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 –
Des Brannigan was born in Dublin in 1918. His family lived in the basement flat of no.19, North Great Georges Street. He went to sea at an early age, where he first became active in trade unionism, eventually becoming general secretary of the Marine, Port and General Workers’ Union.
In his later years he was the work-study expert for ICTU, and produced background reports for trade unionists engaged in various disputes.
Des was also a deep sea diver, and helped in the discovery of many of the Spanish Armada wreaks which lie off the coast of Ireland.
As with the Joe Deasy and Sam Nolan tapes, this interview will form part of a series of documentaries for DCTV on Irish labour and working class history. We are still working on the details of the project, but hopefully we’ll have the first of them completed by the end of the summer.
In the meantime, here’s a short clip of Des talking about the first time he heard Jim Larkin speak, which was in Unity Hall, Marlborough Street, sometime in the mid-1920s.
Here is a short clip from an interview between Mick O’Reilly and Sam Nolan.
So far we have filmed two sessions with Sam, each two hours long.
We’re hoping to conduct at least three more interviews with Sam over the next month or so.
In this short five-minute clip, Sam talks about trade unionism in Dublin in the 1940s: first, his experience with the Amalgamated Society of Woodworkers (ASW); and second, his opinion of the ITGWU in response to a question from myself.
As with the Joe Deasy clip, the sound and picture still need work, so this is just to give a flavour of what we hope will be a series of documentaries on Irish labour and working class history.
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.
I was going through some old files on my hard drive and came across these scans of letters from Connolly that I had picked up a couple of years ago. They relate to his time in New York. The first letter is dated 28 January 1907, the last one, 6 June 1910.
