“An ‘Outburst of Irish Feeling’: Fascism in the Irish Free State”

Fascism, to the general public, has become synonymous with the German and Italian cases. This is for good reason: Hitler’s Nazis and Mussolini’s fascists had perhaps the most significant impact on human society at large, drawing the European continent into a six-year-long global war that killed upwards of 70 million worldwide. As a result of this notoriety, many historians used Nazism and Italian fascism to construct a definition of fascism that could then be used to identify similar movements amongst far-right regimes across Europe. This method, however, has proven problematic, as no other movements can quite meet the goalposts set by the Germans and Italians. As a result, many fascist movements in interwar Europe and beyond have gone unidentified. Historians have begun to campaign for a new, transnational understanding of fascism as a malleable, generalized set of ideas and attitudes which could easily take root wherever it was planted. Any country facing any sort of internal instability could galvanize local resentments to fit in with a global, flexible system of responses to any crises of modernity: fascism. Kiera Codey’s project will utilize the transnational framework to analyze Eoin O’Duffy’s fascist movements (colloquially known as the Blueshirts) in the Irish Free State. Transnational analysis will allow for a better understanding of how O’Duffy molded fascist thought—namely in regards to nationalism, anti-communism, and gender— to suit the sociopolitical landscape of 1930s Ireland.