Lesser Spotted Comrades - Peadar O'Donnell
“We are making fools of ourselves putting out one sort of capitalist to put in another. I think I’ll start the Citizen Army here”
Article originally published in Issue 4 of Rupture, Ireland’s eco-socialist quarterly, buy the print issue.
Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1986) is a controversial figure. A socialist-republican, he worked in Britain for the Scottish Farm Servants' Union in 1918. He then became an organiser in the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, where he helped organise sections of Derry's working class Protestant community. By 1919, he was engaged in an effort to reform the local branch of the Irish Citizen Army. Failing to get the ICA off the ground, he joined the Irish Republican Army in 1920 and was catapulted into command of the Donegal IRA's Second Battalion.
By that point, he had led the first “soviet” in Ireland in February 1919. A strike at Monaghan Asylum became an occupation and the strikers raised the red flag declaring a soviet. Despite the use of armed police, the bosses were ultimately forced to agree to better pay and conditions.
O'Donnell adopted the view that the Republican movement had to base itself on organs of struggle created by small farmers and workers in order to win. To him, to be a Republican necessarily meant to be on the side of the workers and peasants and against capitalism. While in the IRA, he attempted to put these ideas into practice. He backed land seizures in defiance of the courts established by the Provisional Government, which did not share his view of the class allegiances of Republicanism.
“A strike at Monaghan Asylum became an occupation and the strikers raised the red flag declaring a soviet”
He joined the Anti-Treaty side of the split in the IRA. After he was imprisoned by the Free State, he was elected as an abstentionist TD for Donegal from his jail cell.
Once out of prison, O'Donnell became part of the left wing of the leadership of the IRA, along with George Gilmore and Frank Ryan. As editor of An Phoblacht, he built a campaign against land annuities. Seeing potential for an explosive struggle, O'Donnell argued that Republicans should orientate towards small farmers in order to “roast the Treaty in the fire from this kindling”. The campaign took off, gaining momentum amongst farmers, Sinn Féin, the IRA and Fianna Fáil. Fianna Fáil was pressured into withholding annuities, resulting in a trade war with Britain that lasted until 1938.
O'Donnell engineered the founding of Saor Éire in 1931 as the political wing of the IRA, proclaiming itself “an organisation of workers and working farmers”. It was banned, and in response to anti-communist backlash, IRA Chief of Staff Maurice Twomey distanced the IRA from it. This deepened a rift between the left and right of the movement. In 1934, the Army Council overturned a majority decision by the IRA membership to form a “Republican Congress” as a means to unify the labour and republican movement. O'Donnell, Ryan and Gilmore split from the IRA and went ahead to establish the Republican Congress.
The Republican Congress had little success. In its brief existence it notably managed to organise some Belfast Protestants, drawing on the work of the Communist Party in the years prior. O'Donnell engaged in united front activity with rank and file IRA members against the developing fascist movement. Fearful of communist influences, the IRA leadership banned collaboration with the Republican Congress, resulting in a section of IRA members leaving to join the Congress.
The Congress split at its first convention in 1934. O'Donnell found himself on the right wing of the defining debate. Opposed motions were brought forward at the convention - the left motion sponsored by Nora Connolly-O'Brien, Roddy Connolly, and Michael Price called for the Congress to form a political party committed to a Workers' Republic, and a counter-motion from O'Donnell, Ryan and Gilmore, which described Congress as a “united front of working-class and small farmers so that the submerged nation may be roused to free itself and to free and unite the Irish Republic”. O'Donnell's motion narrowly won, and a split ensued. His alignment on this issue with the CPI saw him denounced as a Stalinist by Trotskyist-inclined contemporaries, such as Michael Ahern.
O’Donnell had political strengths and weaknesses. He saw the socialist and national struggles as interlinked, and was loath to place unnecessary barriers between the revolutionary left and the mass nationalist movement which had a progressive, if contradictory, character. The flip side of this was a blurring of class antagonisms within the Republican movement. Even after his trial in absentia by the IRA leadership, O'Donnell still considered these right wing leaders to be comrades to be “rescued” instead of opposed. By stressing that Socialism and Republicanism were one and the same, O'Donnell believed he lowered barriers between the revolutionary left and the larger Republican movement. Instead he created political confusion.
O'Donnell championed the cause of the Republican government in the Spanish Revolution. Later he opposed the European Economic Community and the Vietnam war. He had a lifelong focus on questions of culture and language, editing the literary journal The Bell and defying state censorship.