Revolutionary Ireland in the (Neo-)Fascist Imagination

This paper builds on two facts. First, one should consider that Ireland’s revolutionary decade coincided with the years of the rise of Fascism and Benito Mussolini in Italy. Fascism lived on the strength of the myths and ideas it created and propagated through the print and visual media, which were employed also to construct the Fascist national identity. In this regard, the documents Italians then dedicated to the events of the Irish revolution and civil war are of great interest, as they portray Ireland as a locus of anxieties and alterity in which Fascist Italy reflects itself and from which it differs. Hence, my paper will first explore how Italian commentators, including Mussolini, conceived and communicated Revolutionary Ireland from the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia, L’Ardita, and dedicated pamphlets. Second, I will investigate how the Fascist ‘re-mediation’ of Revolutionary Ireland in the late 1910s and early 1920s has been appropriated and further reconfigured by some Italian neo-fascist groups since the early days of the Decade of Centenaries. Such reconfiguration led to the reappraisal of many leading figures of the period and their supposed ‘disciples’ in the following decades (e.g. Bobby Sands). My paper will thus trace the contours of this peculiar and – as I will show – historically groundless Italian legacy of Ireland’s revolutionary period.