SPAIN: Discouraged Celts

The armies of Generalissimo Francisco Franco contain approximately 100,000 volunteer Moors, Italians, Germans. Until last week there was also on his rolls another group of 1,400 men, hailed by neutral observers as the only group of honest volunteers among all the foreigners on the Rightist side: the Irish Brigade of General Owen O’Duffy.

A frustrated Irish Fascist. General O’Duffy was once a rural architect, joined the Irish Republican Army in 1917. Later he opposed Eamon de Valera with a blue-shirted Fascist army of his own (TIME, Oct. 16, 1933 et seq.), had recently faded from the Irish political scene.

The Spanish civil war put blood in the eye of Owen O’Duffy. From the back hills he recruited a battalion of young boys, sworn to die in the fight against communism and in defense of the Catholic Church, and that a great many of them did. Last week, with General Franco pounding away at the gates of Bilbao, word came that General O’Duffy’s Irish Brigade would soon be on the way back to Britain. The official reason was that since the international non-intervention scheme went into effect fortnight ago, no replacements could go out from Ireland. Correspondents with the Rightist armies had other explanations. Since his arrival in Spain, the advice of General Owen O’Duffy has never been asked by the high-powered German and Italian staff officers of Generalissimo Franco.

Spaniards in the Rightist ranks hate all their foreign colleagues, but have found the thin ranks of the Irish Brigade easiest to impose on. In the frontal attack on Madrid recently the Irish Brigade suddenly found itself under heavy rifle and machine-gun fire from its own rear, suffered heavy casualties, had to fight its way back through the Rightist ranks.

Back to the roots of recorded history go the connections between Spain and Ireland. On an English dockside fortnight ago, Welsh-born David Lloyd George exaggerated mildly when he cried: “I am a Basque!” (TIME, May 3). Anthropologists agree that physically the Basques are indistinguishable from the members of the Celtic race, the Welsh, the Irish, the Bretons and the Scots.

The Celts, an ancient people, started somewhere near the banks of the Rhine, spread loosely through Europe, crossed the Pyrenees into Spain, and reached Ireland and England only a few years before the Roman invasion of 55-A. D. They have a basic language. Today linguists agree that the Welsh, Irish, Scottish and Breton languages are related to the Celtic. The Basques, however, a mountainous folk, were little influenced by the Celtic invasion of Spain in the 6th Century B. C., have today a completely unrelated language.

Beyond anthropology the connections between Spain and Ireland are clearer. Bilbao is only 660 miles from Cork. Not only potato growers but Spanish and Irish fishermen have been rivals, sometimes friends, for centuries. The Spanish Armada was wrecked off the coast of Ireland, is blamed for the “black” Irish of the Western Isles. The Irish Duke of Wellington was made a Spanish Grandee.