How the left has used Connolly

A response to John McAnulty’s critical review ( Solidarity 717) of The Easter Rising and Irish History

First of all, on People’s Democracy in 1969 and the British Army in Northern Ireland. Eamonn McCann and Bernadette Devlin (later McAliskey) called for British soldiers to go on the street on 12 August, and Michael Farrell, on 14 August. I quoted them inSolidarity 124.

I never thought this a matter of principle, given the UK’s long-term control of Northern Ireland. But the call for troops by the PD people meant taking political responsibility for the British Army in Northern Ireland, and it was wrong politically to take that responsibility.

Britain would or would not send the Army onto the streets according to calculations of its own. The PD leaders were playing low-level politics, and encouraged illusions in Britain and its soldiers. They helped prepare the Catholics to welcome the troops with cups of tea, etc.

It was the Wilson Labour government in power, and the parliamentary Labour Party that had been calling for direct rule of Northern Ireland from London. PD regarded the reform Unionists as the main enemy, and said so. In that belief, PD worked deliberately to provoke and incite the Orange anti-reformists (indeed, reactionaries) and thus make reform Unionism impossible.

The January 1969 “long march” from Belfast to Derry, which was ambushed by Orange supremacists at Burntollet bridge, was a tremendous success as propaganda, but it helped draw the polarisation of the communities drum-tight and helped lead to the breakdown of the Six Counties into the start of civil war, in August 1969, and then the active role of the British Army.

I criticised that at the time, all too mildly. “The policy of certain people in Northern Ireland of continuing militant civil rights — i.e. Catholic-orientated — demonstrations, with inevitable clashes and the serious possibility of pogroms, when combined with the declaration that the 6 Cos. is sacrosanct this side of socialism, is gross adventurism”. The resolution which said that was probably written some time in July 1969 and was sent to the September 1969 conference of IS (now called SWP) in the name of the Manchester branch of IS.

By his call, Farrell took political responsibility for the British army in Northern Ireland, which would stay “on the streets” there for the next 38 years. It was a piece of prime political stupidity and lack of political discernment.

But between October 1968 and August 1969 PD did not do much that was not politically stupid. For instance, Bernadette Devlin McAliskey, soon after she became an MP in April 1969, visited Ian Paisley at his home and proposed to him an alliance against the reform-minded mainstream Unionists of Terence O’Neill and James Chichester-Clark. Paisley, you see, represented the Protestant working class, and she wanted the Protestant workers to unite with the Catholics.

The account of that meeting by Paisley was, as far as I know, never contradicted or denied. Paisley was an evil bigot, but not a notable liar.

That piece of political stupidity was Devlin-McAliskey being naive, rather than the cynical manipulator she soon became. She was PD, and she acted according to the daft political logic of PD’s targeting of the reform Unionists, but PD had no membership structure at that time, still less control of what Devlin did.

In this article, however, I mainly want to deal with James Connolly’s posthumous status in Irish left politics. I will refer to my own experiences quite a bit.

The first secretary of the Irish Citizen Army (and future writer of plays) Sean O’Casey published a short history of the Citizen Army in 1919. He said that in Connolly Irish labour had not had its first martyr; rather, Irish nationalism had another martyr. I think that was true.

Connolly is lauded on the Irish left because he was a nationalist martyr, with a deservedly high place in the pantheon of Irish republicanism. He was the military leader of the Rising in Dublin in 1916. Certainly I learned to revere Connolly the nationalist first, before I knew anything else about him. I learned from my mother, who also remembered people like Thomas Ashe, who died in jail from force-feeding in 1917.

She had had a cousin, Patrick O’Mahony (my father’s namesake, but no relation) captured, tried, and executed (to use the horrible euphemism for state murder) in May 1923, the 75th of the 77 official “executions” in the civil war.

She would tell my sister Mary and me of hearing the shots ring out from the “Home Barracks” in Ennis on the morning of the shooting. Christopher Quinn and William Shaughnessy, shot in Ennis as the civil war drew to an end, were boys. Quinn was 19. They were nos. 76 and 77 of the 77 Republicans shot by the Free State government.

I heard of Connolly in the National School too, I think. Connolly was the “labour leader” shot in 1916, in a chair because his wound would not let him stand. In my child’s ignorance, I then thought of “labour” as disruptive and as not being “national”.

Connolly Clubs

In Manchester, to move on, I learned of “the Connolly clubs” in the Catholic weekly, The Universe. My sister took it, for whatever reason, but the only declared anti-Catholic in the house was the only one who read it.

I learned that there were communists in England who, in the “Connolly Clubs”, worked to “turn” Irish people away from “their religion” and towards godless communism.

The name Douglas Hyde was prominent. This was not of course the Gaelic League man who became first president of the 26 Counties, but a former member of the CPGB who had converted to Catholicism. He was usually billed as “former editor of the Daily Worker” (he had been its news editor). He made the “Connolly Clubs” seem to be a force that the Connolly Association was not and probably never had been. Hyde claimed that it met immigrants off the boats and was helpful to them in finding digs and jobs. None of that was true in my later experience.

I now believed that working-class communism subsumed everything progressive and worthwhile in Irish nationalism — freedom from foreign rule and constraints on freedom of development. And of course it was much much more. To Irish workers in Ireland and England it offered a revolutionary better system and a road to ending exploitation by the Irish bosses and their sort everywhere. So I believed.

I never had the sense of abandoning Irish nationalism, but rather of subsuming it. That nationalism was my first political consciousness, formed in childhood from my mother’s stories and such records as Delia Murphy’s Down By The Glenside and The Croppy Boy and others. The songs were emotionally central. In puberty it all came alive in a way it hadn’t before.

To my surprise and delight I found that the Young Communist League and the Communist Party were one of the best places to go to for Irish and “folk” songs. I tried to join the Communist Party, but because of my age they would only let me join the YCL.

They sang Irish songs, even Catholic sectarian songs that I couldn’t countenance politically, such as Johnson’s Motor Car and a song of which I remember only a snatch: “Twas early one morning/ On my way to Mass/ I met a bloody Protestant/ And killed him for his pass”. I first heard The Rocks of Bawn sung there, by an old Irish communist, Eddie Lenihan.

Connolly did not feature at all, either as a subject for songs or via any of the good songs he wrote, such as We Only Want The Earth.

Terry Whelan, both of whose parents were Irish, was secretary. The YCL — we had 40 or so in the Cheetham branch, many of them children of party members, often Jewish — sang the Catholic sectarian songs with zest.

The YCL led to the single Manchester branch of the Connolly Association recruiting me. Our main activity was selling the Irish Democrat in the (now long gone) Irish pubs of Rusholme and of Moss Side (which was mainly West Indian, but with a lot of Irish people too). We would shift at least a thousand copies of a new issue on our Saturday night and Sunday morning sales.

Run by Joe Deegan and Michael Crowe, a chemist and an academic, the CA had some non-CP members. I remember Danny Kilcomin, a joiner who always dressed “correctly” (scarf and gloves, etc.) He would tell you that no less than Krishna Menon, then Indian foreign minister, had been “down there on Platt Fields”, the Manchester Speaker’s Corner, where the CA sometimes had a stall.

Menon, a member of Nehru’s Congress Party, was forced to resign when India and China had a brief war in late 1962. I never heard that Danny became Irish foreign minister.

TheIrish Democrat, edited by Desmond Greaves, an Englishman assigned to Irish work by the CP, was a straightforward Irish nationalist paper, a Fianna Fail nationalist paper, with occasional pieces on Irish foreign policy that tipped you off (if you knew your way around politics) that it was also some kind of Stalinist paper.

The 26 Counties refused to join or give bases to Nato because of Partition. The CA was very enthusiastic for the 26 Counties foreign policy, and in one article Greaves described the 26 Counties as “the most progressive state in Western Europe”.

In fact it was a vicious theocracy with a parliamentary front. It lived by exporting meat — cattle and people. With not quite three million inhabitants, it exported about a thousand people a week, mainly to Britain. In the record year for that period, 1958, it exported 80,000 people. At the National School in Ennis, it was taken as a fact of reality that most of us would migrate.

But for the Stalinist-led CA, Ireland’s foreign policy made it “the most progressive state in Western Europe”. That’s what the Irish Democrat told the people who bought it from us in the Irish pubs.

The paper had started as Irish Freedom. The more neutral name Irish Democrat was a product of the World War, when the CA told people to join the British Army. 50 years later, the Irish Democrat would publish Beresford Ellis lamenting that Ireland ill-treated its “aristocracy”, meaning the people who were nominal heads of clans and would be called, for example, “The O’Rahilly”.

But it wasn’t all nonsense or inconsequential oddity. The CA served Russian foreign policy as the CP did.

For its own reason, Russia, from the mid 1920s onwards, tried to use nationalism to disrupt its enemies. For instance, the Yugoslav socialists and then communists wanted a south-Slav federation, and thought Yugoslavia could be made democratic for all its components. But Yugoslavia was the strongest state in the Balkans, and allied to France. So Russia insisted with the Yugoslavs that only Croatian independence would serve.

That was artificial and false, serving Russia and not Yugoslavia. In the cause of using Croatia to disrupt Yugoslavia, the Stalino-communists allied with the forerunners of the Ustase, who in World War 2 would run a Croatian Nazi puppet state.

In Ireland the Stalinists used Irish nationalism to strike at Britain. They gave anti-British Irish nationalism a life that was not quite its own.

Twice, in the 1930s and in the 1960s, the Stalinists got a near-majority or a majority in the IRA. The Workers’ Party (former Official Republicans) veered away from nationalism, but collapsed after the fall of the USSR in 1991, when it came out that the WP was financed by Russia.

The Connolly Association fed Irish nationalism. Mostly, it was the nationalism of the Provisional IRA, which was not financed by Russia, that they dealt in. They made IRA causes their own. They provided the lawyer, John Hostettler, in the case of Kevin Mallon and Francis Talbot, IRA members framed for murder.

I didn’t object to the CA for its subterfuges, as perhaps I should. (I kept a notebook then, so I’m not relying on memory). I thought it was the only way we’d get a hearing from Catholic Irish workers.

But it did not lead anywhere. The CA never dropped the mask and took the Irish workers it reached through Irish nationalism beyond that and to socialism. For practical purposes we were just nationalists. In effect we were Fianna Failers with Stalinist quirks.

There was no flow of CA members to socialism, or even to the CP. Sometimes the traffic went the other way, as with me. I joined the YCL first.

The CA did not have literature by Connolly. If they had had things by Connolly, I would have bought them, and I didn’t. Desmond Greaves’s book on Connolly would be published the following year.

Nonsense

The CA influenced people in the Labour Party close to the CP, but it fed them plausible nonsense like the idea that Partition was responsible for the plight of the 26 Counties economy. It criticised the curtailment of democracy for the Catholics of Northern Ireland, but in order to argue and imply that the Protestant minority in Ireland had no right at all to special treatment as a national minority. It made Irish nationalist confusion on such questions more confounded. And for its own reasons.

Connolly then had no influence at all that I ever saw on the British labour movement, though the CA had some, and amongst CP-influenced people, which included much of the Labour left, a lot.

Later, in 1963, one Saturday morning, a comrade, Rod, and I were selling the Socialist Labour League’s weekly paper, The Newsletter, on the main street in Moss Side. We saw a small Connolly Association demonstration approaching. They were celebrating the bicentenary of Wolfe Tone’s birth, and they had a pamphlet by Greaves on Tone. They shouted at me to join them.

I saw no problem in honouring Tone, the (would-be) founder of secular politics in Ireland, and I joined the march. My comrade, Rod, wouldn’t come with me. He made the charge that I was an Irish nationalist, and the SLL branch was assembled to hear me defend myself.

It was not a trial exactly, but a hearing on the charge laid against me. I defended myself and I suppose I told the meeting about the United Irishmen and Tone, and their relationship to the French Revolution — “the rights of man and the citizen in Ireland”. I distinctly remember saying, with supreme confidence: “If Wolfe Tone were alive today, he’d be in the Fourth International”.

The affair ended with the organiser, Ted Knight, pronouncing that “at least” I’d “made a good case” for marching for Wolfe Tone.

There was no anti-Irish feeling involved. The point here is that the members of the politically most advanced and knowledgeable group in Manchester knew almost nothing of Irish history. They just didn’t know.

Four volumes of Connolly’s writings had been published after 1948, and they were still available from the publisher, “At The Sign of the Three Candles”, in Dublin, but they were not on sale in the Manchester Connolly Association or at the CP bookshop.

I got the four volumes by post from Dublin in the middle of 1961. Connolly’s Labour In Irish History has, I think, more or less “always” been in print, but it was not available in Manchester, either from the Connolly Association or from the CP bookshop. For certain I’d have bought it if it had been, and I did not.

A volume by Connolly had been published by the British and Irish CPs early in 1941. A Socialist In War was a collection of Connolly’s pro-German articles from World War 1 edited by P J Musgrove, but it too was not available.

1941 was at the time of the Hitler-Stalin pact, when Hitler and Stalin had invaded and divided Poland and Stalin with Hitler’s prior consent had invaded Finland. Stalin was acting, as Trotsky put it, as “Hitler’s quartermaster”. The CPs were, so to speak, “contracted out”, and made propaganda for the Nazi peace-terms offer to Britain. It was for making that pro-Nazi propaganda that the Communist Party’s Daily Worker was banned in January 1941.

The early 1941 collection was Connolly being used to justify the Hitler-Stalin pact. When Hitler invaded Russia a few months later, it was “withdrawn”. It became “rare” and was no longer quite kosher.

The CP turned to strike-breaking for the Allies in World War 2 and agitating that a “Second Front” be opened in the West. One of the CP songs Terry Whelan sang in 1959 was:

“It’s here, chum; it’s here, chum/ It’s the Second Front for you/ In spite of the old Atlantic Wall/ We’re the boys to see you through/ It won’t take long to finish it/ When we have got their range/ And then we can all go home and live like humans for a change/ It’s here, chum, it’s here, chum”.

Finally, on Connolly and the British labour movement in that era, I will cite the nearest thing to a survey I know of. Vic Eddisford was secretary of the Lancashire and Cheshire CP, a good man fallen among Stalinists, as so many of them were. He knew a bookworm when he saw one, and believed in using anything and everything that would help his cause. So he asked me to set up a lending library for the comrades.

He gave me a sizeable room at the CP headquarters on Rusholme Road and asked in a circular for comrades willing to donate to the library. The room filled up with piles and piles of books and periodicals — for instance, with bound volumes of Labour Monthly, where Rajani Palme Dutt, the CP’s leading intellectual for 30 years, would give “the line” in long editorials. There were books of every sort and description, even the books of some of the people shot by Stalin, Bukharin for example.

I spent more time reading or scanning through this Aladdin’s Cave of books and bound magazines than sorting. And there was nothing at all for the putative CP lending library by or about James Connolly. Nothing. I know for sure because I’d have ready anything by Connolly. I wanted Labour In Irish History, for example, and I remember that when I got it from Dublin in 1961 I stayed up all night reading it.

There is only one possible exception. I’d already got Connolly’s pamphlet Labour, Nationality, and Religion from the book market at Shudehill — barrows piled high with books and higgledly-piggledy. I had read that. If that was donated to the library, I would not not have read the donated book, and therefore would have forgotten it. A possibility: but, for what it’s worth, my memory says that there was nothing at all by Connolly.

That proves nothing, but it seems to indicate that Connolly was not in circulation among people who responded to Vic Eddisford’s circular. The bowdlerised James Connolly of Irish nationalism was widely known, but Connolly the socialist was then very much a CP phenomenon.

Greaves’s biography the following year, 1961, changed things to some extent. The problem with it is that it is a pack of lies. The barefaced lie I remember most clearly concerns Roger Casement’s return to Ireland from Germany on Good Friday 1916. He came with the news that there would not be a contingent of German soldiers such as the insurgents wanted, expected, and had planned for. He came to stop the rising, but he was arrested at McKenna’s Fort in Kerry.

Greaves boldly says that “Casement came not to stop a revolution, but to join it”. No, he did not!

The general line from Greaves was that Connolly was a straight-line CPer like himself, that Connolly was the paragon of CP-style political virtue.

The British and Irish Communist Organisation, when it was populist-nationalist, attempted to treat Connolly as a straight “Leninist”, the measure of all things, an Irish pocket Stalin or Mao. They would live as Unionists to sum up Connolly in the words that Edward Hyde the Royalist used for Cromwell: Connolly was “a brave bad man”.

Then the Cork Workers’ Club inherited some of the BICO’s stock of pamphlets and augmented some of them. How far the CWC is from having a clue is shown by the way they thoughtlessly pile up articles inIreland On The Dissecting Table.

Before Greaves in 1961, the general Marxist line on Connolly — who was in fact the founder of Irish populist nationalism, not of Irish Marxism — was that he was a pre-Leninist, pre-Russian-Revolution, pre-Communist-International Marxist-socialist. That of course served to excuse and explain away whatever you felt obliged to explain away. I think that was what those who knew Connolly said before Greaves’s lying biography appeared, including CP people such as Deegan and Crowe of the Manchester CA. It was certainly what I thought and said.

But in Ireland today Connolly is not just a pre-Russian-Revolution socialist. He is the model, especially in his choices in 1916.

McAnulty says that by criticising Connolly I am dismissing his role in building the Irish labour movement. No, I’m not. Connolly played an important role as one of Jim Larkin’s lieutenants in founding the modern Irish labour movement. Nothing in his last period undoes that. He not only believed in the class struggle as a fact (as many did, even the Labour right winger Ramsey MacDonald for example). He believed in fighting the class struggle on the workers’ side.

With Larkin in America, Connolly, in his last period, was the effective leader of the Irish working-class movement. Though he had been one of those in the labour movement who believed that a general strike could stop war, he made no effort to involve the Irish labour movement in the 1916 Rising. I believe that was because he thought it wasn’t possible. The Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union was then, after the 1913-14 lockout and strike, down to about 700 members.

I wrote a polemic against Connolly in the Great War, Running With The Hare And Riding With The Hounds, as an 8-page pull-out in Solidarity in February 2023. I think I showed that no “context” justifies Connolly in World War 1. From “The War Against The German Nation” (29 August 1914) to his death on 12 May 1916, Connolly was not an anti-imperialist. He was against Britain and British imperialism, but also a vulgar, and where necessary a lying, partisan and propagandist for Germany and the German empire.

And, unavoidably, for the German-led bloc: Austria, which killed maybe a million Serbs, and Turkey, which committed genocide against the Armenians. Those things were known, and commented on, in Ireland. And, certainly, when Connolly made dishonest propaganda for German imperialism, Germany itself had almost wiped out the whole Herero and Nama peoples in South West Africa, as well as occupying Belgium and part of France. If socialists were to take sides in World War 1 on the “immediate issues” then it would certainly not be with Germany. Marxists like Lenin and Luxemburg argued that world imperialism and capitalism were in an impasse demonstrated in the military impasse of the war. Not one imperialism, but the whole imperialist system, was responsible for the war, and all the imperialisms had to be fought and overthrown.

Pearse himself said: “Connolly is most dishonest in his methods. In public he says the war is a war forced on Germany by the Allies. In private he says that the Germans are as bad as the British”.

There was more than one Easter Rising. There was the one that happened, which inspired and encouraged anti-imperialists throughout the world. (I debated that question at a public meeting in London in 2009 with Ruth Dudley Edwards, who is some sort of Irish Thatcherite). Then there was the one planned, which involved German officers (and possibly soldiers: why not if Germany had taken Ireland seriously enough to commit officers to the rising?).

The decision not to land officers was not an Irish one. The Irish wanted the Germans to land. If Germany had committed itself, Ireland would have become a theatre of war, with pro-German and anti-German taking sides in an Irish civil war.

Connolly died a fervent proselytising Catholic. (He made his Protestant wife Lillie promise to become a Catholic, which she did).

If what I wrote in The Easter Rising In Irish History is regarded as a polemic, the target is not Connolly, but Provo-type physical-force republicanism. The Provo war made no sense, and the cult of Connolly helped to inspire it.

His article on the eve of the Rising where he lauded minority military action as the detonator of revolution was in the vein of the German March Action of 1921 and the nonsense that inspired Guevarism in the 1960s and 70s.

There is a lot more to say about Connolly, and I’ve said some of it in Running With The Hare and The Easter Rising In Irish History. If John McAnulty wants to respond to my direct polemic against Connolly, Running With The Hare, then I’m sure the editor of Solidarity will find space to print that. I will also write further about IS (SWP) on Ireland in 1969, and its links with PD.