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.
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.
[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.”
[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.]
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.
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 –
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
