Two Conflicting Irish Views of the Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War sparked a heated debate in the recently created Irish Free State, as the Republic of Ireland was then called. A country that had also gone through an eleven-month civil war after the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921 was again divided between those who supported the left-wing democratic Spanish Republican government and those who favoured Franco’s “crusade” against atheists and Marxists. In fact, some Irish volunteers joined the International Brigades to confront Fascism together with the Spanish Republican forces, while other more conservative Irish Catholics were mobilised to fight with Franco’s army against those Reds that the media claimed to be responsible for killing priests and burning churches. Both sections were highly influenced by the news, accounts and interpretations of the Spanish war that emerged at that time. Following Lluís Albert Chillón’s approach to the relations between journalism and literature (1999), this article aims to analyse the war reportages of two Irish writers who describe the Spanish Civil War from the two opposite sides: Peadar O’Donnell (1893–1986), a prominent Irish socialist activist and novelist who wrote Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937), and Eoin O’Duffy (1892–1944), a soldier, anti-communist activist and police commissioner who raised the Irish Brigade to fight with Franco’s army and wrote The Crusade in Spain (1938). Both contributed to the dissemination of information and ideas about the Spanish conflict with their eyewitness accounts, and both raise interesting questions about the relations between fact, fiction and the truth, using similar narrative strategies and rhetorical devices to portray different versions of the same war.