The Blueshirts have been one of the most contested and extensively researched subjects in twentieth-century Irish historiography. Debate has focused principally on the extent to which the movement should be understood as a fascist organisation, or as a spontaneous counter-reaction to the domestic political instability that followed Fianna Fáil’s victory in the 1932 general election. However, strikingly little attention has been devoted to tracing the intellectual origins of Blueshirtism in Irish nationalist and republican thought. This article rejects the dominant historiographical representation of the Blueshirts as an aberration in Irish political history and suggests that the movement can only be understood properly in continuity with the political thought of the pre-Civil War period. It is argued, additionally, that the more complex and differentiated ‘hybrid’ theories of ‘fascistization’ developed by scholars like David D. Roberts, António Costa Pinto and Aristotle Kallis provide a useful comparative framework for understanding how nationalist intellectuals such as Michael Tierney, once steadfast in their commitment to the norms of parliamentary democracy, came to endorse a corporatist politics after being voted out of office.

蓝衫军一直是二十世纪爱尔兰史学中最具争议和最广泛研究的主题之一。辩论主要集中在该运动应在何种程度上被理解为法西斯组织，或者是对共和党在 1932 年大选中获胜后国内政治动荡的自发反应。然而，很少有人关注爱尔兰民族主义和共和主义思想中蓝衫军思想的起源。本文拒绝将蓝衫军的主流史学表述视为爱尔兰政治史上的一种失常现象，并指出只有结合内战前时期的政治思想才能正确理解该运动。此外，有人认为，