"Violence, citizenship and virility: The making of ..." Topic

…an irish fascist

"Gael, revolutionary, soldier, chief of police, founding president of Fine Gael: during his short and controversial public life General Eoin O'Duffy played many roles. His place in the public memory, however, is largely bound up with just one of them: fascist. O'Duffy's decision to lead the Blueshirt movement after his removal as commissioner of the Garda Síochána by President de Valera in 1933, and his ill-fated intervention in the Spanish Civil War on the side of General Franco, ensured his legacy as one of the villains of modern Irish history. Perhaps all political lives end in failure, but few careers in Irish public life have ended so ignominiously. The shadow of failure, as one of his acolytes recalled, hung heavily over O'Duffy's final years of ill-health and tarnished reputation: ‘he was really a pathetic and lonely figure at the end; a recluse in the midst of society'. When he died in 1944—a broken man aged only in his mid-fifties—his obituary in the Irish Times noted that his name had ‘ceased to mean much to the public'…"

Main page

link

Armand