Socialist republicans and communists gathered on a traffic island in Dublin’s city centre to mark the International Day of the Prisoner. They flew flags to represent prisoners in Ireland (‘Starry Plough’), the Basque Country and Palestine.
They also displayed a number of placards.
(Photo: IAIC).
The choice of location, apart from being passed by road traffic in three directions, was because of the presence there of the Universal Links on Human Rights memorial sculpture with an eternal flame, commissioned by the Amnesty International organisation.
A plaque near the sculpture bears the following words: “The candle burns not for us but for all those whom we failed to rescue from prison. Who were tortured. Who were kidnapped. Who disappeared. That is what the candle is for.”
Plaque in the ground on the approach to the sculpture. (Photo: IAIC).
Somewhat ironically, one of the placards carried the words: “Amnesty International, do Irish Republican prisoners not have human rights too?” Irish Republicans have long complained that the organisation in question does not raise any issues with regard to Irish political prisoners.
Some have indicated as a possible reason or part-reason the location of the head office of Amnesty International being based in London, capital city of the occupying power. Its interventions on Ireland even during three decades of war in the colony have been very few indeed.
Other placards displayed referred to political prisoners from the liberation wars in India and in the Philippines, the innocent Craigavon Two still in jail and ongoing internment through refusal of bail to Republicansappearing before the no-jury special courts in both administrations.
Some leaflets were distributed about ongoing internment in Ireland through long remands in custody of Republican activists. Between convicted and awaiting trial there are close to 50 political prisoners in jails in Ireland between both administrations.
The Universal Links sculpture by Tony O’Malley (welding by Jim O’Connor) commissioned by Amnesty International. (Photo: IAIC)
The Zionist Israeli state holds 5,000 political prisoners (almost all Palestinian), of which over 1,132 are not even charged (‘administrative detention’). There are 33 female Palestinian political prisoners and 160 child prisoners. Philippines has 803 political prisoners.
The Spanish and French states hold between them around 170 Basque political prisoners.
The event to mark International Day of the Prisoner was organised by the Ireland Anti-Internment Campaign and a spokesperson gave a short explanation on video of the reason for the event with the human rights sculpture in the background.
End.
Some of the flags displayed (Photo: IAIC).Passer-by in conversation with a leafleter. (Photo: IAIC). (Photo: IAIC).
A new plaque commemorating James Connolly was unveiled on the morning of 31st July on 70 South Lotts, the house to which he returned from New York with his wife Lillie and children in 1910 and lived there until May 1911.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
Connolly was born and reared in Edinburgh, left school at 10 and worked with his older brother John for the local authority as a carter, lied about his age and name to join the British Army, in which he first saw Ireland and where he met Lillie Reynolds; they were married soon afterwards.
Like his brother, Connolly became a militant socialist and trade unionist and returned to Ireland at the request of socialists to form the Irish Socialist Republican Party, the first socialist party in Ireland but left for the USA when the party failed to recruit significant numbers.
The ISRP’s office was in Middle Abbey Street, across the road from the premises of the Irish Independent, owned by Irish nationalist William Martin Murphy who was to become an arch-enemy from the Lockout and strikes of 1913 onwards1.
Connolly was a historian and journalist as well as a socialist, trade union organiser and a revolutionary. A report in Breaking News on the unveiling infers that he reluctantly committed to the Rising with the Volunteers; in fact, he had been pushing them to rise for months!
Unveiling speeches
The event started late and in rain. Dáithí De Róiste2, Dublin’s current Lord Mayor, opened the proceedings and commented that the plaque on the house was a reminder that Connolly lived a life in some ways like many ordinary Dubliners, living in a Dublin house and walking city streets.
Dublin Mayor Dáithí De Róiste speaking at the event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Historian Conor McCabe, who did the research for the plaque, speaking outside No.70. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Historian Dr Conor McCabe, of Queen’s University Belfast, proposed the plaque as his research established the background that Connolly was living at the address around the time that his most famous work, Labour In Irish History, was first published in book form.
In deference to those in attendance standing in the persistent rain, Conor McCabe kept his speech very short. This was not the case with every speaker.
Joe Cunningham, General Secretary of Siptu3, an amalgamation with other unions of Jim Larkin’s ITGWU which Connolly had led for six years, commented in his speech that it was Connolly who ensured that the interests of working people were incorporated in the 1916 Proclamation4.
Also that, at the ceremony of raising an Irish flag over Liberty Hall5 in April 1916, had declared that “The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour.”6
Section of crowd in front of No.70 waiting for event to begin. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Dublin City Council Commemorations & Naming Committee was responsible for the placing of the plaque, in consultation with the house occupants and its chairman, Councillor Mícheál Mac Donncha7 welcomed suggestions from the public for commemoration of people and events.
Sinn Féin Councillor Mac Donncha also commented that James Connolly was a personal hero of his.
Jim Connolly Heron, great-grandson of James Connolly, was called to say a few words and invited family members present to join him in front of the house while he spoke and commented also on the importance of commemorative plaques in protecting historical sites.
He did so in reference to the plaque on a house in Moore Street that had disappeared and come to light in a property developer’s office, raising concerns that had led to the long Moore Street conservation struggle.8
Music and song for the event was performed by The Pullovers ballad group but the amplification system had been removed by then which was a pity as it was needed for the music.
Ballads were performed at the event by The Pullovers band. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The 1913 Lockout
James Connolly and family returned to Dublin when Jim Larkin9 offered Connolly a post in the young breakaway Irish Transport and General Workers’ Trade Union, which he took up in 1910. Three years later the union was in a fight for its life.
It is sometimes wrongly claimed that the 1913 Lockout was an attempt by employers in Dublin to prevent workers from joining a trade union but there were other unions operating in Dublin during the period and they were accepted by most of the employers.
Apart from the ITGWU recruiting large numbers of ‘unskilled’10 manual workers, it pursued its objectives militantly, using sympathetic solidarity action by other workers to increase the effectiveness of the workers who were in industrial dispute with their employer.
In August 1913 a combination of around 200 employers presented their workforce with a declaration to sign which committed them to having nothing to do with the ITGWU. En masse, the workers refused to sign, were locked out while others struck work and were locked out too.
Right from the beginning the Dublin Metropolitan Police11 attacked the workers on behalf of the employers and in a baton charge on Eden Quay on 30th August fatally wounded two workers, also beating strikers and onlookers the following day in O’Connell Street (‘Bloody Sunday 1913’)12.
As a direct response, Connolly and Larkin set up the Irish Citizen Army as militant response to police attacks, dedicated also to Irish independence and their flag was the gold Starry Plough on a green background,13 which they flew over the Clery’s building in 1916.14
The only Starry Plough flag unfurled at the event, brought by a member of the attendance. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Comment
The only Starry Plough to be seen at the event was one unfurled during the event independently of the organisers and speakers.
Many who claim to admire Connolly or even to follow his teachings do so on occasion in words but never in action and if Connolly were alive and acting as he did when he was, most of the speakers at the unveiling event would call, if not for his shooting, certainly for his jailing.
SIPTU is much larger than the ITGWU was but it and other unions are much less effective; as a result of the lack of active resistance by the leadership, union membership in Ireland is at an all-time low in modern times. Nor would Connolly have ever agreed to the partition of Ireland.
The Irish Labour Party, which Connolly and Larkin formed in order to give the working class a voice in municipal affairs, has been in coalition government a few times, always capitalist and most often with the right-wing Fine Gael, when they have joined in attacks on the working class.
Joan Burton, while Tánaiste15 of the Labour-Fine Gael coalition government in 2014, complained about working class people being able to afford video-phones and tried to get people jailed for organising an effective protest against her in Jobstown.16 She too attended the unveiling today.
Joan Burton, who attended the event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Fianna Fáil is a party of the Gombeen client class and has been in government more often than any other, whereas Sinn Féin in its current incarnation is seeking to replace it with more of the same.
It is a tribute to the memory of James Connolly held so dearly among the working people that these types, so far from Connolly in their reality, are obliged to pay public homage to the man and to his principles while their daily practice is in opposition to all that he stood for.
End.
FOOTNOTES
1An editorial in his newspaper, The Irish Independent (still one of two main newspapers of the state), after a number of British executions of a number of 1916 leaders, called for continued executions of leaders prior to the execution of Connolly and Mac Diarmada, the last of the 14 to be executed in Dublin (Kent was shot in Cork and Casement hanged in London).
3The largest union in Ireland, owner of the current Liberty Hall which stands on the ground of the original union building.
4There is no record that this is the case but it is a natural and widely-held assumption. It is a fact that the Proclamation was printed in Liberty Hall.
5Cunningham said it was “the Irish flag” which most would think a reference to the Tricolour. However that flag had not yet been accepted by the majority as the primary flag of the nation, which really occurred after the 1916 Rising. The flag raised instead by teenager Molly O’Reilly at Connolly’s request had the golden harp on a green background, the essential flag of Irish Republicans from the 1790s until the 1916 Rising.
6This was not a random statement by Connolly but rather a strategic one; on an earlier occasion he had observed that of all social classes in Ireland, the working class remained “the incorruptible inheritors of the fight for Irish freedom”. Connolly wrote that in his foreword to his work Labour in Irish History, clearly indicating that only the working class could be trusted to lead the national struggle through to successful conclusion.
7A prominent member of one of the groups campaigning for Moore Street Battlefield conservation, the Save Moore Street Trust, of which Mac Donncha is Secretary.
8That occurred at the beginning of this century and the struggle has been ongoing since.
9Like Connolly, also a migrant and member of the Irish diaspora but from Liverpool. He founded the Irish Transport & General Workers’ Union after his departure from the British-based National Union of Dock Labourers, for which for a time he had been chief organiser in Ireland. Most of the NUDL’s members in Ireland left to join the ITGWU but in Belfast there was a division along sectarian lines.
10This is the general appelation for work not requiring long periods of training. However, anybody who has been employed in work of this category soon learns that such work requires skill to achieve the objectives set, to pace oneself and to guard against injury. This is the reason those recruiting for such ‘unskilled’ work prefer ‘experienced workers’, a code for ‘skilled’.
11A police force of the period for Dublin City, most of its members being without firearms, unlike the armed all-Ireland colonial gendarmerie of the Royal Irish Constabulary (of which the Police Service of Northern Ireland is a descendant body). DMP minimum height requirements were 5ft 9” in a city where many working people were of low stature; this disparity gave substantial momentum to the swing of a truncheon.
12The event wrongly named as leading to the death of two workers, whose deaths were caused by the previous day’s police attack on Eden Quay, just by Liberty Hall. However, a previously healthy Fianna Éireann boy, Patsy O’Connor, who was clubbed in the O’Connell Street police riot while he administered first aid to a victim, suffered frequent headaches thereafter and died in 1915 at the age of 18.
13The design has seven stars in the Ursa Mayor configuration, with the design of a plough following the stars and a sword as the ploughshare. There is also a plainer version flown by the Republican Congress of the 1930s, the outline of the Ursa Mayor constellation in white or silver stars alone on a blue background.
14The flag survived the shell explosions and raging fires along the southern half of O’Connell Street and is currently in the Military History Museum, Collins Barracks, Dublin, along with a number of other flags flown by the insurgents during the Rising.
15Title of the Deputy Prime Minister in the Irish government.
16A number of activists from different organisations, including Paul Murphy TD (member of the Irish parliament) were arrested in raids some time later and among the charges was “kidnapping” Burton. The untruthfulness of a number of witnesses for the Prosecution including a senior Garda officer were exposed (ironically by video taken by protesters) and the jury acquitted all the defendants of all charges.
A broad group of socialist Republicans gathered at the grave of Theobald Wolfe Tone on Sunday 2nd July to honour his memory and to reiterate their commitment to an independent and socialist Ireland outside of imperialist military alliances.
Wolfe Tone’s grave in the Bodenstown Church graveyard has been a place of pilgrimage for Irish Republicans at least since the days of Thomas Davis1 of the Young Irelanders of the 1840s, who wrote of his own visit to the grave and composed the song “In Bodenstown’s Churchyard”.
The late 1960s saw huge numbers of people in attendance at annual commemorations there near the village of Sallins, Co. Kildare, including not only Sinn Féin2, who led them, but many political and social organisations, GAA clubs, along with many non-aligned people.
Over the years, the voluntary and unfunded National Graves Association has improved the site comprehensively and sensitively, leaving the ruins of the Protestant church as they are but building a stage attached to one side, fronted with plaques and commemorative flag stones.
Commemorations currently are usually organised around a Sunday near the date of the patriot leader’s birthday on 20th June but have to be managed between different groups wishing to hold their own commemorations.
Speeches, songs and Garda harassment
The Annual Wolfe Tone commemoration organised by the Wolfe Tone Commemoration Committee took place over the weekend with members of a number of groups and Independent Republicans in attendance.
A Socialist Republican Colour party led the march up from the bottom of the road, turning in to the graveyard through a side gate and taking up positions in front and to one side of the monument, at ordú scíthe (parade rest) position but with flags held high.
Colour party in front of Wolfe Tone monument, Bodenstown Churchyard (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Behind the colour party followed a crowd carrying banners bearing the legends “Irish Republicans against NATO”, “We serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland” and an assortment of flags including green-and-gold Starry Ploughs, Irish Tricolour, Palestinian and Basque national flags.
The event was chaired by a young Socialist Republican who spoke about the importance of the event before introducing a representative of a midland Republican commemoration group who read a short message of solidarity.
This was followed by a socialist republican accompanying himself on guitar singing The Three Flowers.3
The main oration was delivered by veteran Independent East Tyrone Republican Margaret McKearney who linked the past with the present, including the current housing crisis, the British occupation and the Irish State’s push to join PESCO and NATO military alliances.
Musician performing The Three Flowersat the Wolfe Tone monument (Photo: Rebel Breeze)Veteran Republican from Tyrone delivering the oration at the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
There was a clear message at the event that the push towards NATO will be energetically resisted at every turn by the people of Ireland.
Wreaths were laid and a minute’s silence was observed, while the colour party lowered the flags in memory of all those who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the ongoing struggle for Irish Freedom. The event was brought to a close with the musician playing and singing Amhrán na bhFiann.
A handful of Gardaí4 in uniform and in plainclothes (Special Branch, the political police) were parked outside the graveyard watching people arriving and leaving but at that point having no direct interaction with those attending the event.
Part of long tail-back cause by Garda checkpoint very near to Bodenstown Churchyard after the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)Gardaí in uniform and Special Branch in plain clothes harassing and attempting to intimidate people who had attended the commemoration event (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
However, once the event concluded, the Gardaí set up a checkpoint at the bottom of the road and began to harass and attempt to intimidate drivers of vehicles, stopping them, asking for identification, where they were from etc, causing a long tailback.
This is part of the regular harassment of Irish Republicans by police on both sides of the British Border.
“The Father of Irish Republicanism”
Theobald Wolfe Tone (1763-1798) was formally a member of the Church of Ireland5 congregation (Anglican), in his time the dominant religious group in England-occupied Ireland but also one of the smallest.
No-one could be elected to the Irish Parliament unless of that congregation.
In the early 19th Century a section of the Irish bourgeoisie, nearly all Anglican or of the other Protestant churches, “dissenters”, wished to develop the Irish economy free of interference, control, patronage and bribery associated with being an English colony.
Many of them understood the need for a strong base in the population, for which they recognised the need to include representation for the majority population in the country, the Catholics, along with the most populous of the Protestants, the Presbyterians.6
When the liberal but pro-English Crown Henry Grattan brought the issue to a vote in the Westminster Parliament, his motion failed due to many MPs’ sectarianism or vested interests, a situation which continued for decades afterwards.7
That seemed to point to revolution as the only logical way forward.
Theobald Wolfe Tone was one of the founders of the Society of United Irishmen in October 1971, the first broad Republican organisation in Ireland, which soon developed a comprehensive revolutionary agenda, for Irish independence and a Republic based on universal male suffrage.8
In order to accomplish a successful uprising, they invited assistance from Republican France and planned a simultaneous uprising across Ireland, with particular concentration on Antrim (largely Presbyterian and Anglican), Wexford and Wicklow, Midlands and Mayo (largely Catholic).
Colour party leading a march towards the Wolfe Tone monument (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Spies and informers working for the English occupation betrayed some of their plans and most of the Leinster Directorate of the United Irishmen, including Wolfe Tone, were arrested, a disaster for uprising plans in Dublin but also for overall leadership in Leinster.
The 1798 Rising had initial great success in the south-east, particularly in Wexford but was quickly and bloodily suppressed in the Midlands and in Antrim. Mayo rose when a too-small detachment of French soldiers arrived under Humbert in Kilalla but they were outnumbered and beaten.
Tone was was unapologetic at his trial, was sentenced to death by hanging but appears to have attempted to take his own life while awaiting execution, surviving for a few days in great pain before dying on 19th November 1798 as British and Orange loyalist repression swept the country9.
Wolfe Tone Monument by Edward Delaney (d.2009) at S.E entrance to Stephen’s Green, Dublin city centre (image sourced: Internet)
Many leaders of the United Irishmen are honoured in song, writing and in commemorative events to this day but Theobald Wolfe Tone is still the most widely remembered of them all.
End.
The Colour Party and some of the participants line up for a group photo by the monument (Photo: AIA)
FOOTNOTES
1Thomas Davis (1814-1845), journalist, author of the song A Nation Once Again and other works, also co-founder of The Nation newspaper.
2Prior to its split resulting in Provisional Sinn Féin and the later split resulting in the Irish Republican Socialist Party.
3Composed by Norman G. Reddin, a Republican ballad honouring the memory of three United Irish leaders, Robert Emmet, Michael Dwyer and Wolfe Tone. Both Tone and Emmet were sentenced to execution, the latter carried out in 1803 on Thomas Street in Dublin. Dwyer was transported to exile in Australia where he was later accused of planning an uprising in New South Wales for which he was twice imprisoned and tried but exonerated, became Police Chief in Liverpool, Sydney in 1813 but was imprisoned again in 1825 for alleged non-payment of a £100 debt, contracted dysentery, was released again and died very soon afterwards.
5A branch of the Church of England, the state religion of the UK of which their Monarch is the titular head (in addition to being the commander-in-chief of the Armed Forces).
6“Catholic, Protestant and Dissenter”, as Wolfe Tone famously called the alliance.
7In May 1808 Grattan proposed emancipation in the House of Commons, with certain qualifications, but his motion was defeated by 281 votes to 128. In June 1812 the Commons accepted, by 225 votes to 106, a motion in favour of considering Catholic claims. An emancipation Bill, introduced in February 1813, received a second reading but was lost in committee by a narrow margin. Frustration at this lack of progress led to the formation of the Catholic Association in 1823 (of which Wolfe Tone was an active member). Parliament passed an Act to restrict the Association’s activities two years later.
8Very few radical or revolutionary individuals, not to mention movements of the 18th (or even much of the 19th or early 20th) Centuries proposed universal female suffrage, one reason why the 1916 Proclamation of Irish Independence is such a remarkable document, beginning its address with the words “Irishmen and Irish women”.
9Which many, in particular Protestants, fled the country to escape, some settling in the United States and in Canada. The great Catholic emigration from Ireland did not occur until the Great Hunger of the mid-19th Century and later.
Pat Reynolds gave this oration in East London Cemetery on Sunday 21st May 2023 for Michael Barrett, the last man publicly hanged in Britain
A cháirde agus a chomrádaíthe,
Tá fáilte go leor romhaibh chun chruinnithe i gcuimhne Michael Barrett inniu. Welcome friends and comrades to this commemoration today for Michael Barret and Patrick O’Donnell. I have been asked to speak of Michael Barret and the movement he represented.
Michael was born in Ederney in the Maguire County of Fermanagh in 1841 and was judicially hanged though innocent by the British Government in 1868 at Newgate Prison, where the Old Bailey now stands.
Newgate prison was closed in 1903 and his remains with others were interred here in this cemetery. He was the last person to be publicly hanged in Britain.
A Fenian bombing took place on 13th December 1867 to try and rescue O’Sullivan Burke the Fenian who planned the successful prison van escape in Manchester.
The bombing blew a huge hole in the wall and demolished nearby tenement buildings, killing 12 people and injuring many others. It led to a huge State-engineered backlash in Britain against the Fenians and put their cause back some 10 years.
Michael Barret, who had gone to Glasgow to work was an innocent man and was in Glasgow at the time of the incident.
False evidence given by a police informer Patrick Mullaly who was given a free passage to Australia implicated Barrett, but he had compelling evidence that he was in Glasgow at that time. After two hours the jury declared him guilty.
One of the trial lawyers Montagu Williams stated of Barrett:
‘On looking at the dock, one’s attention was attracted by the appearance of Barrett, for whom I must confess I felt great commiseration. He was a square built fellow, scarcely five feet eight in height and dressed like a well-to-do farmer.
This resemblance was increased by the frank, open, expression on his face. A less murderous countenance than Barrett’s I have not seen. Good humour was latent in his every feature and he took the greatest interest in the proceedings’.
Barrett ended his speech from the dock thus:
‘I am far from denying, nor will the force of circumstances compel me to deny my love of my native land. I love my country and if it is murderous to love Ireland dearer than I love my life, then it is true, I am a murderer.
If my life were ten times dearer than it is and if I could by any means, redress the wrongs of that persecuted land by the sacrifice of my life, I would willingly and gladly do so.’
The Daily Telegraph the next day stated that Barrett had:
‘Delivered a most remarkable speech, criticising with great acuteness evidence against him, protesting that he had been condemned on insufficient grounds, and eloquently asserting his innocence.’
Michael Barrett monument detail, Co. Fermanagh (Sourced: Internet)
In Fermanagh his aged mother had walked many miles to appeal to the local Tory MP Captain Archdale, a noted Orangemen, who rejected her. Barrett was hanged in front of 2,000 jeering people singing Rule Britannia. The following day Reynolds’ News recorded that;
‘Millions will continue to doubt that a guilty man had been hanged at all; and the future historian of the Fenian panic may declare that Michael Barrett was sacrificed to the exigencies of the police, and the vindication of the good Tory principle, that there is nothing like blood.’
His hangman was the notorious Calcraft who had botched the hanging of the Manchester Martyrs, Allen, Larkin and O’Brien.
There is a huge difference between an accident leading to deaths by patriots fighting tyranny and the deliberate actions of the imperialists, which is why patriots have to be always careful to avoid civilian deaths.
There are many similarities between the Clerkenwell bombing and the Birmingham bombing of 1974.
In both cases they set back the cause of Irish freedom for many years, deeply harmed the Irish community in Britain and was used by the State for repressive measures against the community and to divide off the Irish community from the English working classes.
Disraeli brought in the Habeas Corpus Act and created the Special Branch. Of interest is that their first definition of Irishness was ‘Persons who were born in Ireland or whose recent forebears came from Ireland.” Back in the 1980s the GLC adopted the same definition.
We also had the Birmingham Six case with the ‘appalling vista’ of Lord Denning the Appeal Judge, who later regretted that the six innocent men were not hanged. For Gladstone it set him on his mission ‘to pacify Ireland’.
I ask you two questions today, what kind of people and community gave rise to patriots like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs, and the second question, what kind of regime or government would hang knowingly innocent men.
To understand the Fenians we have to understand the colonisation of Ireland and in particular the Great Starvation of Ireland An Gorta Mór. Over one and a half million people were starved to death by British imperialism and another two million forced to emigrate to Britain and the USA.
There was no famine in Ireland at this time, and it is imperialistic propaganda to call it such. It was clearly genocide in a land overflowing with food.
The potato crop made up under 25% of the agricultural produce of Ireland, but at this time Ireland was part of the UK where the potato crop was about 5% of the total produce of the UK. I know of no country where there was famine because of a 5% failure of the crops.
Michael Davitt back in 1904 called the Great Starvation a ‘Holocaust’ as did others. Ken Livingstone drew some comparison between the Great Starvation and the experience of the Jewish community during the Second World War.
Hitler named his strategy ‘The Hunger Plan’ where he starved Poles and Jews and others groups of food, and these victims are included in the Holocaust figures including also his starvation of the Warsaw Ghetto.
The shipment of food grown by the people of Ireland to Britain during the Great Starvation was a clear decision by the British government to starve the Irish people.
The Nazi Governor in Poland Hans Frank wrote of the starvation of Jews ‘that we sentence 1.2 million Jews to die of hunger should be noted only marginally’.
The economic theory of laissez-faire is a total invention, within years they could spend millions in Crimea, a place most English had never heard of.
I recall the great Irish writer Frank O’Connor stating ‘Famine is a useful word when you do not wish to use words like ‘genocide’ or ‘extermination’, and again ‘It was not that the people were too simple to realise the Dachau-like nightmare of their circumstances’.
He goes on ‘The word famine itself is a question begging for its meaning ‘an extreme and general shortage of food’, and to use it of a country with a vast surplus of food, cows, sheep, pigs, poultry, eggs and corn, is simply to debase a language’.
O’Connor went further: ‘Irish historians who are firmly convinced that the Famine was all a mistake in the office, explain it in terms of an economic theory called laissez-faire. This is another cock that won’t fight.
Anyone who can believe that the British government maintained a garrison of 100,00 men in Ireland for the purpose of not interfering in trade and industrial affairs attaches some meaning to the word history that escapes me’.
The Great Starvation of the Irish people was a daily planned strategic intervention by the English government which is borne out by the evictions and forced migrations which followed and by the white supremacist and racist beliefs held in England at that time, which has largely been ignored by the historians.
The failure of the Young Ireland movement in the 1848 rebellion led to the deportation of their leaders and a flight of others to France and the USA. From this came the Fenian movement and the Irish Republican Brotherhood set up in the USA and Ireland in 1858.
There was of course also the French Revolution of 1848 which inspired people all over the world and which also inspired the Fenians.
The American Civil War of 1861-65 was to inspire the Irish in the USA. Over 30,000 Irishmen were to lose their lives in War the vast majority fighting for the Union and for the abolition of Slavery.
Revisionists question whether the Irish were really fighting for the abolition of Slavery, yet the same historians in hindsight claim that the British and Irish who fought in the 2nd World war were fighting against fascism and the Nazis.
The Irish men who died firing against slavery are entitled to the same respect from history.
The 1867 rebellion in Ireland did not really take off. Frantz Fanon stated: ‘Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, fulfil it, or betray it’. The Fenians took a more measured road and passed it on to the next generation, but not without a fight.
In the USA they invaded the British Canadian Dominion twice in 1867 with about 700 Fenian soldiers, veterans of the American Civil War. They held a convention in in 1867 with 6,000 armed men present.
In Britain the Fenians massed near Chester Castle in an attempt to seize the guns there and get them to Ireland via Holyhead for the Fenian Rising. As in the USA they were betrayed by spies and with Chester Castle reinforced by soldiers, the raid was called off in February 1967.
In September Colonel Kelly was arrested in Manchester and was released when Fenians attacked the prison coach which later led to the Manchester Martyrs, Allen Larkin and O’Brien who were innocent men framed up by the English government.
The impact of the Manchester Martyrs in Ireland was huge with some 17 monuments put up in their honour and with the Catholic Church forced to backtrack on their anti-Fenian stance and allow masses and commemorations to be widely held in Ireland.
Michael Barrett is part of this sacrifice of the Irish abroad to Irish freedom made within a year of each other. My call is for Michael Barrett to be included within the Manchester Martyrs’ history and commemoration.
By the 1870s the Irish had moved to parliamentary means to move their fight for liberation onwards. You will notice that the fight for Irish freedom goes in flows, a rebellion often followed by political and parliamentary activity along with agitation. Both means were effective for their times.
In Ireland we had Michael Davitt and the Land League, again we have the huge contribution from Britain to this effort from Davitt. We also had the bombing campaign in Britain by O’Donovan Rossa and Tom Clarke from 1880-87, the Invincibles in Dublin and the execution of Lord Cavendish in 1882.
We have the great Irish Literary and Gaelic revival. Again, the Irish Literary Society was founded in Southwark, SE London in the 1880s which spread to Dublin, Belfast and Cork.
We had the Gaelic League and the GAA as part of this revival which led on to the 1916 Rising and the founding of the nation.
What kind of regime or government could knowingly judicially murder innocent men like Michael Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs? We know the history of British colonisation of Ireland and British Imperialism.
This is the same British Imperialism which would in 1919 lead to the Amritsar massacre in India. But let us stay in 1860s iwith this colonial Empire.
In 1865 the Jamaican people rose up against British colonial rule in Jamaica which left 400 dead in a colonial reign of state terrorism. They hung the leader Paul Bogle and 14 others and executed seven women and prosecuted George William Gordon who had nothing to do with the Rebellion.
They executed him. The Fenians at the time raised funds to help the survivors bring action against the English government. You see here a long history of hanging both Irish and Black people across their colonies.
Today I salute the Irish in Britain who marched in the 1980’s against apartheid in South Africa and who today march with the Palestinian people following a noble Fenian internationalist tradition.
British rule in Ireland was based on Imperialism, White Supremacy and Racism. This was first formulated by Gerald of Wales in 1187 some 700 years before they hanged Barrett and the Manchester Martyrs.
Gerald in his books Topography of Ireland and Conquest of Ireland used racism to justify the conquest of Ireland and portrayed the Irish as inferior, backward, inhuman, uncivilised, feckless and lazy.
This was a litany of manufactured racist lies when Ireland had been the ‘Island of Saints and Scholars’ and the seat of learning in Western Europe bringing enlightenment to Europe during the Dark Ages.
Gerald’s views were published across Europe and held sway until around 1650 for about 500 years. This first racialisation of the Irish did not require any religious framework.
When Henry 8th split with Rome in 1534 the racist code used for conquest in Ireland was then overlaid with a state-sponsored sectarian religious code.
Irish scholars were driven out of Oxford where they were a dominant force and Henry sought to build up his fleet to destroy Irish fleets on the south coast to control trading in Irish sea ports and towns.
There followed the Plantation of Elizabeth 1st who knighted Gilbert the mass murderer of Munster who later founded a British colony in Newfoundland.
Later on, we had the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland with large-scale massacres at Drogheda and Wexford, widespread smaller massacres and the forced transporting of Irish slaves to the Caribbean.
Revisionists deny this history and seem to wrongly believe that these people were on some kind of ‘Cromwell Tours of the Caribbean’. For the record these forced transported people were not indentured people.
It is of interest that Gerald of Wales’ views on the Irish were not held of African people from 1200 onwards but were lifted from the Irish situation and applied to African people on the advent of enslavement to justify what the European colonial powers were doing.
So now Africans can be perceived in the same way as the Irish, as backward, inferior, childlike and have their freedoms taken away.
Let us now look at racism and the White Supremacist views of British Imperialism in the 1800s which gave rise to the great Starvation, the Manchester and London hangings of innocent men.
Robert Knox in The Races in 1850 described the Celts as an inferior race which became part of the ‘scientific’ racism of the day, with Knox updating Gerald of Wales.
Even Engels came out with his racist views of the Irish ‘The race that live in these ruinous cottages in measureless filth, and stuck in this atmosphere penned in, as if on purpose, this race must have reached the lowest stages of humanity’, instead of seeing what British imperialism and racism had done to the Irish people at home and abroad.
John Bedoe in his Races of Britain in 1862 views the Irish as Africanoid and having African roots, and again as ‘European Negroes’. Punch portrayed the Irish as apes and monsters, even Parnell, and the Irish as Aboriginals and on the same level as gorillas.
Charles Kingsley on visits to Ireland in the 1860’s states ‘I am haunted by the human chimpanzees I saw’ and ‘to see white chimpanzees is dreadful’. A new Gorilla at London Zoo is called ‘Paddy’ and the ‘Irish Yahoo’ is seen as the missing link between man and gorilla.
The Irish are described ‘as half naked savages who retain a vast amount of their primitive savagery to this day’.
We can see how scientific racism is now applied equally to Black and Irish for the purpose of colonisation and oppression.
In this context we can see the mindset of the British establishment who committed genocide against the Irish people, and who over centuries had murdered Irish people at random. We can see how the same regime of government can hang innocent people at home and abroad.
Michael Barrett, a self-educated man emerges from this dunghill of White Supremacy and pure racism as a heroic figure, like the Manchester Martyrs a true patriot as shown in his speech from the dock. He should be remembered with the Manchester Martyrs and not separated from their heroic end.
Barrett, a Christlike figure and a Cúchulainn who died on behalf of his people and for his political beliefs.
He was part of an Irish tradition in Britain of being in the forefront of democratic rights for liberty justice and freedom, not just for the Irish but also the British people.
We see in the Chartist movement of the 1840s being led by Irishmen Fergal O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien that fight for liberty and the rights of man.
Also the leadership of Donegal man Doherty leading the workers of Lancashire and the ongoing links in the trade union movement to today from leaders like Mick Lynch inspired by James Connolly to Pat Cullen of the RCN.
We see it in the gift of The Red Flag song from a County Meath man and The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists novel by Noonan to the British working class.
In honouring Michael Barrett today, we stand full square for a United Ireland as proclaimed in the Fenian and 1916 Proclamations and for working class liberty in Britain.
I will finish today by reading the Fenian Proclamation of 10th February 1867 from the Irish People to the World. In it we can see what the 1916 Proclamation borrowed and built on. It is also what Michael Barrett lived and in the end died for.
Fenian Proclamation, 1867
Proclamation of the Irish Republic, issued February 10th, 1867, by the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
I.R. — PROCLAMATION! —
THE IRISH PEOPLE TO THE WORLD
We have suffered centuries ofoutrage, enforced poverty, and bitter misery. Our rights and liberties have been trampled on by an alien aristocracy, who, treating us as foes, usurped our lands and drew away from our unfortunate country all material riches.
The real owners of the soil were removed to make room for cattle, and driven across the ocean to seek the means of living, and the political rights denied to them at home, while our men of thought and action were condemned to loss of life and liberty.
But we never lost the memory and hope of a national existence. We appealed in vain to the reason and sense of justice of the dominant powers. Our mildest remonstrances were met with sneers and contempt. Our appeals to arms were always unsuccessful.
Today, having no honourable alternative left, we again appeal to force as our last resource. We accept the conditions of appeal, manfully deeming it better to die in the struggle for freedom than to continue an existence of utter serfdom.
All men are born with equal rights, and in associating together to protect one another and share public burthens, justice demands that such associations should rest upon a basis which maintains equality instead of destroying it.
We therefore declare that, unable longer to endure the curse of Monarchical Government, we aim at founding a Republic based on universal suffrage, which shall secure to all the intrinsic value of their labour.
The soil of Ireland, at present in the possession of an oligarchy, belongs to us, the Irish people, and to us it must be restored.
We declare also in favour of absolute liberty of conscience, and the complete separation of Church and State.
We appeal to the Highest Tribunal for evidence of the justice of our cause. History bears testimony to the intensity of our sufferings, and we declare, in the face of our brethren, that we intend no war against the people of England —
our war is against the aristocratic locusts, whether English or Irish, who have eaten the verdure of our fields — against the aristocratic leeches who drain alike our blood and theirs.
Republicans of the entire world, our cause is your cause. Our enemy is your enemy. Let your hearts be with us. As for you, workmen of England, it is not only your hearts we wish, but your arms. Remember the starvation and degradation brought to your firesides by the oppression of labour.
Remember the past, look well to the future, and avenge yourselves by giving liberty to your children in the coming struggle for human freedom.
The May issue of this newspaper has been out for some weeks and the organisers did well to manage that in the midst of disruptive arrests of their housing activists and raids and arrests following their Easter Rising Commemoration1.
As before, this issue consists of sixteen A4 sides, therefore easy enough to handle and contains what seems the right mixture between short event reports and news items, along with a couple of analytical pieces, one on ‘workerism’ and a thought-provoking other on peat-cutting and energy.
A two-page spread on James Connolly and the Irish Republic quotes extensively from Connolly but without giving any references. This can be an issue since a number of statements commonly attributed to both Connolly and Lenin are lacking in substantial (or even any) verification2.
This edition discusses issues and events in Ireland but also internationally. Reports from the agrarian revolutionary movements in parts of India and in the Phillipines are featured – a list of attacks and casualties inflicted upon the oppressors’ forces.
Another piece marks the death of Palestinian activist Adnan Khader on the 76th day of his hunger strike protest against Israeli ‘administrative detention’ – internment in fact. The mass struggles in France against the raising of the retirement age are also featured.
For Ireland there are reports on the housing struggle, against police repression in the Six Counties, historical commemorations, poster and graffiti campaigns, a sectarian attack in Lurgan and another article deals with mental health issues and the shortage of services in Tipperary.
As commented in an earlier review of this newspaper, the Irish revolutionary movement has long needed a hard-copy revolutionary newspaper. As Lenin commented3, the revolutionary newspaper is an organiser as it requires production and distribution.
Of course, distribution networks for a newspaper can become action-organising networks also but in any case meeting a person to give them a newspaper is a personal contact, when questions and criticisms can be discussed and other information from the community collected to act upon.
This form of contact for the individual is superior to those available on the Internet and also less easy for the State to monitor. A newspaper can also go from hand to hand in a way that only short pieces or videos can compare with in electronic distribution.
Though of course, the latter also has its strengths.
Future editions of APA are to be welcomed and in the fullness of time perhaps we can even graduate to a weekly revolutionary Irish socialist newspaper, not seen here for decades.
End.
An Phoblacht Abú is available from personal contact with AIA or by post from Isrmedia@protonmail.com
FOOTNOTES:
1. See https://rebelbreeze.com/2023/05/07/gardai-arrest-republican-denouncing-the-monarchy-british-occupation/ Although the raid may well have been intended to disrupt plans for protests against US Imperialism’s chief, Joe Biden’s visit to Ireland, a socialist Republican still faces concocted charges relating to membership of an imaginary “illegal organisation”. Under special repressive legislation such a charge without credible evidence has been sufficient, in the no-jury Special Criminal Courts, to jail Republicans for two years.
2 For example, I have searched diligently for the description of the Irish Citizen Army attributed to Lenin, viz. “the first Red Army in Europe” but have thus far failed to find verification.
An organisation by the name of Anti-Imperialist Action yesterday held an anti-monarchist march and rally in Dublin, including a mock execution of royalty, where their speaker was arrested by Gardaí.
The protesters met first at the James Connolly monument in Beresford Place and after some words marched up Abbey Street to Dublin’s main street and to the General Post Office building to hold their anti-monarchy rally.
Royalty and guillotine beside James Connolly monument at start of event (Photo: AIA)
At the GPO the gathering of socialist republicans, socialists and anarchists had grown. As the mock-up guillotine carried out mock execution of the dummy representing royalty, a large force of Gardaí arrested the speaker. Participants then went to Store Street Garda station to demand his release.
At Store Street the protesters were met by a line of Gardaí1 drawn up in front of the entrance to the police station. In speeches and slogans, the protestors denounced the police for the arrest of the speaker at the GPO, also denouncing the monarchy and the State.
Line of Gardaí barring entrance to Store Street Garda Station (Photo:Rebel Breeze)View of protesters outside Store Street Garda Station (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Some speakers criticised also the national broadcaster RTÉ which was devoting four hours to the coronation.
The most frequent chants were: When Republicans are under attack – stand up, fight back!2 One, Two, Three, Four – Occupation no more; Five, Six, Seven Eight – Smash the Free State!3 Brit King – Guillotine! No democracy – under a monarchy! No democracy – in the Free State4!
One of the protesters, accompanying himself on guitar, sang the Republican ballad popularly known as “Come Out Yez Black ‘n Tans”, the attendance joining in on the chorus. They displayed a banner with a slogan from Liberty Hall5 in WW1: We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.
Using a loudhailer, another protester read out James Connolly’s6 1911 denunciation of the monarchy. Yet another speaker quoted Garda Commissioner Drew Harris’ recent words saying the Gardaí were the “biggest gang”, the protester calling them “an MI5-directed gang”.
Eventually news of the release of the arrested man reached the protestors and they marched up Talbot Street with Starry Plough7 flags and a Basque Ikurrina flying, back to the GPO, outside of which they held an impromptu rally.
Along with portraits of Irish hunger-strike martyrs of 1981 there was a portrait of Palestinian martyr Khader Adnan carried also in recognition of the international role of British imperialism and its Head of State.
Many looked on in interest while some applauded them, both in Talbot Street, where a taxi driver enquired the reason for the protest and wished them well and also outside the GPO. Gardaí arrived and stood across from the building to watch the protesters but in smaller numbers than before.
The protestors return to the GPO for an impromptu rally in place of the planned one interrupted by the Garda attack and arrest of speaker (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
Another speaker said the protesters were “health workers, working to rid Ireland of a dangerous disease affecting politicians, media and State forces, a disease that makes them go to their knees in front of royalty and a foreign state, extending their tongues to lick a certain part of the anatomy.”
Interest from the pedestrian reservation in O’Connell Street across from the GPO, including much smaller number of uniformed Gardaí (Photo: Rebel Breeze)
The speaker said they were working “to rid Ireland of this dangerous disease, to enable the people to stand up straight once more, to claim their Republic, celebrate their history and speak out against foreign domination and monarchy”.
He drew attention also to arrest of a Republican speaker outside the iconic GPO, headquarters of the 1916 Rising8 and which still bears the scars of British bullets9.
Reference was also made a number of times by protesters to the arrests of English Republicans in London who were prevented by from holding a protest against the monarchy.
The victim of the police attack returned from police custody and briefly spoke thanking those who had demanded his release; people who had stopped to listen applauded and the group dispersed without further arrest.
End.
Photo taken at GPO before police attack (Photo: AIA)
2This seems adapted from a slogan often chanted by Irish socialist groups.
3This too seems an adaptation but from the Palestine solidarity movement.
4The new state of 26 Counties (missing six, which are in the British colony) and which fought a Civil War against the Republicans was called “the Free State” and though the name was changed (and to a ‘republic’) Irish Republicans and many nationalists in the British colony call it the “Free State” in irony and in negation of its legitimacy.
5Liberty Hall is a very tall building housing SIPTU but the trade union’s ancestor, the ITGWU had purchased the previous building on the same site which was destroyed by the British during the 1916 Rising. The slogan “We serve neither …” etc had been displayed across the front earlier during WWI.
6Revolutionary socialist leader, trade union organiser, writer and historian who brought the Irish Citizen Army to participate in the Rising, during which he was made Dublin Commandant, afterwards being shot by British firing squad.
7Originally flag of the Irish Citizen Army, the first workers’ Army in the world, formed to defend the workers in 1913 Lockout against police attacks and which also took part in the 1916 Rising.
8The rising 24-29 April 1916 was the first against world war and contained many other ‘firsts’ – six different organisations played a prominent part in it, including women. The Rising is regarded as leading to the War of Independence 1919-1922.
9One of many buildings in Dublin that bear the scars of conflict, this one is an imposing building in the city’s main thoroughfare, O’Connell Street. With the building in flames from British artillery on Easter Friday, the garrison, including five of the Seven Signatories of the Proclamation of Independence (which was read out at the start of the Rising) relocated to nearby Moore Street, where the decision was taken to surrender.
Useful link and Reference:
"We confess to having more respect and honour for the raggedest child of the poorest labourer in Ireland today than for any, even the most virtuous, descendant of the long array of murderers, adulterers and madmen who have sat upon the throne of England." – James Connolly pic.twitter.com/o8inKRr5Fi
— Anti Imperialist Action Ireland (@AIAIreland) May 6, 2023
On Sunday participants in a 1916 Rising Commemoration organised by the Irish organisation Anti-Imperialist Action were harassed by police as they gathered to march to the Irish Citizen Army Republican plot in Glasnevin Cemetery.
Six political police in plain clothes walked among those gathered beside Phibsborough shops demanding names and addresses of the participants, most of whom were fairly young. Four uniformed Gardaí also stood nearby and a Public Order Unit van parked at the cemetery entrance.
The participants declined to be intimidated and set off on their march, led by a lone piper playing Irish marching airs, followed by a colour party with different banners interspersed among the marchers, among which fluttered many flags.
Organisers had learned that the coach carrying members of the Republican Flute Band from Scotland that was to lead the parade had been prevented by police there from taking the ferry to Ireland.
Centre photo: Four of the six plainclothes political police violating the civil rights of the peaceful people commemorating the Easter Rising. (Photo: D.Breatnach)Centre photo, another two plainclothes political police. The bald man joked while he harassed people. (Photo: D.Breatnach) (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Historical background
In 1916 a broad alliance the Irish Volunteers, Irish Citizen Army, Cumann na mBan, na Fianna Éireann and Hibernian Rifles1 took part in a Rising organised by the Irish Republican Brotherhood against British rule in Ireland and against world war.
Due to a number of unfortunate circumstances, the leader of the Volunteers cancelled the Rising which however went ahead a day later than planned and was for the most part confined to Dublin, where a third of the numbers in the original plan took part and fought for a week.
The occupying British Army shelled the city centre from a gunship in the river Liffey and also from artillery on land. Explosions and resulting fires destroyed much of the city centre including the General Post Office in the main street, which had been the headquarters of the insurrection.2
After a week with the city centre including the GPO in flames, the rebel garrison evacuated to Moore Street where the following day, surrounded and vastly outnumbered, the decision was taken to surrender.3 A British military court passed death sentences on nearly a hundred prisoners.
All but fifteen of those sentences were commuted to long jail periods but the seven Signatories of the 1916 Proclamation4 and another seven were shot by British firing squad in Dublin, a fifteenth in Cork and after trial months later a sixteenth was hanged in Pentonville Jail, London.
At Easter 1917 Irish Republican and Socialist women commemorated the 1916 Rising; ever since then Irish Republicans and sometimes Socialists in Ireland and in many parts of the diaspora have commemorated the Rising, whether legally5 or otherwise, in jail or at liberty.
The War of Independence began in 1919 with many of the Rising’s survivors participating6.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
The Parade on Sunday – local and national historical memory marked
At Cross Guns Bridge over the Royal Canal the parade halted and flares were lit in memory of events there in 1916.
Marching along the Cabra Road, the wall and a watchtower of the north side of Glasnevin Cemetery on the left of photo. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
On Easter Monday 1916 a small group of Irish Volunteers had marched from Maynooth along the canal bank to join the Rising in Dublin and found guarding the bridge two Irish Volunteers who advised them to wait until the following day to go into the city centre.
The Maynooth group spent the night in Glasnevin and the following day marched into the GPO, passing an empty Cross Guns Bridge on the way. Back towards Phibsborough, British artillery had blown a barricade and killed Seán Healy, a Fianna member at the Nth. Circular Road crossroads.
Later, the Dublin Fusiliers unit of the British Army blockaded the bridge, preventing people from crossing it in either direction. They shot dead a deaf local man who failed to heed their challenge because he did not hear it.
We Serve Neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland declared one banner carried last Sunday, Britain/NATO Out of Ireland another, This Is Our Mandate7, Our Republic and Collusion Is No Illusion, It Is State-Sponsored Murder were another two.
A large banner also declared alongside the image of James Connolly that Only Socialism Can Be the Solution for Ireland. Some organisations also carried their own banners, such as those of Dublin Independent Republicans, Ireland Anti-Internment Campaign and Irish Socialist Republicans.
Flags fluttering included those bearing the logo of the organising group Anti-Imperialist Action and others bearing the slogan “Always Anti-Fascist”, green-and-gold Starry Ploughs, a couple of Ikurrinak (Basque flags) and another two of Red with Hammer & Sickle in yellow.
Basque and antifascist flags (Photo: D.Breatnach)
At the Monument: speeches and songs
At the monument (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Glasnevin Cemetery (ReiligGhlas Naíonn) covers over 120 acres in North Dublin city and is in two parts, each with Republican Plots separated by the Cabra Road and contains the graves of both famous and ordinary people.
On the north side there is also access to the Botanic Gardens, both on the south banks of the Tolka river. The imposing Monument to numerous Republican uprisings and the Irish Citizen Army Republican plot is on the south side, across the pedestrian bridge over the railway line.
(Photo: D.Breatnach)
A man chaired the event for Anti-Imperialist Action and spoke briefly, introducing people for readings (all of which were from James Connolly) and for orations. The presentations of these were evenly divided between men and women, three of those being of young people.
Three songs were sung: a woman sang The Foggy Dew (by Charles O’Neill) and Erin Go Bragh (by Peadar Kearney), while a man sang Patrick Galvin’s Where Is Our James Connolly? Two women read out pieces by James Connolly and another read out the 1916 Proclamation.
Person chairing the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The words of the chairperson and of those giving orations were different but there were common themes: upholding the historic Irish spirit of resistance, the importance of the working class in history and the objective of a socialist Republic encompassing the whole of the Irish nation.
These words were balanced by denunciation of US and British imperialism and the colonial/ NATO occupation of the Six Counties by the latter; the Irish client regime; the special no-jury courts8 of both administrations in Ireland and repression by police forces and occupation army.
One of the singers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
One of the readers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
One of the readers (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Also denounced were those political parties that had abandoned the struggle for the Republic and instead had become part of the colonial and neo-colonial administrations or, in the latter case, were on their way to becoming so.9
Floral tributes were laid by representatives of a number of announced organisations and then others came forward to lay floral tributes also. The colour party lowered flags for a minute’s silence in homage and salute before slowly raising them again and the piper played Amhrán na bhFiann.
The other singer Lowering of the colour party flags in homage to the fallen in the struggle (Photo: D.Breatnach)Colour party raises flags again in symbolism of the struggle continuing (Photo: D.Breatnach)
The chairperson thanked all for attendance, listing organisations by name and cautioning all to stay close together as they left, due to the threatening presence of Gardaí and in particular the Public Order Unit. In the event, the celebrants exited the cemetery and dispersed without incident.
1A small unit, an armed wing of a split from the more socially conservative USA version of the Ancient Order of Hibernians, their participation in the Rising was notable.
2Photos of much of the destruction are available on the Internet and accessible by search browser.
3The terrace they occupied still stands and is the object of a historical memory and conservation struggle against property speculator plans approved by the municipal city managers and Government political parties (see smsfd.ie).
4A remarkable document, the text of which is available from many postings on the Internet.
5Irish women commemorated it in public in contravention of British WWI martial legislation in 1917 and 1918 and for decades the public commemoration of the 1916 Rising (and even the flying of the Irish Tricolour) was forbidden in the British colony of the Six Counties with attendant colonial police attacks on any attempt to do so.
6Sometimes inaccurately called “the Tan War” (reference to a special colonial police auxiliary force that became known as the “Black n’ Tans”), the war saw the birth of the IRA and lasted from 1919-1921. A British “peace” proposal opened deep divisions in the nationalist coalition and was followed by a Civil War 1922-1923, in which the pro-Treaty government and armed forces were armed and supplied by the British to defeat the Republicans in a campaign of repression and jailing, military actions, kidnapping and torture, murder of prisoners, assassinations and over 80 formal executions.
7Also displaying text referring to the First Dáil’s Democratic Program of 1919.
8The Diplock court in the colony and the Special Criminal Courts in the Irish State, political special courts in all but name, with low proof bar and abnormally high conviction rate and refusal of bail while awaiting trial.
9References to 1) the 1930s split from the Sinn Féin party, the Fianna Fáil political party that became a preferred Government party of the foreign-dependent Irish ruling bourgeoisie and 2) to the Provisional Sinn Féin party who endorsed the British pacification plan in 1998 and embarked on the road to becoming a party of reformist nationalism in the colony and is heading for neo-colonial (and neo liberal capitalist) coalition government at the moment.
An event was held on a busy Saturday afternoon in Dublin’s city centre to commemorate IRA volunteer Patrick O’Brien, killed by soldiers of the Irish State.
The event included bagpipe airs, a colour party, speeches and a resistance song.
A colour party with Irish Tricolour and the flags of the four provinces, led by a lone piper marched into and a short distance westward up Talbot Street towards where a crowd waited beside a memorial sign that had been erected shortly earlier. The colour party took up station on the opposite side of the road.
Led by a piper playing Irish airs, the colour party (i.e carrying the flags – the Irish Tricolour and those of the four provinces of Ireland) approaches as the start of the commemoration. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Among the airs being played on the short march were Thomas Moore’s Let Erin Remember and The Wearing of the Green or The Rising of the Moon, the same traditional air to both different songs referring to the 1798 Rising.
THE SHORT LIFE OF A LOYAL REPUBLICAN
Framed portrait photo of Vol. Patrick O’Brien on display at the commemoration (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Gina Nicoletti, chairing the event, recounted to the crowd a short history of Volunteer Patrick O’Brien who was born on 17 August 1898 in the townland of Woodlands near Castledermot in County Kildare to a local agricultural working couple.
The O’Brien family had 16 children, all of whom survived and ten of whom lived with Patrick and his parents in a three-room house at the time of the 1911 Census.
An obituary published in a Republican newspaper on the anniversary of his death suggests that Patrick moved to Dublin in 1915, joining the Irish Volunteers in December of that year aged 17. He took part in the 1916 Easter Rising under the command of Edward Daly.
Evading capture in 1916 and returning home, O’Brien joined the local Irish Volunteers company in Castledermot but returned to Dublin in May 1917 and became attached to E Company, 3 Battalion, Dublin Brigade, Irish Volunteers, which was based on the south side of the city.
Sean Óg sings The Foggy Dew while accompanying himself on guitar and centre of photo is Gina Nicoletti, who chaired the event. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
An active IRA member during the War of Independence, Vol. O’Brien took the anti-Treaty side in the IRA split in March 1922.
In a response to a renewal of executions of IRA men by the Free State government, Liam Lynch (IRA Chief of Staff) issued the ‘Amusements Order’ on 13 March 1923 banning all cinema, theatre and sports events “at a time of national mourning” with action threatened against non-compliance.
At midnight on 23 March 1923, Patrick took part in an operation to blow up the Carleton Picture House, O’Connell Street (then near the Parnell Monument opposite the Savoy Cinema). The cinema had closed an hour before a landmine at the front entrance shattered the glass of several windows.
There were no injuries but newspaper articles reported that the sound of the explosion was heard several miles away. Accounts of what happened afterwards were gathered from one of the IRA unit, Volunteer Joseph Doody in his pension application.
The unit unexpectedly encountered Free State soldiers coming from the Parnell Monument who opened fire on them and another patrol was approaching from the southern end of O’Connell Street and the unit retreated through Findlater Place and out to Marlborough Street.
In the running firefight in Talbot Street, O’Brien was hit by at least four bullets (three in his left leg and one in his right leg). He fell wounded on the pavement between Speidel’s pork butchers and the Masterpiece Picture Palace at 99 Talbot Street and died about 30 minutes after arrival at hospital.
The colour party lowers the flags in honour of a martyr as the piper plays a lament (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Patrick O’Brien was 24 and his death certificate listed his occupation as an employee of a railway company. His address was 28 Cadogan Road, Fairview which is a cul de sac of Victorian redbrick houses close to Annesley Bridge and opposite the Sean Russell statue.
Only three weeks before Patrick’s death, the Free State CID1 had raided no. 43 Cadogan Road and captured the press used to print the Sinn Féin2 paper An Phoblacht along with eight people who were on site. A number of prominent IRA families lived in the vicinity, including the Brughas.
Patrick O’Brien was buried in the Republican Plot, Glasnevin Cemetery and a volley was fired over his grave, presumably following the funeral in the cover of darkness as the IRA could not have risked such a public display during the burial, in a time of martial law.
The colour party raise the flags again in symbolism of the struggle carrying on after honouring a martyr (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Despite the hard repression by the Irish State on combatants, their relatives and friends, O’Brien’s family were proud of Patrick as displayed in an anniversary notice placed in The Nationalist & Leinster Times.
The Irish Independent reported on 27 March 1923 that at the inquest of Patrick’s death, his brother James told those present:
“[My brother] … belonged to the IRA since 1915 being then about 15 years of age. He had never changed his principles since then. He always intended to die as he did … rather than change his principles as he swore allegiance to the Republic in 1916.”
FLORAL WREATH, SONG AND SPEECH
A representative of Anti-Imperialist Action was called upon and stepped forward to attach a green, white and orange floral wreath to the pole beneath the commemorative sign.
The plaque/ placard commemorating Vol. Patrick O’Brien attached in Talbot Street by Independent Republicans with the floral wreath from Anti-Imperialist Action attached below it (Photo: D.Breatnach)
Seán Óg accompanied himself on guitar singing The Foggy Dew, a popular Republican ballad about the 1916 Rising composed by Fr. Charles O’Neill.
Dublin City Councillor Cieran Perry gave a fairly short speech stressing the importance of these acts of remembrance upholding traditions of resistance in the Dublin working class, also denouncing the fake patriots who stir up racist divisions and hostility in the community.
Perry’s speech also listed some of the crimes of the Irish state, facts underlined when Joe Mooney read out the list of 70 IRA Volunteers formally executed by the Irish state along with those killed in battle or after they surrendered, or were abducted, tortured and murdered in Dublin 1922-’23.
Cnclr. Cieran Perry speaking at the commemoration. (Photo: D.Breatnach)
TRAFFIC AND PEOPLE
Traffic was light along the narrow Talbot Street during the event and slowed down to ease past the crowd that had spilled from the pedestrian pavement into the street. A few minutes’ eastward of the spot is the plaque commemorating the killing of Sean Treacy by the British in November 1920.
There was a substantial number of people in support of the event on both pavements of the one-way street but others gathered too, whether out of curiosity or in sympathy. Some of those present consisted of visitors from other countries, whether as students, tourists or workers.
The crowd grew and spilled on to Talbot Street. [The plaque to Vol. Sean Treacy killed by British soldiers in 1920 is high on the front of a building just beyond the tree on the right of photo] (Photo: D.Breatnach).
Not for the first time I thought that having leaflets to distribute summarising the event and the reason for it would be useful. I spent a little time explaining some aspects of the event and its history to a couple of visitors from Sweden who seemed very interested.
The uniformed Gardaí kept away from the event, though no doubt the plain-clothed political Special Branch had a few of their own in the vicinity to collect faces and try to match names.
THE ORGANISERS: INDEPENDENT REPUBLICANS
The commemorative event was organised by a group by the name Independent Republicans which has been doing great work in conserving and promoting historical memory associated with events such as the 1916 Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War.
The Irish Free State came to power as an instrument of British imperialism which clothed, armed and otherwise supplied the state’s National (sic) Army. Independent Republicans have collected the names of 70 Irish Republicans killed in Dublin by that Army.
The group has also devoted time and effort to researching the backgrounds and circumstances of death of many on that list, a substantial undertaking for which we owe them a great debt. Their erection of ‘plaque’ signs around the city at the spot where the fighters fell is also great work.
The commemorative plaque/ placard to Vol. Patrick O’Brien’s memory being erected shortly before the start of the event (Photo: D.Breatnach)
On Easter Saturday (8 April) Independent Republicans will be holding a 1916 Rising commemoration in Dublin city centre, details below.
Anti-Imperialist Action will be holding theirs on Easter Sunday (9 April), details below.
End.
FOOTNOTES:
1Criminal Investigation Department, based at Oriel House, where police detectives and some soldiers of the Free State organised operations against Republicans including raids, assassinations, abductions and torture.
2This is not the party of the same name today. Sinn Féin began as a dual-monarchy Irish nationalist party, adopting Republicanism later in 1918. Those who later supported the anti-Republican status of the country and partition by England left the party and another large number left to join the Fianna Fáil party upon the latter’s founding. Briefly in the 1960s the party espoused socialism but split at the end of the decade and Sinn Féin under the Provisionals briefly adopted socialism again during the 1970s. The party of that name today is neither socialist nor even Republican.
A picket outside the Italian Embassy in Dublin on Thursday (23rd) was part of a day of action across Europe in solidarity with an Anarchist prisoner on hunger strike since October in a struggle for more humane prison conditions.
The picket, organised at short notice, included Irish Republicans, Anarchists and revolutionary Socialists. Banners and placards indicated the presence of Saoradh, Irish Anarchist Network and Ireland Anti-Internment Campaign.
At one point five uniformed Gardaí stood near the Embassy’s gate while three plain-clothes Special Branch (i.e. political police) watched from a car across the road. The police numbers may have been due to a request from the Embassy in the midst of attacks on some Italian Embassies in Europe.
Despite the presence of Gardaí, Embassy staff appeared nervous, meeting one visitor at the gate to check her reason for attendance after speaking to her on her mobile phone, rather than first allowing her to enter the garden and approach the main entrance.
Some of the uniformed Gardaí attending the solidarity picket and some of the protesters. (Photo: IAIC)
Three Special Branch Gardaí (political police) parked across from the picketers, surveilling them (Photo: IAIC)
THE HARSHEST ITALIAN PRISON CONDITIONS
Alfredo Cospito is an Italian political prisoner kept under the harshest Italian prison conditions, “41-bis”, which include solitary confinement for most of the day, family visit once a month through glass, no reading matter sent from outside and no phone calls in either direction or lawyer privacy.
According to information on the Internet, these inhumane conditions were developed for Mafiosa leaders, in order to prevent them running their organisations from inside jail and also to pressure them into breaking ranks and informing on their colleagues.
Whatever we may say about that, what can be the intention of subjecting a political prisoner to those conditions, except to break him or to destabilise him mentally? EU recommended rules on prisoner management don’t recommend more than three weeks in solitary confinement.
Lawyers for political prisoner Nadia Lioce, who has been living under the 41-bis regime for two decades, have said due to limited hours permitted contact, she has effectively only interacted with people for a total of 15 hours in the space of a year.
Italian media reported Lioce’s lawyers as saying she is now so “psychologically isolated” that, when her mother and sister visit, she is unable to speak to them for more than a few minutes.
Some of the picketers, the Italian Embassy in the background (Photo: IAIC)
Amnesty International and the European Court of Human Rights have both criticised several aspects of the 41-bis, and in 2007 a US court refused to extradite a convicted Mafia drug trafficker on the grounds that the 41-bis regime he would face in Italy would have “constituted torture”.
The Anti-Imperialist Front gave a call for an international solidarity day of action which found an active response in many countries.
Alfredo Cospito’s case is up for review by the Italian prison system this month and pickets and other actions have been organised around Europe to exert pressure on the Italian penal authorities to release Cospito into house arrest in his sister’s home.
The picket displayed not only internationalist solidarity but exemplary broad unity of disparate political forces in solidarity with an Anarchist political prisoner. Hopefully this unity will continue to be built upon as time goes on, for the unfolding struggles of class and nation demand it.
Hopefully the international actions will cause the Italian authorities to relax the inhumane conditions of Alfredo Cospito’s incarceration but now Italian authorities are claiming that Cospito is somehow coordinating violent actions from within his extreme isolation.
Another two of the picketers (Photo: IAIC)
A side trip into history
The Italian Embassy is in Northumberland Road, on the south side of the Grand Canal (near the Israeli and US Embassies).
As they were leaving, some of the picketers took time to look at a plaque and monument to the Mount Street Bridge Battle between Irish Volunteers and British soldiers in 1916. Four Volunteers were killed and between 26 and 30 Sherwood Foresters, with 134 more wounded.
Mount Street Battle Monument, on the Bridge over the Grand Canal itself. The English explanation is on the reverse. (Photo: IAIC)
A number of Volunteers were captured but a number got away also. Two of the buildings from which the Volunteers fought remain, bearing the marks of bullet strikes. The third, Clanwilliam House was set on fire by the British and was replaced by a 1960s-type office building later.
A new socialist Irish Republican hardcopy newspaper has appeared in Ireland in recent months. January and February 2023’s editions, believed to be nos. 3 & 4 are reviewed here.
HARD-COPY NEWSPAPERS
While today, at least in the developed world, the production of Internet media is of great importance for the revolutionary movement as much as it is for the capitalist system, the hard-copy newspaper disseminated by hand still has an important role.
Hardcopy newspaper distribution entails contact in the real world with real people, answers given to questions asked and challenges made, contacts made between the potential organisers and potential activist supporters, can go from hand to hand and be left for a random reader.
Online media has no equivalent to this.
Lenin observed that the revolutionary newspaper is an organiser, not only in its calls to action but in the necessary tasks of production and distribution. Ireland has very few revolutionary newspapers and not even one weekly one, to say nothing of daily editions.
An Phoblacht Abú is produced and distributed by Irish Republican Socialists, whose activist manifestations have been seen in the Revolutionary Housing League’s occupation of empty buildings and its calls for a general emulation of such actions.
Another manifestation has been the activities of Anti-Imperialist Action, notably in protest pickets against imperialism and neo-colonialism, antifascist actions and anti-spiking campaigns, also in commemorations of Republican martyrs, often supported by sticker and leaflet campaigns.
An Phoblacht Abú Front January 2023, front page.
CONTENT, FORM AND PRICE
Both issues reviewed contained 16 sides of A4 pages, composed of two A3 sheets folded in half, one inside the other. They sold at 2 euros per issue – less than one-third the price of most pints in Dublin and much longer to consume!
In general the articles are well-written and with few typographical errors. The editions reviewed here covered national and international news and the overall line in the content is of revolutionary overthrow of the ruling class and eschewing electoralism.
With regard to coverage of national issues, anti-fascism, anti-racism, building a broad front, opposition to NATO and the British occupation of the Six Counties and the neo-colonial and neo-liberal ruling class of the Twenty-Six Counties have figured prominently.
Apart from such regular themes, January’s issue documented the struggle against student fees and treachery of the student union executive in Maynooth and reported a joint Republican Prisoners’ solidarity picket in Dublin along with the release of a known Loyalist sectarian murderer.
Commemorations of Irish Republicans murdered by the Free State during the Irish Civil War/ Counter Revolution (1922-1923) figured in both issues.
In foreign news coverage, actions of peoples’ guerrilla forces in the Philippines and India, for which one would search the main dailies in vain, are covered in both issues and, in January’s, Scottish independence and John McLean and Israeli expulsion of Palestinian campaigner Salah Hamouri.
The environmental struggle in Germany figured in February’s issue.
Regarding economic questions, the rise in “cost of living” and housing crisis attacks on working people were addressed in short articles. Wider pieces on action were included on class struggle and community representation and action in the February edition.
LOOKING AHEAD
The appearance of An Phoblacht Abú is welcome and it is hoped can be sustained. Hopefully further issues will deal with questions of culture and the Irish language, the war in Ukraine (on which the Left seems deeply divided), historical-cultural conservation, trade union organisation and education of the people.
AVAILABLEat 2 euro per copy (back issues sometimes free) from sellers and supporters or from irsmedia@protonmail.com
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