The Gaelic Commonwealth
Researcher: Dr Susannah Riordan
The article will be a study of the influence of distributism on the writings of three Sinn Féin propagandists: Aodh de Blácam, Darrell Figgis and Fr. William Ferris. It traces their attempts to fuse Irish nationalism with nostalgic medievalism and the social teachings of the Papal Encyclical Rerum Novarum and to popularise a vision of the development of an independent Ireland in accordance with the social theories of G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc. While the three shared a common vision of the future, however utopian, this vision led them to take widely divergent positions on the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. For De Blácam the establishment of the Irish Free State amounted to the betrayal of the idea of a Gaelic Commonwealth; for Ferris it made that idea manifest.