Why has Fianna Fáil never been a truly all-Ireland party? |
IF the recent plans of some figures in Fianna Fáil had come to fruition, it would have celebrated the centenary of its launch at the weekend by sitting in government in the south while simultaneously having a direct influence at Stormont.
Instead, the party’s northern wing has seldom been less visible, and it is difficult to identify any momentum behind its sporadic efforts to develop a presence which might eventually allow it to claim that it was a true all-Ireland entity.
It is hardly what the activists who came together to form Fianna Fáil at the long-disappeared La Scala theatre, just off O’Connell Street in Dublin, on May 16 1926, and who were drawn from both sides of a border then in its infancy, envisaged.
The meeting was chaired by Countess Constance Markievicz, who died the following year at the age of 59, but the architect was of course Éamon de Valera, who among his many other later accomplishments as Taoiseach and President was the abstentionist Stormont MP for South Down between 1933 and 1937.
De Valera had resigned as Sinn Féin chairman two months before the La Scala gathering, following the defeat of his ard fheis motion calling on party members to be allowed to take their seats in Dáil Éireann if the contentious Oath of Allegiance was removed.
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He was said to have seriously considered retiring from........