Michael Donnellan and Adolf Hitler
Published in 20th-century / Contemporary History, Issue 1 (Jan/Feb 2010), Letters, Volume 18Sir,
—I wish to point out that R. M. Douglas has his facts a bit mixedup in his article ‘Ailtirí na hAiséirighe: Ireland’s fascist New Order’(HI 17.5, Sept./Oct. 2009), where he states that Michael Donnellan,leader of Clann na Talmhan, boasted of the similarities between hispolitical mission and that of Adolf Hitler. In the research for my bookThe Ploughman on the Pound Note I did not come across any instance ofMr Donnellan comparing his political mission with that of Adolf Hitler.On the contrary, it was Mr Seán MacEntee, then Fianna Fáil minister forlocal government, speaking at Ballinasloe during the 1943 generalelection campaign, in an attempt to demonise Clann na Talmhan, whodescribed it and the Labour Party as an ‘unholy alliance’. They had‘Hitler’ Donnellan with his totalitarian party in Galway and ‘Stalin’Duffy and Larkin in Dublin as allies. Undercurrents and sinisterinfluences, he said, were at work in Ireland today and they are notnative. They were working to overthrow democratic rule, said MrMacEntee. At a later meeting in Ballinasloe Mr Donnellan replied to MrMacEntee, and said that the answer to the mud-slinging by a responsibleminister would be given by the decent farmers and sons of the soil on22 June [election day]. Those decent people, he said, knew nothing andcared less about Communism or Nazism. Therefore I contend that MrDouglas has done an injustice to the memory of Michael Donnellan, whodevoted his lifetime to the betterment of the farming community of theWest of Ireland.
—Yours etc.,
EUGENE DUGGAN
Athenry, Co. Galway
Personal Histories
On this Day
June 30
- 1921 The brothers Richard (24) and Abraham Pearson (19) were executed by an IRA firing party on their farm at Coolacrease in the foothills of the Slieve Bloom Mountains. The pair had been court-martialled for firing on IRA Volunteers, who were cutting down trees on their land for the purpose of mounting a roadblock.
- 1690
Above: William of Orange—had a close shave the day before the Battle of the Boyne when grazed by an enemy musket-ball.
Eve of the Battle of the Boyne. Early that morning, William led his multi-national army south from their camp in Loughbrickland, north of Newry, through Dundalk, where he was joined by the Duke of Schomberg, who had wintered there, and on through Ardee, arriving at the Boyne in the early afternoon. Shortly afterwards he had a lucky escape. As both armies surveyed each other across the river, exchanging sporadic fire, an enemy ball killed a soldier and two horses directly beside him, and a second, according to a witness, grazed the king’s right shoulder blade, ‘taking away his outward coat, his chamois waistcoat and his shirt and issuing a spoonful of blood’. At four in the afternoon, having had his wound dressed and his arm placed in a sling, William dined on the field and at nine called a council of war. His chief commanders, Schomberg and his cousin, the Count of Solms, sharply disagreed on tactics. Schomberg proposed that the main part of the army should perform a flanking movement, involving a roundabout march of several miles, to cross the Boyne where it bends at Rosnaree, thus attacking the Jacobites’ left flank. Solms, however, favoured a single frontal attack at Oldbridge. William eventually compromised, allowing 10,000 men to be sent to Rosnaree but concentrating the main attack at Oldbridge. Orders were then given that the troops should be ready to march at break of day, with green sprigs in their hats to distinguish them from James’s men, who, it was understood, would wear pieces of white paper. It was after midnight when William retired to his tent ‘impatient for the approaching day’.
- 1934 Nazi Germany’s ‘Night of the Long Knives’. The leader of the paramilitary SA, Ernst Rohm, and hundreds of his followers, along with dozens of Hitler’s political opponents, were murdered by the SS and the Gestapo in a two-day purge.