Irish Labour and Working Class History

[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

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.

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.

Last month Tom Redmond of the CPI gave me a large collection of newspapers and pamphlets relating to the Irish left, including all fourteen issues of The Ripening of Time (1976-1982), an Irish Marxist journal produced by the Ripening of Time collective.

Throughout its six-year run, The Ripening of Time provided introductions to Marxist theory, as well as articles which applied those theories to the island of Ireland, its history and society.

The theoretical articles are essentially clear summaries of widely-available, if densely-written, material, but the articles on Ireland are all original and well worth reproducing; and over the next few weeks hopefully I’ll get them all scanned and posted.

The first article in the series on Ireland, from issue one, Introductory Notes on Dominated Ireland, is below.

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

‘Here is The Ripening of Time‘ the opening editorial said, ‘the collective product and the focus of study-groups, of long drawn-out discussions, of a lot of effort.’

There are many revolutionary organisations and groups in Ireland today. We want to clearly state that The Ripening of Time is built not in opposition to what exists, but on the contrary to complement them. At this time, the unity and consolidation of all the anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist forces around a united programme and strategy for revolutionary action is an urgent and pressing need. We offer The Ripening of Time as our contribution to the unity of action and aim.

The Ripening of Time is a theoretical journal. We see theoretical struggle as an essential part of class struggle, equally important as the economic, the political or the military struggle. Anyone who tries to isolate one or any of those unbreakable aspects of the class struggle is amputating the revolutionary process. As an instrument of theoretical struggle, we do not intend to set up any sectarian principles of our own by which to shape and mould the anti-imperialist and revolutionary movement.

What we aim for is to help militants, and, why not, organisations develop on the basis of our collective effort, work and research, a concrete analysis of the situation – a class analysis; to be used in the interests of the exploited and oppressed masses of the people in our country – north and south.”

Introductory Notes argues that by the mid-1970s the Irish economy had become heavily dependent on International industry and capital, that ‘the decline of the 26 county economy has been accompanied by an increased dependence on the more powerful capitalist countries.’ This dependence manifested itself not only though the significant number of foreign companies which had set up in Ireland since the 1960s, but also through the rise of multinational banking in Ireland, which saw the establishment of American, Dutch and German financial institutions on Irish shores. (It’s interesting to note that Introductory Notes acknowledges the work of ‘Sinn Féin Gardiner Street’ – or Sinn Féin Workers Party – with regard to its analysis of banks and the Irish banking system. The party’s pamphlet, The Banks, was posted here last week.)

The role of these financial and industrial powers in the Irish economy was such that the latter was increasingly run in the interests of the former. The societal functions of the economy were increasingly marginalised in favour of quick and easy profits with the barest of pay-offs for Ireland and its people. And successive Irish governments, particularly those run by Fianna Fáil, were entirely complicit with this set-up. Introductory Notes highlights the so-called ‘merger’ of the Irish semi-state company Erin Foods with the US multinational Heinz as an example of where a multinational simply took over an already-existing, and profitable, company while the government got to chalk it up as foreign investment. It also covers the dubious record of the IDA in bringing jobs to Ireland – in 1974 the IDA ‘created 16,000 new jobs but as 20,000 old jobs got destroyed, all this money did [£66m in grants] was to produce a net loss of 4,000 jobs.’ The policy of handing over sections of Irish economic activity to foreign investors who were out for a quick buck led T.K. Whitaker to sound a word of caution: ‘would there not be a serious risk to employment if large areas of Irish trade and industry came under foreign control in this indirect way?’ Introductory Notes says well, yes, and not only to employment but to Irish society as a whole.

The article ends with a short note on housing and the (1976 economic) crisis. It mentions the serious decline in social housing construction and the huge rise in the mortgage market, fuelled by government tax breaks and more accessible loan and mortgage systems, and argues that such a scenario will lead to a housing shortage as the vast majority of working class families, with no access to private purchase, depend on council housing for accommodation. It’s a tentative conclusion, one surpassed by events in the 1980s and 1990s, but one befitting an introductory article in a series of of same, spread out over six years.

The main articles in The Ripening of Time which deal with Ireland are:

Issue 1 (1976) – Introductory Notes on Dominated Ireland
Issue 2 (1976) – Agriculture and fishing: Two Forgotten Faces of Capitalism in Ireland
Issue 3 (1976) – The State of Ireland pt.1
Issue 4 (1976) – The State of Ireland pt.2
Issue 5 (1976) – The Development of Capitalism in Ireland; Revolt in the North; The Failure of Republicanism; The Economics of Independence
Issue 6 (1977) – Reflections on Agriculture pt.1
Issue 7 (1977) – Reflections on Agriculture pt.2; The Bourgeois Class in Ireland
Issue 9 (1977/78) – Reflections on Agriculture pt.3
Issue 10 (1978) – The Bourgeois Class in Ireland – 18th Century
Issue 11 (1978/79) – Changing Patterns of Domination Since World War II; Irish Republicanism, Socialism and Imperialism
Issue 13 (1980) – Working Class Absenteeism; The Crisis in the 1970s
Issue 14 (1982) – In to the Republic (special edition written by Derry Kelleher)

[Click on image to read the booklet]

I’m putting up this booklet with a couple of caveats, but in spite of them, the booklet does show how the Irish left has pointed out the serious flaws within the Irish banking system for decades, and that the problems are structural, not personal.

Last year’s publication by Shane Ross, talked up the greed, collusion and incompetence of Irish bankers and politicians, arguing that the Irish story was ‘unique’ in its tawdriness. Finian O’Toole pretty much drew the same conclusion in his book, Ship of Fools.

For thousands of left activists across the island, though, the news that some bankers were, *gasp* corrupt and self-serving, came as no surprise as the banking system itself is *gasp* corrupt and self-serving. Even a good man in the wrong place will do bad things.

There is a strong desire on the part of the Right to personalise the failings of the banking system, that all we need are a few good men to ride into town and sort out the problems. The analogy which springs to mind is with The Magnificent Seven, with the Irish as the Mexican peasants gong to town to hire Yul Brynner to get the bandits off their back.

But, the bank crisis wasn’t due to a moral failure on the part of some individuals. The bank system is geared towards the interests of its private owners, not anyone else. Given the systemic importance of banks and banking to a modern economy, it’s one fraught with dangers, but to acknowledge that is to acknowledge the problems associated with the private ownership of critical services. Better to have a moral tale than a structural analysis.

With regard to the Workers’ Party’ booklet, its strengths lie in the data it gives on the structure of banking in Ireland, as well as providing a short history of the sector. It also gives a reasonably simple and succinct overview of the analysis of money as given in volume one of Capital.

The political analysis put forward by The Banks is in line with the conceptual framework of the party’s magnum opus, Irish Industrial Revolution – an incredibly flawed, but equally fascinating, piece of work, and one which I’ll try to make available online soon.

The overall thesis of The Banks falls broadly within state capitalism. The booklet argues that it is the necessary to nationalize the banks in order to further industrialize the economy, and that the banking system is too important to be left in private hands. The ultimate goal is a country where both the banking and industrial sectors are controlled by the state. In simple, broad-stroke terms , the Workers’ Party was arguing that capitalist exploitation is more in the field of output, rather than in how the machine works. Were it possible to socialize output, this would in some way counter-balance the inherent contradictions and endemic exploitation of the capitalist mode of production.

It could be argued, of course, that this is exactly the situation Ireland has today, that the banking and industrial sectors are run in the state’s interests, but that the state’s interests are those of the banking and industrial sectors.

There is a symbiosis between those who run the banks and those to fund the political parties. Irish citizens and their children are given little say in economic matters, and are instead viewed by the state as little more than betting chips for hedge fund managers.

It can also be argued that a form of right-wing state capitalism – or neo-corporatism as it is sometimes called – has been in operation in Ireland since the foundation of the state in 1922. (I make a deeper argument for that type of analysis here.)

Anyway, despite these concerns, the research presented in The Banks is still of use to us today, and certainly it provides a resource to the Irish Left in its attempts to tease out an analysis of Irish economic and social life which doesn’t trip itself up in simplistic morality tales of greed and exploitation.

A pdf of The Banks is available to download here. (2.8MB)

Enjoy.

[Publications : Youth Bulletin, June 1971 (PDF, 11.5MB) ; Youth Bulletin, August 1972 (PDF, 5.6MB) ; Youth Bulletin, September 1972 (PDF, 5.4MB) ; Workers' League, Newsheet, 3 July 1976 (PDF 2.6MB) ]

The League for a Workers’ Vanguard was formed in Belfast in 1969, later infiltrating the League for a Workers’ Republic and leading a breakaway group.

Dermot Whelan has the League for a Workers’ Vanguard as established in 1970 (see below). According to Paula Howard in Fortnight (22 February 1974), however, the group began publishing Vanguard: Journal of the League for a Workers’ Vanguard some time in 1969.

There is a copy of the first issue of Vanguard in the Linen Hall library, Belfast, and although it is undated, it references an Ulster Loyalist Association rally at which William Craig asked ‘what sort of absurdity is this peace line when the forces of law and order cannot go into certain places.’ Vanguard gives the date of the rally – 27 September – but not the year. However, these words were spoken by Craig at a rally outside City Hall, Belfast on Saturday, 27 September 1969.

The address for the editor of Vanguard was given as 2 Josephine Street, Belfast. In 1971, the address was given as 35 Howard Street, Belfast.

The League for a Workers’ Vanguard was pro-Healyite and apparently little more than a Socialist Labour League (SLL) front. The SLL had branches in Derry, Belfast and Dublin.

John Throne of Militant talks about meeting an SLL member in Derry in the late 1960s, while another source says that SLL activist George Craig was in Harland and Wolff in the 1960s. However, the League for a Workers’ Vanguard was the first real attempt by the SLL to organise an independent organisation in Ireland.

According to Dermot Whelan in his pamphlet, The Socialist Labour League and Irish Marxism,

In 1969 the League for a Workers’ Republic wrote to the International Committee [of the Fourth International], asking for a discussion, which resulted in Cliff Slaughter’s visit to Ireland in October of that year. To this meeting were invited the SLL’s branches in Ireland and the League for a Workers’ Republic, who had by this time built up a strong youth movement in Dublin, as well as a basis of support around certain layers in the Irish Labour Party…

The most significant thing about Slaughter’s meeting was that, for the first time, the SLL proposed the setting up of an Irish section of the International Committee. The real reason for this change of position became clear only three years later. It was not motivated by a desire to build an independent, healthy movement of the Fourth International at all. What it wanted was a factional ally, an extra vote, who could be used against the French in the internal struggle in the Executive of the International Committee…

Although the SLL acceded to the LWR’s request for a period of further study before agreeing to join the International Committee, they immediately organised a secret faction in early 1970, composed of students, who split from the LWR, before discussion had concluded, in May 1970…

The immediate task of the Irish section was, for G. Healy, the building of a strong youth movement. This is, of course, a key to the building of the Bolshevik Party itself. Healy, however, saw it as a substitute for the party. This is why in early 1970 he issued an ultimatum to Jack Vance, George Craig and Freddie Campbell, the Belfast Protestant militants who led the section, that, unless a big youth movement was built quickly, he, Healy, would split with them…

Such activities manifested in the organisation of dances, film series, meetings and sport, drew in large forces around the Irish Young Socialists [the League for a Workers' Vanguard youth section], first in the North in late 1970, and then, in the South, in early and middle 1971, from whom a nucleus of important cadres were won. This was done at the expense a) of the adult movement, whose paper ‘Vanguard’ was dropped, and where the production of a theoretical magazine was continually put off, because the Irish Young Socialists’ work absorbed all its time, and b) the Irish Young Socialist itself, where political education was confined to a few classes and a series of public lectures given by Healy in late 1970 and 1971.

Whelan also writes that the entire SLL leadership in Belfast left the organisation in early 1971, in disillusionment, and that the leader of the Irish Young Socialists at the time was a man called David Fry.

From 1970 to 1972, the Irish Young Socialists published Youth Bulletin, which in 1972 was incorporated into Workers’ Struggle.

In 1972, with the split in the International Committee of the Fourth International, the League for a Workers’ Vanguard changed its name to Workers’ League.

Towards the end of 1974 the Workers League began publication of Marxist Journal: Theoretical Paper of the Workers’ League. There are two copies of the journal in the National Library of Ireland: Vol.1 No.2, February 1975 (4B 1762), and Vol.1 No.4, October 1975 (1K 1376). Initially, Marxist Journal was intended as a bi-monthly publication, but in October it went monthly.

There were three contact addresses listed:

- Workers’ League, c/o Bulletin Publications, 55 Lower O’Connell Street, Dublin
- W. White, 47 Leenan Gardens, Derry
- F. Quigley, 3A Thornhill Court, Twinbrook, Belfast

The main address for correspondence was the Dublin address.

Marxist Journal argued that theory is not an abstraction, but a necessary tool in the fight against capitalism. The bourgeois is constantly bombarding the working classes with its ideological falsities – indeed, it is one of the ways it keeps a hold over the working classes – and as such it is not enough to do something to combat the bourgeois, to go on marches or strike or protest, one also has to think with clarity and precision as well. And this clarity and precision can be provided only by Marxist theory – correct Marxist theory – for if it is not correct the conclusions will be false, and bourgeois ideology will be left unopposed in its task of infecting and docilizing the working class.

This leaves Marxist revolutionaries – proper Marxist revolutionaries – with three fronts to fight:

1. Against the concrete forces of Capitalism
2. Against bourgeois ideology
3. Against false Marxism (revisionism)

False Marxism is proliferated not only by the Stalinist Communist parties, but also by Trotskyist groups who are not members of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). The following quote is from the February 1975 editorial of Marxist Journal:

Today, the struggle for Marxist theory can be fought not as an abstraction, but as the necessary ideological training, which alone will equip workers to fight back against capitalism, and to win.
This struggle for theory can only take place inside the context of the concrete struggle to win those forces who are being pushed forward by the crisis, and who are breaking from the policies of class collaboration and reformism.

Capitalism rules primarily by transmitting its bourgeois and reactionary ideology into the working class. Those who refuse to struggle for Marxist theory, in opposition to the prevailing bourgeois consciousness in society and in the working class, end up on the same side as imperialism, in opposition to the working class.

In Britain in the struggle to free the Shrewsbury building pickets jailed by the Tories under an obscure law, the Stalinists and the Revisionist IS [International Socialists] and IMG [International Marxist Group] the Wigan to London march supported by the Workers’ Revolutionary Party. They have betrayed their anti-Marxism in practice and have lined up with the reformist bureaucracy against the workers.”

In terms of one particular aspect of Irish Marxism – its republican strand – the editorial had this to say:

The revisionists who suggest that it is possible to reconcile Marxism and Republicanism play a most dangerous role. The lessons of the betrayals of the Officials and Provisionals prove that there can be no compromise between Republicanism and Marxism… The struggle for the materialist world outlook by this magazine, is the only way to ensure the victory of the working class. It is essential that this journal becomes the rallying centre for those forces who are now breaking from republicanism, and for those workers who are prepared to fight to prevent the working class being made into slaves.”

The October 1975 edition of Marxist Journal saw the Workers’ League continue to engage with theory as a method of defeating capitalism and countering false consciousness. In a catechism of Marxist thought entitled Science and Materialism Part 1: Fundamentals of Materialism, the group asked ‘Is Marxism compatible with the results of modern nuclear physics?’ Having asked the question, the group provided the following answer:

Modern nuclear theories are a rich confirmation of Marxism, not simply because atoms and particles exist and can be irrefutably proved to exist, but because Marxism insisted that these fundamental building blocks of matter, could not be hard little brilliant balls, but must interact and be transformed into the other in a constant process of change. Nuclear physics has shown that these particles in each family can be represented as different states of the same particle and that the difference in these particles is relative. The particles in these difference familiars interact between themselves according to laws which physics is beginning to unravel. The exact form these laws take is not predetermined by a Marxist scheme but these laws enrich our materialist conception of the world and thereby Marxism and revolutionary science.”

The October 1975 edition also carried a statement by the Central Committee of the Workers League, entitled Withdraw the Troops! Form Workers’ Defence Guards! Build the Revolutionary Party in Ireland and Britain. It argued that British imperialism, the British army, and Loyalist organisations, were working in tandem to create a civil war in Ulster.

‘Through a series of sectarian assassinations and provocations it intends to inflame the situation to a point where pogroms and armed attacks are carried out on Catholic working class areas culminating eventually in a Loyalist regime which will impose fascist-type rule on all sections of the working class.”

The statement goes on to place Ulster, and the events in Ulster, within the context of events in British capitalism, ‘as it reels under the twin blows of the world economic crisis and the movement of the working class.’

The statement said that the events in Ulster were being used by British capitalism to smash the power of the British working class. This is a crucial point in the Workers’ League’s approach to Ireland, which saw Ireland, more times than not, in terms of its effect on Britain. In June 1974 the Central Committee issued a statement which summed up this analysis.

“History has shown that when the British ruling class has been pushed back in Ireland and Britain it has turned to the Protestant bourgeoisie and has prepared to use its ideology and its hold on the working class and backward workers as a battering ram to break all opposition in both countries. Craig, Paisley and West would not stop in the North nor with an assault on Catholic workers alone. Their purpose is to smash the entire working class in both Ireland and Britain. The Convention is a total farce and is only a curtain for a projected loyalist take-over.”

The Central Committee rejected Republicanism and Loyalism, adding that:

‘the only ally of the Catholic worker is the Protestant worker. Similarly, the only ally of the Irish worker is the British worker. In the North, the South and in Britain the strength of the working class and its refusal to accept the effects of the crisis is the dominant factor. What the bourgeoisie fear above all else is the prospect of this great strength being welded together and united around a socialist programme. As they work desperately to maintain the divisions,they are helped by all the reformist, republican, Stalinist and revisionist leaderships in the working class. Only the Workers’ League and the Workers’ Revolutionary Party can offer a programme which cuts through religious and national divisions and unite workers along class lines.”

Having rejected Republicanism as bourgeois and revisionist, the Central Committee then went on to argue the following:

“In the struggle for unity between all workers in Ireland, particularly between workers in the North and the South, it is essential that a firm stand be taken against partition. The border was introduced to divide the working class, and to head off developments towards socialist revolution that were taking place in 1918-1921. In closing ranks to defend their rights Irish workers must do away with the border. The struggle to defend living standards and democratic rights can only be achieved by throwing off the yoke of imperialism and setting up an independent workers and small farmers government based on nationalised industry and a planned economy… fight fascism and repression. Build a workers’ militia now, based on class organisations like trade unions and tenant associations, to protect housing estates, factories and workers going to and from work. [We demand] the immediate withdrawal of the British army and the disbandment of the R.U.C., “C” Specials and U.D.R. Proscribe all Loyalist and fascist factions within the unions.”

Finally, having gained independence, smashed the border and Loyalism, the R.U.C. and the British army in Ulster, and by having done so, somehow rejected Republicanism, Ireland’s future would be secured by the formation of a workers and small farmers government as part of a United Socialist States of Europe.

According to Wikipedia, the Workers’ League was ‘moribund’ by 1978.

[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 a repost from Cedarlounge, 15 October 2009]

Of the other elements involved perhaps it is worth mentioning the Irish Workers Group, which is a revolutionary Socialist group which aims to mobilise the Irish section of the international working class to overthrow the existing Irish bourgeois states, destroy all remaining imperialist organs of political and economic control and establish an all-Ireland Socialist Workers Republic. The leader is Gerard Richard Lawless of 22 Duncan Street, London, a former member of the I.R.A who was interned by the Government of the Irish Republic in 1957. Eamon McCann of 10 Gaston Square, Londonderry, a prominent participant in the unlawful procession, is chairman of the Irish Workers Group in Northern Ireland. The Northern Ireland membership includes Mr. Rory McShane of 14 Upper Crescent, Belfast, who was prominent in the formation of the so-called Queen’s University Republican Club.” (William Craig, 16 October 1968, Stormont Papers, Vol.70 (1968), p.1022)

Copy of Irish Militant, May 1966, here. (5MB)

Copy of Workers’ Republic, May-June 1967, here (note:38MB)

The Irish Workers Group (IWG) was formed in London in 1966, out of the divisions within the Irish Communist Group. It is argued by D.R. O’Connor Lysaght that the IWG was the first active Trotskyist group to establish itself in Ireland since the Revolutionary Socialist Party of the 1940s. This does not mean that the origins of modern Irish Trotskyism lie within the IWG – the SWM/SWP and Militant/Socialist Party, who arrived in the 1970s, are both outside its borders, while the Socialist Labour League had activists in Ireland contemporaneous to the IWP – merely that it is pivotal to any understanding of the Trotskyist movement on the island. Indeed, in terms of personnel, if not quite ideology, it is possible to trace the IWG in 1967 to the present-day Workers Unemployed Action Group in Clonmel, as well as Socialist Democracy.

The IWG may not have been the only Trotskyist group in Ireland, but what made it a step apart from the others was the fact that it had been set up by Irish émigrés in London and brought back to Ireland by Irish people. Almost all other groups I have come across so far were essentially branches of already-established British movements. Whether this lessens or strengthens the authority of the IWG in Irish Trotskyism, I don’t know. However, it is a fact, and needs to be acknowledged.

In 1967 the IWG published its Manifesto, available here.

As regards the story of the IWG, there are two main written accounts. One is by Seán Matgamna, who was a member of the group for a short time, and D.R. O´Connor Lysaght, who wrote an article sometime in the 1980s on the history of Irish Trotskyism.

Matgamna’s account is available on Workers’ Liberty, here. He takes issue with a lot of what O’Connor Lysaght says, particularly with regard to Gery Lawless, for whom Matgamna seems to carry a personal disregard.

Matgamna makes a few claims about Gery Lawless regarding the time Lawless was interned in the Curragh – claims that are unfounded as this article by John McGuire of the University of Limerick makes clear. Matgamna also makes claims about Lawless’ case against Ireland in the European Court of Human Rights. However, a reading of the actual case shows that Matgamna, on this point, is again somewhat less than accurate.

O’Connor Lysaght’s account is not freely available, and so I’ve taken the liberty of reproducing an extract from his article where he deals with the IWG.

Similarly, ‘The Origins of Trotskyism in Ireland’ by Ciaran Crossey and James Monaghan,although available, is hard to find. The last six paragraphs which deal with the re-emergence of Trotskyism in Ireland after 1958 is reproduced after O’Connor’s article below.

I believe, but I am not certain, that membership of the IWG included the following: Gery Lawless, Eamonn McCann, Liam Daltun, Michael Farrell, Joseph McAnna, Bairbre McCluskey, James Lynch, Anne Murphy, and Paddy Healy.

By the way, both extracts claim that Gery Lawless was instrumental in establishing the Irish Workers Union. From conversations with one person who was in the Irish Workers Union at the time, and with another who knew some of the people involved, this does not appear to be the case. However, Lawless was certainly a member of the Irish Workers Union, and an active one at that.

Here’s what O’Connor Lysaght has to say on the IWG. As always with this series, all comments and clarifications gratefully received.

[From 'Early History of Irish Trotskyism' by D.R. O'Connor Lysaght.]

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This is the second progamme in the four-part series, Looking Left, which is being made for DCTV. The topic here is the Ripening of Time, the political journal of the Ripening of Time Collective, thirteen issues of which were published between 1976 and 1980. On the panel are Ursula Barry, UCD Women’s Education, Research and Resource Centre (WERRC); Michael Youlton of the Irish Anti-War Movement; and myself. The programme is hosted by Seán O’Siorchu.

You can download issues by right-clicking on each of the numbers here: no.7, no.9, no.11 (part of), no.13.

Alternatively, you can read them online, below the video file.

Enjoy.

Looking Left 2 : The Ripening of Time from DCTV on Vimeo.

Below is the first of four programmes on various left-wing publications in Ireland in the 1960s to 1980s. This one discusses the Irish People, which was the newspaper of Official Sinn Féin, later Sinn Féin the Workers Party, later The Workers Party.

On the panel are Dr. Brian Hanley, Queens University, Padraig Yeates, former editor of the Irish People, and myself.

It is hosted by Daniel Finn.

Copies of the Irish People are available here and here.

Enjoy.

Looking Left from DCTV on Vimeo.