Lia Fáil (political party)

Lia Fáil was founded on 1 November 1957 in Lusmagh, County Offaly as the "Ireland for the Irish Association" with Father John Fahy named as President of the organisation.

[2] The Irish political establishment was not saved from the paper’s fury and in particular the ruling Fianna Fáil and Éamon de Valera were savaged in its articles.

During the 1959 Irish presidential election campaign Lia Fáil called on its followers to support Seán Mac Eoin over De Valera.

The paper’s reasons for supporting Mac Eoin were because he was "an honest-to-God Irishman of our own flesh and blood whose father and mother we know" and his military background.

In this world Lia Fáil has abolished the Oireachtas, drafted a new constitution, froze the banks, decoupled the Irish Punt from the British Pound, outlawed emigration, introduced mandatory military service, abolished both the Garda Siochána and the Civil Service and sent those former employees to work on the land alongside 500,000 other young men returned to Ireland from aboard.

All members of Fianna Fáil, including De Valera, have been captured, tried, found guilty and sentenced to death, with their corpses left hanging in Dublin as a warning to others.

[1] The incident immediately featured in the headlines of the national newspapers, and doubly so when two days after the escape, the five wanted farmers attended Mass at Father Fahey's church in view of the public.

Highly embarrassed by the developing situation, the Garda Siochana moved to act decisively and a 50 officer raid took place on Father Fahy's home the next morning.

Flanagan drew comparisons to anti-clerical oppression in China and Russia, much to the government's chagrin, while in the pages of the Lia Fáil newspaper Fahy compared the detectives who raided his home to the Black and Tans.

Perhaps cognisant that the case was grabbing national headlines in the middle of a presidential campaign and a referendum on Proportional Representation, the judges elected to handle things with care and attempted to defuse the situation by offering leniency if the farmers would promise not to re-offend.

Initially, the farmers refused to do so but after several adjournments and the matter being dragged out until November, they eventually relented, perhaps because in the meantime Lia Fáil's reputation in the public had considerably dropped.

[1] Sensing the unrest in Offaly, De Valera and Fianna Fáil arranged for the Ministry of Land and Fisheries Erskine H. Childers to officially open an annual carnival in Banagher at the end of May.

But it also backfired with the general public as well; Childers was highly respected and in fact, he had credible Republican credentials of his own, his father having died fighting for the anti-Treaty side in the Irish Civil War.