came to power at the 1932 general election (to begin what would be an unbroken 16-year spell in government) and went on to long dominate politics in the independent Irish state. An attempt in the 1940s to access funds that had been put in the care of the High Court led to the Sinn Féin Funds case, which the party lost and in which the judge ruled that it was not the legal successor to the Sinn Féin of 1917. By the late 1940s, two decades removed from the Fianna Fáil split and now the Sinn Féin funds lost, the party was little more than a husk. The emergence of a popular new republican party, led by former IRA members, in Clann na Poblachta, threatened to void any remaining purpose Sinn Féin had left. However, it was around this same time that the IRA leadership once again sought to have a political arm (the IRA and Sinn Féin had effectively no formal ties following the civil war). Following an IRA army convention in 1948, IRA members were instructed to join Sinn Féin en masse and by 1950 they had successfully taken total control of the party, with IRA army council member Paddy McLogan named as the new president of the party. As part of this rapprochement, it was later made clear by the army council that the IRA would dictate to Sinn Féin, and not the other way around. At the 1955 United Kingdom general election, two Sinn Féin candidates were elected to Westminster, and likewise, four members of Sinn Féin were elected to Leinster House in the 1957 Irish general election. In December 1956, at the beginning of the IRA's Border Campaign (Operation Harvest), the Northern Ireland Government banned Sinn Féin under the Special Powers Act; it would remain banned until 1974. By the end of the Border campaign five years later, the party had once again lost all national representation. Through the 1960s, some leading figures in the movement, such as Cathal Goulding, Seán Garland, Billy McMillen, Tomás Mac Giolla, moved steadily to the left, even to Marxism, as a result of their own reading and thinking and contacts with the Irish and international left. This angered more traditional republicans, who wanted to stick to the national question and armed struggle. The Garland Commission was set up in 1967, to investigate the possibility of ending abstentionism. Its report