The Irish leader who prayed for a Nazi invasion

The pro-Hitler General Eoin O’Duffy, who died 75 years ago this week, is a reminder of the indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews which existed in some parts of Ireland in the 1930s

V IN THE summer of 1939, General Eoin O’Duffy received a message from Francisco Franco. The Spanish dictator thanked the former head of the Irish army and police for his messages of support “on the victory of the Spanish Army in defence of Christianity, occidental civilisation and humanity, over the forces of destruction and disorder”.

Nor were these the only words of gratitude to O’Duffy from the ranks of the victorious Nationalist forces at the conclusion of Spain’s bloody three-year civil war. The Archbishop of Toledo wrote to the general expressing his “admiration for noble and Catholic Ireland, from whom Spain received encouragement and sympathy during the hardest moments of her struggle for the faith”.

O’Duffy, who died 75 years ago this week, is one of the most controversial figures in interwar Irish history. Ireland’s answer to Oswald Mosley, he led the young state’s fascist Blueshirt movement and organised the Irish Brigade, which briefly fought for Franco in Spain. He is, moreover, a reminder of the dark undercurrent of antisemitism and indifference to the fate of Europe’s Jews which existed in some quarters in Ireland in the 1930s.

Like Mosley — a former Conservative and Labour MP before founding the British Union of Fascists — O’Duffy was no political outsider. He joined Sinn Fein and the IRA in the wake of the failed 1916 Easter Uprising, fought in the Irish War of Independence, and supported Michael Collins pro-Treaty forces in the ensuing civil war. In 1922, after a brief stint in the Dail, O’Duffy became police commissioner and was also briefly also in command of the army.

O’Duffy’s indifference to the rule of law was already apparent during his time as Garda commissioner. But it was when he was dismissed from his post by the newly elected government of Eamonn De Valera in 1933 — O’Duffy is believed to have advocated a coup to prevent it taking office — that his dalliance with fascism began.

Within months, O’Duffy had been elected head of the Army Comrades Association — a vigilante group of rightwing former officers — who had adopted the uniform of blue shirts.

Like Mosley, O’Duffy was drawn to, and impressed by, the growing strength of European fascist movements. He renamed the “Blueshirts” the National Guard and began to advocate sweeping political changes which would effectively gut Ireland’s young democracy. Recognising this, in August 1933, a planned, Mussolini-like “March on Dublin” by the Blueshirts was banned by the government, which deemed it “likely to interfere with law and order”.

O’Duffy’s movement posed a threat to Irish democracy and to the country’s small Jewish community. It was only open to Christians and its newspaper advocated that the “first act” of a Blueshirt government should be to “send all the foreign exploiters who have come in here during the past 12 or 13 years back to the land or lands of their birth”. Thus, as the historian Dermot Keogh, has argued, it was through the Blueshirts that “antisemitism was introduced more directly into Irish politics”.

But, like Mosley, too, O’Duffy straddled the divide between a willingness to work within the political system and a desire to use extra-parliamentary activity to smash it and, like his British counterpart, too, he was also courted by some mainstream p o l i t i cians who sought to capitalise

British counterpart: Oswald Mosley on his supposed popularity. When Ireland’s opposition parties formed Fine Gael in September 1933, O’Duffy was invited to become its president, with the former prime minister, William Cosgrave, leading it in the Dail. As Tony Gray writes in his account of 20th century Irish history, this meant that “the new party had an alternative para-military force with which to oppose the official army/police force — a potentially sinister situation”.

Like its counterpart in London, De Valera’s government moved to hinder the extreme right by banning political parties from wearing military-style uniforms. O’Duffy’s threats that “our movement has long passed the stage when the government intimidation could put it down” ultimately proved idle. In the end, the alliance between Ireland’s aspiring fascist leader and some of its parliamentarians proved an uneasy and short-lived one, with O’Duffy resigning as Fine Gael president in late 1934. O’Duffy’s explicitly fascist National Corporate party, formed the following year following a split within the Blueshirts, failed to catch light.

O’Duffy’s political marginalisation led him to attempt to exploit the strong popular support for Franco’s forces when civil war broke out in Spain in the summer of 1936. As the academic Fearghal McGarry has suggested, for many in Ireland, the war was viewed “as a religious rather than political conflict” with the undoubted acts of anticlerical violence perpetrated by the Republican forces seen as posing an existential threat to their fellow Catholics in Spain.

O’Duffy’s movement was only open to Christians