Irish Labour and Working Class History

Dr. Ann Matthews will give a talk prior to the book launch, entitled, ‘The Widow’s Mite: The Widows of 1916′, from 2.45 to 3.30pm.

[Photo from 'Darkest Dublin' collection, RSAI]

Below is an article by Ruth McManus. It’s from 2003 and was first published in International Labor and Working-Class History.

The title is ‘Blue Collars, “Red Forts” and Green Fields: Working Class Housing in Ireland in the Twentieth Century.’

Her book, Dublin 1910-1940: Shaping the City and Suburbs (Four Courts Press, 2002) is in the public library system, and is available for purchase from Four Courts here.

She says on her website that the article is available for free from the Cambridge Journals website, but it’s a dead link.

However, I’m going to assume that it’s ok to reproduce the article online for research purposes, so here it is below.

Have a read. It’s excellent

[PDF of McManus' article is here.]

JIM LARKIN

[click on image for Pathe News site]

Footage from Pathe News which they have listed on their site as 1920, but is more than likely from the 1913 lockout.

Firstly, Liberty Hall is intact, which means it’s pre-1916; secondly, Jim Larkin is in the footage, which means its pre-1914, as Larkin left for America that year.

Also, the clothes Larkin is wearing are the same as in this photo from 1913.

Saturday July 31st, 10am – 6pm

AX1, Auxilla House, North Campus, NUI Maynooth

9:30 – 9:45 Registration, Auxilia Foyer

9:45 – 10:00 Welcome; Eoin Flaherty (NUIM) and Terry Dunne (MIC)

10:00am – 11:00am Industry and Proto-Industry

Education in 19th century model villages in Ireland
Elena O’ Brien, Archaeology, (UCC)

Mapping social class in 19th century Ireland: towards a more systematic approach
Dr. Jane Gray, Sociology, (NUI Maynooth)

11:00am – 11:15am Break

11:15am – 12:15pm Health

‘In death there is no remembrance’: The evidence of post-medieval health from human skeletal remains
Linda G. Lynch, Archaeology, (UCC)

The silent voice: Narratives of health at the 19th century watering-place
Dr. Ronan Foley, Geography, (NUIM)

12:15pm – 12:30pm Break

12:30pm – 1:30pm Late Nineteenth Century

Social change in 19th century Ireland: The advent of narrow gauge railways in Munster
Edel Barry, Archaeology, (UCC)

The poorest classes? Language and social class in post-famine Ireland
Dr. Nicholas Wolf, History, (Virginia Commonwealth University)

1:30pm – 2:30pm Lunch

2:30pm – 4:00pm Pre-Famine

Class conflict in the 1830s Tithe War
Noreen Higgins-McHugh, History, (UCC)

Between a rock and a hard place: The reality of being a land agent in Ireland in the 1830s and 1840s
Laura Vickers, Moore Institute, (NUIG)

“No more at present from your friend, Captain Rock”: ‘Threatening letters’ and social attitudes in pre-famine Ireland
Terry Dunne, History, (MIC)

4:00pm – 4:15pm Break

4:15pm – 5:15pm Modes of Production

The rundale system in 19th century Ireland: Conceptualising and exploring the ecological dynamics of primitive communism
Eoin Flaherty, Sociology, (NUIM)

‘Wooden idols triumph and human beings are sacrificed’: Marx on legal theft in the Rhineland and Ireland
Dr. Eamonn Slater, Sociology, (NUIM)

Sponsored by the Comparative-Historical Research Cluster; Department of Sociology, NUI Maynooth.
Co-conveners: Terry Dunne and Eoin Flaherty.

Paper abstracts are available here. Conference registration is available here.

[Protest in Cork against the Vietnam War, 1967. From left to right: Gerry Higgins, Jim Savage, Jim Lane, Jim McCarthy, Derry McCarthy, Noel Lane, Jim Blake, George Sisk, Gerry Madden, Barty Madden, Tom McCarthy.]

What follows deals almost entirely with internal divisions within Cork republicanism and is not meant as a comprehensive outline of republican and left-wing activities in the city during the period covered. Moreover, these notes were put together following specific queries from historical researchers and, hence, the focus at times is on matters that they raised.’ (Miscellaneous Notes, p.1)

We will be covering the various aspects of Jim Lane’s activism as a Socialist and Republican at a later date, but for now, below is a copy of his recollections of the period 1954 to 1969. It touches on his involvement with the IRA campaign of the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as the Cork-based Irish Revolutionary Forces, and the publications An Phoblacht (Cork), and People’s Voice. The pamphlet ends with 1969 and the outbreak of the Troubles.

Last September (2009) I interviewed Jim in his home in Cork. We talked for about five hours. Below is a short eighteen-minute extract from that interview, where Jim talks about the Irish Revolutionary Forces (IRF), as well as the attraction which Maoism held for the IRF at that time.

Jim explained this a little further to me in a recent correspondence:

“Sean Daly (ex IRA at the time) and myself met Hardial Bains and the other leaders of the Internationalists in 1968. Sean Daly is the person mentioned several times in my Miscellaneous Notes……. We met with the intention of working together to build a Marxist-Leninist type party in Ireland. We certainly had a great issue with them about their methods of work in Ireland, among other matters. Suffice to say, we didn’t reach an agreement on the way forward. However, we did agree to remain in touch. Prominent in their group then and in the years that followed were; David Vipond,John Dowling, Arthur Allen and Carole Reekes. Hardial Bains of Indian birth was based in Canada.

As I may have said to you in our conversations last year, we were attracted to the line of the Chinese Communist Party, after we had studied the publication, The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement, (China, 1965). For us here in Ireland in the 1960’s, we saw Mao and his party as advocates of armed revolutionary struggle, whereas the Soviet Union favoured the ‘ peaceful road to Socialism, by Parliamentary means’ . Is it any wonder why Irish Socialist Republicans began to take an interest in the writings of Mao Tse-Tung back in the 1960’s. Mythology has led many students of republican development in the 60’s, to believe that all those who opposed ‘the left-wing drift’, were ‘right-wing red necks’. Not so, many who were conveniently refered to as ‘Maoists’ within and without the Republican fold, were in fact those who were struggling to uphold true socialist revolutionary concepts.”

[Download 'Miscellaneous Notes' pdf here.]

[Please keep in mind that the MP3 below is only a short piece from almost five hours of conversation, and that Jim spoke for all of that time without notes.]

[http://www.irishlabour.com/JimLane/jim-lane.mp3]

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Part II of The Irish Story’s interview with the author of ‘Lockout: Dublin 1913′ is now online.

Great post on 1913 Dublin over on The Irish Story, which includes an interview with Padraig Yeates, author of Lockout: Dublin 1913.

Check it out here.

As with the first article in this series, forgotten faces is more of a discussion piece than a finished analysis. It’s only in the later issues of The Ripening of Time, especially nos. 11 and 13 which date from 1979 and 1980 respectively, that we get a full and detailed Marxist analysis of Ireland in the 20th century. As a result, the early articles are more akin to blog pieces than anything else. It’s almost like they should have a collection of comments after them, teasing out and expanding on the analysis.

[Click on image to read online. A pdf of the article is available to download here.]

The introduction states that

in putting this analysis of agriculture and fishing forward, it is intended to redress the tendency among Marxists and socialists in Ireland to focus their attention exclusively on the working class struggles to the detriment of other dominated and exploited classes and layers of the society.

This is as relevant today as it was 34 years ago. The glaring, and somewhat embarrassing, omission from Irish Marxist analysis is an understanding of the capitalist structure and dynamic of agriculture in Ireland. I’m still trying to work out why this is the case, but my suspicions at the moment are falling on the idea in British Marxism that agriculture is a form of proto-capitalism, the stage of accumulation, the precursor to the industrial stage and ‘true’ capitalism. Now, that’s me guessing, but it’s what I’m thinking at the moment. Certainly the strongest influence on Irish Marxism has come from the British left, and conclusions drawn from Manchester may not necessarily work for Tullamore. Both places are different parts of the same machine, but that inter-connectness seems to have been lost over the years. Certainly it was there in the 1930s when Brian O’Neill wrote War for the Land in Ireland, yet Irish Marxists will quote Connolly on agriculture quicker than O’Neill. Why, again, I don’t know.

Forgotten faces places Irish agriculture firmly within modern capitalism. It does not treat it as a stage, or as some form of archaic mode of production, but as the supplier of raw material for the metropolis, in this case, England.

Under generalised commodity production, the small holder and small producer becomes a link in a production process over which he has no control, and inside of which the division of labour allocates him an increasingly smaller part of the process which turns raw material into a processed-ready-packed-frozen consumer good. This fragmented production process ties the calf producer of the west to calf rearers in other regions to the cattle fatteners on the estates of Meath or the grazing plains of England to the meat factory [My emphasis]. A division of labour and production such as this fosters internal regional differences; in a dominated society: a regional underdevelopment. (p.53)

The division of labour in Irish cattle production was highlighted by by Ray Crotty in his 1974 pamphlet, The Cattle Crisis and the Small Farmer, and by Paul Bew in his 1979 book, Land and the National Question in Ireland, 1858-82, yet this simple fact of Irish agricultural production, and what such a system of production says about Irish economic, social and political life, is virtually absent from Irish Marxism, certainly since the 1960s anyway.

Forgotten faces also talks about Irish fishing, highlighting the subservient role it has played in the Irish economy, and asserting that it is due in no small part to the absence of a native bourgeoisie within fishing which could have fought for its place at the table.

Class relations in fishing are somewhat different from those in manufacturing industry or agriculture in Ireland. The ease with which international capital has penetrated the fishing industry is a feature of the lack of a big, native bourgeois class controlling fishing in this country. In agriculture, as we see, there is a definite presence of a big bourgeois or rancher class, fractions of which have certain contradictions with international capitalism.

Again we see The Ripening of Time feeling its way through the dynamics of Irish economic relations, in this case with regard to fishing and agriculture. The journal comes back to these areas later on in the series, expanding and refining the tentative conclusions presented here.

The Third Annual George Brown Memorial Weekend takes place in Inistioge, Co. Kilkenny on Friday and Saturday, 25/26 June.

George Brown was the son of Francis Brown from Inistioge and Mary Lackey from Tullogher. George was reared in Manchester during the early decades of the twentieth century. At that time it was an urban area of high unemployment and appalling poverty and deprivation. As a young man, he became very involved in the campaign for the betterment of the rights of workers and their families and by the early 1930s was regarded as the leading member of the British Communist Party in the Manchester region. George’s commitment to working-class activism and democratic principles led to him growing increasingly concerned with the rise of Fascism throughout Europe. When the fledgling Spanish Republic found itself under threat from the forces of Franco, backed by German and Italian military might, he was among the first to enlist in the International Brigade in defence of Spain’s democratically elected government. George Brown arrived in Spain in January 1937 and quickly was to see action. In his efforts to stem the tide of Fascism he paid the ultimate price. He was killed at the Battle of Brunete in the defence of Madrid in July 1937. He was thirty years of age.

[Mike Hehir, leading national spokesman of the CPI M-L, 1970]

When The Internationalists were first set up in Trinity College Dublin in November 1965, it was not as a fully-formed Marxist-Leninist party, but ‘as an exercise in better staff-student relations.’(1) Prominent among the initial group was Hardial Bains, a lecturer in bacteriology who was originally from India, but who had left for Canada in 1959 and had completed his post-graduate studies in Vancouver at the University of British Columbia. Bains was a former member of the Communist Party of India, having resigned in protest at the party’s endorsement of Khrushchev’s criticisms of Stalin. In March 1963 he founded a political group in Vancouver which was called The Internationalists (later the Communist Party of Canada (Marxist-Leninist), and while the November 1965 TCD group may not have been exactly an Irish version at this stage, the choice of name suggests Bains’ strong input from the start.

Also among those involved at the early stages of the group were two African students, David Akerele and Koye Majekodunmi, and staff members Kader Asmal (who was then head of the Irish Anti-Apartheid Movement), Professor David Webb (Professor of Botany), Dr. Owen Sheehy Skeffington and Dr. R. B. McDowell. Given such participants it is highly unlikely that The Irish Internationalists were at this stage in any way Marxist, or even socialist.

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