Rise and

Send to: The Secretary, M.S.R. 38 Clanawley Road, Dublin 5. litical force more potent in death than in e. This is partly because of the heroic end ‘many of its members in the Spanish vil War. More effective have been the gends put about by the Stalinites of the P.1. who have portrayed it as a classic cample of their ideal strategy, the Popular Front”, ruined only by the antics f the “Ultra Left”.

In fact the Congress represented merely 2 most conscious attempt before the 160s to overcome the political weakness f Republicanism without actually reaking with it. Fianna Fail had been an tempt to do this simply by adopting opulist constitutional politics. In 1931, 1¢ IRA started the Socialist Republican ont, Saor Eire (another evocative name). was smashed by the Cumann na nGael avernment with little effective opposition ‘om its own supporters. The Republican ‘ongress was neither subverted nor crushe¢ y its opponents, yet its most positive chievernent was to send Irish men to ght against Franco's reactionaries in Spain. 's failure requires more detailed xamination than it has been given in talinite accounts. 1 Ireland, what became, in 1933, the second ommunist Party was never as much influenced y the ultra-left policies of the Comintern’s Third Period” strategy as were its opposite umbers in other lands. Sean Murray, who became ie Secretary of the revived party advised in te drafting of the Saor Eire programme. owever, he and his comrades did little to help uild it beyond this and tended to act as if they ww themselves a3 rivals, as distinct from, en short term, allies of, the much larger IRA. his policy caused a large section of the latter psuccumb to two complimentary pressures. any therein had close contact with the embership of Fianna Fail, whose leaders had wweht alongside them in the Irish Civil War; with ie latter party in government after 1932, they ndéed to hope for a victorious conclusion to i@ national struggle with only a minimum of ‘essure from themselves. At the same time, the itholic hierarchy, of which the majority stiked the new government, maintained an iti<Communist witch hunt which the [RAS was equipped politically to withstand. Its sociated weekly paper, An Phoblacht began to ove away from the Socialism of its previous Many left wingers began to leave the army. Meanwhile, opposition to Fianna Fail’s very limited anti imperialist measures began to take on an openly fascist form. From Augusut, 1933, Cumann na nGael was amalgamated with other parties, becoming Fine Gael, under the Fascist leader, Eoin O'Duffy.

In April 1934, Ryan and other left-wing members and ex-members of the IRA, issued a manifesta in Athlone, It called for a Republican Congress to review the political anti-imperialist struggle that the IRA itself was unable to continue, [t left open the question of what that Congress would meet to do; would it call for a new, Republican Socialist, political party or for a“United Front” against Fascism, as the C.P.1. urged in giving the manifesto critical support? This ambulance was to prove its undoing.

This Stalinite line had a certain objective justification. Not only did the C.P.L have a vested interest in stopping a “Socialist Republican” rival to it, but such a rival would probably have been merely an extra source of confusion to the Irish workers’ consciousness. However, the circumstances were not ripe for the Stalinites’ alternative: a “United Front” of Republicans and Socialists, for the achievernent of state power. Such fronts are only possible as between such mass working class parties as did exist in Ireland af the 1930s. any more than they do, there, today. (Now, however, the C.P.L has overcome its own problems, if not those of the working class, by building a “United Front™ that includes the “Socialist Republican” Official Sinn Fein). Even to lay the foundations for such a front would had, until recently, been shunned by the C.P.L.

as “Social Fascist’) and from the 1.R_A. (which expelled those of the signatories of the Athlone manifesta that were still within it).

The Republican Congress was, then, under conflicting pressures from the facts of a situation that did not justify a “United Front"

and from the C.P.1. which had a clear perspective of such a body, By the end of September 1934, when its founding conference was held in Rathmines, these pressures had intensified No further Republican grouping affiliated to the majority of Fine Gael’s leadership found that it wasn't helping them electorally and expelled C.P.L entered the Congress and intensified the pressure against the original majority that blocs was a group headed by Roddy and Norah Connolly who were in the Irish Labour Party and were thus against creating another one, but who supported such a perspective as against the ,tather than the Workers’ Republic, whick Read Information journal of Fourth International Contributors include, Ernest Mandel, Livio Maitan, Alain Krivine Available from SR seller and 38, Clanawley Road, Dublin.

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