their power. O'Donnell also rejected the proposal, arguing that the Left had more power as a united front. Spanish Civil War and after In 1936 O'Donnell was in Barcelona in order to attend the planned People's Olympiad on the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. He joined the Spanish Republican militia that supported the Popular Front government against Francisco Franco's military insurgency. When he returned to Ireland, he encouraged other republicans to fight for the Spanish Republic. Republican Congress members led by Frank Ryan and some Communist Party of Ireland members joined the International Brigades, where they were known as the Connolly Column (named after James Connolly). This was an unpopular stance in Ireland, as the powerful Catholic Church supported Franco's Catholic Nationalists. Attitudes to the Spanish Civil War mirrored the divisions of Ireland's civil war. O'Donnell remarked that the bishops had condemned the anti-Treaty side in the latter for opposing a democratic government, but were now advocating the same thing themselves. O'Donnell's former comrade Eoin O'Duffy, leader of the Blueshirts, led the ultra-Catholic Irish Brigade to Spain to support the Nationalists; they were sent home by Franco. O'Donnell was chairman of the anti-Vietnam War "Irish Voice on Vietnam" organisation which he co-founded with Dan Breen. Writings After the 1940s, O'Donnell devoted more of his time to writing and culture and less to politics, from which he withdrew more or less completely. He published his first novel, Storm, in 1925. This was followed by Islanders (1928, which was published in the US under the title, "The Way it Was With Them"), which received national and international acclaim, The New York Times describing it as a novel of "quiet brilliance and power", conservative London magazine The Spectator "an intensely beautiful picture of peasant life." The writer Benedict Kiely recalled meeting a Chicago man in Iowa in 1968 who had never been to Ireland but could describe the landscape of west Donegal, and the ways of its people, in minute detail despite being blind. When Kiely asked him how he knew so much he revealed he had read Islanders in Braille. Adrigoole, published in 1929, was swiftly followed by The Knife (1930) and On the Edge of the Stream (1934). O'Donnell also went to Spain and later published Salud! An Irishman in Spain (1937). Adrigoole was set in Donegal, but based on the real-life story of the O'Sullivans, a Cork family who