President Emmanuel Macron hopes that the glamour of the Olympics will distract the French people from divisive politics for a while, but the problems facing his centrist coalition have worsened after surprise elections he called to thwart the advance of the far-right Rally National. The left-wing New Popular Front won a surprise election and is now the largest group in the National Assembly. This hastily assembled coalition alludes to the Popular Front government of Léon Blum elected in May 1936. Then, as now, France had a powerful, xenophobic, far-right force deeply hostile to republican values.
In a letter to the Irish Press, André Sheehy Skeffington defended the new government against accusations that it would implement anti-Catholic policies and bring about the “spiritual disasters” that had befallen Russia and Spain under the Bolsheviks. He pointed out that Blum was a leader of the Socialist Party, not a “spokesman for the Communist movement.” He noted that the French far-right had previously planned a major attack on the National Assembly, and that the Popular Front had shown that socialists and liberals could unite and persuade millions of voters to elect an anti-fascist government. As a French citizen, Sheehy Skeffington would not have been able to vote for the Popular Front. Women could not vote in France in 1936. When Parliament met for the first time after the election, feminists filled the gallery and held up banners calling for women's suffrage.
Owen Sheehy Skeffington, André's husband, wrote that Bloom quickly introduced the wage increases and paid holidays he had promised to workers. In a column for the current affairs magazine Ireland Today, Owen pointed out that the reporting on France's left-wing government was disproportionately inflammatory. Much of the right-wing accusation levelled at Bloom stemmed from the fact that he was Jewish. While the far-right in France posed a very serious threat, Spain's Popular Front government faced a military coup in July, which Hitler and Mussolini immediately lent aid to, giving the rebels overwhelming military superiority and leading to civil war.
Peder O'Donnell, who spent three weeks in Catalonia at the beginning of the Generals' Revolt, wrote in a letter to the Irish Independent that Spain's democratic government challenged the landowners, the backbone of the rebellious officer class. General Franco's appeal to religious opinion was merely a political tactic, O'Donnell said, just like Lloyd George's appeal in 1914 to save “Catholic Belgium.” Marin Mitchell, author of Storm Over Spain, informed readers of Ireland Today that Spaniards starved in the drylands and sometimes faced starvation. “Where the land is dry, the peasants are starving.” For supporters of the Popular Front, land reform was as important as addressing the problem of illiteracy. Kate O'Brien also wrote a book about Spain, Mary Lavelle. “I believe in the Spanish Republic and its Constitution,” she declared. It should win “for all of us.”
But Hitler's aggression continued, thanks to French and Spanish appeasement. The systematic Nazi attacks on German Jewish communities during Kristallnacht, the final weeks of the Spanish Republic in November 1938, sparked a debate about helping Jewish refugees. Francis Stuart, who would later broadcast from Berlin during World War II, wrote to the Irish Times that appeals for financial support for “suffering foreigners” were ironic, given the number of people living in poverty in Ireland. “True charity begins at home. In the parable of the Good Samaritan we learn that our neighbour is the one we are closest to.” He argued that the plan to provide relief for Jewish victims of Nazi violence was merely a “gesture” to “demonstrate the humanitarianism” of European democracies. Letter writers disagreed with Stuart. One, for example, wrote that sympathy for the unemployed “should not deter us from helping those who suffer directly from the cruel cruelty of their rulers.” Others argued that Stuart confused the issue by pitting those who helped refugees against those who helped those in need on their doorsteps; they were often “the same people”. One correspondent found Stuart's interpretation of the Good Samaritan “very strange”. Most would read the fable as “a lesson in the brotherhood of man, and that it is our duty to help any man who has been robbed, beaten, or left by the wayside, without first asking whether he is an Irishman or not”.
In a moving speech at the All-Ireland hurling final, GAA president Jarlath Barnes reminded modern xenophobes that they do not understand Irish history. Before presenting the Liam McCarthy Cup to the Clare hurlers, Barnes recalled Irish immigrants whose ancestors had to flee famine and war. “We are thinking of you today,” he said. “Thank you to the countries that have taken you in and given you work,” he said, echoing the feelings of many. Barnes may have had in mind Michael Considine, a refugee from Spanshill, County Clare, who emigrated to the United States in 1870 and wrote a famous ballad about an imaginary return to home and to his love. But he wakes up from a “hallucination” to find himself in California, “miles from Spanshill.”
