Killing off the Competition

Abstract

In August 1929, James W. Upton, Editor of the republican newspaper, Honesty, discovered that that Seán Lemass and Gerald Boland, the Secretaries of the Fianna Fáil party, had issued a circular to their members that blackballed Honesty and promoted the sales of The Nation, a publication that Fianna Fáil's leader, Éamon de Valera, had recently brought under his control. The event that triggered this action was Upton's decision to publish an article critical of the Fianna Fáil leadership, something Upton did in the interest of freedom of speech. Upton, who was sympathetic to the Fianna Fáil cause, dubbed Lemass and Boland, ‘the Dublin Junta’ and accused them of launching an underhand attack to further their own careers and party ambitions. Fianna Fáil retaliated in the pages of The Nation, declaring that Honesty was no longer a republican journal and thereby destroying Honesty's readership. An exploration of these events reveals political duplicity and a fundamental misfit between the views of a republican idealist and hardheaded professional politicians. Upton believed that republicanism without journalistic freedom was no republicanism at all, whilst Lemass and Boland focused on building a disciplined party machine intent on suppressing dissent, within and without of its ranks.