Page "History of the Republic of Ireland" Paragraph 34

One of Fianna Fáil's first actions in government was to legalise the IRA and to release imprisoned republicans.

IRA members began attacking Cumann na nGaedhal supporters, who they considered " traitors " at rallies.

This greatly antagonised pro-Treaty Civil War veterans, who in response formed the quasi-fascist Blueshirts ( initially the " Army Comrades Association "), led by the former Garda Commissioner Eoin O ' Duffy to oppose the IRA.

There were frequent riots and occasional shootings between the two factions in the early 1930s.

De Valera banned the Blueshirts in 1933, after a threatened march on the Dáil, in imitation of Mussolini's March on Rome.

Not long afterwards, in 1936, de Valera made a clean break with political violence when he banned the increasingly left-wing IRA after they murdered a landlord's agent, Richard More O ' Farrell, in a land dispute and fired shots at police during a strike of Tramway workers in Dublin.

In 1939 it enacted the Offences against the State Act, for the prosecution of illegal armed groups ; an act just as draconian as any legislation previous administrations had passed.