The Communist Party of Ireland
A Critical History, Part 2 by DR O'Connor Lysaght, 1976

Whatever reason the Comintern may have had for allowing the Communist Party of Ireland to liquidate into Larkin's Irish Worker League, the result was to force Irish Communism back organisationally three years. Although Larkin was certainly superior to O'Brien politically, his conception of organisation was no different. Under O'Brien, the Socialist Party of Ireland had been a propagandist appendage of the ITGWU. Larkin's IWL had the same relationship to the Workers' Union of Ireland. In 1925, even the Irish Worker, the very paper around which the League was formally built ceased publication for nearly two years. Without it the IWL's propagandist function fell to zero. No attempt was made to raise working-class consciousness. No programme was developed. Even in elections, Larkin ran as a Left Independent – 'Friend of the Poor', calling on the electors to trust him and those who were pledged to give their personal support to him. The Irish Worker League remained throughout its life a personal Fief for one man.

The Workers' Party of Ireland
In 1926 an attempt was made to re-assert Bolshevism in Ireland. In the Spring, Roddy Connolly, his sister Nora, McClay and Labour veterans who had not been in the original CPI such as PT Daly came together to form a new Workers' Party of Ireland and to seek affiliation to the Comintern. Walter Carpenter had died in 1925, but his son Walter the younger became president of a Youth section. Another member was Tom Lyng, a veteran of Connolly's IRSP. From May, the WPI published its paper (duplicated) the Irish Hammer and Plough which made the following policy statement, in its first issue (22 May 1926):

The Workers' Party of Ireland made progress during the months of May and June. As with its predecessors it worked within the current Irish National Unemployed Movement. Branches were established at Delvin, Co. Westmeath[1], and Killeshandra, Co. Cavan – both areas of contemporary social unrest.

In politics as its paper's first editorial revealed it expounded clearer and better analyses than any of the Communist Parties of Ireland. In June, the Party published its 'Objects and Aims':

This is not better than the CPI's Social Programme for Republicans.

Indeed it looked towards the maximalism of Seán Murray's Irish Case for Communism in the next decade. However this programme was particularly limited by the circumstances, both international and national, and this seems to have played a role in shortening the life of its party.

In the first place, the Comintern with which the WPI naturally and publicly sought to align itself was in a major right-wing deviation. Stalin and Bukharin were combining to oppose the Left Opposition of Trotsky and Zinoviev. The policy of the majority was 'Socialism in One Country' to be secured through organising the largest foreign organisations that might be friendly to the USSR. This meant necessarily downgrading the affiliates of the Comintern. It did not mean creating new vanguard groups like the WPI when sympathy for the USSR was expressed by Larkin's IWL and even by members of the new constitutional Republican Party, Fianna Fáil.

On top of this the objective internal circumstances of the Irish situation provided further limits to the prospects for a Communist Party. The struggles of the workers and the Republicans had only recently been defeated. The latter were being won to Fianna Fáil which represented at once a moral weakening and a limited intellectual advance on the Civil War politics. The workers had retreated into a defensive economism. Belfast was still closed to Bolshevism if not to Social Democracy. A new Party needed immediate victories if it was to justify itself to the rightist Comintern. But those victories could, in 1926, only be small ones.

A certain political capitulation was made by the WPI in its analysis of the left-wing bureaucrat leading the British NUM – AJ Cook and of de Valera and Fianna Fáil. Of the latter's founding conference the Irish Hammer and Plough commented (22 May 1926):

In the next issue, however, it was less hopeful for Fianna Fáil:

And in the Irish Hammer and Plough of 19 June a certain synthesis of the two positions was made by Roddy Connolly:

De Valera did not find it necessary to notice these criticisms. Despite its branches in Counties Cavan and Westmeath, the Workers' Party did not win the mass support that would have given it an argument to justify its existence on the Communist International. Worst of all, Larkin moved to denounce it. This attack (answered in Irish Hammer and Plough, 7 August 1926) was typically workerist (he denounced the Party for having 'bourgeois' members) but it would have been a major argument against the WPI in the eyes of Bukharin and Stalin. The Irish Hammer and Plough is last known to have appeared on 16 October. There is no further record of its party's survival beyond that date. Participation in it was RJ Connolly's last Bolshevik-style action. The next year he joined the Labour Party where he has remained to this day.[2] The veteran PT Daly also returned to the Labour Party despite great fury from both William O'Brien and from Larkin. The others returned to the IWL. They included a young man named Seán Nolan.

So, with the blessing of the Communist International, Larkin's Irish Worker League was the sole interventionist expression of world Communism in Ireland until the end of the 1920s. This was not due only to Moscow pressure (or lack of it). Because of the historical underdevelopment of the Irish working class it has generally been over-sensitive to Larkin-style personalia; this sensitivity was magnified in the late Twenties on account of the defeats of the earlier part of the decade.

With any Bolshevik form of opposition to him liquidated, Larkin achieved a couple of triumphs both within Ireland and via-à-vis the International. In the election of September 1927, his League fielded three candidates. It used a certain confusion over names to defeat the three Labour TDs in the greater Dublin region (one of these being the party leader, Thomas Johnson) and to get Larkin elected for the North City constituency though as an undischarged bankrupt he was unable to take his seat. The same year, he went to Moscow and formally affiliated his Workers' Union of Ireland to the Red International of Trade Unions.

But this was to be his last visit to Russia. While there, he refused to give his support either to the right centre majority block of Bukharin and Stalin or to the expelled Left Opposition, regarding the current disputes as being purely internal. At the same time, he backed a new switch in British Communist policy away from alliance with the Labour and Trade Union left fakirs and spoke of Stalin in glowing terms. None the less, politically, in his failure to organise a proper even bureaucratic centralist party and in his connected lukewarmness on religion, he was on the right and the Comintern (or rather its Stalinite leadership, no Congress agreed to this) was on the eve of a swing to the ultra-left. Perhaps more important, from Stalin's point of view was the fact that Larkin was his own man and might be able and prepared to oppose the Moscow line if he disagreed with it. To get rid of Larkin would mean eliminating a potential Irish centre for criticism within itself that the Third International was not to know until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.

Revolutionary Workers Groups
The International had allowed Larkin to contribute to wrecking the Irish Communist movement without comment. Now it prepared, using the same, essentially organisational, methods, to bypass Larkin and rebuild Irish Communism in its own, Stalinite image. Larkin's son James, Young Jim, with other including the current General Secretary of the Irish Worker League, Seán Murray, a Republican from Co. Antrim, were invited to Moscow to be educated at Lenin College – an institution that was now Stalinised. Thus Murray began a career of more than thirty years as probably Ireland's leading Stalinite.

In Ireland, young Jim Larkin, Seán Nolan and others began to organise to break with the IWL. Since there was no Congress of the Comintern between 1928 and 1935, their work was to produce a fait accomplit for that organisation. From 1929, various Irish Workers' Press Groups began to be established to build a new working class newspaper, around which a new Communist Party could expand. These groups met in conference in early 1930 and prepared a preparatory Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party in Ireland. In April there appeared the first number of this Committee's paper The Workers Voice and in October, young Jim Larkin was elected to the reconstituted Dublin Corporation where for one month in 1933 he would be the only open Communist Councillor it has ever had. His father was already renouncing his Communist past.

The Communist Party of Ireland shows a measure of shrewdness both politically and organisationally when it emphasises 1933 – the founding only of the second CPI – as the date from which progress has been made. Not only was there greater continuity between the second and third Communist Parties, than between the first and the second, but it was recognisably a Stalinite continuity. But there is more than this. The 1930s were a period of genuine activism, and, indeed, heroism in Irish Stalinite history. It was under the Stalinite leadership that the Catholic and Protestant unemployed of Belfast fought the police. It was the Stalinite Irish-American, James Gralton, who was deported from Co. Leitrim for his work in organising the small farmers. The Stalinites played a big role in helping to organise the miners of Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny and the textile workers of Rathmines, in leading the striking Dublin tramwaymen in 1935, in opposing Fascism in Ireland and Spain. From 1931 they upheld the celebration of May Day – Trotskyism has not such a record and is accordingly in an immediately difficult position via-à-vis its Stalinite opponents. It has to recognise its weakness the better to capitalise on the fact that, in most of the above mentioned cases, the Stalinites were handicapped by their politics from leading the struggle to success. (The Castlecomer struggle is perhaps an exception since the struggle for union recognition required personal and moral, as much as political qualities; even so, it was a long-drawn out dispute which might have benefited from the leadership of a Farrell Dobbs). In short, the problems posed by the 1930s are specific examples of aspects of our paramount task: that of getting the Irish left to think rather than feel and re-act.

The Revolutionary Workers Groups into which the Workers Press Groups were transformed under the aegis of the preparatory Committee for a Revolutionary Workers Party lasted as such for three years before being transformed into the second Communist Party of Ireland. This was not simply because of the need to avoid repeating the experiences of 1922 to 1926. As early as January 1931, there was more than one group in Dublin as well as groups in Belfast (the Belfast Communist Group), Castlecomer and Longford. Nearly two years later, there were 400 at a meeting that called for the immediate establishment of a Communist Party, even after which the delegates had to wait another six months. Besides this, a Revolutionary Workers Party seems to have been in existence in Dublin for some eight months before the first (1931) Conference mentioned, judging by references in the Workers' Voice. It seems that part of the reason for the caution shown by Nolan, and, after their return from Moscow in 1931, by Larkin and Seán Murray, was the political motive of (Stalinite) orthodoxy; neither they nor the Kremlin were prepared to risk an independent Irish revolutionary force. When the new Communist Party was founded finally it was at a Conference of only 50 delegates, and even then its foundation was followed by expulsions. That this was a possibility was reflected in the early issues of the Workers' Voice. It serialised Reed's 10 Days that Shook the World without excising its references to the now exiled Trotsky. Even less orthodox was the line on Liebknecht and Luxemburg whose denunciation by Stalin was now beginning. As late as 28 January 1933, the Irish Workers' Voice could run an article entitled 'The Heroism of Rosa and Karl'. Earlier, Betty Sinclair was, on her own account first attracted to Stalinism by a lecture on those two whom Stalinites in other countries were ignoring. Perhaps most significant of all was the silence of the Revolutionary Workers Groups on the current dogma of the Comintern via-à-vis Social Democracy. The term for this – Social Fascism – was only used once in the Irish Workers' Voice of 3 March 1934 (ie when the line was about to be changed anyway), and then only defensively, (literally: the Comintern 'was right to call [the Social Democrats] Social Fascists').

This laxity was partly due to the traditional fact henceforward to be an obvious aspect of Irish Stalinism: its already mentioned use of non-sectarian formulae – or, just, form – to cover an essentially philistine approach to most matters. However, in Stalinism's third period, the non-sectarianism was emphasised beyond and future CPI party practice to answer Irish Stalinism's need to accumulate primitively as large as possible number of cadres. A more dogmatic line would probably have alienated potential recruits. The same strategy was to be used in the early days of the Connolly Youth Movement.

But if the propaganda of the Groups was moderate, their practical policy was as far to the left as Irish Stalinism has ever been. The Manifesto of their Preparatory Committee called for a Workers Republic. Relationships with the Republican Movement, which was currently moving leftwards at the head of the anti-annuity and unemployed movements, were generally bad. (This was not altogether the RWG's fault; the Republican orthodoxy, even at that time of Socialist Republicanism, was full of petty bourgeois illusions. However, the Groups might have been more tactful in their handling of those). Though the Groups supported the Republican Front, Saor Éire, and spearheaded the fight against the Coercion Acts passed to crush them and it, they did little to build it. The Labour Party and Fianna Fáil were, of course, totally beyond the pale at this time even if the former was not 'Social Fascist'. In the general elections of February-March 1932, Fianna Fáil defeated Cumann na nGaedhael, took office and suspended many of the oppressive measures that its desperate predecessors had used against the left during their last months. Among the beneficiaries were the Groups and their paper, the Workers' Voice. However, its analysis of the change went no further than this:

Despite this the next week, there was an article celebrating Mellows and the appeal was made:

And in June, the Dublin RWG went to Bodenstown, but those were the only gestures made to the Republican Movement, which was allowed to lapse into a dangerous and blind euphoria after the Fianna Fáil victory. Though the Workers Groups did now make national demands, they did so as if they were the immediate rival of the IRA at the time. United Front propaganda which might have then had an effect was not proposed.

The other aspect of the Third Period Stalinism of the RWGs is to be seen in the Workers' Voice treatment of Connolly. In both Easter 1930 and 1931, it published articles on Connolly that explained his Marxism but ignored completely his development of the national struggle towards achieving the social revolution. In these articles, Connolly's presence in the GPO does not appear; for them, it would seem, his death in 1916 could quite as easily have been caused by a heart attack as by a British firing-squad.

The Third Period of Stalinism of the Revolutionary Workers Groups was summarised in Seán Murray's pamphlet, The Irish Case for Communism, published in March 1933. That this is, in fact, 3rd period Stalinism will be shown. However, its hysteria is reduced by the already mentioned tradition of formal non-sectarianism. This enabled many Trotskyists when the pamphlet was re-discovered in the late '60s to ascribe to its very Stalinite author a position of Trotskyism. The specific cause for their illusion was that this pamphlet did give, in opposition to the, since then, prevalent, Stalinite, two or more stages theory of Irish revolution, a one stage perspective thereof which was based on a quite accurate economic analysis. British imperialism and Irish capitalism were recognised in it as interdependent; more: 'Irish capitalism is the social basis for British imperialism within the country'. p.10.

However, the events of the past five years help to clarify the deficiencies of this pamphlet and reveal more clearly the fact that its politics were ultra-left Stalinite rather than Marxist. For example the one-stage perspective is stated too dogmatically and uncompromisingly. The cause of the national revolution in Ireland is seen as so interdependent with the struggle for social revolution in Britain that the struggle for social revolutions in Ireland becomes indistinguishable from the struggle across the water. This is certainly an optimistic perspective. However, it was not a realistic one at a time when the Fianna Fáil victory had initiated a serious anti-imperialist struggle with a Britain where the working-class had suffered an almost equally serious defeat.

Even less is to be said for the programme with which Murray ends his pamphlet. Here is not a set of transitional demands, but, rather, an early version of Stalinite Maximalism as later revealed in Ireland and Britain. A wide range of industry, transport and banking is scheduled for nationalisation but the issue of workers' control is not mentioned. Furthermore, although the programme is strictly non-denominational and has very specific proposals for the abolition of parliament and the bourgeois legal system, the question of how to achieve this: how to physically smash the state of which parliament and the law courts are simply subordinate institutions, is not considered. The arming of the workers on which alone must depend any move to replace bourgeois state institutions by those of the proletariat is never mentioned. Most amazing of all is the complete absence of any programmatic approach to the major economic problem of the time: unemployment.

That this programme was in fact merely a maximum one was shown by the fact that, while Murray was having his pamphlet published, the RWG was presenting a much less ambitious set of nine demands as propaganda during the Saorstát General Election of January 1933. In this programme, nationalisation is never mentioned, there are several proposals for 'soaking the rich', for disbanding the CID and the growing Army Comrades Association (the future Blueshirts), for opposing the treaty and for improving social welfare (particularly for the unemployed). The most extreme proposal is one for confiscation of the property and imprisonment of those who assist the imperialist enemy. But its sum total amounts to no more than an extreme and logical set of Republican demands. It is the minimum programme to which Murray was to produce the maximum. The question of transition: of linking the immediate needs programmatically to their only solution is not considered. This division of programmes (at a time when Third Period Stalinism had yet to expose itself by its German defeat) anticipated the more thoroughgoing organisational opportunism of Irish Stalinism in its policies of 'United' and 'Popular' Fronts.

The Unemployed Workers Movements
Even before the division between minimum and maximum programmes had yet to take full organisational form, the phenomenon was clear in that field of work from which the CPI gained its greatest share of credit. This was the National Unemployed Workers Movement and, of course, most particularly in Belfast.

Right from the beginning, the Irish Stalinite movement had an advantage that its Centrist predecessors had never possessed: it had a base in Ireland's largest industrial centre. In Belfast the smashing of working class organisations in the pogroms of 1920-22 did not enable the Orange industrialists to restore their economy to health. Their fathers and grandfathers had done a thorough job in integrating their market with that of Britain. Now that Britain was suffering depression its outpost could not develop even the independence shown by the economy of Saorstát Éireann. By 1930 Northern Ireland had the highest rate of unemployment of the three states of the British Isles, and it grew worse when Harland and Wolff's East Yard closed down.

Orangeism was failing to justify itself to its own workers. In 1925, the Northern Ireland Labour Party fought and won three seats in Belfast. It could probably have won more seats in 1929 had the Craigavon Government not abolished proportional representation. Both Catholic and Protestant workers were faced with a government that was able only to hold onto state power nut could show them no economic justification for it doing so. The Labour Party insisted on adhering to the parliamentary road that Unionism had proved itself well able to divert. Meanwhile the world slump added new problems to workers of both religions. This gave an obvious opportunity to the Belfast Communist Group.

In May 1930, the Workers Voice (31 May 1930) proclaimed the programmatic basis for a new Irish National Unemployed Movement. The Unemployed Workers Charter included eight points: abolition of the system of task work; unemployment and non-receipt of benefit to be the only qualification necessary to obtain relief, every unemployed worker married or single, over 18 years to receive it; rates of relief to be 18/- [€1.83] per week for those over 18, 10/- [€0.63] per week for adult dependent and 5/- [€0.31] per week for dependent child; and relief to be administered by Joint Committees of representatives of Unemployed Bodies and Poor Law Board; a 7 hour day with trade union rates for Poor Law Board employees; abolition of separation of man and wife inmates in the workhouse and 50% reduction in the salaries of Poor Law Board officials now earning over £400 [€500] per annum. This moderate minimum programme was soon forgotten. An Irish National Unemployed Movement did exist and did useful local work but it soon broke up into local appendages of the RWGs. The fact was that there were differences in the Poor Law practice north and south of the border. In the Saorstát, payment of relief was often in kind and work was dispensed under a system of patronage. These facts were reflected in a specific programme for Dublin unemployed (Workers' Voice, 7 May 1932). At the same time, while the 26 County workers had gained a limited victory by replacing the conservative Cosgrave by the populist de Valera, the 6 County unemployed had no such hope. The Craigavon Government maintained its iron control, followed completely by the British National Government's reduction in the dole and gave police support to Orange counter-demonstrations against the Communists. Yet these last could not, for once, counteract the objective facts. The Mayday Demonstration in Belfast in 1932 was twice as big as that in Dublin.

In the Workers' Voice of 23 July 1932, Thomas Geehan, a leading Belfast Communist, explained how he saw the way forward. He urged a:

Two days later, just such a Committee – the Belfast Relied Workers' Committee – was formed. On 18 August it held a conference at which 5,000 attended. It demanded on pain of a strike of relief workers five concessions: the abolition of task work; an increase in relief to pay one man 15/3d [€0.99] per week, his wife 8/- [€0.51] per week and 1/- [€0.06] per week for each child, all relief work to be paid in cash, street improvements and other schemes to be paid at trade union rates; adequate outdoor allowance to all single men and women who are unemployed and not in receipt of unemployment benefit. It will be noticed that this was far less than the original demands of the Unemployed Workers' Charter. It is understandable that it should be so; the original eight points were unsuccessful minimum demands; since they had been formulated for two years, the situation of the unemployed had deteriorated. The minimum demands of 1932 were far less ambitious claims than those of 1930. The Communists had no immediate recommendations to develop the consciousness of the mass of the workers so that they would recognise the need for Socialism. In these circumstances, as will be shown, what was actually achieved in 1932 was, again, no more than that what was demanded.

However, the Belfast Corporation was not prepared to grant any concessions without a confrontation. In September, it continued to provoke the workers. It cut the wages of its engineering employees by 10% and removed cuts from its higher paid officials while maintaining those on its lower paid ones. The unemployed were ignored. On 30 September, the 20,000 workers on relief went on strike.

This might not have been so significant had it not been so widespread. Protestants as well as Catholics had suffered from the closing of the shipyards. In desperation they closed ranks on a class basis. The timber-workers struck in sympathy. Marches in sympathy came from Coleraine and Derry to Belfast. Alarmed, the Government tried to split the strikers by an offer of increased rates to married relief workers; but this was rejected on a motion of Geehan, the Chairman of the Relief Workers' Committee. On 5 October, unemployed demonstrators clashed with the RUC. They were sent in a second time and backed by British troops. The result was Bloody Sunday – 11 October 1932. Two workers were killed and barricades rose in defiance on Shankill and the Falls.

The Government now made concessions on some of the Strikers' demands. Allowances were increased for families (though, not in all cases to the level demanded), single men in lodgings were given relief and the rate of relief was fixed as uniform (though still subject to the Means Test) for all Belfast. In addition, relief would continue indefinitely rather than ending after six months. Geehan accepted this as a magnificent victory. Certainly, the strike had gained concessions from a regime that had managed very successfully up to then without making such things. Nonetheless the victory was a tactical one.

The Belfast Communist Group knew this; it knew the limited gains that had been won so hardily and at such a cost in endurance, courage and lives would have to be defended as long as capitalism lasted. To underline this, one strike leader, Arthur Griffin, was now arrested and got three months in jail. (He dies later from his treatment there). The Group's reaction was not political but organisational. A Conference of Rank and File workers was called for 19 November. Murray emphasised the need to unite employed and unemployed workers and criticised, correctly enough, the Belfast Trades Council for trying to sabotage such unity as existed. On 5 November, the Irish Workers' Voice appealed to the workers of Belfast:

With such a perspective – not even, immediately mentioning the remaining, and unconceded, demands of the Relief Workers' Committee – it is not surprising that the Rank and File Conference came to nothing. However, the Communist leader, Archie Magill, estimated that sixty had been recruited to Communism as a result of the strike. In January 1933 Geehan beat Murtagh Morgan of the NILP into third place in the contest for the Court Ward councillorship on Belfast Corporation. The Dublin unemployed won 25% increases in relief, in cash, and relief payment to single people, all not doubt helped by the Saorstát Government's fear of a possible repetition of the Belfast confrontation. Above all, stimulated by these triumphs, an Irish Unemployed Workers' Movement was formed. It had a seven point programme: a national relief scale (though slightly less than the new Belfast rate); trade union rates of pay for relief work; all relief to be paid through dispensaries; housing to be built at economic rates and no eviction of unemployed workers. Yet, again, this minimum was not taken seriously by the Communists themselves. Geehan's campaign for Belfast Corporation included such unlisted (tho', no doubt, beneficial and popular) demands as cheap coal and light for the unemployed, special work schemes for destitute persons and abolition of the Means Test. Later, in September 1933, the Belfast unemployed made the call for improved winter relief. And in March 1934, new demands were given the unemployed movement to fit in closer to the British struggle against the National Government's Unemployed Bill. What is more, with this political confusion, it is not really surprising to find that a permanent demand of Belfast Unemployed agitation after 1932 was simply that the October agreement should be implemented. As early as January 1933, the Irish Workers' Voice (11 January) was reporting:

It can be said that the Stalinite leaders of the Belfast unemployed operated by the letter if not actually the spirit of the Revisionist Bernstein's view that 'the Programme is nothing, the Movement is everything'. This is not to say that greater programmatic clarity on the part of the Communists would have necessarily made the qualitative difference between success and failure for the working class struggle for state power. Opposing the workers in Northern Ireland was an extremely sophisticated ruling class which had great experience in exploiting with the maximum effect, all differences amongst its workers.

The task of this group does not seem to have been made easier by the 'Catholic Nationalism' that our two Nation friends can now identify in the CPI. In fact the only example of this that they have produced has been a remark made by Larkin at a meeting in Dublin in solidarity with the relief strikers. Here, he stated objectively enough, that the relief workers were 'in revolt against the British Empire and all it stood for'. Certainly, non-sectarian working-class unity was frail enough despite the barricades but to attribute the breakage to one speech is merely to admit that this unity was doomed anyway. In any case, in the Irish Workers' Voice of 17 December 1932, Geehan listed three handicaps to advancing the struggle: namely the Red Scare, the use of economic means (paying married but not single people) to divide the unemployed and the Labour fakirs' plans to establish their own purely parliamentary movement of the unemployed. Of course, he may have been blinded by 'Catholic Nationalism'. Nonetheless, it is significant that, at this time, he does not put too high a premium on Orangeism.

Even so, and inevitably, the Unionists did beat the Orange drum. It is this period (1932-35) to which belong such great quoted remarks of Unionist bigotry as Craigavon's 'Protestant Parliament for a Protestant people' and Brooke's (later Brookeborough's), 'I have not one Catholic about my place'. Finally, in 1935, after the final closure of Workman, Clark and Co., and as the CPI continued to gain recruits, the Daily Worker was beginning to the sold around the shipyards, the demonstrations for winter relief had begun to reach 1932 proportions, the Orange mobs were given a blank cheque for action.

Yet, even this was not as successful as that of the 1920s. Geehan had to leave his house. He was still able to organise squatters successfully in the Belfast suburb of Glenard. His party opened a bookshop within four months of the pogrom and it remained open. An attempt by the Northern Irish government to attack openly the 1932 rates of relief was defeated. The CPI survived in Belfast to become the CPNI.

However, it is true that, if not in 1935, then in 1936 (after a final struggle to defeat a new reduction in unemployed rates) there is a change in the Communist Party's emphasis and that the unemployed movement became less important to it than it was up to that date. In his report to the Belfast Branch for the latter year, the Secretary, William McCullough, reported:

No mention of unemployment, here! Nor is it because the rate of unemployment in Northern Ireland had fallen drastically. (It had not). The reason was to be found in the most recent switch in the strategy of the Comintern and of its Irish section.

The United Front
The Revolutionary Workers' Groups were fused into the second Communist Party of Ireland in June 1933. Already the Communist International was making moves to modify its Third Period sectarianism in the light of the Nazi takeover in Germany. However, it had to do this as far as possible without admitting that the line that had contributed to the Nazi seizure of power had been incorrect. As far as Stalin was concerned this operation was executed successfully enough, although in practice it meant liquidating two of the three German Communist leaders whom the Comintern had complimented on their handling of the pre-1933 situation. (The third, Ernst Thaelman, was saved from his friends only by being in the hands of his Nazi enemy). Politically, what the change meant was that the Communist Parties all over the world began to forget about the horrors of 'Social Fascism' and began, instead, to flirt with its exponents in the name of the 'United Front'.

As far as Ireland has been concerned a United Front as understood and defended by Lenin and Trotsky has not been a realistic strategy since perhaps the 1920s. For its original exponents a United Front meant the participation of a mass Communist Party in an alliance with one or more other parties of the working-class so that it could expand its political influence and establish its hegemony over the working-class as a whole to lead it to take state power. Trotsky made this very clear when he wrote (almost as if mentioning Ireland by name) in his Thesis 'On the United Front.'

Significantly, in the Manifesto for his Fourth International – The Death Agony of Capitalism, the United Front is not mentioned. None of the FI's affiliates were large enough for it to be relevant – though they could use and have used certain of its techniques for their tactical alliances.

In Ireland (and indeed in Britain) the organisation of the Communist Party obviously did not yet reach United Frontist possibilities. The Communist Party might, as Lenin advocated for the british, apply for affiliation to the Labour Party; or as Trotsky was to direct, it might enter the Labour Party clandestinely. It might make a similar entry move into the Republican Movement. It might try out alliances for action with elements in one or the other. Its decision would depend on the objective circumstances of the class struggle and its subjective effect on the large working-class and anti-imperialist organisations. At all times, it would maintain its distinct organisation around its programme. Even if an Irish Communist Party did become strong enough to demand a United Front (presumably, with the Labour Party) it would, as of now, have to face up to the fact that the majority of the irish working-class supports parties that are not even subjectively working-class (i.e. Fianna Fáil, Fine Gael, and the various Loyalist groups).

In 1933, as to-day, Irish Communism had a long way to go before it had to face this problem. Insofar as it considered it, its reaction was highly schematic. As has been shown, it had no concept of transitional demands. Its programmatic view was expressed in the good old Social-Democratic 'mini-maxi' dialectic. Even during the Third Period, it recognised the bourgeois democratic struggle (after two years ignoring it) only by producing a minimum election programme as the means of showing that it was more Republican (in the full sense) than the Republicans. During their last 18 months (apart from Murray's pamphlet) the Revolutionary Workers Groups propagandised programmatically as superior Socialist Republicans rather than as Communists.

The change in Irish Stalinism that occurred in 1933 (and was roughly co-existent with the organisational creation of the CPI) was organisational rather than political. Insofar as a programmatic change was made it was a blunting of potential. In the CPI's Manifesto (entitled, significantly, Ireland's Path to Freedom) there was no programme whether Transitional, Maximum or Minimum. This Manifesto was to continue as the chief Party statement throughout the life of the second Communist Party of Ireland.

The other significant aspect of Ireland's Path to Freedom was the strategy that was expressed in it. After the vagueness of the Third Period and Murray's attempt to write internationalism into his pamphlet by his perspective of interlocking British and irish revolutions, the Manifesto returns to the two stage prospect, 'First the Republic, then the Workers Republic':

This strategy was to be developed over the next period. Its most definite development had already been started. As early as March, the Belfast Communist Group was calling for a United Front of Belfast working-class organisations for five limited aims: opposition to proposals to tax co-operative societies; removal of the Special Powers Act; the assistance of the (currently striking) railwaymen; and the prevention of war. The front had a meeting at which the future Labour (and eventually, Unionist) MP, HC Midgeley allowed himself to be elected as its Chairman (probably because he was impressed by Geehan's relative success at the polls). He took care never to call meetings of it and it had disappeared by the end of the year. Further United Front calls came to nothing.

For Party strategy in the Saorstát, the prevailing Stalinite orthodoxy allied to the two-stage strategy was given extra encouragement by the growth of Irish Fascism. In March 1933 members of the Fascist (Free State) Army Comrades Association had been in a mob that burnt the intended HQ of the CPI. The Association's successor, the National Guard, seemed to take over Cumann na nGael, the only openly pro-imperialist opposition party in August 1933. This is not the place for a full analysis of the Blueshirts. It is, however, enough to say that while there can be no doubt of their Fascism, it can now be seen that, in Saorstát Éireann in the 1930s, the objective circumstances for a Fascist seizure of power existed perhaps less there than elsewhere in Western Europe. The petty bourgeois, the historic staple of successful Fascism movements was not demoralised but growing in strength and anticipating further growth. Without its help, the Blueshirt organisation of the large farmers' sons and lumpenproletarians had no real hope of taking power. Fine Gael was able to shed its Fascist elements more easily than any such body elsewhere in Western Europe could have done at the time. None of this means, of course, that the CPI and its allies were wrong to oppose the Blueshirts by every means in their power. However, it does shed a light on the objective value of the means they used.

This was, in common with the rest of the Comintern, first the United Front, then the Popular Front. The first began doubtfully. Midgeley flirted with it. Irish Labour ignored it. (Unlike in Belfast the CPI did badly in the Dublin municipal elections of 1933, both Larkin and his father losing their seats).

There remained another possibility for an alliance. In its two-stage perspective, the CPI had emphasised its role as leader 'of the peasants for an Independent Ireland'. From this standpoint, it was a logical step to seek to expand its United Front strategy to take in the Republican Movement. In fact, what it was to produce was a reformed embryo of the future Popular Front, but this concept would be carried to even greater extremes than elsewhere.

At first, the appeal of the Republicans developed quietly. On the one hand, the CPI did merely what the Revolutionary Groups could have done profitably before. It gave genuine if critical support for Republican candidates in the Northern Irish General election of 1933, for example. The trouble was that this action was based on a totally misleading perspective. By this time, there was, in fact no possibility of the Republicans as a whole blocing with the CPI. The movement's course was rightwards. Frank Ryan was removed from the Editorship of An Phoblacht and the Communist Party literature sellers were attacked at Bodenstown – an event foreshadowing the hooligan attack of 1934. Still the CPI flew its United Front kites. On 9 December, the Irish Workers' Voice headed an article 'On to the Republic through the Workers' Struggle'. On 13 January 1934 it revived an old Third Period shibboleth – the United Front from the bottom; but this was to be on purely democratic – 'Anti-Fascist' demands. On 10 February it reported the founding of a 'Labour League Against Fascism'. A month later it revived (albeit, of course, with far fewer forces) the calls of the irish Labour Party in the War of Independence: for a Mayday general strike against Fascism. It gained its bonus in April – in the shape of the Socialist Republicans' Athlone Manifesto calling for a vaguely described National Republican Congress. The CPI's main criticism of it was that it was not explicit enough on the need to struggle against Fascism.

However, after a year of agitation the numbers of those wishing to fight Fascism under Communist leadership had now swollen. But even this limited achievement was neutralised further by that leadership's handicap of it. The United Front idea had been based on a confused analysis both of the concept and the said front and of the current Irish situation. Now the illusions were compounded. Instead of working to recruit the dissident Social Republicans, the CPI opposed determinedly Michael Price's desire to establish a revolutionary party. It backed, instead, the establishment of what would be in practice its own party front without any alliance with Labour or the Republican organisations. Murray justified this at the famous Rathmines Conference:

This very clear two stage perspective was backed by Frank Ryan, George Gilmore, Peadar O'Donnell (who asked 'what stage of the struggle were they at?' – IWV, ibid) and by John Breen of the Labour League Against Fascism and a future Labour and anti-Communist Lord Mayor of Dublin, who declared that 'two separate revolutions' had occurred in Russia in 1917. A narrow majority sided with them. Price and the majority of what [had] been since April a second Irish Citizen Army broke with their former comrades and entered the Labour Party. The CPI had to continue as the centre of a conglomerate of itself and its front organisations, the Congress organisation proper, headed by O'Donnell, Gilmore and Ryan as well as Murtagh Morgan's tiny breakaway Northern Ireland Socialist Party, and several rank and file Labour supporters headed by the indefatigable Roddy Connolly. Connolly had bloced with Price at Rathmines – on centering the new body's strategy around the demand for a Workers' Republic, rather than (in line with the stages dogma) a republic pure and simple. However, unlike Price he considered that this should be the demand for a front not a party, so he stayed in the Congress. The rump Congress was in fact a pointless body as shown by the fact that O'Donnell has never got beyond fellow-travelling, Gilmore has never really got as far as O'Donnell in this and Ryan only entered the Comintern in a Fascist prison cell in Spain. Of course, and inevitably, many of the rank and file moved into the CPI but they would have probably done that anyway without the two stage mumbo-jumbo. As it was, it was to be through the original Congress – both its dissidents (Price) and its loyal members (Coulter) that the Trotskyism was to get a base in Ireland. So the CPI's idea of a United Front produced its own Nemesis.

Of course, this is not to say that the Congress and the CPI did not do some basic, useful work as during the Dublin Tram Strike of 1935, but here again they worked with the IRA majority. The point is that the Republican Congress per se was not simply unnecessary but a luxury in the actual conditions of the struggle at the time. For example, it had a weekly paper which acted as a rival to the Irish Workers' Voice, which itself couldn't afford this. On the other hand, co-operation between the CPI and Connolly and Morgan and their followers could have been achieved anyway. This was admitted by the Central Committee in July 1935, when it stated: 'the work of the Party in the struggle against repression remains backward' (Irish Workers' Voice, 6 July 1935). However, its solution was to carry the front idea even further.

The Popular Front and the Spanish Civil War
In June 1935, the Seventh Congress of the Comintern which included an Irish delegation, gave formal approval to just such a strategy. In place of 'United Fronts', there were proclaimed 'People's Fronts' of the workers and formally petty bourgeois (really bourgeois) 'anti-Fascist' parties such as the French Radicals and the British Liberals, with the purpose of fighting elections. As with the 'United Fronts' this strategy had been festering for some time in France. In Ireland – always open to pressure towards the right – a sign had been the publication in the Irish Workers' Voice of 22 December 1934 of an article by Cahir Healy, Nationalist MP and friend of Sir Edward Mosley. In this he criticised Britain for failing to operate the Treaty of 1921!

In Ireland, the Popular Front does not seem to have caused any further approaches to Healy. What it did initiate was a period of several months in which the Republican Congress wooed Fianna Fáil. Several joint 'republican' (i.e. Fianna Fáil) – Labour (WUI and Republican Congress) meetings were held in Dublin ('Republican Labour' was of course the irish term for Popular Front as Republican Congress meant United Front). Dan Breen and others signed a manifesto for such a movement. In the end, however, the Fianna Fáil leadership did not need or want a Popular Front. It invoked Party discipline: a few held out and were expelled. They didn't enter even the Republican Congress.

More significant in the long term was the effect of Popular Frontism on the CPI's relations with the Labour Parties. As late as September 1935, Midgeley was still attacking the idea of a front with the CPI. However, the latter was not prepared to give up anything except its programme. More important, perhaps, was the fact that Midgeley had lost a lot of support by keeping silent over the 1935 pogrom. When he announced a list of minimum demands, McCullough declared that he agrees with it, 'in so far as it is in the interests of the working-class' (Irish Workers' Voice, 18 January 1936), and he invited the NILP to send a delegate to a meeting to achieve unity against Unionism. In April, an electoral front was agreed for the Belfast municipal election. Its candidates were defeated. What is more important is that it is from this time that the mass organisation of the Belfast workers, particularly the unemployed, began to lose its importance in CPI propaganda. After the Unemployed Workers' Movement's defeat of the attempt to reduce relief in April 1936, only one unemployed demonstration is mentioned (briefly) the following November and as has been remarked, McCullough's own report of February 1937, confirms this impression, despite the continuing high rate of unemployment in Northern Ireland and of Belfast alone. On the other hand, of course, the Popular Front was nothing if not a Parliamentary strategy, Midgeley was primarily a parliamentarian and proud of it and the CPI had accepted his programme in principle. The circumstantial evidence is quite strong.

In the Saorstát, the CPI went even further in seeking to conciliate Labour – and with even less success. No 'United' or 'Popular Font' strategy was agreed with the larger party. Instead, after hearing of the defeats of the 'United Front' candidates in Belfast, the CPI withdrew its own candidates – Murray and Larkin – from the Dublin municipal elections lest they split the Labour-Republican vote. Admittedly, this may have permitted them to publish an unusually radical election programme (including municipalisation of the tramway and gas companies), and Gilmore and Ryan went forward under it for the Republican Congress. However they and the Labour Party were defeated utterly. Murray's reaction was to urge the WUI candidates (including the elder Larkin) to find a common unity with Labour in the future. As usual, the terms for this remained vague.

The uneven political development of the CPI and its fronts north and south of the border was maximised by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Here, for Stalinism, the issue is clear. Not alone was the liberty of the Spanish people at stake, so, too, was its hardly worked out strategy. The Popular Front now faced International Fascism in military struggle. In Spain itself, this gave an extra impetus to Stalinite opposition to attempts to make the Republic a Workers' Republic. On the international scale it meant that the affiliates of the Comintern should give first priority to pressurising the governments of their countries into supporting the Spanish Republic against the reactionaries.

In Ireland, in particular, this task was made more difficult for two reasons. One was the small size of the CPI. The other was that the Catholic Church showed a unanimity that it had not displayed since the Civil War in giving its backing to Franco and his irish supporters – the Christian Front.

In these circumstances, the Irish Labour Party, which had for some years tried to steer a middle course between verbal radicalism (a new commitment to the Workers' Republic) and clerical disapproval thereof, surrendered completely to the latter. Not all its deputies followed the example of Limerick's Michael Keyes who spoke at Christian Front meetings. However, Keyes never expected to answer for it. Matters were different in the Republican Movement, even in its most right wing party, Cumann na Phoblacht. There, Dr Joseph Brennan found that his leadership of the Front cost him the seat on its National Directorate. Indeed, all Irish Republicanism supported the Spanish Republic – even those like Fr Michael O'Flanagan, who had been confused on the Ethiopian issue. Perhaps the most concrete achievement of the Republican-Communist alliance was the brief reunification of the 'Republican' wing of the republican Congress, under Frank Ryan, with its 'Workers' Republic' minority under Kit Conway to supply and man [an] Irish force to join the International Brigade.

In these circumstances, the Labour Party (then including that future, well-known, non-sectarian, Conor Cruise O'Brien) tail-ended the clergy even to the right, not only of the militant Republicans – but of the determinedly non-interventionist Fianna Fáil. This stand was criticised correctly enough by the CPI.

In Northern Ireland, however, matters were different. The NILP gave its backing to the Spanish Republic and criticised its 26 County comrades for not doing so. Midgeley produced a pamphlet (Spain – The Press, The Public and the Truth) on the strength of which he was later to provide a measure of left cover for the Unionist Government. The CPI hailed it as 'brilliant' and forgot the many criticisms it had made of Midgeley and his Party on their omissions nearer home.

Under pressure, the Communist Party not only tail-ended Midgeley, it bent politically under the clerical attack. In its last issue of 1936, its cyclostyled weekly, The Worker (the Irish Workers' Voice had had to liquidate after being sued successfully for libel by a parish priest) quoted a Protestant clergyman:

No such allowances were made for Trotsky or the Moscow trial defendants whom the Party now noticed and denounced.

Three months later Popular Frontism reached its climax, when the Worker became a monthly to make way for a new Popular Front weekly called the Irish Democrat. This only lasted to the end of 1937 partly due to a boycott. After a year of quiescence the CPI resumed weekly publication of the (duplicated) Irish Workers' Weekly in 1939.

Meanwhile, Gilmore and Ryan ran for the Dáil in the general election of 1937 as 'Republican-Labour' candidates. They lost their deposits. Ryan returned to Spain where he was captured by the reactionaries. The Irish Republicans that he had led had already returned to Ireland after the intervention as creditable as any in Irish military history and a good deal more justifiable than most. The Republican Congress was not reconstructed, and the 'popular' or 'Republican-Labour Front' remained a pious aspiration.

In political terms, then, the period of the popular Fronts was, in Ireland, even more disastrous than that of the 'United Front' that preceded it. The Republican Congress neutralised the potential of many Socialist-Republican revolutionaries. The awful verdict on 'Republican-Labour co-operation' must be that it helped destroy them politically if not physically.

Objective factors were against the CPI of course. From January 1935 there was a spell of relative prosperity in the 26 Counties that lasted until after the London Agreements of 1938. The opportunism of the Irish Labour Party though more blatant, was more successful than that of the Stalinites; most people in the areas where the CPI was strong tended to look to the Workers' Republic rather than the Republic. And, in any case, the Republic was merely (as, of course, it could only be) a tighter version of what Fianna Fáil seemed to be providing. In fact under the London Agreements of 1938 it did indeed provide more than the CPI, amongst others, had expected. Not only did it end the Economic war of 1938 and keep the Annuities in Ireland but it maintained its 'dictionary republican' constitution and removed Britain's Irish navy bases. Its triumph here cut the ground from under both Republic and Workers' Republicans for the next five years. A year later, Franco triumphed finally in Spain.

Liquidation – Again
There were more opportunities for the CPI in Belfast. From 1937, many of its members found jobs (and a political base) in Short Brothers' Aircraft factory. In the 26 Counties unemployment rose again in 1939. The unity of the country was still not achieved. On this last, it appears that the Popular Frontist attitude was continuing, from the following quotation by Seán Murray:

This statement reveals an entirely un-Communist (but wholly Stalinite) approach to the national bourgeoisie. (Perhaps, again, over-reacting to de Valera's unexpected success in London). This mistake was revealed when the Second World War began and de Valera, though not taking an openly Redmonite position, refused to break a neutrality that was very benevolent towards Britain even for the sake of national unity – let alone Socialism. For the next six years anyone who had taken seriously deValera's advocacy of 'the re-uniting of the severed area of the North-East with the rest of the country' was likely to find himself in the Curragh, if not in the Death Cell.

For the first years of the war the USSR was neutral, albeit, with a bias towards Germany. The affiliates of the Comintern were directed to wage war against the war in their own countries. In neutral Ireland, the CPI was able for once to approach the position of James Connolly although under a more confused political form (Popular Front) rather than its own. In May 1940, it declared:

This is the statement of a confused and isolated Party drawing on its none too full reserve of theory and experience and getting mixed up. Even so, its confusion is superior theoretically to its clarity.

Although its vagueness had political possibilities that were dangerous for the Fianna Fáil Government, the CPI was not a threat to it like the larger and armed IRA. A few Stalinite militants, notably Neill Goold, went to the Curragh under the Offences Against the State Act, but for their work in trying to revive the unemployed movement – not for militant nationalism. In Northern Ireland, where the Party's stand at this time hurt the war effort, the Government was more hostile. William McCullough and Betty Sinclair received jail sentences for 'sedition'. Nonetheless, the Stalinites in Northern Ireland grew in strength with the expansion of industry and the decline in unemployment. In 'Éire' unemployment declined only because emigration increased (including emigration to Belfast). The CPI, there, declined too.

Then, on 22 June 1941, Germany invaded Russia. For the Comintern, the imperialist war automatically became a struggle between Fascism and Democracy – a larger version as that of Spain. This meant that the second Communist Party of Ireland, like its foreign comrades renounced formally all thoughts of revolution and pinned its hopes on the Red Army. This cause it to suffer a final, and decisive, split along the lines of the border. In Comintern theory there is no reason why its branches in 'Éire' should not change their line along with the rest of the world Stalinite movement, agitate for unilateral surrender of naval bases to Britain, etc. After all, in far-more-oppressed India, the Stalinites did follow such a policy. In Ireland. they might have used the alliance as the price for Irish unity – an idea that Britain had considered. In practice, such a course could only have been carried through by an organisation which could draw on reserves of strength in the country to be favoured. Support for Britain in 'Éire' meant support for the oppressor not only of Ireland but of India and black Africa. Such a policy would be too unpopular even for the Party that had defied the hierarchy over Spain. It would alienate too many potential and actual cadres and those who would replace them would be doubtful entities, qualitatively and quantitatively. To call too loud even for support for the ally of the Soviet Union would probably have a diminishing return in terms of support for the USSR in 'Éire'. Of course, none of this applied to Northern Ireland where there were already big pickings among the workers and where such pickings were even more likely among unionist workers on a pro-British basis.

On 10 July 1941, the National Committee of the CPI presented to a general meeting of the Dublin Branch the following resolution:

The motion was passed by the meeting. There followed a dispute about its interpretation, with Larkin opposing too tight a discipline on the entrists and Nolan leading the hardliners. In December, all entered the Labour Party, but Larkin, like his father, did not follow the discipline of his old comrades. Murray (who had moved to Belfast) and the Party's 6 Counties branches remained as, in fact, though not immediately in form, what would be more than twenty-eight years the Communist Party of Northern Ireland.


[1] Yes, the Valley of Squinting Windows had some radicals besides – and (dare we say it) somewhat more constructive than – the MacNamaras!

[2] Connolly's defection should be examined in some detail. His subsequent actions in the Republican Congress have encouraged Irish Stalinites to explain it as a simple case of ultra-leftism. Since he had by then been seven years in the Labour Party, this is untenable. More accurately, it can be seen as the act of one whose entire early political life had been spent in revolutionary and pre-revolutionary situations and who was unable to adjust himself to the post-1923 change in a proper way.

On to Part 3

Back to Part 1

Back to Irish Communism