Parliamentary party discipline and tactics: the Fianna Fáil archives, 1926–32

Extract

Academic study of the development of Irish political parties has been hampered by a shortage of primary source material available to historians and political scientists. This is because the headquarters records of parties, where they have survived, are generally fragmentary and ill-organised, and because few national politicians or party organisers have left papers for research.

The shortage of primary sources on the major political parties is reflected in the standard academic works dealing with their development, from Maurice Manning’s Irish political parties (1972) and Michael Gallagher’s The Irish Labour Party in transition, 1957–1982 (1982) to Richard Dunphy’s recent The making of Fianna Fáil power in Ireland (1995). These are largely based on secondary sources, on interviews, and on the private papers of individual politicians. Where scholars have had access to party records, furthermore, it has generally been on an informal and improvised basis. It was in such circumstances that John Bowman, while preparing De Valera and the Ulster question, 1917–1973 (1982), and Dermot Keogh, while researching Ireland and Europe, 1919–1948 (1988), were given sight of some of the records of the Fianna Fail national executive committee and the parliamentary party.