The Communist Party of Ireland
A Critical History, Part 3 by DR O'Connor Lysaght, 1976

The organisational division of Irish Stalinism along the lines of the border coupled with its liquidation in the 26 Counties, seems to have been (indeed it must have been even for the Stalinites) designed as a temporary measure to be reversed at the end of the Second World War.

In fact, reunification was not to be so easy. Having subjected its own revolutionary perspectives to the hypothesis of 'Socialism in a single Country', the two Stalinite groups discovered themselves reacting increasingly according to their immediate local situations in direct contradiction to each other. The split itself had been designed originally to help the Anglo-Russian war effort (or, more particularly, to be seen to do so) and the protection of Stalin's 'Socialist Society'. Now this surrender to the immediate conjunctural needs weakened resistance to future surrenders that would be less favourable to the needs of the Russian Bureaucracy. Certainly, this interest would, after 1945, have benefited more by a revived thirty-two county party than by what it actually found: a six county Party and a 26 county 'League'.

A major contributory factor in the weakness was the fact that, from 1943, the instrument by which the Russian bureaucracy enforced conformity existed bo longer. How far the Comintern had functioned from 1939 onwards (indeed, how fat the CPI's liquidation in 1941 was the result of a direct order from Moscow) is uncertain. What is definite is that, in 1943, as a new concession to his imperialist allies, Stalin sent the Comintern the way of its Irish section. It was revived in fact after the war but was, outside the new workers' states, a shadow of its predecessor. Organisationally, the Irish Stalinite groups would tend, in the revived third International to act as a satellite of the british organisation which was, in turn, in that body, subordinate to its French comrades. It was not until 1957, that Irish delegates attended an international conference at Moscow, the first time Ireland had been represented there since 1935.

But this result, if it was to affect, negatively, Irish Stalinism after 1948 was itself helped to reach its goal by its own internal development after the 1941 split. This history can be summarised as one of uneven political development: a major difference between organisational expansion on the one hand and organisational liquidation leading to political disintegration on the other.

The Communist Party of Northern Ireland
The keynote of the wartime policy of the rump Communist Party of Northern Ireland was set by its Manifesto on 4 October 1941:

Thus the remaining organised expression of Irish Stalinism was prepared to consign the Irish revolution to cold storage until such time as 'the Soviet Union and its Allies' could win the war. However it remained in being in the six counties as it did not in the twenty-six. In Northern Ireland, the larger proportion of the total working-class was readily accessible to the claims, if not so much of Russia, or of Socialism, than of the 'Anglo-American people'. The newly-reconstituted Communist Party of Northern Ireland had an obvious base on which to build both its own interests and those of the Russian war-effort.

But there were two snags in this perspective. In the first place, the workers to whom the CPNI now directed its appeal were precisely those who were prepared to sympathise with the USSR only as long as its positive social achievements were not related concretely to the situation in Northern Ireland. In other words, the appeal of Russia to the Protestant majority in Northern Irish workers was mainly in so far as it was an ally of British Imperialism. Of course, it was, somehow, a 'working-class' ally and, as such, perhaps a pleasanter friend for a Protestant workers than the USA. Nevertheless, the bulk of his support was for the imperialist war waged by the United Kingdom rather than the 'Anti-Fascist War' that the CPNI was concerned to claim was being fought by the Soviet Union.

Whether or not this attitude would have been amended by the Northern Irish Stalinites is, itself, dubious. The British imperialism that the Protestant workers defended was, for them, defensible, precisely because it maintained guardianship of an essentially undemocratic – and, hence, unsocialist colonial state which had been created so as to guarantee certain real but, in comparison with the possibilities infinitesimal rights to a religiously defined majority of the people. While, under the condition of partition, it is conceivable that a violently repressive regime could enforce a measure of negative equality as between the communities, such a move would be against its own interest (that of 'divide and rule') and unlikely to last if the repression ended without the end of partition. It was not really possible to lay the foundations for a lasting workers' state in Northern Ireland, without either abolishing partition or creating the revolutionary momentum that would destroy partition. From 1941 to 1970, the Communist Party of Northern Ireland, despite all its triumphs – at least in the early part of this period – represented a movement that had organisationally renounced such a strategy. The 'needs of the Soviet Union' (more correctly the limited needs of the ruling bureaucracy thereof; its objective need was still for a working-class revolution worldwide) seemed to fuse extraordinarily well with an opportunistic desire to adapt to Orangeism. To the pressure provided by the first (objective) snag was added a force created by a second (subjective) one. The leadership of the CPNI was merely the Northern Irish part of those who had led the united CPI in the days of the Republican Congress and 'Republican-Labour Unity'. For such people, there could be no principled hesitancy, no analysis of the class relations affecting and affected by partition, only total commitment to the short term aim of Allied victory at any cost.

Their war-time programme was set out in their Party's Conference in October 1942:

It backed these demands with such denunciations as the following:

After this, it was already overdue for the CPNI to recognise formally the Northern Irish State, which it did in 1943.

Once again, Irish – or at least, Northern Irish – Stalinism found itself tail-ending HC Midgeley who had now broken with the NILP and formed his own 'Commonwealth Labour Party' pledged to accept partition. Midgeley's change enabled him to enter a 'reconstructed' Unionist ministry under Brooke in 1943. To this move the CPNI could only protest in vain that less pliant Labour representatives should have been recruited as well. It was ignored.

Nonetheless, Northern Irish Stalinism benefited organisationally from its support for the Second World War. Its opposition (practical as well as theoretical) to all strikes tended to strengthen it since few strikes were successful. At one time, with nearly 2000 members it was even able to claim a larger membership than the NILP, which, with the departure of Midgeley, had begun a period of relative leftism and anti-partitionism. Its weekly papers that succeeded Irish Workers' Weekly (banned in the Six Counties), The Red Hand and Unity gained a wide readership.

But this success was qualified. It was essentially organisational rather than political, and it was based entirely on the Protestant workers who were encouraged to look to the CPNI as more radical types of Labour Unionists than Midgeley or the Minister for Health, William Grant. It would be wrong to ignore that its strength in the industrial organisations of this group has helped towards a moderating effect on traditional working class Orange bigotry at least on the factory floor. Nonetheless, the greater political unity of the Northern Irish – let alone Irish – working-class was not advanced by Stalinite policy. While the CPNI wooed the Orange workers, their Catholic peers moved from Fianna Fáil sponsored 'Republicanism' to Harry Diamond's Republican Socialist group, or, even, towards the NILP.

In June 1945 occurred the first general election for the Northern Irish Parliament since 1938. The Communist Party nominated three candidates: William McCullough in the Bloomfield division of Belfast, Betty Sinclair in the Cromac division and Sylvester Maitland in West Down. All these constituencies returned Unionist MPs throughout their existence. But they were not all homogeneous; thus Cromac included a large Nationalist minority in the Markets area.

The Party's election Manifesto was entitled 'Let's Build a New Ulster'. It contained a 5 Point Programme of minimum demands:

In this, two characteristics are obvious. The first is the, now commonplace adherence to minimum demands (thus, the chief economic panacea is, once again, 'control' not 'nationalisation').

The second characteristic is the programme's stand – or, rather, non-stand – on partition. It seems to be in favour of the border but it phrases its support in such a way ('alliance' with [not even within] the UK and 'friendly relations' with 'Éire') that this can be denied formally.

The same careful blurring of issues extended into the actual tactics of the Party's election campaign. In Cromac, Betty Sinclair's election posters did not mention that the lady was a 'red'. And there was a possibly unintentional confusion in that her Unionist opponent was also called Sinclair.

Because of these tactics, or despite them, the three Communist Party candidates won, between them, 12,456 votes – 3.5% of the total poll. This was nearly 12 times the percentage of votes that would be won by candidates of the Communist Party of Great Britain in the United Kingdom general election the following month. It appeared that the Protestant workers of Northern Ireland were awakened to class-consciousness in the vanguard of the workers of the British Isles.

But before this can be accepted to-day it is necessary to note two differences in the circumstances of the two general elections. To compare the two parties overall share of the votes is misleading since it ignores other figures. In the first place, whereas the CPNI fought three seats out of 28 contested, the CPGB fought only 20 out of some 640 (615 if the university and Northern Irish seats are eliminated). It is, perhaps, fairer to judge the performances by the constituency averages of the two parties – bearing in mind that the Northern Irish single-seat constituencies were 29-33% the size of those in Britain. So we find that the average vote per Northern Irish constituency for each Communist Party [candidate] is 4,152 (12,456 on the British scale). The equivalent average vote for the British Communists is 5,155. Thus, in 1945, the CPNI enjoyed and electoral support of, on average, 2.5 times that enjoyed by their British comrades. But here again, a second constitutional consideration must be introduced. All the Northern Irish Communists opposed the Unionists in straight fights; that is to say, in their three constituencies, anyone who did not wish to vote Unionist could choose only between voting Communist and not voting at all. The British Communists were less fortunate; they all had to oppose Labour and Conservative candidates and often, others, as well.

None of this is to deny the impressive nature of the electoral achievement of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland in 1945. A large vote for a Communist candidate is always admirable, particularly in Ireland. The point is that this achievement and the result has been a major historical distortion which had been used by opponents of the exploited and oppressed.

The 1945 election results were the highest political achievement resulting from the CPNI's support for partition. From then on it's wartime decision to restrict it's actions to the Six Counties would show diminishing returns – indeed losses.

The most important of these was now to be shown in the Party's inability to regroup itself as a 32 County organisation. The war ended finally in September 1945. The split between the Soviet Union and it's 'democratic allies' was soon underway. Even in the short term the interests of the Soviet bureaucracy required a united Communist Party of Ireland, if only for it's nuisance value to British imperialism. Yet the CPI was not reformed for a quarter of a century after 1945. It's failure to reconstitute itself immediately was due to three things: the fact of the dissolution of the Comintern and the weakening of direct organisational links between Moscow and Ireland, the fact that the CPNI feared to sacrifice it's new base among the Protestant workers and the fact that 26 County Stalinism was in no position to take on the tasks of participating in even a bureaucratically distorted Communist Party.

Twenty-Six County Stalinism
When the Stalinites in 'Éire' liquidated their organisation into the Irish Labour Party in July 1941 they did so merely to find a safe billet from which they could agitate in support of Socialism in general and Soviet Russia in particular for the duration of the war. They had no definite perspective for an eventual split. For a few months they tried to maintain the Workers' Weekly but constant censorship forced them to end it in November 1941. It was succeeded by The Red Hand, a paper geared to the needs of the CPNI. They didn't even do work in support of their northern comrades' call for a Coalition Government. They merely maintained a dubious unity around the theoretical journal, Review, fought the Dublin Trotskyists with a certain amount of success (helped by the USSR's current struggle), and gained influence over their paper, The Torch.

This was all they could do given their non-existent perspectives. It did not provide a firm opposition to pressures encouraging it's members' political surrender to Social Democracy. In particular, there were the local election victories of 1942. In this year, Breen was elected to the Dublin City Council in a Labour landslide. In 1943, Larkin was returned to the Dáil. Both these achievements increased the pressures on the individuals concerned to break with their old politics. This was exposed by the latter victory, coupled with 'Big Jim's' victory in North East Dublin.

The 1942 Municipal elections had been won after the Larkinites – as well as the Stalinites – had rejoined the Labour Party. This was not welcomed by William O'Brien and the bureaucracy of the ITGWU. Their supporters tried to block the Larkinites' nominations for candidacies in the coming general election. In the resulting period of infighting, one member of the Party's Administrative Council, Owen Sheehy-Skeffington, was expelled. But, eventually, 'Young Jim' was returned as an official Labour TD for South Dublin and his father was elected as an Independent, applied for the Party whip and was given it despite opposition from the ITGWU Deputies.

This was the cause of the split in the Labour Party and the Irish TUC that now ensued. The initial matter at stake was simply whether Norton or O'Brien should run the Party. The Communist scare raised by the latter the better to fight the Larkins was merely an excuse for so doing. That this was so was shown by two facts. The ex-Christian Frontist, Keyes, and the scarcely less clericalist, William Davin, stood with Norton in this issue. Furthermore, Norton himself, who had revealed his susceptibility to red scares before and would do so again (over the Mother and Child Scheme) did not retreat before the ITGWU – at least, not as far as might have been expected. The Larkins remained Labour Deputies, although most of the ITGWU members in Dáil Éireann seceded to form a 'National Labour Party'.

But if Norton showed a greater determination in facing the scare put around by the ITGWU fakirs than he did similar scares manufactured by men in dog collars, he still bent further than a Socialist might have done. The Larkins were saved from expulsion: they were sitting TDs. Breen and the Larkinite, Bernard Conway were city councillors. Seán Dolan was not such a loss to the Party's representation on public bodies. In January 1944, he and three other rank and file members were expelled. Some months later, Larkin spoke out. In the letter to Norton, he declared:

For the rest of his life he was to act in the spirit of this statement.

The Stalinites who remained as such were barely happier. None of Nolan's fellow-expellees were to become prominent in the mainstream Stalinite movement of the next thirty years, though one, John deCourcey Ireland, who appealed successfully against his expulsion, has gained a certain political niche as Ireland's only Titoite. Despite some new recruitment stimulated by continuing Russian victories, the Review group was smaller in 1945 than it had been when it entered the Labour Party.

This numerical decline in Stalinite members in 'Éire' was partially repaired by a certain number of recruits it won from the persecuted Republican Movement. In particular, there was a hard core of potential cadres educated in the Curragh by Neil Goold during a stay there which was cut short when the clergy was told what he was doing. The most notable of Goold's converts was the International Brigade veteran, Michael O'Riordan. But, by the end of the war, neither he nor his fellow recruits to Stalinism had merged with what would become the Review group. Instead, on his release, he first tried to work within the Labour Party, was expelled, and then started a Socialist group in his native Cork.

It was this group that took the first major step towards reviving Stalinism's fortunes in 'Éire'. In 1945 O'Riordan was narrowly defeated for a seat on Cork Corporation. In June 1946 he fought a bye-election in Cork City. He won 3,184 first preference votes (the largest total votes he's polled yet) – nearly 11% of those cast. As a comparative result, it has more in common with the Northern Irish election returns that with those of the British general election, despite the discrepancy in size between the Cork City constituency and those of Northern Ireland. No Labour candidate fought the seat – though O'Riordan beat the formidable Republican, Thomas Barry, into fourth place. Although, perhaps not a striking as the CPNI results in Belfast and in West Down, it was quite a satisfactory achievement for a group that had existed only for a short time and which was already feeling the draught of the Cold War that would be waged enthusiastically by the Catholic hierarchy.

TA Jackson and Irish Stalinism
Despite the obvious potentiality that existed for the revival of the Communist Party organisation in 'Éire', the CPNI did little to expand thither. It was more than two years after O'Riordan's campaign that a distinctive Stalinite political grouping established itself, at last, in the 26 Counties. It's theory owed more to a member of the CPGB than to the CPNI.

The British Stalinite who provided the political ideology behind the reorganisation of Stalinism in the 26 Counties of 'Éire' was Thomas Alfred Jackson, for many years the CPGB's expert on Ireland (among other things). Jackson was a veteran British Socialist who had long maintained an honest opposition to British imperialism and its expansion. He had been moved to radicalism by boyhood admiration for Parnell: he developed into Second International Marxism out of opposition to the British aggression against the Boers. He was never fooled – as many Social Democrats (following the Fabian Society) were fooled – by the undeveloped, petty bourgeois, political nature of many anti-colonial movements (so different from the Socialist ideals of Ramsay MacDonald and Sidney Webb!) However he tended to go too far in the other direction.

The right to self-determination has been granted by the colonial power to it's oppressed subjects because colonialism weakens politically the Socialist movement both in the colony and in the coloniser. In both, it stimulates the emotional political outlook known as 'Nationalism'. In the metropolitan power, this is a wholly reactionary force acting as an ideological excuse for imperialist war, or at the very least, creating a narrow, chauvinist, conservative class-collaborationist prejudice, among all classes – and in particular, the workers. In the colony, Nationalism's obnoxiousness is more subtle precisely because here Revolutionary Marxists often have to fight for the same aims (national self-determination, etc) as the Nationalists. Nonetheless, Marxists have to maintain their political independence of the Nationalists and, indeed, criticise their weaknesses, since Nationalist politics – their very real emphasis on the primacy of the nation as against any international class (even the working class) – oppose the aims of the world proletarian revolution and weaken the effectiveness, at times even of the struggle for the limited aims of national self-determination. Accordingly support for a colony's right to self-determination is independent of the character of the leadership that will exercise this right. In this way, Lenin recognised and accepted the right of the Finns to independence of the USSR, even though this right was executed, initially, by the reactionary militarist Gustave Manneheim. The right of the Ugandans to self-determination is not compromised by a brute like Idi Amin, any more than that of the Libyans is compromised by the sexist, Qadafy, or that, indeed, of the Irish by the peculiar hacks that have ruled the 26 Counties since the proclamation of the Dáil.

Evasion of this truth has tended to encourage – and in turn be encouraged by – the Stalinist dogma of the stages of revolution, with it's emphasis on the progressive, independent role, even of such as Chiang Kai-Shek. In TA Jackson, this process is expressed in a case-history. His essentially romantic anti-colonialism was expressed as early as 1921, when he anticipated that the irish Republican Brotherhood would lead the opposition to the Anglo-Irish Treaty. Of course, it did no such thing, anti-Treaty forces were led by other, only nationalistic groupings. But the point is the IRB was the established Republican leadership of the time. Instead of analysing the class forces in detail, Jackson allowed himself the luxury of glorifying petty-bourgeois nationalists. It is not surprising that he was to prove to be one of the most bitter Stalinites in the next three decades; nor that his weakness was highlighted in the book he had published in 1947.

Had Ireland Her Own been simply what its author claimed, his debility would have been less important. In his foreword he declares:

The confused assumptions in this passage are very obvious. Basically, they are aspects of the overall petty-bourgeois limitations that prevents Ireland Her Own ever reaching the level of Connolly's Labour in Irish History. A man who can describe Anglo-Irish relations as being, 'throughout, imperialist relations' during the 800 years is guilty, at the very least of confusing two concepts: the traditional and Leninist views of 'Imperialism'. Again, the failure of the Irish and English peoples to achieve freedom and their being instead 'jockeyed into being weapons used by the exploiters each for the enslavement of the other', has as much historical inevitability as tragedy about it. In the same way, Connolly's Labour in Irish History may or may not be 'a work of genius'. Its real value is infinitely greater than such an overused cliché. It is important because it is a work of original Marxist research. In the British Isles 'works of genius' may not be two a penny; actual Marxist achievements are still rarer at any price.

Again it must be insisted; these defects would not have had their decisive importance in Irish Stalinite thinking had the book been simply a propaganda exercise; had it simply continued the Irish historical 'narrative beyond the point at which Connolly left off', provided 'English readers with an introduction to the study of Connolly's work, and that of other specialist writers on Irish history' and provided 'Irish readers with an introduction to the history of the English democratic and labour struggle'. In fact Jackson provides both more and less than all this total of useful aims.

On the one hand, there is some extremely detailed and useful research expressed in the parts describing the Irish land system in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This certainly gives Ireland Her Own a position of academic value in a sphere barely touched by Connolly's work.

The weakness comes in Jackson's political handling of his material. When he doesn't have Connolly to keep him on the straight and narrow path of Marxism, his work suffers. Thus he is never as good after the Fenian revolt (where Connolly's history ends) as he is before it. Connolly's narrative has had to await another historian to be adequately continued. The reason for this is the same one that prevents Jackson from providing the English with an adequate introduction to Connolly and for doing the same for the irish with regard to 'the English democratic and labour struggle'. In the one field he romanticises the bourgeois nationalists: in the other, he ignores the betrayals of the British labour fakirs. In the face not only of Connolly but of Karl Marx, he makes only a timid criticism of Grattan; elevating him by comparing him with Flood. He can only attack O'Connell for his inaction in and after 1842. Above all, his childhood admiration for Parnell is never reconsidered: the Parliamentary Nationalist leader is given a 'puff' that his actual role cannot sustain; an entire chapter is devoted to his fall. On the British front, though the Labour leaders cannot be whitewashed in the same manner, their chauvinist approach to the Irish question is simply ignored. The question between them and Larkin over the 1913 lock-out (simply the question; was there to be a British sympathetic general strike?) is carefully camouflaged by praise for the British trade unionists fund-raising for the ITGWU. The current and later opposition of JH Thomas to the cause of irish self-determination is ignored. Most significantly, it is possible to read Jackson's account of 1916 without discovering that the Secretary of the British Labour Party, Arthur Henderson, was in the actual War Cabinet that signed Connolly's death warrant. A little less space for the eighteenth century land tenures and a little more in exposing the real darkness of bourgeois nationalists and petty-bourgeois Labour bureaucrats would have improved Ireland Her Own immeasurably. It is not too much to say that the failure to do this arises out of Jackson's own romanticist weakness as preserved by the opportunist compromises demanded by Stalinism.

Jackson's ultimate failure appears in his consideration of the remaining task of the Irish bourgeois revolution: the reunification of the country; the ending of partition. (Although his work was published before the formal declaration of the Republic of Ireland, he ignores this aim, regarding it, correctly, as a non-event that could be accomplished easily enough.) Jackson concentrates, naturally, on the British share of responsibility for partition. The trouble is that he doesn't really explain it. In the end, he is reduced to an assertion:

This is a gross over-simplification. Partition was not established as essential to British imperialism's control of Ireland – though it had made matters easier for it. In fact, even by 1947, it was clear that the chief reason for British capitalism's support for partition was the negative fact that the status quo would be imperilled if 1,000,000 'Loyalists' had their aspirations discouraged and were left to the tender mercies of the Republican majority of the irish. The real argument for partition is – as it has always been – the purely conservative one of the need to keep things quiet. The chief argument against it – always after the duty of the metropolitan power to recognise its client's right to self-determination – is that its ending can help to stop this quiescence. Again, Jackson – ably aided by the practice of his party – turns the facts upside-down:

Backed by a great mass of historical research, which has made Ireland Her Own a large and more complete study of the 'Irish Question' than anything Irish Stalinism has been able to produce, this conclusion gave the book the status of Irish Stalinism's central ideological inspiration. All mainstream (CPI) Stalinite theory on Ireland since 1947 has been based on Jackson's history and his conclusions. Much that seems – and, indeed, is – mistaken in the CPI's historical positions – their glorification of Parnell, for example, and their insistence that partition was established only by British guile – both of which are easily disproved – date back at least as far as Jackson, though, as has been seen, he merely codified Irish Stalinite practice. More relevant to the present situation is the method pursued currently by the CPI in