DAVE MANSEiLL the larger :financia! interests were able to absorb the shock because the war had turned them into creditors with large overseas holdings: large surpluses accumulated during the war had ifinanced the purchase of many additional stocks and shares. Interest accruing to the residents of the Irish Free State alone in the early 1920s was greater than the interest accruing to the whole of Ireland in 1913. The economic buoyancy of the larger farmers and financia! interests compared with the economic depression of the rural and urban wage-earners plus the fact that that the Roman Catholic hierarchy had thrown itssweight behind the proTreaty forces spelt doom for De Valera in the June 1922 elections. The more "nationalist" and the more "revolutionary" sections of the I.R.A. split from the national army, and initiated a guerilla campaign in which they became known as the Irregulars. Once more a situation of dual power existed and De Valera and his part of Sinn Fein almost immediately formed a junction with the Irregulars. In October 1922 they set up, under De Valera's presidency a government that claimed to represent the legitimate autority of the "Republic". They failed, however, to gain popular support because the mass of the country was war-weary, because the "Free State" had access to British weaponry, and because the Roman Catholic hierarchy stigmatized the Republican campaign as a "system of murder and assassination of the National forces", · and excommunicated anybody who took part in it. As we have seen, De Valera abandoned the military struggle in May 1923 and eventually founded the Fianna Fail (in 1926) with which party he re-entered parliamentary politics in 1927. This left a rump of "nationalist" and "revolutionary" Republicans still dedicated to a military dissolution of the border established by partí tion. They retained the name of I.R.A. and the theoretical claim that their inner council (consisting almost entirely of I.R.B. members) was the legitimate government of the whole of Treland since they had never accepted the 1921 Treaty and were still at war with the British. Their ideology was a hopeless conglomerate of nationalism and "socialism" which split their militants into two camps which often carne out into open opposition to each other (and presaged the split into "Official" and "Provisional" I.R.A. in 1969). The only unifying factor was a"mystical" belief that the military re-unification of the island would somehow solve all Irish problems. 56
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