On this day, 13 November 1936, Friday 13th, the advance party of the pro-Franco Irish volunteers sailed from Ireland for Spain. In Ireland, public (and clerical) opinion was strongly on the side of Franco, and more than 7000 men volunteered to fight for the fascists. Led by former-IRA leader Eoin O'Duffy, the volunteers were anti-communists and defenders of Catholicism, many of them former members of the Blueshirt fascist movement. Only 700 made it to Spain, where their limited deployment and comic ineptitude led the great writer Brendan Behan to famously joke that they were the only army in history to return with more men than they left with. Their first active deployment, on February 19th 1937, resulted in an hour-long exchange of friendly fire with Falangists near the village of Ciempozuelos. In March, they refused orders to attack the village of Titulca. Plagued by indiscipline and drunkenness, with officers who spent much of their time socialising or sightseeing, the Irish fascists were withdrawn in April and repatriated in June 1937. But this debacle wasn’t the end of Ireland’s flirtation with fascism: throughout the 30s and 40s, Nazism and anti-Semitism remained prominent within the church (e.g., in the writings of Father Denis Fahey) and within the Dáil (e.g., Oliver Flanagan, who served in parliament until 1987, and was for a time Minister for Defence, in 1943 used his inaugural speech to applaud the Nazi persecution of the Jews and to demand “we rout the Jews out of this country”). The Irish government maintained cordial relations with Nazi Germany even after details of the holocaust emerged, and the President and Prime Minister of Ireland were joined only by the leaders of fascist dictatorships in Portugal and Spain when they expressed condolences upon the death of Hitler.
We talk about this in this podcast where we tell the story of the Spanish civil war: https://workingclasshistory.com/2018/07/29/spanish-civil-war-podcast/ https://www.facebook.com/workingclasshistory/photos/a.296224173896073/1262633277255153/?type=3
