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.

a continuation of Sunday’s post (with background information), the final 25 minutes of Sam Nolan talking about the Unemployment Protest Committee and Jack Murphy.

Part two: the election of Jack Murphy – writing speeches for Murphy – abstaining from the vote for Taoiseach – lack of impact in the Dáil – government cuts the food subsidies – Murphy on hunger strike – Murphy as a religious man – street protests and rallies – Steve Mooney – Summerhill march on the Dáil – Unemployed Committees in Cork and Waterford – The Catholic Church and the Unemployed Protest Committee – Archbishop McQuaid and Murphy – resignation as a TD –

Sam Nolan and the Unemployed Protest Committee, 1957: Part Two from conormccabe on Vimeo.

There’s a great post on the 1953 unemployed protest march over on Come Here To Me, which pushed me to finally get around to editing this footage of Sam Nolan talking about the unemployed protests later that decade, in 1957 and 1958.

This is the first thirty minutes of an hour-long clip. It was filmed in Sam’s home in Ballymun in February 2010. The interviewer is Mick O’Reilly. The second clip should be up sometime during the week.

By way of background, below the video is an extract from Communist Party of Ireland: Outline History which deals with the setting up of the committee and the subsequent election of John (Jack) Murphy as the first unemployed T.D. in Ireland.

Part one: Origins – building slump – Werburgh St public meeting – trade union support – Jack Murphy – local authority housing – ‘emigrate, fight or starve’ – the 1957 election – Dublin South Central Constituency – Peadar O’Donnell – selection of candidate – election campaign – Roddy Connolly

Sam Nolan and the Unemployed Protest Committee, 1957 from conormccabe on Vimeo.

Early in 1957 a group of building workers came together at the Werburgh Street (Dublin) Labour Exchange and discussed the prospects of finding employment. They decided that the only hope was to organise the unemployed to demand work. They borrowed a chair from a nearby shop and began a public meeting. From that meeting an Unemployed Protest Committee [UPC] was formed which included such persons as Liam O’Meara, Jack Murphy, Sam Nolan, Packey Early, Steve Mooney and Johnny Mooney.

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Below is a clip from an interview with Sam Nolan of the Dublin Council of Trade Unions, where Sam discusses the 1979 tax marches. It’s taken from a series of interviews which have been conducted with Sam, and which chart his life as a political and trade union activist, going as far back as the 1940s when he first joined the Irish communist movement. The interviewer is Mick O’Reilly, former Irish regional secretary of the ATGWU.

The clip is 18 minutes long. By way of context there’s an extract from the Irish Times of 21 March 1979 below the video.

Sam Nolan on the 1979 tax marches from conormccabe on Vimeo.

HUGE SHOW OF STRENGTH BY PAYE WORKERS

Upwards of 150,000 PAYE workers took to the streets of Dublin today to demand tax reform in the largest demonstration in the history of the State. And in Cork, Galway, Limerick, Waterford, Dundalk and other centres throughout the Republic, tens of thousands of workers also downed tools and joined in protest over the tax system. But it was in the capital that the full wrath of the PAYE taxpayer was felt as Dublin experienced its greatest industrial shut-down ever.

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Ostensibly an official history, John Cunningham’s study of the Association of Secondary Teachers in Ireland (ASTI), and its relationship with the education system, also touches on four key elements of Irish society over the past 100 years: religion, class, politics and economics. It looks at the changes in Ireland since the foundation of the association in 1909, the role of the various Churches in education, the expansion of the secondary school system in the late 1960s, the growth of militancy among school teachers in the 1970s and 1980s regarding wages and women’s issues, and the move from the 1980s onwards towards the commodification of students and results. It also brings into focus the uneven relationship between economic and social class, with secondary school teachers finding themselves for much of the 20th century with a middle class status, but a working class wage.

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I was in Seomra Spraoi last night to pick up the latest edition of Loserdom and while I was there I called up to the zine archive. It’s on the first floor and it has a couple of hundred fanzines and alternative media publications from around the world, but mainly Ireland, UK, and USA. They are all sorted and boxed, but there’s no database, so I offered to work on producing one and so hopefully in a couple of months I’ll have it ready and on the web.

I got chatting to one of the guys, Ed, who runs the DIY Irish Hardcore Punk Archive, and who has a zine of his own, The Devil on 45, and I said to him that I’ve been up in the Irish Labour Museum for the last few months, sorting and cataloguing its newspapers and periodicals. “Oh” he said. “You might find this interesting. Niall McGuirk [of the Hope Collective] dropped this into us last week.” It was a copy of Busman from 1978, which seems to have been produced by bus workers in Phibsboro Garage. The issue has contributions from Bill McGamley, and an interview with Ruairi Quinn. I had my digital camera with me and snapped a quick copy. Now it’s a bit blurry, but Ed has a scanner in Seomra Spraoi and so next time I’ll get a proper copy.

Contents:

1. Assaults on busmen
2. Road Traffic Act
3. Inspectors and Discipline
4. Privilege Travel
5. Equal Pay Dialogue
6. Ruairi Quinn T.D.

The look and aesthetic of Busmen is fanzine to the core, but the content is industrial relations in scope and direction. Not that unusual. The Revolutionary Marxist Group, for example, had a publication called Irish Trotskyist (PDF copy here) which could almost pass for a fanzine in look and aesthetics as well. There’s a definite study there on the layout and feel of Irish fanzines and political publications of the 1970s.

Anyways, here’s the link to a somewhat blurry copy of Busmen (7MB).

For the past couple of months, myself and Mick O’Reilly (former Irish regional secretary ATGWU) have been conducting a series of interviews with veteran Irish left activists, including Sam Nolan, Des Brannigan, and Joe Deasy. It is hoped that these interviews will be broadcast on DCTV in the near future. In the meantime, here is a short clip of Joe Deasy talking about his involvement with the Inchicore Co-op of the 1940s/50s. I have already posted an audio recording of this segment, but I’ve started work on the editing of the video itself, and so this is just a little extract. As you’ll see and hear, the sound and vision still needs a bit of work, but hopefully we’ll get there soon enough.

For more on Joe Deasy, here is a link to a piece based on Brian Kenny’s recent pamphlet.

[Joe Deasy giving a speech in Middle Abbey Street, c.1965.]

The following clip is from an interview with Joe Deasy, who was born in 1922 and who met and worked with Jim Larkin Snr in the 1940s. Both were Labour councillors on Dublin Corporation. Joe would later leave the Labour party and join the Irish Workers League, which was a communist organisation, the antecedent to today’s Communist Party of Ireland.

The interview, which was videotaped, was conducted with Mick O’Reilly and myself, and will hopefully form the basis of a programme on Joe Deasy which we’re planning to make in the new year.

In 1963, Joe wrote The Fiery Cross: The Story of Jim Larkin, which was republished in 2004 by the Irish Labour History Society. Francis Devine and Niamh Puirséil wrote an introduction to the pamphlet, giving an outline of Joe Deasy’s life, a highly edited version of which is below:

“Joseph Deasy was born on 12 July 1922 in the Ranch opposite Inchicore Works, Dublin. His father, Richard was was an active member of the Labour party, standing as a candidate in Dublin South West. Joe began working life as a railway clerk in 1941, an occupation that he claimed strengthened his socialist convictions. Outside work, Deasy had joined Conradh na Gaeilge and, in 1941, the New Theatre Group commencing a life-long love of theatre. In April, 1945, Deasy wrote and produced Under the Banner Connolly in the Dining Hall, Inchicore Works, his first writing experience.Not long after joining the Labour Party, Joe was elected chair and then Secretary, Inchicore Branch. Esther McGregor, a veteran communist who was then active in the Labour Party, proposed that Joe run in the 1945 local election. He was elected and became, aged twenty-two, the youngest councillor in the country. Joe campaigned for social housing, improvements for TB patients in Crooksling Sanatorium and in support of the Dublin Trades Council Lower Prices Campaign.

Although Joe supported coalition in 1948, believing that the country needed a change of government, nevertheless it was not long before he became disillusioned with the Labour Party’s performance in government. He did not put himself forward for the 1950 local elections and joined the Irish Workers’ League in 1951, a decision that was painful difficult and demanding of personal courage.

Cold War anti-communism meant that Deasy was precluded from being active in both his trade union and his community. He was forced out of his postion as the Railway Clerks Association’s representative on the Dublin Trades Council, while the Ballyfermot and Inchicore Co-op grocery shop, where Joe and some Irish Workers’ League comrades were central figures, became the target of a Church orchestrated boycott. They were denounced from the local pulpits, and clerical pressure ultimately forced the closure of the shop.

In 1975 Joe was among those who resigned from the Communist Party of Ireland after tensions within the party over Czechoslovakia and the 1968 soviet invasion finally came to a head. Joe became active in the subsequently formed Irish Marxist Society, continuing political discussion and considering which was the best path to follow. Joe’s path was a return to the Labour Party in 1977 and action at branch and constituency level, a path he is still stoically treading.”

Here, Joe is talking about the Inchicore and Ballyfermot Co-Ops, which were set up in the late 1940s, before being forced to close in 1952 due to pressure from the Catholic Church.

Evanne Kilmurray, ‘Joe Deasy: the evolution of an Irish Marxist, 1941-1950′, Saothar 13 (1988), pp.112-119
Joe Deasy, ‘Fiery Cross: The Story of Jim Larkin’, Studies in Irish Labour History 9 (2004)

Note: All photos taken from ‘Fiery Cross’, Studies in Irish Labour History 9 (2004)

[Ballyfermot & Inchicore Co-op Society, some members of the management committee. Joe Deasy is back row, second from right. His closest friend, Tim Graham, is beside him, first on the right.]

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[This is an edited version of an article I wrote which first appeared in Football Studies 11, 1 (2008). The article itself is based on a paper I presented at the 2005 Irish Sport History Conference.]

In 1955 the Irish political, cultural, and religious establishment found itself challenged by an unusual and reluctant opponent: The Football Association of Ireland (FAI). The clash arose over a friendly soccer game between the Republic of Ireland and Yugoslavia, which was played at Dalymount Park on 19 October of that year. The Catholic archbishop of Dublin, Dr. John Charles McQuaid, one of the dominant figures in Irish 20th century life, called for the cancellation of the game. This was echoed by various government ministers, senior civil servants, and Catholic lay organisations. The Irish national broadcasting service Radio Televis Éireann (RTE) declined to cover the game after its main sports commentator, Phil Greene, pulled out of the broadcast.

The protests arose out of the continued persecution of the Catholic Church in communist Yugoslavia, and were similar in tone to other protests held in Ireland over the previous seven years. The fact that the game went ahead with an attendance of around 21,400 has been read by some as a counter-protest against the forces of conservative Ireland, especially the public influence of archbishop McQuaid. Indeed, the archbishop’s biographer, John Cooney, wrote that the Yugoslavia game was ‘a populist revolt against McQuaid’s iron rule; the first of his reign.’ (Cooney, p.309.)

This article will argue that the controversy reveals a clash of culture in 1950s Ireland, rather than one over politics or ideology. This is not to say that 1950s Ireland was bereft of clashes over politics or ideology, but that the Ireland v Yugoslavia game became a protest against an attempt by the dominant Irish conservative forces to interfere with the most popular cultural activity of working class Dublin, rather than one energised by a desire on the part of the working class to confront the government, the Catholic Church, or the permanent secretaries of the Irish civil service. The game also provides an entry into Irish working class life – an area often neglected by Irish historians, and one with a culture that, on this occasion at least, found itself in uneasy conflict with the Irish establishment.

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(This is the fourth post in a six-part series of articles originally written as part of the North West Spanish Civil War Memorial Project, and which appeared in the Derry newspaper, Sunday Journal, in April-May 2006. They are reproduced here with kind permission of the author. All photos courtesy of Ciaran Crossey)

Below is a list of men from Donegal and Tyrone who served in defence of the Spanish Republic. The information is drawn from the same sources cited in part 3 of this series. Again, all additional information and corrections from readers will be gratefully received and acknowledged. I am obliged to Conal Houston for details on Hugh Bonner, and to Brian Curragh for details on his great-uncle, Ben Murray.

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