THE CONSERVATIVE RESISTANCE

It offers an apt commentary on the growing conservatism of Fianna Fáil in the late 1930s that the most potentially radical initiative at that time, the demand for a corporatist (or, in Irish parlance, vocationalist) reorganisation of society, was launched by circles closer to Cosgrave than to de Valera. Irish corporatists derived their intellectual stimulus in large measure from Pius XI's 1931 encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno. The general ideological thrust of the encyclical, condemning materialistic capitalism as well as materialistic communism, contained much to appeal to de Valera. But the demand of Irish corporatists, however vaguely formulated during the 1930s, for a national vocational council, to either advise or supersede parliament, had one decisive disadvantage from de Valera's viewpoint. It would curb the power of political parties, which in practice meant the power of Fianna Fáil. As if to confirm his reservations, the opposition sought to exploit the papal pronouncement for their own purpose. The Blueshirts mouthed corporatist rhetoric, and Fine Gael, out of office, and devoid of any idea of how to return to it, coquetted with the vocabulary of vocationalism.

De Valera handled the vocationalist threat with consummate skill. He adopted the classic Augustinian posture – give me corporatism, but not yet. He told the Fianna Fáil Árd Fheis in 1936 that