Many will have been shocked at the violent turn taken by anti-immigration protests in Ireland in recent years, with calls to “burn them out” of their emergency accommodation. Indeed, there have been several cases of arson. But, this is not the first time these tactics have been used by the far right here. Assault, arson and even murder were all part of the toolkit of the Blueshirts in the 1930s.
While it may have lain relatively dormant since the mid-20th century, Ireland has a long history of far-right agitation, including by more-or-less explicit adherents to fascist ideology. This history is the subject of Burn Them Out!, a new book by Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc.
Already in the 1920s there were a number of esoteric far-right fringe groups in existence. The story begins with Mussolini’s march on Rome, and the organic emergence of the fascio di Dublino, an offshoot of his fascist party among the Italian expatriate community. The group raised the hackles of trade union organiser Jim Larkin, among others, but had limited impact on the political discourse in the early years of the Free State.
During these years following the War of Independence there remained an appetite among a cohort of those resentful of the new regime for a political outlet that reflected their views. This was particularly pertinent among the British army officer class. This proved fertile ground for another exotic import, the British Fascisti, whom Óg Ó Ruairc characterises as “a curious mix of Italian fascism, British conservatism, Irish loyalism and conspirational anti-Semitism”. In fact, one aspect that shines through the author’s narrative of the 1920s and 1930s is the extent of anti-Semitism in elite circles in Ireland.
Consideration of both the fascio di Dublino and the British Fascisti helps provide a complete picture of the emergence of fascism in Ireland. However, their chapter-length treatment perhaps gives misleading prominence to fringe outfits with foreign origins that never had a meaningful impact on the Irish political scene.
This criticism is less valid when it comes to the British Union of Fascists (BUF), which succeeded in gaining more of a foothold on the island of Ireland. Many readers will be familiar with Sir Oswald Mosley, the most infamous of British fascists, some of whose exploits were dramatised in the fictional Netflix series Peaky Blinders. They may be less familiar with his efforts to organise in Ireland after founding the BUF in 1932. These efforts were concentrated in Northern Ireland, operating through a front organisation, the Ulster Fascists, and achieved a degree of success among the unionist community. Perhaps naively, Mosley aspired also to attract Catholic nationalists and even sent an emissary to propose a merger with the Blueshirts.
Mosley would later make a high-profile cameo appearance in Ireland, appearing as a guest on The Late Late Show, at a time when he was banned from appearing on the BBC. Ó Ruairc is highly criticial of his “soft soap” treatment by host Gay Byrne, noting that it was left to a member of the audience to challenge Mosley on his anti-Semitism.
In the eyes of the author, the Army Comrades Association (ACA), as the Blueshirts were formally known, was very much a fascist movement with Irish characteristics. In this important respect his analysis differs from that of Maurice Manning, heretofore the most notable historian of the movement. The ACA was deeply Catholic, conservative, anti-Republican, ethno-nationalist and anti-Semitic. There are documented instances of prospective recruits being refused membership on the basis of their Jewish religion. Among the epithets thrown at their nemesis, taoiseach Éamon de Valera, was that he was a “Spanish Jew”.
Accounting for more than a quarter of the book, the chapter on Fine Gael and the Blueshirts provides the real meat of the story. Far from being a fringe organisation, the Blueshirts had a peak membership of 47,000. This was more than the BUF had at its peak, despite the UK population being some 15 times greater than Ireland’s. As noted above, it was an avowedly violent outfit. Unlike the BUF, the Blueshirts actually killed a handful of people, without ever being brought to justice for their crimes.
Following the Blueshirts’ merger with Cumann na Gaedheal and the National Centre Party to form Fine Gael in 1933 they provided that party’s first leader, Eoin O’Duffy, and counted 60 Fine Gael TDs among its membership. Several of these would even wear their Blueshirt uniforms in the Dáil chamber.
The movement could also claim adherents among the cultural elite. For example, centrist politicians often cite The Second Coming by WB Yeats – “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” – in calling for moderation. One wonders if they are aware of Yeats’s own flirtation with fascism and membership of the Blueshirts, finding himself “constantly urging the despotic rule of the educated classes”. This is a prime example of the author’s shining a light on inconvenient historical facts that may be more typically swept under the carpet of Irish mythology.
Ó Ruairc paints a portrait of O’Duffy as a chronic alcoholic, a fantasist, an almost clownish avatar for the Irish far right at the peak of its powers. Both Yeats and Fine Gael would soon become disillusioned with his antics, the latter opting for the more respectable path of Catholic conservatism over fascism. Having been ousted by the Blueshirts and disowned by Fine Gael, O’Duffy remained to the forefront of Ireland’s far right for a time, leading his Greenshirts to fight ignominiously on the side of Franco in the Spanish Civil War.
Reminiscent of the fascio di Dublino in the 1920s, a branch of the Nazi party emerged in Ireland prior to the outbreak of hostilities in the second World War. In what would become acutely embarrassing for the Irish government, the branch’s leader, Adolf Mahr, was director of the National Museum. In another memorable vignette, one which will no doubt horrify today’s supporters of the club, Bohemians FC played a friendly match against the crew of the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein at Dalymount Park. The ship would later come to global attention when it fired the first shots of the second World War.
Although the author broadly identifies anti-Republicanism as a common thread among Irish far-right groups, he notes that some Republicans sought to align with the Nazis during the second World War in the hope of precipitating a British military defeat, and thereby a united Ireland. This was not due to any affinity with Nazism, but a cold calculation that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend”.
Having detailed at length the various currents that dominated the Ireland’s far right in its heyday from the mid-1920s to the mid-1940s, the final chapter sees the author race through 80 years of postwar history up to the present day. This is not a reflection of editorial choice but of the relevant dormancy of the far right.
Ailtirí na hAiséirghe, a party focused on promoting Gaelic culture and language, fused with neo-fascism, was successful in electing several county councillors immediately after the war but had completely disappeared by the 1970s. In certain respects, however, its template could be considered the forerunner of Ireland’s modern far right.
For the best part of a half century, Ireland’s far right lay relatively dormant. There were attempts by Northern loyalists to build links with neo-fascist organisations in Britain, and occasional aborted attempts by the latter to organise in the Republic. Ó Ruairc recounts the riot by sections of the visiting support at the 1995 friendly football match between England and the Republic of Ireland at Lansdowne Road in 1995 and their links to neo-nazi outfit Combat-18. They chanted “Judas, Judas!” at Ireland manager Jack Charlton. Not only was he a former English player, as the author notes he was a “committed socialist and anti-fascist and a founding member of the Anti-Nazi League in Britain”.
Burn Them Out! concludes by noting the failure of the far right to make a breakthrough in the 2024 general election, but warns that `the Irish do not have an intrinsic immunity to fascism and Nazism`
Towards the end of the last decade the far right re-emerged on the political fringes as immigration has become more politically salient. This trend accelerated during the Covid pandemic and has burst into the open since. Things appeared to have come full circle last August when anti-immigrant protestors brought tricolours and a “Coolock Says No” banner to a loyalist-led demonstration in Belfast. Ó Ruairc notes that this fulfilled the 1930s aspiration of Mosley to unite Catholic nationalists with Ulster loyalists behind a fascist agenda.
Burn Them Out! concludes by noting the failure of the far right to make a breakthrough in the 2024 general election, but warns that “the Irish do not have an intrinsic immunity to fascism and Nazism”. The takeaway lesson is that a fringe political movement can quickly move centre-stage in a charged political environment, particularly against a backdrop of economic chaos. A housing crisis that has become chronic, a cost-of-living crisis that still bites, and choppier economic waters on the horizon mean that we cannot take for granted that the moment of peril has passed.
The book would have benefitted from a prologue to guide the reader through what follows. Instead, this role is played by a short foreword by the singer-songwriter Christy Moore, who concludes that “this book should be essential reading for anyone who fears the rising tide of hatred and thuggery seen in recent years”.
This is an important book for anyone wanting to learn more about the origins and precursors of Ireland’s newly resurgent far right.
Further reading
The Blueshirts (Gill & Macmillan, 2006) by Maurice Manning. Although Pádraig Óg Ó Ruairc takes exception in ‘Burn them Out!’ to several of Manning’s main conclusions, the latter’s 2006 history of the movement has heretofore been considered the definitive book-length treatment of the movement. Unlike Ó Ruairc, Manning concluded that they “had much of the appearance but little of the substance of Fascism.”
The Origins of Totalitarianism (Schocken Books, 1951) by Hannah Arendt. Published in 1951, and often cited since, Arendt’s first major work examined Nazism and Stalinism, the defining totalitarian movements of the 20th century. The author distinguishes between Italian fascism, based on dictatorial one-party rule, and the all-encompassing Nazi and Soviet regimes that “discovered a means of dominating and terrorizing human beings from within”.
How to Stop Fascism: History, Ideology, Resistance (Allen Lane, 2021) by Paul Mason. Previously reviewed in these pages, Mason’s 2021 book considers the history and ideology of fascism. He not only looks at the rise of Hitler and Mussolini, but the ideas that motivated them, the social actors that facilitated them and the political actors who failed to stop them.
