In the early 1970s I read a book on the Blueshirts and felt when I’d finished it that I knew less about them than when I had started. Many of the movement’s stars were still alive and in good health when the book was published in 1970. The movement itself had been founded in 1932. The author had good access to them and to others competent to comment on them. He has been a Senator and a Member of the Dail, alternating between Houses for 21 years,if not being a plague on both of them. He was and is a member of Fine Gael, which people with long memories still call Blueshirts. He is Chancellor of the National University of Ireland and his name is Maurice Manning.
My attention was arrested by a headline in THE IRISH TIMES Weekend Review of 18 June – “An anti-Nazi intellectual” – “Daniel Binchy served with distinction
as an academic and diplomat, warning of Hitler’s Rise.” The Review, by Manning concerned a biography of Binchy, by Professor Tom Garvin.
Daniel Binchy is described, wrongly, as the Irish ambassador to Berlin from 1929 to 1932. The Free State’s highest ranking envoys were Ministers,
and the 1938 Constitution did not upgrade their status. That development followed the declaration of the Republic in 1949, not without wrangling, for
example with Australia’s cringing Empire Loyalist Government. Binchy was an outstanding intellectual, and would not have been impressed by such
slipshod classification.
As a student in Munich in 1921 he had seen Hitler in person. We are told that he warned Fine Gael against “any flirtations with Fascism in any guise.”
“This was a time when in Garvin’s words ‘such ideas enjoyed a certain cachet in parts of the Irish civil service, the teaching professions and in both Fine Gael and De Valera’s Fianna Fail.”
Let’s take De Valera first.He introduced into the Dail in 1934 a Bill to outlaw the wearing of paramilitary uniforms, and, supporting him, Sean Lemass noted
that similar laws had been passed in European democracies, and should, in Ireland serve to save the country from the reopening of the Civil War which
had ended but eleven years earlier. The Bill was attacked from the Fine Gael, Blueshirt benches by one of Ireland’s most distinguished barristers, who
forecast that as “the Blackshirts had triumphed in Italy, and the Hitler Shirts (sic) in Germany, so assuredly, would the Blueshirts triumph in Irleland”. Fourteen years later the Blueshirt, John A Costello, led a coalition government in Ireland, but Fine had had to abandone its fascist salutes, opposition to parliamentary government and blue-shirted strutting.
In the meantime Fine Gael applauded Mussolini’s rape of Abyssinia, and supported Franco’s fascist revolt. De Valera had called for League of Nations
sanctions on Italy and his Government gave no support to Franco. A Fine Gael MP had in 1943 called for the expulsion of Ireland’s Jews and endorsed
Hitler’s attitude towards them, though, like most of the world, he did not know how far that had gone. He had a great career with Fine Gael and served in
Fine Gael-led Cabinet.
Professor Garvin and Maurice Manning are long-time personal friends.
THE IRISH TIMES, which carried the review, in February 1933 editorially warned of the return of Fianna Fail to Government. The electorate gave Fianna
Fail another fifreen years of unbroken rule.
In March 1933 the IRISH TIMES welcomed Hitler’s accession to power.
Over zealous FG members were known to shout “up the blueshirts” at party conferences well into the 1970s
The far right seems to be gaining power in more and more countries throughout the EU.
It reminds me of the banking collapse, when house prices kept going up and up, most people felt it wasn’t sustainable deep down but it seemed to be good for our pockets so it was allowed to continue until the bubble burst.
I wonder what will become of the EU when the far right once again take control and one by one, more and more bubbles burst throughout Europe?
It is as blatantly obvious to me as the bank collapse was a few years before it finally did.