Ireland, the Basques and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract In late 1936, two Irishmen arrived in the Spanish Basque Country. One was General Eoin O'Duffy, signing the terms of agreement for an Irish Brigade to support the military uprising against the Second Spanish Republic. Meanwhile, socialist republican George Gilmore journeyed across the Pyrenees in search of a Basque nationalist priest he had met four years earlier. While O'Duffy was drawn into the conflict by traditionalist monarchists from Navarre, his leftist opponents in Ireland mounted a pro-republic propaganda campaign focused on the war effort of the rival Basque nationalists. In effect, a civil war between Basques became entangled with the legacy of the Irish Civil War, as old rivals such as O'Duffy and Gilmore constructed alliances on opposite sides of the conflict as it played out in this small corner of Spain. This article places a new emphasis on the Basque dimension of Ireland's engagement with the Spanish Civil War and illustrates how it was shaped by earlier Basque-Irish relations.