Irish Brigade volunteers receive Mass, La Marañosa

This photograph, displaying Irish Brigade members at a Mass celebrated by a Carlist priest, Padre Alonso, at La Marañosa in spring 1937, conveys the importance of Catholicism for Franco’s Irish volunteers. It was taken by James Roche who served with the Brigade as a medic. On his departure to Spain, Roche was described by the local press as a popular athlete from a well-known family from Bandon, County Cork. His father, Pat, a former Olympic athlete and Military Cross winner, had been killed on the Western Front in 1917. 

The Irish Brigade was set up by the former Blueshirt leader, General Eoin O’Duffy, for political reasons but Catholicism was central to its popular appeal. Appealing for volunteers, O’Duffy emphasised Catholic Ireland’s historic links to Spain, and the need to defend the Spanish Church from communism. Franco’s regime also understood how the Irish Brigade might enhance its international credibility as defenders of Catholicism. As Count Ramírez de Arellano, the Carlist aristocrat who invited O’Duffy to Spain, declared: ‘What a glorious example Ireland could give the whole of Christendom!’ 

Irish Brigade propaganda emphasised religious motivations. Flanked by three priests, Colonel P.J. Coughlan, the organiser in Roche’s home county, informed his young recruits that ‘the hour had come to take their departure for the battlefields of Spain to strike a blow for Christ the King’. The Irish Brigade proclaimed itself ‘part of a crusade prepared to fight under the banner of the Cross to help deliver Spain’. As they embarked from Galway in December 1936, crowds gathered to sing ‘Faith of our Fathers’, presenting the volunteers with Sacred Heart badges, miraculous medals, and prayer books. 

Although some members of the seven-hundred-strong militia belonged to O’Duffy’s fascist National Corporate Party, most were idealistic rural youths who regarded the conflict as a Catholic crusade against communism. The Irish Brigade leadership described its first casualties as ‘true Irish martyrs’, a perspective that was initially widely shared in Ireland. On learning of the death of her only son, one grieving mother offered ‘him to Christ for Whom he fought’. 

Many Irish Brigade volunteers, however, were disillusioned by their experiences in Spain. The poorly-led, undisciplined unit was quickly transferred from the front after it was judged unreliable by Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco, the ruthless commander of the Foreign Legion. The brutal methods they witnessed, including the execution of republican prisoners, led some to reconsider their view of the conflict as a holy war. The chaplain of the Irish College at Salamanca observed in his diary that some Irishmen, having witnessed low attendances at Mass, were disappointed by the Spanish Catholic Church, due to its identification with the rich and powerful, ‘even though that’s what the whole row is supposed to be about’. 

Many of those who returned were embarrassed by the military failure of their militia which was ridiculed as ‘the Rosary Brigade’. The Irish Catholic newspaper, for instance, declared itself ‘a little ashamed’ of its early return. After the discrediting of fascism following the Second World War, Franco’s Irish volunteers learned not to speak of their service. Some even died decades later without their wives or children knowing of their service in the Spanish Civil War.