Fionnán Sheahan

Yeah, and yet we look back over the last 100 years, certainly in the first 85, they were the dominant force.

I mean, it was... How did they achieve that?

To go from...

the Civil War to being established as a new party, to dominating Irish politics, especially for the first 25 years of their existence.

Absolutely.

Grassroots structures and organisation, they were present in every half parish in Ireland.

If you look across the early decades of this country and right up to my childhood,

Every parish, every half parish, had three or four things.

They had a national school, they had a post office, a few other bits like that all in common, and a Fianna Fáil common or branch.

And that, it came from the bottom up.

A lot of people mistakenly believed that the founder, Eamon de Valera, was an autocrat.

In actual fact, he was reluctant and slow, but very democratic.

in his approach and pace of the slowest and always prepared to listen.

They began with the IRA structures, went to all the local people.

de Valera took on board

Most of the guys who were seen as the hard men in the War of Independence and the Civil War, people like Sean Moylan in Northwest Cork, Gerry Boland in Dublin, people like that who were seen to be quite radical, diehard IRA people.

He got them on board and they used the IRA structures, but they went beyond that.

And while they were based on those who had opposed the treaty,

They had no objection to taking on people who had initially supported the treaty and then were kind of disabused of the established Comann na nGaeil, which became Finna Gaeil.

Government, which we had for the first decade, felt that Ireland needed answers to social questions like poverty, housing, employment to curb emigration, things like that.