Fighting on all Fronts (14 page)

The republican movement was rather a mixed bag and a few individuals produced publications like
War News
under illegal conditions. It is difficult to establish how much the IRA links with Nazi Germany went beyond a purely instrumental arrangement for fighting British imperialism or how far there had been a drift to more extreme right thinking. One thing is certain though. The movement was hooked on the dogma
of armed struggle and displayed no tactical sense. It was totally outmanoeuvred by de Valera and had no viable strategy to undercut his rhetorical anti-imperialism. By contrast, the resurgence of labour militancy proved more dangerous for the Southern state.

As soon as it came to power Fianna Fail embarked on a programme of protectionism to foster native Irish capitalism. The strategy had limited success and one of its by-products was a growing confidence among workers. The Irish Transport and General Workers Union (ITGWU), for example, grew by 120 percent between 1930 and 1938.
²⁹
This newfound confidence was soon in evidence as workers responded to price rises at the start of the war. The government’s call for an embargo on wage rises was largely ignored as unions such as the National Union of Railwaymen made substantial wage claims. A wave of strikes broke out at the end of 1939 and the start of 1940 with one major union figure declaring that “there were strikes all over the place; there were pickets on every street in Dublin”.
³⁰
Attempts to conscript the unemployed to labour camps modelled on the Construction Corps in the US also met with stiff resistance. In Cork there was a riot after 300 unemployed men were called up to join the scheme.
³¹

Fianna Fail’s initial response was to introduce anti-strike legislation modelled on the British Trade Disputes and Trade Unions Act 1927 that had followed the defeat of the General Strike. At the core of this was a ban on strikes in essential services and fines for those who refused to return to work. Sean McEntee, the minister responsible, drafted a memo to his cabinet where he noted that strikers were normally “more reliant upon physical strength than on mental process for the solution of difficulty” and had, therefore, to be subject to economic sanctions.
³²

However, vocal opposition from the ITGWU led the government to a change of direction. Fianna Fail had been carefully cultivating the union’s leadership since the mid-1930s. Their main point of common agreement was opposition to the presence of British-based unions in Ireland. This stemmed from both a shared nationalist outlook and a belief that British unions were not fully responsive to the needs of the Irish state and might engage in militant action. The ITGWU leader, William O’Brien, had tried to remove British unions through a voluntary agreement in the wider labour movement but when this failed he turned to Fianna Fail for legislative action.

When the Second World War broke out relations between the ITGWU and Fianna Fail grew even closer and the union was very explicit in its support for neutrality. The union president described the war as “an imperialist bloodlust”
³³
and a key ideologue within the union, Cathal O’Shannon, wrote in Labour Party paper
The Torch
:

Let no man tell us after these last shameful years that Chamberlain, Daladier and the capitalist and imperialist elements they serve are leading a crusade against Nazism and fascism and a holy war for democracy and liberty… No, the issue now in 1939 is not so very different from in 1914-1918. It is a clash of competing imperialisms.
³⁴

But while O’Shannon’s language was left wing, a more accurate description of the ITGWU’s approach emerged at a Labour Party conference in 1941 when a Trotskyist member proposed a motion seeking to combine neutrality with a more general internationalist championing of struggles against imperialism. The ITGWU representative rebuked him in terms that showed the union’s real agenda, when he said that they did not want:

A full time job worrying about the position of oppressed people in India and China…we are only a small island and should be better employed consolidating the labour movement. Surely we do not want a revival of the sufferings of 1916 and 1922, the days of the Fenian and Penal laws.
³⁵

The ITGWU had moved a long way since its foundation by the revolutionary socialist James Connolly. Its aim was to settle into a comfortable groove with close links to the Southern state and it saw its relationship to Fianna Fail as the way to bring this about. It only used occasional left rhetoric to wrong foot those socialists who took an uncritical view of Britain’s role in the war. Its primary motivation for supporting neutrality was not a consistent anti-imperialism but a growing identification with an emerging 26 county national identity. Symbolically it gave a £50,000 loan to the government to help with “the Emergency”.
³⁶
Fianna Fail was also more than willing to respond to the union’s entreaties.

Instead of pressing ahead with its original legislation to impose sanctions on strikers it entered secret talks with William O’Brien and decided to play the nationalist card by dividing the labour movement. The result of these talks was the Trade Union Bill of 1941, which contained two major provisions. Unions who wished to gain immunities under the Trade Disputes Act had to first lodge a substantial deposit with the High
Court. The aim of this measure was, in the words of an internal circular, “the disappearance of small irresponsible unions”.
³⁷
The principal target here was the Workers Union of Ireland (WUI), a significant militant breakaway from the ITGWU led by the legendary Jim Larkin. The second provision was for a tribunal to establish sole negotiating rights for the union that had a majority of members in particular workplaces and industry. British-based unions were to be automatically excluded and so faced eventual extinction. These two measures cemented the alliance between the left and British-based unions in opposing the Fianna Fail/ITGWU axis.

However, Fianna Fail now made a tactical error. As well as trying to push through the Trade Union Bill they imposed a Wages Standstill Order to break the strike wave. The Dublin Council of Trade Unions—from which the ITGWU had withdrawn because of the presence of the WUI—responded by setting up the Council of Action and began to publish its own paper,
Workers Action
, to get around the censor. It denounced Fianna Fail’s measures as the first step to “corporative organisation made up of workers and the employers under the control of the government”.
³⁸
This was a reference to the contemporary campaign promoted by the Catholic bishops to implement Catholic social teaching through such a form of organisation. In June 1941 the Council of Action organised a massive 20,000 strong demonstration and Larkin symbolically burnt the trade union bill from the platform.
³⁹
Another huge demonstration took place in October. The scale of the opposition persuaded the Labour Party to come out strongly against both measures and they experienced a spurt of growth. In 1941 the Labour Party had 174 branches but by 1943 this had risen to 750.
⁴⁰

However, the growing links between the ITGWU and Fianna Fail meant that this massive display of opposition was not translated into industrial action. The result was a defeat for the unions as the Trade Union Act was pushed through with minor amendments and an extensive system of wage regulation was introduced via an Emergency Powers Order. In the immediate aftermath, however, the anger against these measures translated into electoral support for the Labour Party and a weakening of Fianna Fail’s base in the Dublin working class. In 1942 Labour won many extra seats to become the majority party in Dublin Corporation. At the 1943 general election its share of the vote rose to 17 percent—a full ten points more than it had received at the start of the era of Fianna Fail dominance in 1932. Nationally, Fianna Fail’s vote dropped from 51 percent to 41 percent.

The party responded by forging an alliance with the Catholic bishops and ITGWU bureaucrats to launch a Red Scare which one writer described as “the most effective in the state’s history”.
⁴¹
The
Catholic Standard
, a paper with a circulation of 80,000 at the time, spearheaded the campaign. Using its access to Special Branch files—undoubtedly supplied by Fianna Fail—the paper ran regular exposé articles against known communists.
⁴²
A small number of Communist Party members had, in fact, joined the Labour Party after the Communist Party had voted to dissolve its Dublin branch in 1941. This led the Fianna Fail minister McEntee to denounce Labour leader William Norton, as “the Kerensky of the Labour Party” who was “preparing the way for the Red Shirts”. The Labour Party leadership responded by promptly setting up a commission of inquiry and expelling a number of these individuals.

However, the real target of the campaign was not the tiny handful of Communist Party members but Larkinism. “Larkinism” was a term that summed up the popular sympathy which the Dublin working class had for Jim Larkin and his three sons, who played leading roles in the Workers Union of Ireland and who typified a militant approach to trade unionism and left wing politics. Larkin had also joined the Labour Party in 1941 and was elected to a Dail seat in 1943. The ITGWU attempted to block his nomination and, when that failed, they disaffiliated from the party. Seven members of the Dail (TDs) who were closely linked to them broke away to form the National Labour Party.

The formation of the anti-communist National Labour Party has sometimes been presented in terms of a long-standing personal feud between ITGWU leader William O’Brien and James Larkin, leader of the WUI. But while a personal animus no doubt existed, there was far more to it. Its real roots lay in the ITGWU’s retreat from Connolly’s revolutionary syndicalism. It had evolved to a position of embracing Catholic social teaching and attacking socialist ideas. This in turn was part of its wider journey to embracing the 26 county state, which was also using a form of Catholic fundamentalism to unite its population around it. The upsurge of militancy at the start of the Second World War and its political after-effects in the 1942 local and 1943 general election served, in fact, to crystallise all these tendencies. The result was the formation of an axis of anti-communist Catholic fundamentalism that united the ITGWU and the National Labour Party with the Catholic bishops and Fianna Fail.

One factor which helped this alliance gain considerable hegemony over workers was the approach that left wingers took to the Second
World War. The Communist Party was an insignificant force in the South but it was a different story in the North. Within two years of the invasion of the Soviet Union the party had grown to 1,000 members as it embraced “the patriotic war”. The party had moved from being a subversive body to one where its pamphlets were distributed to thousands of households and its meetings even advertised in Unionist Party publications. Around the party was also grouped a looser alliance of left wing trade union officials principally in the Amalgamated Transport and General Workers Union (ATGWU), which was the main British-based union in Ireland.

The Northern Irish working class responded to the war in quite contradictory ways. In the largely Protestant section of the workforce support for the war effort was combined with deep seated plebeian cynicism about the elite leading it and a determination to maintain some control over their working lives. The Catholic section of the workforce was simply indifferent and sometimes downright hostile. This combination led to an occurrence of considerable “lack of discipline” in the workforce. The number of strikes—particularly in aircraft, engineering and shipbuilding—grew considerably. Although Northern Ireland accounted for only 2.5 percent of the insured UK workforce, it accounted for 10 percent of the working days lost.
⁴³

In October 1942 a strike at Short and Harland over Sunday working and overtime led to the sacking of two shop stewards. In response the Belfast Shop Stewards movement was formed to link together all the major factories in the city to spread the strike. The Communist Party, however, took a position that “a strike, no matter under what circumstances it takes place, cannot be supported by our party”.
⁴⁴
Naturally this met with considerable hostility from the workers. On 25 February 1944 the largest wartime strike took place when 3,000 workers at Harland and Wolff shipyard came out to demand a pay rise. By 24 March 20,000 workers were on strike as a solidarity movement spread across the city. The Belfast Shop Stewards movement again led the struggle and five of its leaders were jailed. This only led to further solidarity action and Belfast was soon in the grip of a virtual general strike. Once again throughout these struggles the Communist Party was implacably opposed to the strikes. It manoeuvred behind the scenes to defuse the conflict and the shop stewards were released on bail. The strikers, however, won a pay rise and more autonomy for their shop stewards.
⁴⁵

Communist Party opposition to strikes arose from their uncritical acceptance that Britain was fighting an anti-fascist war. This position also
led them—and the wider left—to constantly challenge the neutrality of the South. The main forum for this occurred inside the Irish Trade Union Congress, a 32 county body that linked all unions together, and in the Labour Party to which many unions were affiliated. Communist Party officials from the North openly attacked neutrality and promoted the line of their Belfast party leader, Billy McCullough, that neutrality was “a matter of grave concern to democratic opinion” because it put Ireland “out of step with the rest of progressive mankind”.
⁴⁶
This view was echoed by the leader of the ATGWU, Sam Kyle, who spoke against neutrality at a Labour Party conference, claiming that Ireland “could not be indifferent to the national rights of France, Poland, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Holland, Yugoslavia, Albania, Greece and Czechoslovakia”.
⁴⁷
The significant omission from this interesting list was countries such as India, which had been colonised by the British Empire and therefore excluded from the category of those with national rights.