Irish Social Credit Party | |
|---|---|
| Founder | Maud Gonne |
| Founded | 1932; 93 years ago (1932) |
| Dissolved | 1940; 85 years ago (1940) |
| Headquarters | Gardiner Street,Dublin |
| Ideology | Social Credit economics |
TheIrish Social Credit Party was a political party active in theIrish Free State. Founded as the Financial Freedom Federation in 1932, it was renamed in 1935.[1]
Formed in 1932 as the Financial Freedom Federation (FFF), it became the Irish Social Credit Party in late 1935. The party sought to reform Ireland's financial and economic system on lines consistent with thesocial credit economics as espoused by MajorC. H. Douglas. The FFF had split in two factions: one operating under the banner of the Financial Freedom Federation and the other under the banner of the Financial Freedom Federation of Ireland.[1]
A list of the party's executive committee member submitted to the 1934 Banking Commission includesMaud Gonne MacBride and Josephine Fitzgerald.[1] As of 1936, the Party's headquarters was based in Gardiner Street, Dublin.[2]
In theIrish Independent in 1936, Gonne criticisedErnest Blythe's denunciation of social credit economics. She wrote: "I read with amazement the report of Mr. Blythe's broadcast attack on Social Credit. Major Douglas's contention that production has outstripped distribution with disastrous results of unemployment and starvation, tending to war and anarchy is uncontrovertible, and is apparent to all in the desperate scramble for markets, the restriction of output and destruction in almost every country of consumable goods, while millions of people who need these goods are allowed to starve."[3]
Along with Gonne, other notable names on the party's executive committee of the organisation were those ofPatrick Lenihan and former captain of the British army, Henry Neville Roberts. Former chief organiser of the IRB in Ulster, Seamus Dobbyn, presided as president for most of the decade. When the movement was revived under a different moniker in the 1940s, it was led byJames Lennon, from Carlow, who had been elected as a TD to the first Dáil in 1919.[1]
The party went into decline by the late 1930s and it had become confused in the public mind with theCommunist Party of Ireland. An example of this was at a public meeting of the party at the Gloucester Diamond, Dublin in April 1936. Before the meeting could commence, an angry anti-Communist mob, seemingly provoked by a party banner exclaiming ‘social justice through Social Credit’, smashed the platform and destroyed books and literature before launching missiles, including cabbage stalks at party members, including Gonne.[1]
In 1941,Denis Ireland publishedÉamon de Valera Doesn’t See it Through: A Study of Irish Politics in the Machine Age, in which he defended Douglas'sdistributive philosophy. "Social credit" or "national dividend" payments to citizens were essential to redress the otherwise chronic lag in "the machine-age" between their capacity to consume and the "productive capacity" of industry. In a "world of artificial scarcity" the alternative, he suggested, was fascism.[4] Ireland's position with regard to the Social Credit party, however, is unclear. In 1948, he entered theSeanad Éireann forClann na Poblachta,[5] the republican and broadly social-democratic party of Maud Gonne's son,Seán MacBride, making him the first Northern Ireland resident to serve in theOireachtas.