Irish Literary Responses to the Spanish Civil War—With Particular Reference to Peadar O'Donnell's Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937)

Abstract

This paper discusses the reverberations which news of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936 had in the Irish Free State. As a result of the Irish Catholic Church and the conservative press hailing General Franco as the saviour of Catholic Spain from a godless Communist minority, Irish public opinion was overwhelmingly pro-Franco. Against this background, the paper gives a brief overview of the most interesting literary treatments of the Spanish Civil War in different genres by both pro-Nationalist and pro-Republican Irish writers. The rest of the paper focuses on Peadar O'Donnell, Irish novelist and one of the founding figures of the Republican Congress, a radical left-wing movement of the 1930s. His book Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937) represents an eyewitness account of the mobilization of the Republican defence forces and the workers’ revolution in Catalonia during the first few months of the war. O'Donnell tried to present a seemingly even-handed picture of the Spanish revolutionary anarchists, whose agricultural reforms he clearly admired, but whose violent attacks on the Catholic Church he condemned.