Irish newspapers and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

Early in life I had noticed that no event is ever correctly reported in a newspaper, but in Spain for the first time, I saw newspaper reports which did not bear any relation to the facts, not even the relationship which is implied in an ordinary lie. I saw great battles reported where there had been no fighting, and complete silence where hundreds of men had been killed. George Orwell (1943) The Spanish Civil War was one of the most controversial conflicts of recent history. For many on the left, it was a struggle between democracy and fascism. In contrast, many Catholics and conservatives championed Franco as a crusader against communism. Others felt Spain was the beginning of an inevitable conflict between fascism and communism which had increasingly threatened the stability of inter-war Europe. Spain has remained a battleground of ideologies ever since. Many supporters of the Spanish Republic attribute its defeat to the failure of other democratic states to oppose fascism, a policy of appeasement which ultimately led to the Second World War; for others on the left, including Orwell, Spain came to symbolise the betrayal of socialism by the Soviet Union — a disillusioning suppression of liberty repeated in subsequent decades in Hungary, Czechoslovakia and elsewhere. Ireland was no less drawn to Spain than other European nations. Within months of the war breaking out, close to one thousand Irishmen were fighting among the armies of both sides on the frontlines around Madrid. But for most Irish people, influenced by the Catholic church and sensational newspaper reports of anticlerical atrocities, the ideological conflict was perceived to be between Catholicism and communism rather than left and right. The outbreak of the war was followed by an immense outpouring of popular sympathy for Franco’s Nationalists. During the autumn of 1936 the Irish Christian Front organised mass pro-Franco rallies which attracted the support of opposition politicians, clergymen and much of the public. The dissenting voices of support for the Spanish Republic emanating from the marginalised Irish left were ignored or, more often, suppressed. De Valera’s Fianna Fáil government expressed its support for Spain’s Catholics while, somewhat awkwardly, adopting a position of neutrality for reasons of international diplomacy.

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