Michael Tierney and the Intellectual Origins of Blueshirtism, 1920–1938

Abstract

The Blueshirts have been one of the most contested and extensively researched subjects in twentieth-century Irish historiography. Debate has focused principally on the extent to which the movement should be understood as a fascist organisation, or as a spontaneous counter-reaction to the domestic political instability that followed Fianna Fáil’s victory in the 1932 general election. However, strikingly little attention has been devoted to tracing the intellectual origins of Blueshirtism in Irish nationalist and republican thought. This article rejects the dominant historiographical representation of the Blueshirts as an aberration in Irish political history and suggests that the movement can only be understood properly in continuity with the political thought of the pre-Civil War period. It is argued, additionally, that the more complex and differentiated ‘hybrid’ theories of ‘fascistization’ developed by scholars like David D. Roberts, António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis provide a useful comparative framework for understanding how nationalist intellectuals such as Michael Tierney, once steadfast in their commitment to the norms of parliamentary democracy, came to endorse a corporatist politics after being voted out of office.