Thomas Johnson became the first Labour head of government in Ireland in 1927.
This was a very unlikely turn of events, for his party had only 22 seats out 153 in the Irish Parliament (the ‘Dail Eireann’) at that point.
It went like this.
The Government of the day was the Cumann na nGaedheal party, who had won the Irish Civil War, which was fought over the issue of whether to stop fighting the British. Cumann na nGaedheal, led by the unassuming W. T. Cosgrave, defeated the anti-Treaty forces (who became the Fianna Fail party) after much bloodshed and unpleasantness, and proceeded to govern almost unopposed, for Fianna Fail refused to take their seats in the Dail, just as the Red Alba Party currently refuse to take their seats in the UK Parliament. After the elections in the June of 1927, then, there were 44 empty seats, which allowed Cumann na nGaedheal to hold the confidence of the Dail with support from Independents and third parties.
Kevin O’Higgins, a Cumann na nGaedheal TD (‘MP’), introduced a Bill in 1927 to force Fianna Fail to choose between taking their seats or ceasing to stand in elections. He was assassinated by the IRA for his troubles, but the charismatic and devious Fianna Fail leader, Eamon de Valera (who is tragically little-known today), saw the writing on the wall and led his followers into the Dail for the first time since the Civil War. Most of them carried weapons on the first day.
Very quickly, De Valera connived with various other TDs and parties who were unimpressed with Cosgrave’s Government for a variety of reasons, principally the Labour Party, who were the only major centre-left party in Ireland (and even then, ‘major’ is pushing it) and had opposed the Treaty; and also the National League Party, who were an amalgamation of pro-British conservatives, moderate Nationalists - and, for some reason, vintners - led by Captain William Redmond. They, along with some Independents, hatched a plot to bring down the minority Cumann na nGaedheal government. Thomas Johnson would introduce a motion of no confidence and propose a minority coalition between his own Labour Party and the National League Party. Fianna Fail, who had more seats than both of these parties combined, would vote in their favour and give them Confidence and Supply in the hope of replacing them in Government before too long.
The day of the vote came, and it was predicted by the mathematics of the situation that the motion would pass 73-70. Close, but not Squeaky Bum Time. However, the unnatural deal between the right-most and the left-most parties in the Dail, and the paltry 30 votes they could muster between them, had lost them the confidence of two National League TDs. One, Vincent Rice, very publicly crossed the floor to join Cumann na nGaedheal with the words “I do not think that Deputy de Valera has ever disguised that his aim is to get rid of the Treaty and the Constitution, and if he is not serving that purpose by keeping Deputy Redmond in office, how many hours will he keep him there?” How right - and yet how wrong - he was. It now stood at 72-71.
At this point, another National League TD, a Sligoman named John Jinks, decided to quietly jinx the vote. He slipped out of the Dail while both sides were in full fervour and slipped off into the streets of Dublin. Redmond noticed that there was an empty seat behind him, and he needed every vote he could get if he was going to be Vice-President of the Executive Council. If it came to a 71-71 tie, the Ceann Comhairle (‘Speaker’) would have the casting vote, and he would vote for the status quo. National League functionaries were sent off to trawl the streets of Dublin for Deputy Jinks, and after a number of dead ends and close calls, they found him at the bar of his hotel, and physically dragged him into the Dail, where Captain Redmond guided him firmly by the arm into the correct lobby. Cumann na nGaedheal TDs reported that Jinks had struggled against Redmond’s covert grip, but if he did so, it availed him nothing. Thomas Johnson was now President of the Executive Council - at De Valera’s pleasure.
In these first few months of the Labour-led Government, very little legislation could be passed due to the fragility of the Parliamentary arithmetic. But Tom Johnson did manage to bring Fianna Fail and the National League behind a couple of policies: the abolition of taxes on tea and tobacco, and the creation of a state pension for widows and orphans. Both were passed, and Captain Redmond (now Minister for External Affairs) was sent to negotiate a Free Trade Agreement with the United Kingdom in return for the relaxing of certain Treaty clauses. Nothing came of this, however, because in October, De Valera informed Johnson that he would no longer support the mackled-together Labour-National coalition, and would prefer to be in charge himself. If Johnson didn't mind.
This did not suit Johnson, who was just beginning to enjoy himself. He immediately called new elections and fought them on the basis of his record in Government, his long-time support for Irish workers despite being born in Liverpool (he was not the last foreigner to command Ireland, in fact) and the scurrilousness of De Valera. Both Labour and the National League gained vast numbers of votes from both Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail. Labour now had 54 TDs while the National League had 20. This was almost - but not quite - a majority, but the coalition survived with the help of Independent TDs such as John Daly.
What had been a coalition between minor parties had eclipsed the Civil War factions of old. Ireland was moving on. And in 1928, the impossible happened: the remnants of Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail, who had been literally at war with one another six years before, merged back together into Sinn Fein under the threat from the Left and the Right.
At the same time, Captain Redmond was able to convince the British Government to agree to the Statute of Westminster (1929) in which Acts of the Dail Eireann would have equal status to Acts of the UK Parliament, as opposed to being inferior. Now, Thomas Johnson was able to abolish the Oath of Allegiance and reduce the tax burden on tenant farmers by ceasing to force them to pay annuities to the British Crown - these annuities were repayment for financial assistance extended by the British to their fathers in the late 19th century, and were obviously moderately unpopular. This move increased Labour support in the provinces, but the opposite effect was happening to the National League Party. The absence of their Leader in London and their powerlessness against Labour policies alienated many of the supporters they had gained, and when another election was held in 1929 (early in the Dail, so as to gain a fresh mandate before the Wall Street Crash made itself felt in Ireland and caused the Government to fall) the National League had too few TDs to make a coalition with Labour a stable Government.
Instead, a deal was brokered by Thomas Johnson with the new Leader of Sinn Fein (the merged parties Cumann na nGaedheal and Fianna Fail, not the extremist Republicans who could no longer afford to contest elections) Desmond FitzGerald, about whom the Gordon Lightfoot song ‘The Wrecking of Desmond FitzGerald’ was penned. This was a Grand Coalition between the two major parties, and as such was chaotic and ineffective, as not only were Sinn Fein and Labour singularly unsuited to working with one another, there were also bitter dissentions within both parties. Sinn Fein were still at each other’s throats over the Civil War, and had only worked together to contain the Red threat. Now that it was impossible for a Government to form without both of them in it, there didn’t seem to have been much point. Pistols were carried into the Dail on a daily basis. Meanwhile, Labour were divided on the Soviet issue.
While the Party line was to ally itself to Social Democratic parties like the British Labour Party, some individual TDs were quite fond of the Irish Workers’ League, the Comintern-aligned Party which had stormed into the Dail in 1929 under the divisive figure of ‘Big’ Jim Larkin. In 1930, the Labour TD William X. O’Brien (later, of course, to show little love for Larkin) attracted the support of the IWL in offering asylum to Leon Trotsky, who was at that time hiding in Turkey. This obviously would not do as far as the Left were concerned, and they fought hard to convince Sinn Fein to agree to house him in Ireland. This almost destroyed the Government, and for two months in the winter of 1930, Sinn Fein members stopped attending Executive Council meetings. When Trotsky arrived in the January, clashes between the welcoming party of thousands of trade unionists and rightist armed groups, including bits of the old IRA and off-duty Garda including commissioner Eoin O’Duffy.
During this Dail, the Constitutional issue was all but shelved in order to minimise faction-fighting in Sinn Fein, and this might have worked if there hadn’t been an equal amount of gridlock between Labour and Sinn Fein over domestic policy. As a result, Ireland was hit quite badly by the Great Depression and the Government were not seen to be able to do much about it, which led to the growth of radical forces on the Left and the Right. At first, it seemed as if Larkin’s IWL would be the main focus of this dissatisfaction, but in 1932, Eoin O’Duffy formed the National Guard, a corporatist Fascist party which we will look at in more detail later.
All we need to know at this point is that they won 19 seats in the 1932 general election, in which the IWL also made gains, and Sinn Fein overtook Labour in seat count. Again, the only possible Government was between Sinn Fein and Labour, except this coalition would now be in a minority in the Dail. But this would be fine as long as the National Guard refused to cross the path of an IWL man without spitting, which seemed unlikely. But it did mean that Thomas Johnson, who had managed to hold two unnatural coalitions together in the face of grave economic and social emergencies, could no longer be President of the Executive Council.
