Ireland's OWN: History

 

Peadar O'Donnell and the Spanish Revolution Peadar O'Donnell (1893-1986), the novelist and  political activist, is a major figure in the  history of the Irish left. Born in Donegal, he  left teaching (and a prominent role in the  Donegal branch of the Irish National Teachers' Organisation) to become a full-time organiser with the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union in 1918. His mother, a fervent Larkinite, and her brother Peter, a member of the Wobblies (the Industrial Workers of the World) in Butte, Montana, had instilled a strong syndicalist sensibility in the young Peadar and its fruits emerged in an active burst of union organising, which included the successful strike at Monaghan asylum in January 1919 when he led the workers in a week long successful occupation of the institution. With the outbreak of the war of independence O'Donnell joined the IRA. He opposed the Treaty and was among the IRA executive when the Four Courts were shelled in 1922. Imprisonment and hunger strikes followed before he escaped from the Curragh in 1924. For the next ten years he served on the Army Council and Executive of the IRA, arguing that class politics should be the dynamic of republican politics and the IRA should adopt the role of a Connolyite citizen army. As editor of An Phoblacht from 1926 to 1929 he pursued his left republican agenda, focussing particularly on the land annuities campaign, which he himself initiated as a grassroots popular campaign. The revolutionary left was monopolised by the 'orthodox' communists at this time and O'Donnell was aligned to many of the Comintern groupings that emerged in the late twenties and early thirties, particularly the Irish Working Farmers' Committee movement, a branch of Krestintern, the communist Peasant International. A leading figure in the failed 1931 Saor Eire experiment, when the IRA rhetorically embraced a socialist programme, he eventually split from the IRA with the formation of the doomed Republican Congress in 1934. He went to Spain on a writing holiday in 1936 and was accidentally caught up in the revolution and civil war. His experiences formed the basis of his book Salud! An Irishman in Spain. Although no longer a member of any political organisation, O'Donnell remained an important figure in Irish political and cultural life. He helped found the Liberal Bell magazine in 1940 and edited it from 1946 to 1954. He was associated with most of the progressive campaigns in post-war Ireland and was a seminal figure in groups like the Anti-Apartheid Movement and CND. He was prominent in the Save the West campaign of the 1960s, and in the National Land League which agitated for the break up of large estates. He also continued his lifelong support of Irish emigrants abroad, particularly in Britain. He published the last of his 7 novels in 1975, and died aged 93 in 1986. Salud! An Irishman in Spain Salud! An Irishman in Spain (Methuen, London, 1937), Peadar O'Donnell's book detailing his experiences in Spain in the early months of the revolution and civil war in 1936, is a little-known account of these events by one of Ireland's best known and respected radical figures. It is particularly interesting for Irish anarchists, given its sympathetic treatment of the anarcho-syndicalist contribution by a long-time 'fellow traveller' of the orthodox Irish communist movement, which has always set out to denigrate that contribution. Not surprisingly, O'Donnell's account and impressions of anarchism in action in Spain in the summer and autumn of 1936 are never referred to by mainstream and Stalinist writers. They are notably ignored by the Communist Party of Ireland's Michael O'Riordan, who fought with the international brigades, in his book The Connolly Column and in the numerous talks he gives on the topic. For the likes of O'Riordan, Peadar O'Donnell had impeccable credentials, so to accommodate his portrayal of and sympathy with revolutionary Spain would be to undermine the official Stalinist line. Far easier to focus on and dismiss George Orwell, with whose account and impressions in Homage to Catalonia O'Donnell's tally, because of his direct involvement with the supposedly 'counter-revolutionary' POUM and his subsequent anti-Communist work for British Intelligence, fuelled by his hatred of Stalinism. Page updated 31 Aug 2008 Ireland's OWN Logo by Eamann Website Design and Celtic Background by Míchealín Daugherty Copyright © 2008 Ireland's OWN All Rights Reserved.