PEADAR O’DONNELL: IRELAND’S NEGLECTED REPUBLICAN SOCIALIST
By Peter Urban
While widely respected for his contribution to modern Irish literature, Peadar O’Donnell’s contribution to the Irish republican socialist tradition rarely seems to attain the recognition it merits. Perhaps Liam Mellows tragic death before a Free State firing squad while still in his youth accounts for the tremendous disparity between the respect that his memory has received within republican socialist circles in Ireland and that accorded to O’Donnell. But if the latter half of O’Donnell’s 93-year-long life lacked some of the drama that may account for Mellows’ memory being so elevated, the first half is filled with events that leave little question but that O’Donnell deserves to be recognized as one of the greatest figures in the Irish revolutionary movement since the towering figures of James Connolly and Jim Larkin.
Peadar O’Donnell was born on February 22, 1893 in the region of Donegal known as the Rosses. He was born into a large family of small farmers and, like many such families in Donegal, the land that his parent’s owned was not sufficient to alone support the family. As a result, O’Donnell’s father seasonally migrated to Scotland each summer, to work at harvesting potatoes and in the winter he worked as a waged labourer in a cornmill. This familiar pattern in Donegal of small farmers spending at least part of each year engaged as wage-earners and the common phenomena of Donegal small farmers regularly traveling to Scotland for work contributed to the region’s small farming populace acquiring proletarian consciousness and a far more cosmopolitan outlook that would otherwise be expected in such a rural district.
O’Donnell’s intellectual and political development were also influenced by local traditions anti-landlord secret societies, such as the Molly Maguires, who exploits in the mid-19th century were fodder for a great many local legends. A relative of the O’Donnell family, Anthony Gallagher, had even been hung in 1863 for his part in the killing of a local landlord. Peadar’s maternal aunt was a schoolteacher and a member of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) and both she and his mother were devout followers of ‘Larkinism’, as revolutionary syndicalism was known at the time. Moreover, his mother’s brother had worked as a hard-rock miner in Butte, Montana, in the U.S., where he had been an active member of the Industrial Workers’ of the World, before returning to Donegal in 1913.
O’Donnell became a schoolteacher himself and joined INTO. In July 1917 he was elected CountySecretary at the union’s Annual General Meeting. In addition, the AGM passed two motions he’d drafted, including one of which called for compulsory education up to the age of 16, supported by a house tax. The other motion by O’Donnell passed by the AGM was a call for equal pay for female teachers, which illustrates what would be a consistent pattern of fighting for women’s rights throughout his life, much as did James Connolly. It was also in 1917 that O’Donnell emerged as a frequent contributor of letters to various newspapers, another trait that would remain constant throughout most of his life. In a letter to the Derry Journal in November 1917 advocated, “Politics (be) discussed from the social and economic point of view,” declaring that, “Modern politics are inseparable from economic conditions.”
O’Donnell emerged immediately as a revolutionary, calling, in a speech made in 1918, upon his fellow INTO members to, “Let us convert our schools into hotbeds, where working men’s interests are fostered.” Later in 1918 his union affiliated to the Derry Trades and Labour Council, providing O’Donnell with broader contacts within the trade union movement. His activism had not gone unnoticed and when efforts were made to organize local workers who were engaged in seasonal work in Scotland as potato harvesters, he was asked to act as the chair of the meeting at which the Arranmore Migratory Labourers Union was founded. That summer he traveled to Scotland to observe working conditions there for himself and it was at that time he first met Willie Gallacher, a leading figure among Scotland’s ‘Red Clyde’ revolutionaries and a founding member of the Communist Party.
On Gallacher’s recommendation, O’Donnell gave up his teaching career and became a full-time organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, the industrial union forged by Larkin and Connolly. He was made the ITGWU organiser for Ulster in August 1918 and quickly earned a reputation for having “blazed a trail of glory clean across Ulster,” in the words of the ITGWU’s newspaper, The Voice of Labour. It was about this time that O’Donnell began reading the writings of Karl Marx and came to see himself as a Marxist.
O’Donnell’s work for the ITGWU during this period shows a consistent record of revolutionary zeal, original and effective tactics, the capacity to overcome the challenge of sectarianism within the working class, and a preparedness to engage in direct action. When negotiations on behalf of workers at an insane asylum broke down—the strike began after the directors balked at wage increases for female workers, to which O’Donnell replied, “As the question of the female workers has not been settled, nothing is settled,”—O’Donnell organised a 12-day-long occupation of the asylum that included defending the premises from an attempt to re-take it by 125 police. During the occupation, the workers flew the red flag above the asylum and maintained a superior record for the health and well being of the patients than the normal average, despite operating under siege conditions.
In 1919, O’Donnell attempted to found chapters of the Socialist Party of Ireland in both Monaghan and Derry, though without success. Despite being consistently critical of Sinn Fein’s anti-labour policies during this period, O’Donnell also joined the Irish Republican Army during 1919. He had actually wanted to join the Irish Citizen Army that Connolly had led during the Easter Rising, but the ITGWU had effectively mothballed the ICA at the time. However, after spending some time within the ranks of the IRA, he commented to his friend and fellow volunteer Pat Murray, “Murray, 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,” and then went on to found an ICA unit in Monaghan, though he later disbanded it, because of the low level of class-consciousness among the volunteers there. O’Donnell’s recognition of the importance of distinct working class organisation within the armed national liberation movement in Ireland at the time, however, testifies to O’Donnell being far closer to the advanced thinking of James Connolly than most of his contemporaries.
In 1920 O’Donnell was active in campaigning for Irish Labour Party candidates in counties Cavan and Monaghan, where six of 13 Cavan town Urban Council seats were won by Labour candidates, including the first female Labor councillor elected in Ireland. He moved to Derry later that year, where he founded the Workers’ Education Committee, which was later to become a branch of the JamesConnollyLabourCollege. In Derry, O’Donnell himself stood for election as the city’s Poor Law Guardian. He listed his occupation on his candidacy papers as, “Workers’ Republican Organiser.” During this period in Derry he intervened to bring a successful conclusion to a strike by the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, where is commitment to fighting for the rights of the women workers left such an impression many women workers from Derry’s Protestant community took membership in the ITGWU, despite these being times of heightened sectarianism there.
At the close of October 1920, however, O’Donnell drew his final wages from the ITGWU, as he was given command of the IRA’s Second Battalion in Donegal and headed a flying column that was active throughout the region through the end of 1921. During this period he managed to remain politically active, however, including giving a talk in Derry on the topic of “Labour and Partition,” where he reiterated the analysis James Connolly had put forth on the same topic, arguing that Partition would serve to divide the working class and foster a general climate of reaction.
When the Treaty was signed bring the national liberation war to an end, O’Donnell joined those Irish republicans opposed to the Treaty and was with the rest of the Republican leadership in the Four Courts in Dublin when it was shelled. He was imprisoned with other members of the IRA’s leadership in MountJoy and it was there that he met his future wife, Lile, who acted as a messenger between the Republican leadership and their supporters outside the prison. Lile was already a member of the Communist Party of Ireland at that time. O’Donnell remained imprisoned until he escaped in March 1924, during which time he was, for a time, next in line for execution by the Free State if the IRA carried out any further assassinations of member of the Dail, following the execution of Liam Mellows. Also during his period of incarceration he participated in a hunger strike in 1923, going 40 days without eating until the prisoners won their demands.
It was also during his incarceration that O’Donnell engaged in most of the creative activity on the literary works for which he is best known. In 1925, the same year he was elected to the 7-person Army Council of the IRA, that he published his first novel, Storm. It was also that year that he became the editor of An Phoblacht, the Republican Movement’s newspaper. As the paper’s editor, O’Donnell had the opportunity to demonstrate his internationalism, including articles in support of Sandino in Nicaragua, the Indian movement for national liberation, and the Soviet Union. He was later an active member of the League Against Imperialism and in 1929 joined André Malraux’s League of Writers Against Fascism and War.
1926 O’Donnell was back in Donegal, where he was responsible for building a national “No Tribute” movement, which called upon small farmers to withhold paying land annuities, which the Treaty had forced the Free State government to collect, when Britain demand compensation for 30-years’ worth of arrears in land payments. Despite De Valera’s objection to what ultimately translated into a rent-strike by small farmers, the popularity of the campaign not only forced Fianna Fail to adopt the “No Tribute” position into its electoral program, but eventually forced the Free State to suspend payments to Britain, when withholding by small farmers ultimately spread to over 90%. He also helped to organize an Irish delegation to attend the Congress of Small Farmers in April 1930 and, in 1931, formed the Irish Working Farmers’ Committee and attended the European Peasants Congress in Berlin, as a member of the IWFC. In fact, O’Donnell is unequalled in the history of 20th Century socialist activism among Ireland’s rural populace. Peadar O’Donnell is arguably the most successful figure in leading revolutionary organizing within Ireland’s small farmer community since Michael Davitt and the Land League, but surpassed Davitt by wedding the struggle of the Irish small farmers to the socialist struggle of the Irish working class.
In 1929 O’Donnell had passed the editorship of An Phoblacht on to his protégé Frank Ryan and started his own socialist newspaper, Workers’ Voice, in 1930. The following year he launched a new political party, with the endorsement of the IRA, called Saor Eire (Free Ireland). O’Donnell’s influence as a socialist within the republican community was already such a recognized threat by both the Free State government and Ireland’s reactionary Catholic hierarchy the new party was immediately denounced in a Pastoral Letter read out at churches throughout Ireland and then proscribed, along with the IRA, in the Public Safety Bill of 1931—which also proscribed just about every other organization in Ireland with the words “worker” or “labour” in its name.
In 1933 O’Donnell, along George Gilmour, campaigned throughout Ireland to build support for launching a broad Left front, which would become known as the Republican Congress. The concept was advanced at the IRA Convention held on the 17th of March 1934 and a majority of delegates in attendance voted in favor of the proposal. However, the Executive and the Army Council opposed the resolution, thereby forcing O’Donnell, Gilmour, Ryan, and Mick Price to resign from the IRA. Immediately thereafter, O’Donnell launched the Republican Congress newspaper and threw himself into organizing for the new united front organization.
The Protestant workers who attended the Bodenstown commemorations in both 1934 and 1935 were members of Congress chapters in Ballymacarret and the Shankill Road that had been founded by O’Donnell, who had a long history of demonstrating his ability to overcome sectarianism within the northern working class. What is less widely publicized that the attendance by these Protestant working class chapters of the Republican Congress at Bodenstown, however, is the fact that in both years they attended, IRA volunteers from Tipperary blocked them from entering the cemetery; because of the “communist” banners they carried. In both years, these contingents of class-conscious Protestant workers were compelled to lay the wreaths and banner outside the cemetery gates. It is noteworthy that these were the last years in which the Republican Movement included any notable body of Protestants within its ranks.
Despite the early successes in building the Republican Congress, an unyielding divide between the primary organizers of the effort wreaked the founding convention of the front. Unbeknownst to O’Donnell, Gilmour, and Ryan, Mick Price and Roddy Connolly (of the Communist Party and the son of James Connolly) intended to use the Republican Congress as the base from which to launch the Workers’ Republican Party and use the new party to vie for seats in the Dail. When the convention was held, the final vote was 84 for the founding of a new political party and 99 for the formation of a United Front. With neither side prepared to compromise, the Republican Congress was doomed to failure and O’Donnell stopped publishing the Republican Congress newspaper in November 1935.
Lile and Peadar went to Catalonia in the Spring of 1936 for a holiday and wound up finding themselves in the midst of the launching of Franco’s attack on the Spanish Republican government. Upon they’re return to Ireland they threw themselves into countering the Catholic Church’s propaganda campaign against the SpanishRepublic in favor of the Phalangists. O’Donnell returned to Catalonia again in September of the year and upon his return campaigned to recruit members for the Connolly Column, which Frank Ryan would lead to join in the international defense of the SpanishRepublic.
Ireland’s adoption of a “Republican Constitution” in 1937, which O’Donnell felt would undermine support for the Republican Movement, coupled with the collapse of the Republican Congress and Frank Ryan becoming a prisoner of war in Spain seem to have drained O’Donnell of much of the revolutionary zeal that so much typified his younger years. As O’Donnell approached the 45th year of his life, he largely retreated from revolutionary political activity, though never renouncing or completely severing his relations with the revolutionary movement. For example, O’Donnell was the first president of the Irish section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a sponsor of the Irish anti-apartheid movement. Moreover, despite suffering a major stroke in 1964, O’Donnell led a march on the US embassy in Dublin in 1968, to coincide with the March on the Pentagon being held in Washington, DC. After Lile died on Halloween 1969, however, O’Donnell retreated even further from public life.
Perhaps it is a result of Peadar O’Donnell having lived long enough to feel the approach of middle-age and his senior years and to wind down his political activism incrementally, rather than to have become a martyr in his youth, like too many other Irish revolutionaries; but O’Donnell has not received the recognition he deserves for his contribution to the Irish republican socialist tendency. If that is the case, there may be a lesson for us all in reflecting on O’Donnell’s contribution—the contribution of republican socialist revolutionaries must not be required to undergo martyrdom in order to be fully appreciated. Our side has lost far too many gifted leaders and we would do well to ensure the republican socialist activists be capable of living for the struggle, rather than insisting they must die for it.
Whatever the cause, however, recognition of the contribution of Peadar O’Donnell to the republican socialist tradition in Ireland is long overdue. O’Donnell’s recognition of the importance of distinct working class organization within the Irish republican tendency is a vital return to Connolly. The example he set in his lifetime for overcoming religious sectarianism in Ulster in building working-class consciousness is worthy of emulation. Moreover, O’Donnell’s insights on organizing around socialist objectives within Ireland’s rural populace have not been surpassed since his death. While Liam Mellows may deserve the honor accorded him, Peadar O’Donnell is without equal among Irish republican socialist activists after Connolly and Larkin.
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While widely respected for his contribution to modern Irish literature, Peadar O’Donnell’s contribution to the Irish republican socialist tradition rarely seems to attain the recognition it merits. Perhaps Liam Mellows tragic death before a Free State firing squad while still in his youth accounts for the tremendous disparity between the respect that his memory has received within republican socialist circles in Ireland and that accorded to O’Donnell. But if the latter half of O’Donnell’s 93-year-long life lacked some of the drama that may account for Mellows’ memory being so elevated, the first half is filled with events that leave little question but that O’Donnell deserves to be recognized as one of the greatest figures in the Irish revolutionary movement since the towering figures of James Connolly and Jim Larkin.
Peadar O’Donnell was born on February 22, 1893 in the region of Donegal known as the Rosses. He was born into a large family of small farmers and, like many such families in Donegal, the land that his parent’s owned was not sufficient to alone support the family. As a result, O’Donnell’s father seasonally migrated to Scotland each summer, to work at harvesting potatoes and in the winter he worked as a waged labourer in a cornmill. This familiar pattern in Donegal of small farmers spending at least part of each year engaged as wage-earners and the common phenomena of Donegal small farmers regularly traveling to Scotland for work contributed to the region’s small farming populace acquiring proletarian consciousness and a far more cosmopolitan outlook that would otherwise be expected in such a rural district.
O’Donnell’s intellectual and political development were also influenced by local traditions anti-landlord secret societies, such as the Molly Maguires, who exploits in the mid-19th century were fodder for a great many local legends. A relative of the O’Donnell family, Anthony Gallagher, had even been hung in 1863 for his part in the killing of a local landlord. Peadar’s maternal aunt was a schoolteacher and a member of the Irish National Teachers’ Organisation (INTO) and both she and his mother were devout followers of ‘Larkinism’, as revolutionary syndicalism was known at the time. Moreover, his mother’s brother had worked as a hard-rock miner in Butte, Montana, in the U.S., where he had been an active member of the Industrial Workers’ of the World, before returning to Donegal in 1913.
O’Donnell became a schoolteacher himself and joined INTO. In July 1917 he was elected CountySecretary at the union’s Annual General Meeting. In addition, the AGM passed two motions he’d drafted, including one of which called for compulsory education up to the age of 16, supported by a house tax. The other motion by O’Donnell passed by the AGM was a call for equal pay for female teachers, which illustrates what would be a consistent pattern of fighting for women’s rights throughout his life, much as did James Connolly. It was also in 1917 that O’Donnell emerged as a frequent contributor of letters to various newspapers, another trait that would remain constant throughout most of his life. In a letter to the Derry Journal in November 1917 advocated, “Politics (be) discussed from the social and economic point of view,” declaring that, “Modern politics are inseparable from economic conditions.”
O’Donnell emerged immediately as a revolutionary, calling, in a speech made in 1918, upon his fellow INTO members to, “Let us convert our schools into hotbeds, where working men’s interests are fostered.” Later in 1918 his union affiliated to the Derry Trades and Labour Council, providing O’Donnell with broader contacts within the trade union movement. His activism had not gone unnoticed and when efforts were made to organize local workers who were engaged in seasonal work in Scotland as potato harvesters, he was asked to act as the chair of the meeting at which the Arranmore Migratory Labourers Union was founded. That summer he traveled to Scotland to observe working conditions there for himself and it was at that time he first met Willie Gallacher, a leading figure among Scotland’s ‘Red Clyde’ revolutionaries and a founding member of the Communist Party.
On Gallacher’s recommendation, O’Donnell gave up his teaching career and became a full-time organiser for the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union, the industrial union forged by Larkin and Connolly. He was made the ITGWU organiser for Ulster in August 1918 and quickly earned a reputation for having “blazed a trail of glory clean across Ulster,” in the words of the ITGWU’s newspaper, The Voice of Labour. It was about this time that O’Donnell began reading the writings of Karl Marx and came to see himself as a Marxist.
O’Donnell’s work for the ITGWU during this period shows a consistent record of revolutionary zeal, original and effective tactics, the capacity to overcome the challenge of sectarianism within the working class, and a preparedness to engage in direct action. When negotiations on behalf of workers at an insane asylum broke down—the strike began after the directors balked at wage increases for female workers, to which O’Donnell replied, “As the question of the female workers has not been settled, nothing is settled,”—O’Donnell organised a 12-day-long occupation of the asylum that included defending the premises from an attempt to re-take it by 125 police. During the occupation, the workers flew the red flag above the asylum and maintained a superior record for the health and well being of the patients than the normal average, despite operating under siege conditions.
In 1919, O’Donnell attempted to found chapters of the Socialist Party of Ireland in both Monaghan and Derry, though without success. Despite being consistently critical of Sinn Fein’s anti-labour policies during this period, O’Donnell also joined the Irish Republican Army during 1919. He had actually wanted to join the Irish Citizen Army that Connolly had led during the Easter Rising, but the ITGWU had effectively mothballed the ICA at the time. However, after spending some time within the ranks of the IRA, he commented to his friend and fellow volunteer Pat Murray, “Murray, 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,” and then went on to found an ICA unit in Monaghan, though he later disbanded it, because of the low level of class-consciousness among the volunteers there. O’Donnell’s recognition of the importance of distinct working class organisation within the armed national liberation movement in Ireland at the time, however, testifies to O’Donnell being far closer to the advanced thinking of James Connolly than most of his contemporaries.
In 1920 O’Donnell was active in campaigning for Irish Labour Party candidates in counties Cavan and Monaghan, where six of 13 Cavan town Urban Council seats were won by Labour candidates, including the first female Labor councillor elected in Ireland. He moved to Derry later that year, where he founded the Workers’ Education Committee, which was later to become a branch of the JamesConnollyLabourCollege. In Derry, O’Donnell himself stood for election as the city’s Poor Law Guardian. He listed his occupation on his candidacy papers as, “Workers’ Republican Organiser.” During this period in Derry he intervened to bring a successful conclusion to a strike by the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, where is commitment to fighting for the rights of the women workers left such an impression many women workers from Derry’s Protestant community took membership in the ITGWU, despite these being times of heightened sectarianism there.
At the close of October 1920, however, O’Donnell drew his final wages from the ITGWU, as he was given command of the IRA’s Second Battalion in Donegal and headed a flying column that was active throughout the region through the end of 1921. During this period he managed to remain politically active, however, including giving a talk in Derry on the topic of “Labour and Partition,” where he reiterated the analysis James Connolly had put forth on the same topic, arguing that Partition would serve to divide the working class and foster a general climate of reaction.
When the Treaty was signed bring the national liberation war to an end, O’Donnell joined those Irish republicans opposed to the Treaty and was with the rest of the Republican leadership in the Four Courts in Dublin when it was shelled. He was imprisoned with other members of the IRA’s leadership in MountJoy and it was there that he met his future wife, Lile, who acted as a messenger between the Republican leadership and their supporters outside the prison. Lile was already a member of the Communist Party of Ireland at that time. O’Donnell remained imprisoned until he escaped in March 1924, during which time he was, for a time, next in line for execution by the Free State if the IRA carried out any further assassinations of member of the Dail, following the execution of Liam Mellows. Also during his period of incarceration he participated in a hunger strike in 1923, going 40 days without eating until the prisoners won their demands.
It was also during his incarceration that O’Donnell engaged in most of the creative activity on the literary works for which he is best known. In 1925, the same year he was elected to the 7-person Army Council of the IRA, that he published his first novel, Storm. It was also that year that he became the editor of An Phoblacht, the Republican Movement’s newspaper. As the paper’s editor, O’Donnell had the opportunity to demonstrate his internationalism, including articles in support of Sandino in Nicaragua, the Indian movement for national liberation, and the Soviet Union. He was later an active member of the League Against Imperialism and in 1929 joined André Malraux’s League of Writers Against Fascism and War.
1926 O’Donnell was back in Donegal, where he was responsible for building a national “No Tribute” movement, which called upon small farmers to withhold paying land annuities, which the Treaty had forced the Free State government to collect, when Britain demand compensation for 30-years’ worth of arrears in land payments. Despite De Valera’s objection to what ultimately translated into a rent-strike by small farmers, the popularity of the campaign not only forced Fianna Fail to adopt the “No Tribute” position into its electoral program, but eventually forced the Free State to suspend payments to Britain, when withholding by small farmers ultimately spread to over 90%. He also helped to organize an Irish delegation to attend the Congress of Small Farmers in April 1930 and, in 1931, formed the Irish Working Farmers’ Committee and attended the European Peasants Congress in Berlin, as a member of the IWFC. In fact, O’Donnell is unequalled in the history of 20th Century socialist activism among Ireland’s rural populace. Peadar O’Donnell is arguably the most successful figure in leading revolutionary organizing within Ireland’s small farmer community since Michael Davitt and the Land League, but surpassed Davitt by wedding the struggle of the Irish small farmers to the socialist struggle of the Irish working class.
In 1929 O’Donnell had passed the editorship of An Phoblacht on to his protégé Frank Ryan and started his own socialist newspaper, Workers’ Voice, in 1930. The following year he launched a new political party, with the endorsement of the IRA, called Saor Eire (Free Ireland). O’Donnell’s influence as a socialist within the republican community was already such a recognized threat by both the Free State government and Ireland’s reactionary Catholic hierarchy the new party was immediately denounced in a Pastoral Letter read out at churches throughout Ireland and then proscribed, along with the IRA, in the Public Safety Bill of 1931—which also proscribed just about every other organization in Ireland with the words “worker” or “labour” in its name.
In 1933 O’Donnell, along George Gilmour, campaigned throughout Ireland to build support for launching a broad Left front, which would become known as the Republican Congress. The concept was advanced at the IRA Convention held on the 17th of March 1934 and a majority of delegates in attendance voted in favor of the proposal. However, the Executive and the Army Council opposed the resolution, thereby forcing O’Donnell, Gilmour, Ryan, and Mick Price to resign from the IRA. Immediately thereafter, O’Donnell launched the Republican Congress newspaper and threw himself into organizing for the new united front organization.
The Protestant workers who attended the Bodenstown commemorations in both 1934 and 1935 were members of Congress chapters in Ballymacarret and the Shankill Road that had been founded by O’Donnell, who had a long history of demonstrating his ability to overcome sectarianism within the northern working class. What is less widely publicized that the attendance by these Protestant working class chapters of the Republican Congress at Bodenstown, however, is the fact that in both years they attended, IRA volunteers from Tipperary blocked them from entering the cemetery; because of the “communist” banners they carried. In both years, these contingents of class-conscious Protestant workers were compelled to lay the wreaths and banner outside the cemetery gates. It is noteworthy that these were the last years in which the Republican Movement included any notable body of Protestants within its ranks.
Despite the early successes in building the Republican Congress, an unyielding divide between the primary organizers of the effort wreaked the founding convention of the front. Unbeknownst to O’Donnell, Gilmour, and Ryan, Mick Price and Roddy Connolly (of the Communist Party and the son of James Connolly) intended to use the Republican Congress as the base from which to launch the Workers’ Republican Party and use the new party to vie for seats in the Dail. When the convention was held, the final vote was 84 for the founding of a new political party and 99 for the formation of a United Front. With neither side prepared to compromise, the Republican Congress was doomed to failure and O’Donnell stopped publishing the Republican Congress newspaper in November 1935.
Lile and Peadar went to Catalonia in the Spring of 1936 for a holiday and wound up finding themselves in the midst of the launching of Franco’s attack on the Spanish Republican government. Upon they’re return to Ireland they threw themselves into countering the Catholic Church’s propaganda campaign against the SpanishRepublic in favor of the Phalangists. O’Donnell returned to Catalonia again in September of the year and upon his return campaigned to recruit members for the Connolly Column, which Frank Ryan would lead to join in the international defense of the SpanishRepublic.
Ireland’s adoption of a “Republican Constitution” in 1937, which O’Donnell felt would undermine support for the Republican Movement, coupled with the collapse of the Republican Congress and Frank Ryan becoming a prisoner of war in Spain seem to have drained O’Donnell of much of the revolutionary zeal that so much typified his younger years. As O’Donnell approached the 45th year of his life, he largely retreated from revolutionary political activity, though never renouncing or completely severing his relations with the revolutionary movement. For example, O’Donnell was the first president of the Irish section of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and a sponsor of the Irish anti-apartheid movement. Moreover, despite suffering a major stroke in 1964, O’Donnell led a march on the US embassy in Dublin in 1968, to coincide with the March on the Pentagon being held in Washington, DC. After Lile died on Halloween 1969, however, O’Donnell retreated even further from public life.
Perhaps it is a result of Peadar O’Donnell having lived long enough to feel the approach of middle-age and his senior years and to wind down his political activism incrementally, rather than to have become a martyr in his youth, like too many other Irish revolutionaries; but O’Donnell has not received the recognition he deserves for his contribution to the Irish republican socialist tendency. If that is the case, there may be a lesson for us all in reflecting on O’Donnell’s contribution—the contribution of republican socialist revolutionaries must not be required to undergo martyrdom in order to be fully appreciated. Our side has lost far too many gifted leaders and we would do well to ensure the republican socialist activists be capable of living for the struggle, rather than insisting they must die for it.
Whatever the cause, however, recognition of the contribution of Peadar O’Donnell to the republican socialist tradition in Ireland is long overdue. O’Donnell’s recognition of the importance of distinct working class organization within the Irish republican tendency is a vital return to Connolly. The example he set in his lifetime for overcoming religious sectarianism in Ulster in building working-class consciousness is worthy of emulation. Moreover, O’Donnell’s insights on organizing around socialist objectives within Ireland’s rural populace have not been surpassed since his death. While Liam Mellows may deserve the honor accorded him, Peadar O’Donnell is without equal among Irish republican socialist activists after Connolly and Larkin.
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