JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

86 SAOTHAR 13existed in the countryside, hopelessly caricatured and thus ultimately vindicated the FF approach.More significant for the. longer term was the social republican analysis which culminated in theRepublican Congress split. For at the heart of this analysis was a central ambiguity about the nature ofFF. Although labelled a middle class party, it was reckoned to have progressive tendencies within it.For 0' Donnell these comprised more than workers and small farmers in the rank and file, they includedindividual prominent members and even de Valera was not seen as fundamentally hostile to progressivepolicies. In asking the question why workers voted FF it is necessary to remember that O'Donnellhimself saw his agitational and ideological work as aimed at pushing FF to the left rather than displacingit. 21From 0' Donnell down to the distinctions that were still made between FF and the 'really' bourgeoisparties by some sections of the left in the 1960s, the weaknesses of left analysis mirror the strength ofFF hegemony . When FFJeaders described their party as a 'national movement' rather than a party theywere reflecting in their own way on a reality which the left failed to come to terms with for decades.To label FF a middle class party would only have been to discredit them with the working class if therewas a widespread conception that the stage of nation-building was over and that the fundamentalcontradiction in the society was a class one. Instead FF could relatively easily give the problems ofbackwardness a nationalist inflection which provided the basis for a pan class consensus around the poleof development In the 1930sa familiar pattern of left discourse was established - the didactictransmission to the masses of 'truths' which are in fact obvious to them. If workers voted FF in the 1930sit was not because they had failed to notice that it was a 'middle class' party. More fundamentally itwas because ~e realities of Irish economic backwardness continued to provide a base for a popularnationalism of development which was assented to not only by the socialists of the Labour Party butalso by their revolutionary scourges - the 0 'Donnells and Gilmores - who simply warned the workingclass that FF might not-ultimately deliver. Leftism had moved in a decade from a syndicalismunconcerned with the significance of state power for the political and ideological resources of thebourgeoisie to a position where the dispute with the bourgeoisie was over who could best complete thenational revolution - an ideological collapse which syndicalism, for all its faults was incapable of.Support for a bourgeois project of economic development and class awareness are not, in fact,necessarily contradictory. It all depends on the con jucture, nationall y and internationally. The workingclass can have an interest in the development and success of its national capitalist class. FF wouldexperience problems not by being identified with the bourgeoisie but with a bourgeoisie that was visiblyfailing - from the early 1940s .. onwards -to'deliver employment. But the failure of protectionism didnot fatally damage its sponsors because it was still possible to unfurl another strategy for developmentwhich, while at variance with traditional Sinn F6in economic policy, could still derive support from thedismal facts of emigration and unemployment and their demonstration that 'real' independence had notbeen achieved.The new policies of free trade, EEC membership and attraction of foreign capital appeared to someofFianna Fail's opponents on the left to open up new possibilities. The social republicans of the 1960s,together with a section of the Labour Party in the Dail, tried to arouse the masses by pillorying Lemassand Lynch for betraying the core principles of 'republican' economic policy.22 More forward-looking,if equally unsuccessful, were those in the Labour Party who saw in the new policies, and in theindustrialisation they encouraged, the hope of a modernisation process which would render traditionalparty cleavages redundant. But despite all the conservative encrustations that FF had developed as thenormal party of government between 1932 and the 1960s, despite even the less salubrious aspect of itsrelationship with sections of the bourgeoisie revealed in the T ACA episode,23 the party would not easilygive up its populist image. For protectionism and welfarism it now substituted a form of practicalKeynesianism and corporatism.The crisis of the traditional protected industries in the freer trading conditions of the 1970s, togetherwith the international recession, have put the material basis for the party's new strategy underconsiderable strain. Intersecting with severe factionalism in the party, a legacy of the Arms Trial of