Custodianship Over Contest, Sinn Féin and Abstentionism: Part 2

1926-1938: The System, Withdrawal and Transfer of Authority

The Sinn Féin that emerged from the split of 1926 did not mistake its survival for success. It had retained a justification without a viable constituency only a year after the split and a doctrine without a state apparatus. Electoral politics moved on without it and the governing apparatus it refused to recognise continued to entrench themselves. What remained was a Republicanism stripped of momentum and obliged, for the first time, to justify itself without reference to imminent victory.

This condition produced a narrowing rather than a collapse. The movement that remained did not attempt to recover influence by softening its terms, nor did it seek validation through popularity. Instead, it turned inward, refining its understanding of the Republic’s inheritance and unbroken claim of its political traditions with increasing severity. Abstentionism ceased to be merely a boundary marker and became a defining condition of Republican identity. To remain Republican was no longer to aspire, but to refuse.

It was in this context that Brian O’Higgins assumed increasing prominence. When he succeeded O’Kelly as president of Sinn Féin in 1931, he inherited not a party in the conventional sense, but a trust. His primary task as President of Sinn Féin was not to expand the party, but to preserve its terms and doctrines under conditions of growing political irrelevance. Where O’Kelly and MacSwiney had brilliantly articulated refusal, O’Higgins sought to codify it.

In Brian O’Higgins, the Republican disposition of Sinn Féin assumed a more explicit and systematic form. His extraordinary body of literary and devotional work, ranging from poetry and songs to religious pamphlets, prayer books and writings about saints, along with his more history-focused writings, reflected a vision of Republicanism inseparable from Christian piety, Gaelic culture and inherited forms of belief. For O’Higgins, national liberation was intelligible only within a moral universe shaped by tradition and the transmission of faith across generations. A governing assumption was that, the Republic, if it meant anything at all, had to be consonant with the spiritual and cultural life of the people it claimed to represent.

It was from this standpoint that O’Higgins resisted attempts to recast Republicanism in the language of abstract social theory or international ideological systems. He was deeply sceptical of efforts to align the national struggle with forms of socialism or communism that treated religion, culture and inherited moral authority as secondary or expendable. Social justice, as he understood it, could not be detached from place, belief, or historical experience, nor imported wholesale from foreign intellectual traditions. His Republicanism was thus conservative not merely in temperament, but in a structure that was ordered, devotional and anchored in continuity rather than innovation.

O’Higgins did not attempt to revive Sinn Féin as an electoral force, nor did he engage in rhetorical gestures aimed at reclaiming the initiative. Instead, he treated Republicanism as a doctrine requiring preservation through instruction, repetition and transmission. Under his leadership, the movement increasingly understood itself as a custodian of the Republic’s sovereignty rather than a contender for political office. Withdrawal from public political life was not embraced as virtue, but accepted as consequence.

This approach found expression above all in O’Higgins’ sustained engagement with Republican history. Through regular publications and commemorative writing, he sought to order the Republican past into a coherent narrative, one in which rightfulness flowed not from mandate or effectiveness but from continuity with an original claim. History, in this sense, was not merely in the past. It was disciplinary. It fixed terms where political life had rendered it ambiguous.

The effect of this was twofold. On the one hand, it further reduced Sinn Féin’s appeal beyond a shrinking circle of committed adherents. The party spoke increasingly to itself, indifferent to persuasion and uninterested in adaptation. On the other hand, it clarified the distinction that had driven the split of 1926 to its logical conclusion. Republicanism, as O’Higgins presented it, was no longer a language capable of multiple interpretations, but rather it was a condition that either obtained or did not.

This should not be mistaken for pride or inertia. The abstentionist tradition under O’Higgins remained active in asserting the continuity of the Republic through symbolic and procedural acts. Most notably, it preserved the stance that the authority of the Second Dáil had never been lawfully extinguished. This claim, as marginal as it appeared in practical terms, functioned as a keystone. It ensured that Republican legitimacy remained something that was inherited or lived up to rather than completely manufactured.

The severity of this position was made abundantly clear by a further rupture within abstentionist Sinn Féin itself. In 1934, both Brian O’Higgins and Mary MacSwiney resigned from the party following the election of Michael O’Flanagan as president. Their objection was not to O’Flanagan’s politics or to his Republican credentials per se, but to what they regarded as a fundamental inconsistency, his employment as a civil servant under the Free State. For O’Higgins and MacSwiney, leadership of a party that denied the validity of the state could not be reconciled with holding a salaried position within its apparatus. The episode illustrated the extent to which abstentionist Republicanism, as they understood it, functioned not merely as a political stance but as a discipline governing conduct as well as belief.

A culmination of this logic came in 1938, when the surviving members of the Second Dáil who stayed true to the abstentionist position transferred custodianship of the Republic to the Army Council of the Irish Republican Army, with Seán Russell being its Chief of Staff at the time. It represented the final attempt to preserve succession of the Republic’s leadership without redefinition. That title was not asserted on the basis of success, consent or necessity, but transmitted as a trust to be held intact by its custodians.

By this point, Sinn Féin as an organisation had largely withdrawn from public political life. But what had been preserved was not merely a memory. It was a conception of Republicanism that had survived ordeals without surrendering its terms. In an environment increasingly dominated by institutions, mandates and outcomes, O’Higgins and those around him insisted that legitimacy remained prior to all three.

This insistence carried a cost. It isolated the tradition and rendered it unintelligible to a political culture oriented toward results. Yet it also secured something rarer, which was coherence across conditions of constraint and many obstacles. By refusing to adapt Republicanism to the conditions of power, O’Higgins ensured that it remained a doctrine of authority rather than aspiration.

When Brian O’Higgins passed away in 1963, he did so quietly, collapsing while at prayer in St. Anthony’s Church in Clontarf. The manner and place of his passing were fitting. Clontarf itself carried an older resonance as it was there that Brian Boru, a Gaelic Catholic High King of Ireland, fell centuries earlier after resisting foreign domination and forces hostile to the Christian order he sought to defend. O’Higgins’ own life had been marked by an unwavering adherence to the Catholic faith, a sustained commitment to the revival and Gaelicisation of Irish cultural life and a determination to keep Republicanism within the moral and national traditions from which it had emerged. Just as firmly, he rejected attempts to encapsulate the Republican struggle within certain doctrines, particularly forms of socialism and, even more so, communism that he regarded as foreign in origin and indifferent, if not hostile, to Ireland’s historical and spiritual inheritance. For O’Higgins, ideas around social justice could not be imported ready-made from other countries, nor could national liberation be reduced to a universal theory detached from place, faith and culture.

What remained at the end of the 1930s and beyond was not a movement poised for return, but a tradition intact in its own terms. It had withdrawn from history as it is commonly written, but not from history as it understood itself. In that sense, the abstentionist Republicans did not lose their argument. They refused to abandon it

Holding the Claim

The history traced here is not one of triumph deferred, but of defiance sustained. From the strategic experiments of early Sinn Féin to the custodianship of the 1930s, the Republican tradition underwent challenges that were forced upon it by circumstances rather than choice. What emerged from that process was not a streamlined path back to power, but a clarified understanding of what could not be surrendered without altering the nature of the tradition itself.

Figures such as J. J. O’Kelly, Mary MacSwiney and Brian O’Higgins were not innovators in the conventional political sense. Their significance lay precisely in their resistance to innovation where innovation threatened continuity. They understood Republicanism not as a programme to be updated, but as a tradition to be preserved. This disposition shaped their hostility to manoeuvre, their suspicion of expedience and their insistence that participation carried implications that intent alone could not neutralise.

The abstentionist tradition they defended came with a heavy price. It marginalised itself and eventually withdrew from electoral politics. Yet it did so deliberately, accepting isolation as the cost of coherence. What it preserved was not organisational vitality, but a standard, a conception of political authority grounded in succession rather than success and in continuity rather than consent.

In that sense, the abstentionist Republicans did not mistake endurance for victory. They endured setbacks without allowing it to dictate belief. What they preserved was not the momentum of a cause, but the integrity of a claim and a measure by which all subsequent settlements would necessarily be judged.