On 22 January this year, one of Ireland’s last true communists died. Bob Doyle was born in Dublin in 1916 to a poor working class family. Doyle had a difficult childhood; while his father was away at sea, his mother was interned in a mental asylum, and he was sent to a convent to be educated. In his memoirs, he recalled the peculiar mixture of nationalism and anti-semitism inculcated by the nuns.
Doyle, like so many of his generation, was brought up to be an obsequious Catholic. Yet ironically it was the Catholic Church which inspired his conversion to communism. On 27 March 1933 in the Pro-Cathedral in Dublin, Doyle listened to a sermon by a Jesuit priest condemning all forms of socialists, whom he described as ‘vile creatures’. After the service, a mob of up to a thousand parishioners marched to Connolly House, the meeting place of Irish socialists, and set fire to the building.
This virulent mixture of racism and anti-communism was propagated by a newspaper called Catholic Mind. In May 1934, an article appeared in that paper claiming that “the founders of communism were all Jews”. The article goes on to name Marx, Engels, Lenin and a host of others in an evil Jewish conspiracy to take over the world!
Ireland’s love-affair with fascism was eloquently expressed by the Fine Gael leader John Aloysius Costello, who wrote in the same year: “The Blackshirts have been victorious in Italy, and Hitler’s brownshirts were victorious in Germany, as, assuredly, the Blueshirts will be victorious in the Irish Free State.” In his book An Irishman’s Fight Against Fascism, Doyle recalled his shame at having been among the Catholic mob that attacked Connolly House. However, soon thereafter he met Kit Conway, who explained socialist theory to him. Doyle soon became a committed communist, vehemently opposing the rise of the staunchly Catholic ‘blueshirt’ fascists lead by Eoin O’Duffy.
In 1936, when the shadow of fascism was spreading throughout Europe, he enlisted with Frank Ryan, Micheál O’Riordan and others as a brigadista of the 15th International Brigade in the Spanish Civil War to fight for the republicans. The trauma of Spain’s fascist past is still being felt today. Since the election of Zapatero in 2004 – whose form of neo-republicanism has been largely influenced by the Irish philosopher Philip Petit – the legacy of the Spanish Civil War is being discussed more openly. The divisions remain, with Aznar’s right-wing Parti Popular and the Catholic Church eager to promote historical amnesia, so that their support for Franco’s brutal dictatorship may be forgotten.
One wonders how far the Catholic Church will go in its attempt to re-write history. Following the example of the previous pontiff, Pope Benedict XVI has recently attempted to cover up the crimes of his church by beatifying Pope Pius XII, a known Nazi sympathiser. Benedict, himself a former member of the Hitler Youth, has recently reinstated Bishop Williamson, a Holocaust denier.
None of this is surprising, as the evidence of history proves the ideological link between fascism and the Catholic Church. What is surprising, however, is that extreme right-wing ideology has not yet been fully eradicated from mainstream European societies, and that there is a dangerous apathy shown by many to confront it.
Responding to the financial crisis shortly before he died, Bob Doyle regretted that capitalism continues to oppress the workers of the world. When the racist Eoin O’Duffy died in 1944, he was given a State funeral. The Irish State, yet again, paid its respects to a Nazi sympathiser. There was no such funeral for Bob Doyle, a true republican with the courage to take up arms in the fight for social justice.
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