On the Road to Extinction: Agrarian Parties in Twentieth‐Century Ireland

Abstract

Four main explanations have been offered to account for the absence of a major agrarian party in post‐independence Ireland and for the minor status and transience of those agrarian parties that did appear. For contextual reasons associated with nationalism and modernity, two of these suggest that there was no real need for a major agrarian party to begin with. Two other explanations point to the inability of the three main agrarian parties that did emerge to transcend the class divisions that prevented farmers becoming a coherent political class, and to counter the inadequacies that left them organisationally and tactically disadvantaged vis‐à‐vis their political rivals. The author’s reading emphasises how the difficulties generated by class and political divisions were mutually reinforcing and how these difficulties in turn impacted on organisational and tactical prospects.

Keywords:

• Irish agrarian politics
• farmers’ parties
• the Farmer’s Party
• the National Centre Party
• Clann na Talman

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Alistair Clark, Liam Weeks, and to the anonymous referees, for their comments.

Notes

1. A new wave of European agrarian parties has appeared in the wake of the collapse of state socialism.

2. In contrast, Lipset and Rokkan (1967: 21) view relations formed between ‘landed and urban interests’ around commodity markets as generating conflicts that could but ‘did not invariably prove party‐forming’.

3. Clark’s (1979: 301) contrary suggestion is that class alliance was possible on the basis of large farmers, as leading figures in the Land League agitation, being ‘in a position to prevent it from turning in directions contrary to their interests’.

4. The two men in question were Frank MacDermot and James Dillon.

5. 1938 was described as ‘the worst year within living memory for County Galway farmers’ (Farmers’ Gazette, 3 December 1938).

6. Leinster tillage farmers, an important element of the UFPA’s support, stood to gain under the protected tillage agriculture favoured by the early Fianna Fáil.

7. North of the border in the 1921–1972 period ‘a monopolistic consultative relationship’ evolved between an Ulster Farmers’ Union with close ties to the Unionist Party and the Ministry of Agriculture (Greer, 1996: 3, 123–124).

8. Elements in Cumann na nGaedheal were equally ready in 1933 to portray ‘the government’s modest land redistribution bill as the “first step in an Irish anti‐Kulak campaign”’ (McGarry, 2005: 203).

9. M. Donnellan, Commission on Vocational Organisation. Minutes of Evidence, National Library of Ireland (NLI), MS 931, 18 April 1941, p. 3190.

10. In 1940 the IFF was claiming to have a membership of about 14,500, of which 13,500 were farmers and the balance agricultural labourers (Commission on Vocational Organisation, Minutes of Evidence, NLI, MS 929, 24 October 1940, pp. 2635, 2649).

11. In 1923 the Farmers’ Party also faced competition from some other aspiring (but electorally unsuccessful) farmers’ parties professing to speak for small farmers (Coakley, 1990: 282).

12. One of its two Connacht successes was in Sligo‐Leitrim where the Farmers’ Party had briefly won a seat in June 1927. Roscommon, where MacDermot retained his seat, was the one constituency where success had previously eluded the Farmers’ Party.

13. Seven of the party’s 26 candidates in 1933 (and three of those elected) were either outgoing or former Farmers’ Party TDs (Gallagher, 1993).

14. This 10.25 per cent derives from 12.07 per cent in 1923, 9.15 per cent in 1933 and 9.54 per cent in 1943 (Gallagher, 1993: 45, 176, 268). Clann na Talmhan’s proportion of the vote in 1943 has been given as 9.80 per cent (Gallagher, 1993: 268), but when William Sheldon (Donegal East), who never identified himself with the party (Donegal Democrat, 22 May 1943, 26 June 1943; interview with author, 3 November 1984), is excluded Clann na Talmhan’s share comes to 9.54 per cent.

15. Of course, MacDermot and Dillon insisted in 1933 on seeing the United Ireland Party as something quite new rather than a revamped Cumann na nGaedheal (Gallagher, 1985: 105; Manning, 1999: 78–83).

16. It should be said that tariff protection could be a divisive issue within the IFU/Farmers’ Party (Moss, 1968: 29).

17. Hannan (1979: 27–67) makes a case for the presence of a subsistence‐based peasant economy in inter‐war western Ireland; and Kissane (2002: 221) sees Clann na Talmhan as a ‘harmless’ Irish version of the sort of ‘radicalised peasant movements’ found in inter‐war eastern Europe.

18. Speaking in Tuam in 1943, Donnellan declared that ‘the politicians were deserters and turncoats. They turned away from rural Ireland and from the workers and turned to the money‐grabbers, Jews and speculators’ (Irish Press, 15 June 1943).

19. ‘Clann na Talmhan has not many landlords to drive’, Donnellan pointed out in 1942, ‘but it has landlordism No. 2, namely, politicians, and they must go’ (Irish Farmers’ Paper, Vol. 1, No. 9, April 1942). Such sentiments became grist to the mill of Seán MacEntee who could label Donnellan a fascist (‘Hitler’ Donnellan) and Clann na Talmhan a ‘totalitarian Communist’ party in 1943 (Puirséil, 2007: 100; Feeney, 2009: 149; see also Douglas, 2009: 129).

20. Weeks (2009: 15) estimates that independent farmers ‘regularly gained between one‐quarter and one‐third of the Independent vote from the 1920s to the 1960s’.

21. Only after the Farmers’ Party had already agreed on coalition in 1927 did the IFU’s National Executive give its approval (Irish Times, 11 November 1927).

22. Gorey’s successor as party leader, Patrick Baxter, would lose his seat in the 1927 September election (Irish Times, 15 October 1927).

23. While Donnellan claimed in 1944 to have resigned for constituency and personal reasons (Irish Independent, 27 July 1944), he later revealed that he had been voted out of office (Provincial Council minutes, 27 July 1958; Varley, 1996: 618).

24. In 1933 Frank Aiken, Minister for Defence, dismissively referred to the Oxford‐educated MacDermot as ‘this new‐fangled Anglo‐Parisian farmer’ (Roscommon Herald, 21 January 1933).

25. To this end MacDermot counselled his supporters in 1933 against giving their lower preference votes to Fianna Fáil or Labour candidates (Roscommon Herald, 21 January 1933).

26. Why the Farmers’ Party opted for coalition at this juncture, and settled for less than a cabinet seat, reflects an overwhelming desire to retain the outgoing government in office and to keep Fianna Fáil out of power (see Irish Times, 13 October 1927, 9 February 1928).