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P.S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein: How it Won It and How it Used It (1924)

The Victory of Sinn Fein is one of a select group of extended memoirs written by people who were close to the centre of things in Irish separatist politics during the most crucial and activist phase of the movement between 1913 and 1923.1 Comparisons might be drawn with such classics as C.S. Andrews’ Dublin Made Me, David Hogan’s The Four Glorious Years or Ernie O’Malley’s On Another Man’s Wound.2 However, these three works were written after a long interval and from a markedly anti-Treatyite and republican point of view. For these reasons they have remained better known to the general public. The O’Malley book is less reliable than the O’Hegarty book as a memoir; it was written much later and strives for a pronouncedly romantic literary effect rather than strict historical accuracy. Again, Andrews was trying to give an accurate and conscientious account of the events of the period and an analysis of the mentality of a young IRA volunteer of the time. However, he wrote a full generation after the events. A comparison might also be drawn with Ernest Blythe’s Irish-language trilogy, which would merit translation and a much wider readership.

O’Hegarty’s book is written from a point of view that is almost completely forgotten. The clearest statement of it that I have come across other than Victory is Eimar O’Duffy’s fictional but partly autobiographical The Wasted Island. Both writers, early members of Sinn Fein, argue passionately in very different ways that most of the violence associated with the independence movement was unnecessary and even self-defeating. O’Hegarty regretfully accepted the inevitability of a defensive ‘War of Independence’, but argued in Victory that violence clearly had no part to play after the Truce of July 1921. After that, negotiation with London and with Belfast should have become intense and without any threat of violence from anybody. He argued also that the Rising of 1916 was sufficient; a protest in arms had been made, and the rest should have been left to the political process.

Whatever about the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–21, the Civil War of 1922–23 was, he claimed, an avoidable disaster, one which killed the spirit of the national movement and cost the country the leadership of Michael Collins and Arthur Griffith. Collins and Griffith were O’Hegarty’s heroes; to him, Griffith was the wise leader, always in the background, always trying to subordinate military considerations to the political purposes which he saw as being far more important. At one stage (May 1920), when the IRA proposed some unnamed enormity, he said to O’Hegarty:

The military mind is the same in every country. Our military men are as bad as the British. They think of nothing but their own particular end, and cannot be brought to consider the political consequences of their proceedings.3

Griffith is portrayed as being free from an all-too-common obsession with symbolic forms, and wanting Irish independence under whatever formula was politically possible, even under a Hanoverian monarchy if necessary. Arguments about Free State versus Republic were, to him, pointless. What counted for both Griffith and Collins was the means of state power: control of the army, taxation, customs and the ports. Given these, all else would follow quickly or gradually. O’Hegarty was sympathetic to this view, but unfortunately, not all the leaders saw it that way.

The character sketches of Griffith, Collins and de Valera are vivid, and make you almost feel that you had met them and even been on close terms with some of them. The portrait of Collins is affectionate and evidently drawn from a long familiarity with the man. They had become friends as young fellows in London, both of them working as clerks in Mount Pleasant Post Office in North London in the 1900s. Even now, the hostile treatment of de Valera in O’Hegarty’s memoir might give offence to some, much as did Neil Jordan’s rather similar take on him in his Michael Collins film of 1996. However, many people in the early twenty-first century, if they think of de Valera at all, see him not as the putative wrecker of the treaty settlement of 1922, but rather as the old and wily statesman who kept the country out of the Second World War and, perhaps, outstayed his welcome in the 1950s. He has come to represent a long-vanished past version of Irish society and his behaviour as a relatively young man in 1921–23, devastatingly described by O’Hegarty, has been forgotten or forgiven.

Certainly, de Valera’s extraordinary conduct in 1921–22 when he rejected the Treaty sight unseen and foolishly permitted his name to be associated with a ghost presidency of a ghost republic under the actual control of Liam Lynch’s rump IRA did untold damage to an emergent Irish political culture. It permitted many to question the constitutional continuity from Griffith’s Dail government to Cosgrave’s Free State and it provided alibis for many murders afterwards. The legitimacy of the new state was routinely questioned for over a generation afterwards. O’Hegarty believed that Dev’s almost reverential reception in America went to his head and encouraged him to overrate his own importance and centrality to the movement. Certainly, after America, de Valera was extraordinarily self-righteous, untrusting and unwilling to have his equals in ability close to his throne. When he returned to Ireland over a year later, he had found that Collins had put himself at the head of an entire underground government and political system. Whenever he felt like it, Collins, a brilliant administrator and an even more able conspirator, could bypass everyone else in the revolutionary apparatus and get his way.

However, de Valera had, in turn, ways of getting round Collins. Ernie Blythe, later Minister for Finance in the Provisional Government, apparently heard Kevin O’Higgins (later Minister for Justice) say sometime in early 1922, ‘That crooked Spanish bastard will get the better of that pasty-faced blasphemous fucker from Cork.’4 De Valera came to fear and even hate Collins and Griffith, seeing them as betrayers of him, never mind Ireland. Certainly de Valera can be accused of creating a political culture of complaint, denial and delegitimation of democratic processes. He can also be accused of infantilising Irish political discourse permanently. O’Hegarty takes an even less kind view. Yet, the true problem of the Sinn Fein party was intellectual. It was led by men and women who were not equipped by background and education for the task ahead of it after its electoral victory in 1918. O’Hegarty gives an eye-witness account of Collins and Boland as machine politicians:

The great mistake which Sinn Fein had made was its refusal to look ahead, above all its refusal to face obvious facts and provide for them. When it went to the polls in 1918 for that General Election at which it won its first majority, it selected its candidates purely with an eye to votes. The man who was in prison, or who had been in prison, obviously had the best chance, and neither his ability nor his suitability were considered. Ability, on the contrary, was rather a disqualification, because it tended to make its possessor difficult to handle by a machine, and Sinn Fein was rapidly becoming a machine. I had an illuminating insight into democracy in practice one day in 6 Harcourt Street. Harry Boland, who was then Secretary to Sinn Fein, was sitting at a desk as I entered, and going over a list of names. ‘John Brown. We can’t have him.’ Then ‘John Black. I wonder is he safe. I’ll ask X.’ Then ‘John Green. He’s all right.’ Then he came to another list and he looked at it, and said to me: ‘Gavan Duffy. Do you think, P.S., that Gavan Duffy is a good Republican? Do you think we ought to let him go up?’5

O’Hegarty persuaded Boland to let Duffy stand for the first Dáil, but independent-minded people were discouraged for reasons of power. The second Dáil of 1921 was, he argues, even less representative than the first: ‘a collection of mediocrities in the grip of a machine, and leaving all its thinking to Griffith, Collins and de Valera’.6 This machine, under different labels, was to dominate Irish electoral politics for two generations.

The Victory of Sinn Fein is a polemic and a period piece, as the author himself conceded even at the time of publication in 1924. The hero worship of Collins and Griffith, the demonisation of de Valera and the unsentimental treatment of the female extremists will strike some minds as over the top and possibly offensive. The women are portrayed as aggressive, naïve and able to intimidate the men into taking political stands which were far more extreme than their private opinions would have prompted them to take. However, his point of view was not looked upon as being eccentric or outlandish at that time; much of what O’Hegarty says would have been accepted by very many people of his generation of both sexes as a common-sense view of things.7 For that reason, it is a valuable source of IRB and ‘Free State’ mentality and gives a view of Irish history which the author lived through that is invaluable, illuminating and sometimes surprising. The Victory of Sinn Fein was written in a hurry, and is sometimes repetitive; however it is also written with enormous passion, verve and energy; it reads like a thriller. It is also very much an insider story, who was telling the truth as he saw it, however exaggerated or distorted some might take his judgements to have been.

O’Hegarty was quite a prolific writer both before and after writing Victory and was an early contributor to the pre-1914 IRB newspaper, Irish Freedom, a profoundly liberal and republican-nationalist paper by the standards of the time. He vehemently opposed any attempt to coerce the North into a united Ireland, enunciating a doctrine of Northern consent long before it was popular or profitable, and long before republican propagandising and later Fianna Fáil rhetoric made it anathema among large sections of the Irish public. He would have had contempt for the republican argument that unionist consent to a united Ireland would have been forthcoming were it not for British military might enforcing partition in defiance of the wishes of the vast majority of Irish people. Like many other Irish Republican Brotherhood veterans, he had a curious mixture of radical and conservative views. For example, this otherwise quite enlightened man believed that education beyond the age of fourteen or so was unnecessary and a burden on the nation. Young people should, presumably, educate themselves in public libraries and at the school of hard knocks.

O’Hegarty championed many Irish writers of his time, and saluted with enthusiasm James Joyce’s Ulysses, published in 1922. He defended Sean O’Casey’s The Plough and the Stars in the face of howls of nationalist and clerical execration. He wrote short memoirs and character sketches of several other well-known figures of the period. Of his later writings, the most substantial was his highly nationalistic A History of Ireland under the Union (1951). Interestingly, his account in the later book of the events dealt with in The Victory of Sinn Fein rows back somewhat and is somewhat gentler on the anti-Treatyites, while retaining his central charge against de Valera: that he transformed a difference of opinion over the Treaty into a question of trust and betrayal which then led to a political split and subsequently sowed the seed of the Irish Civil War.8 The book became quite an Aunt Sally for ‘revisionist’, mainly liberal or leftist historians from the sixties onward, who commonly argued that it had a tendency to glorify the protagonists of the separatist cause and demonise the British government, particularly its officers in the governance of Ireland. The fashion for portraying British governance in Ireland as unfailingly enlightened and well-intentioned has in turn faded. Nowadays A History of Ireland Under the Union is apparently forgotten, along with its critics.

TG

Notes

1P.S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein: How it Won It and How it Used It (Dublin: Talbot Press, 1924).

2David Hogan was a pseudonym of Frank Gallagher.

3See O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, p.47. It is likely that the ‘enormity’ was Cathal Brugha’s plan to drive a car bomb into Westminster. Collins apparently remarked that if they wiped out the British cabinet, a far worse cabinet (from the Irish point of view) would replace it.

4James Matthews, Voices (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1983), p.400.

5See O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein, pp.75–6.

6Ibid., p.77.

7For similar views on the republican women: Batt O’Connor Papers, University College Dublin Archives, (28 December 1921), p.68; Michael Hayes Papers, University College Dublin Archives, p.53, p.303; Freeman’s Journal, 23 February, 1922. See also, Tom Garvin 1922: the Birth of Irish Democracy (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1996), pp.97–104. It was objected to vehemently by some feminist historians and calmly accepted by others.

8See my sketch of O’Hegarty in P.S. O’Hegarty, The Victory of Sinn Fein [1924] (Dublin: University College Dublin Press, 1998; introduction by Tom Garvin), pp.vii–xiii.