatened the Fianna Fail government but
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