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Eoin O'Duffy and the march of the Blueshirts
By Desmond Devoy Adolph Hitler. Benito Mussolini. Francisco Franco. Eoin O'Duffy?
For some, it is a stretch to link all four men together, with O'Duffy being the odd man out. For others, it makes perfect sense. O'Duffy did admire all three, and even fought for Franco. But to write him off as simply Ireland's wannabe Fascist dictator is to diminish a man who was arguably very much reflective of the era in which he lived.
For some Irish people, O'Duffy was a man who tried to keep the peace at a time when various competing groups, including the IRA, were trying to hold sway in Ireland.
For others, as the likes of author T. Ryle Dwyer contend, he came close to becoming Ireland's answer to the Fascist strongmen of Europe during the dark days of the 1930s, trying to take over the duly elected government in 1932.
Regardless, he remains one of the most interesting figures of Irish history during Ireland's first two decades as a nation, and a reminder that, no matter which way one cuts it, Ireland's fledgling democracy at the time was still fragile indeed.
Eoin O'Duffy was born Owen O'Duffy in Lough Esigh, near Castleblayney, County Monaghan on October 20th, 1892. He apprenticed as an engineer in Wexford before returning to work as an engineer and architect in Monaghan. In 1919, he became an auctioneer. During the 1910s, he was also a leading member in the Ulster branch of the Gaelic Athletic Association.
In 1917, O'Duffy joined the Irish Republican Army, and took part in the fighting of the War of Independence. In February of 1920, he took part in the first capture of a Royal Irish Constabulary barracks in Ballytrain, County Monaghan. He was later imprisoned several times but eventually became a director of the army in 1921.
In May of 1921, he was elected as a Sinn Fein TD for Monaghan in the second Dail Eireann. By January of 1922, he became the IRA's Chief of Staff, replacing Richard Mulcahy, making him the youngest general in Europe until Spain's Francisco Franco - for whose cause he would later take up arms - was promoted to that rank. During the Irish Civil War in the early 1920s, O'Duffy supported the Anglo-Irish Treaty, and served in the Free State Army. He took Limerick City for the Free Staters in July 1922. When the Irish Free State was declared in 1922, O'Duffy was appointed Commissioner of An Garda Siochana (as bearla, the Civic Guard) the national police force, guiding it through its first decade of service in protecting the peace.
Following the General Election of January 1933, Eamon de Valera, now the President of the Executive Council, dismissed O'Duffy as Garda Commissioner. De Valera told the Dail that he made the move because O'Duffy "was likely to be biased in his attitude because of past political affiliations."
However, some historians allege that O'Duffy was one of the voices urging the previous council president, W.T. Cosgrave, to support a military coup rather than turn over power to de Valera. O'Duffy refused de Valera's offer of another position of equivalent rank in the public service.
In July of 1933, O'Duffy became the leader of the Army Comrades Association. He soon began to embrace Fascist ideology. That very same year, Adolph Hitler had been elected as the German Chancellor, and his fellow dictator Benito Mussolini continued his reign in Italy. After taking over the ACA, O'Duffy changed its name to the National Guard, which soon adopted symbols associated with European fascism, including the straight armed Fascist salute from Italy. They also used a distinctive uniform, granting them the name The Blueshirts, a name still used to belittle members of Fine Gael.
In August of 1933, O'Duffy was in the midst of planning a parade of Blueshirts to march on Dublin to commemorate the deaths of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith, who had died 11 years previously. However, de Valera feared that O'Duffy was trying to emulate Mussolini's famous March on Rome, which he felt could lead to an O'Duffy coup d'etat. As a result, the parade was banned. The next month, the Irish government declared the Blueshirts to be an illegal organization. To get around this, the group's name was changed to the League of Youth.
That same month, O'Duffy made his mark on direct political history, when his Blueshirt movement joined Cosgrave's old Cumann na nGaedhael party and the National Centre Party, to form Fine Gael, the United Ireland Party, with O'Duffy as its first leader, even though he was not a TD at the time. The National Guard became the party's youth wing. In September 1934, O'Duffy resigned as Fine Gael leader.
By 1935, the Blueshirt movement and its organization no longer existed, even though O'Duffy tried in June of that year to launch his own pro-Fascist National Corporate Party.
By 1936 though, a new military adventure beckoned to O'Duffy, offering him a chance to help out one of his Fascist soulmates, General Francisco Franco in Spain, during the Spanish Civil War.
Even though the de Valera government ruled that participation in the Spanish conflict was illegal, O'Duffy was able to rally 700 of his followers to form an Irish brigade to fight on Franco's side. Meanwhile, about 250 Irishmen volunteered to fight for the more leftist Republicans.
After returning from Spain, O'Duffy retired from politics. He approached the German Legation in Dublin in the summer of 1943 with an offer to organize an Irish Volunteer Legion to help with the German war effort on the Russian front. The Germans decided not to take O'Duffy up on his offer.
O'Duffy's health had begun to deteriorate by this time and he died on November 30th, 1944 at the age of 52. He was given a state funeral by the government. Following a requiem mass at Dublin's Pro-Cathedral, he was buried at Glasnevin Cemetery.
O'Duffy died a bachelor, never having married, which prompted rumours to circulate after his death that he had been a homosexual. The famed Irish actor Michael MacLiammoir, the co-founder of The Gate Theatre in Dublin, confirmed to playwright and magazine editor Mary Manning that he had in fact had a homosexual relationship with O'Duffy in the 1930s. MacLiammoir biographer Denis Staunton confirmed as well that MacLiammoir and O'Duffy had had an affair and that they had remained friends after the affair ended. The affair was also revealed in the RTE documentary "The Odd Couple," which aired in 1999, which focused on MacLiammoir's relationship with his long time partner Hilton Edwards.
Another of O'Duffy's secrets was that despite his public declarations that he was a teetotaller, in private he had a long battle with the bottle as a chronic alcoholic.
Since O'Duffy's death, there has been no shortage of opinion on his impact on Irish society and history, which is only now starting to see the light of day in intellectual discourse.
Certainly, his support for the likes of Hitler make it hard for the likes of Fine Gael and O'Duffy's supporters, many of whom backed him in spite of this, to warmly acknowledge him as one of their own.
While playing up Germany's past support for Ireland, O'Duffy would later find himself on the wrong side of history for declaring, according to RTE, that "one nation alone, and one who at present is again subject to the slanderous press campaigns of the British-Jewish propagandists, has never concealed its sympathy with the Irish people and their just cause - the German nation. Hitler has done more for Germany than any other leader in the world." At this point, not only was O'Duffy enamoured of Fascism, but had also bought into the intellectual garbage that is anti-semitism. (It should also be noted though that the IRA also sought to help the Nazis, though for more self-serving reasons, feeling them out on a possible Nazi invasion of Ireland, landing in County Mayo, with IRA aid, in return for a united Ireland.)
"O'Duffy had met and been enthralled with Mussolini and then became a great admirer of what the Nazis were trying to do in Germany," said Richard English of Queen's University, in an interview with RTE.
However, with his Fascist notions aside, McGarry did acknowledge to RTE that "he [O'Duffy] was a key figure in the building of the Irish Free State." Four years ago, another Fine Gael leader made a passing reference to O'Duffy and his contribution to Irish life, placing the era in historical context.
In a speech to the Meath Constituency Executive of Fine Gael at the Ardboyne Hotel in Navan, County Meath on Monday, September 8th, 2003, former FG Taoiseach John Bruton (1994 to 1997), speaking on the occasion of the party's 70th anniversary, described 1933 as a time of "exceptionally difficult circumstances."
Bruton noted that at the first meeting of Fine Gael in the Mansion House in Dublin, he described O'Duffy's Army Comrades Association's original intent as being that of "benevolent association to protect demobilised, ex-Free State soldiers, [but] it quickly developed into an organisation to protect the right of Cumann na nGaedheal speakers to address political meetings, meetings that which were being broken up by Republicans emboldened by Fianna Fail's 1932 election success."
Bruton acknowledged in his speech that O'Duffy was the party's first president but that fact is not mentioned in the party history section of Fine Gael's web site. A recent search of O'Duffy's name turned up only one mention of him - Bruton's speech - on the party site.
O'Duffy has also been removed from other parts of Ireland's recent historical narrative, charges Fearghal McGarry of Queen's University in Belfast, who recently authored the book "O'Duffy: A Self-Made Hero," which claims to be the first-ever biography of O'Duffy, and was published last month by Oxford University Press.
"Eoin O'Duffy has, to a large extent, been airbrushed out of Irish history and certainly he's been airbrushed out of the history of Fine Gael," McGarry charged during an interview in the RTE documentary "Eoin O'Duffy - An Irish Fascist."
However, Bruton also noted in his speech that, at that time, as the likes of de Valera dreamed of a peaceful, agrarian Ireland, replete with whitewashed farmhouses dotting the green hills, other European nations, like Italy, Germany, Portugal, Russia and Spain, were in the midst of, or had, formed dictatorships, Ireland had "established a genuinely democratic state, at a time when democratic states were becoming increasingly rare across Europe."
As such, folding his National Guard into Fine Gael could either been seen as a way to achieve power through legitimate democratic means, or as a way to give legitimacy to his cause and to use it as a means to an end to establish a Fascist government, much like Hitler had done that same year.
Undoubtedly a man of contradictions, some academics have come to see O'Duffy as "a mirror to Ireland in the 1920s and 1930s. He represented a lot of the contradictions and inconsistencies, or perhaps the double standards and hypocrisies of Ireland in that period," said Diarmaid Ferriter of Dublin City University, in an interview with RTE.
Editor's Note: My father Donogh (Donnie) F. O'Loghlin was a true Fine Gaeler to the very end. He would definitely have joined the Irish army had he not inherited the family business in Ennistymon, County Clare. The store was a General Draper & Outfitter operation catering to all and sundry. Born in 1913, he was quite political in his day and certainly was influenced by General Eoin O'Duffy and the Blueshirts. While more extreme influences took control of the Blueshirts over time, their original intent of being a benevolent association that protected demobilized Free State soldiers was something that my father fully believed in. Our family business was definitely affected over the subsequent decades because of my father's political leanings. Certain families wouldn't "darken the door of that Blueshirt bastard".
In fact when I left for Canada in 1975, he gave me a box of 12 Hortex ties with the Blueshirt emblem (St. Patrick's Cross) on them, telling me that I should give them to "The Right People". Little did he think that one day I would actually have the honour of presenting one to Fine Gael Taoiseach, John Bruton when he visited Toronto in 1996. On that occasion I was proudly wearing my Blueshirt tie when Mrs. Bruton approached me and asked me where I got such a tie. I told her the story and she asked if she could get one for the Taoiseach who had noticed it earlier. "No problem", says I and the following day the Taoiseach left for Ireland with his new tie in his suitcase. He was sufficiently appreciative to send a thank you to my father who was so thrilled by the turn of events.
Always one for a bit of devilment and the craic, I also presented one to Minister Sile De Valera when she visited Toronto. She actually dropped in to visit me Dad after that occasion eventho' back in the '30's my father would have been more likely to shoot a De Valera than welcome them. History is funny at times but, as they say, time is a great healer.