Support For The Brigade
Support for Irish involvement was based primarily on the Catholic ethos of most Irish people, as distinct from their opinion on Spanish politics per se. Many Irish Independent newspaper editorials endorsed the idea, and on 10 August 1936 it published a letter from O'Duffy seeking assistance for his "anti-Red Crusade". The Catholic Church was naturally on side. Many local government County Councils passed resolutions in support, starting with Clonmel on 21 August. While the Irish leader de Valera remained strictly neutral, in line with the multi-national Non-Intervention Committee, his publicist Aodh de Blacam wrote "For God and Spain".
This support was mirrored outside the Irish Free State. In the USA the largely Catholic Irish American community was in a minority that supported Franco and the rebels, but a proposal in the US Congress to allow sales of arms to the Spanish Republic was opposed successfully by a campaign led by the Catholic Joseph Kennedy. In Northern Ireland, support was so strong in the Catholic minority that it largely abandoned the Northern Ireland Labour Party, whose leader Harry Midgley supported the Spanish Republic (Midgley was greeted at one party meeting with chants of "we want Franco").
Read more about this topic: Irish Brigade (Spanish Civil War)
Famous quotes containing the words support and/or brigade:
“... married women work and neglect their children because the duties of the homemaker become so depreciated that women feel compelled to take a job in order to hold the respect of the community. It is one thing if women work, as many of them must, to help support the family. It is quite another thing—it is destructive of woman’s freedom—if society forces her out of the home and into the labor market in order that she may respect herself and gain the respect of others.”
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