Identity and self-representation in Irish communism:
the Connolly Column and the Spanish Civil War

Notes on this table:

Various lists of the Connolly Column have been compiled on the basis of snippets gleaned from a range of sources, and it is impossible to be exact on figures. All lists include all those born in Ireland as, while many of the expatriates were politicized abroad, others were the product of Irish politics, and some, notably those in the London, where the Republican Congress had a branch, were still engaged with Ireland. This table does not include second generation exiles or the ‘honorary Irish’, foreigners who associated with the Irish in Spain. The total of 243 includes five who served with the POUM, the CNT, or the Madrid militia, five who served in medical units, and one driver on a supply convoy. The others were International Brigaders.

‘Communist’ refers to membership of any communist party before Spain.

‘Previous republican affiliation’ means former membership of the Citizen Army, IRA, or Republican Congress.

‘Labour/socialist’ includes an anarchist and members of the Irish and Northern Ireland Labour Parties, the SPNI, the (British) Independent Labour Party, and the Industrial Workers of the World.

‘Non-party’ includes a Quaker and volunteers designated as such or known to be of no political affiliation.

Sources: RGASPI, Moscow, International Brigades in the Spanish Republican Army, 545/6/-; Marx Memorial Library, London, International Brigades Memorial Archive; newspapers, especially the Irish Democrat; O’Riordan, Connolly Column; and the most authoritative and comprehensive website on the topic, www.oocities.org/IrelandSCW/ maintained by Ciarán Crossey, Belfast International Brigades Commemorative Committee (IBCC).

The Irish were unusual too in their policy on recruitment. O’Donnell said he wanted just enough men to make a credible counterpoint to O’Duffy. His claim that hundreds had offered to fight but ‘he selected only 145’ was echoed by Ryan, and divers sources attest that O’Donnell, Ryan, and the CPI dissuaded them from going to Spain, arguing that they were needed at home. Tacitly accepting special treatment for the Irish, the XV International Brigade allowed Ryan to repatriate those he deemed to have done a reasonable tour of duty. (19)

Wherever the Irish in Spain formed a critical mass, they did what they could to assert their distinctive politics. The most controversial instance occurred in January 1937 when the Irish were denied battalion status for lack of numbers. In one of only two such ‘mutinies’ in the International Brigades, the majority left the British battalion and formed the ‘James Connolly centuria’ of the Abraham Lincoln battalion. The centuria commemorated Easter Week, 1916 on the Jarama front in March 1937, and organized a more official commemoration, with formal XV Brigade participation, on 12 May, the 21st anniversary of Connolly’s execution. The gathering pledged to fight fascism internationally, and ‘imperialism, native and British’ at home. Just over a year later the Irish on the Ebro front marked the high point in the republican calendar with a ceremony for Wolfe Tone, founder of the United Irishmen. (20) Drawing comparisons between Spain and Ireland became a theme of ‘communist republicanism’. With their strong sense of history, republicans found all sorts of connections: O’Duffy and Franco; the misuse of religion by the bishops; the nationalism of the Irish, the Basques, and the Catalans; the struggle of the landless against landlords; stories of Republican atrocities and loyalist propaganda against the insurgents in 1798; and the hysteria for ‘Catholic Spain’ in 1936 and ‘Catholic Belgium’ in 1914. (21)

As the war progressed, the CPI took an increasingly republican line, even to the point of jeopardizing the effort for Spain. The CPI’s relations with the IRA improved when Tom Barry became chief of staff in June 1936. Though Barry banned IRA volunteers from going to Spain, the ban applied to both sides and the motivation was to keep the army focused on what he regarded as its primary purpose rather than fear of the crozier. Barry ended the IRA’s proscription on CPI membership – introduced in 1933 – and the party found him ‘very sympathetic and helpful’. (22) Ryan resumed collaboration with the IRA, for the first time since the split in 1934. In March 1937 the CPI retired its organ, the Worker,, in favour of the Irish Democrat, which was published jointly with the Republican Congress and the SPNI. The Democrat survived tensions over Spain: its denunciation of the POUM as ‘fascists in the rear’ provoked objections from the SPNI. It did not survive tensions over Ireland. The CPI complained of having to exclude IRA targetted material to accommodate the SPNI, whose membership was at once largely Protestant, anti-partition, and anti-IRA. (23) The Irish Democrat collapsed in December when the cash-rich SPNI withdrew its support over the paper’s republican slant. Ironically, the SPNI’s sizable war chest was the balance of compensation for the burning of its hall by loyalists in 1921.

Republicanism of a softer variety was central to Moscow’s analysis of Ireland. Éamon de Valera’s refusal to recognise the Franco regime in the face of pressure from the Catholic Church, Fine Gael, and the Christian Front, earned him some respect on the far left. Comintern experts believed that, augmented by the return of O’Duffy’s ‘fascist bravos’, the Christian Front would mount a serious challenge to Fianna Fáil in the 1937 general election, and strengthen ‘developments towards fascism in Ireland’. The CPI was directed to broaden its membership, and develop a new popular front that would include the rank and file of Fianna Fáil. The Comintern also considered inviting ‘a small group of influential Fianna Fáil people’ to Moscow, and promoting cultural and trade relations between Russia and Ireland. The CPI’s election manifesto duly called, not for the replacement of Fianna Fáil, but for ‘a vigorous working class and republican opposition’ to make Fianna Fáil ‘fight’. (24)

The general election in July 1937 was indeed a watershed for partisans of the Spanish conflict. The Fianna Fáil government survived with a reduced majority. But Fine Gael too lost ground and the Christian Front threat failed to materialize. O’Duffy’s men had limped home in June, to be received with embarrassment on account of their poor military performance, and internal disputes which suggested some disillusionment with Franco and his war. On all sides, interest in Spain began to abate.

‘Viva la Quince Brigada'

Today, there is nothing to commemorate O’Duffy’s brigade. By contrast, there are fourteen memorials to men of the Connolly Column. More are in the pipeline. Identification with the International Brigades goes well beyond the far left. The monument in Waterford was erected on behalf of the city, and others have had the approval of local authorities. Tributes have been paid to the Connolly Column by Presidents of Ireland and Lords Mayor of Dublin and Belfast. In 2001, Michael O’Riordan, a veteran of the British battalion in Spain and longtime general secretary of the CPI, was invited to address the Labour Party’s annual conference and hailed by the party leader as a champion of democracy in the 1930s. When Peter O’Connor, a sergeant in the Lincoln battalion, died in 1999, his death was the lead item on the flagship news bulletin of the state television channel, RTÉ 1. The same RTÉ commissioned a seven hour television history of the state, Seven Ages, broadcast in 2000, which never once mentioned labour. So what is the celebration of the Connolly Column about?

The key to this question lies in the power of the Catholic church in Ireland from the 1930s to the 1960s, and the way in which the church made anti-communism an expression of that power. The church said little on communism in the 1920s, communist public meetings attracted no hostility, and there were occasions when Fianna Fáil politicians stood on communist platforms. The coincidence of three developments in 1929-30 would change that profoundly. First, in December 1929 Josef Stalin launched a new campaign against religion in Russia. Pope Pius XI responded in 1930 by virtually excommunicating communists. Secondly, the Papal encyclical Quadragesimo Anno (1931) encouraged a specifically Catholic engagement in society and politics. Thirdly, the centenary celebrations of Catholic emancipation in 1929 – followed by the Eucharistic Congress in Dublin in 1932 – palpably demonstrated to a pleasantly surprised clergy that they were no longer of a minority church in a Protestant state, but enjoyed a virtually unchallenged status in independent Ireland. Catholic reaction emerged in early 1930, and fought a small, but growing, communist movement by creating a near totalitarian intolerance of any expression of socialism. It was clear by 1933 that the church had triumphed.

While the CPI was legal, Comintern agents in Dublin complained of a ‘spirit of illegality’ in the party. Pat Devine reported ‘serious capitulatory tendencies shown by our members in the face of [Lenten religious sermons]. On more than one occasion I had to practically force our comrades to hold [street] meetings’. (26) The climate extended to labour too – the Labour Party submitted its constitution to vetting by the hierarchy in 1938, and duly removed references found contrary to Catholic teaching – and would intensify during the height of the Cold War, when any expression of socialism or leftwing internationalism was tabu. (27) Given the weakness of the left, it beggars belief that the rationale was political. Arguably, it was not theological. Plausibly, it was a means of establishing loyalty to clerical authority.

Attitudes relaxed in the 1960s. And whereas the liberalism of that decade was often justified with references to the reforming pontificate of John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council, the 1970s saw the growth of secularism, and the emergence of demands for reform of legislation on sexuality, public morality, and control of education: a socio-political force which the media labelled ‘the liberal agenda’. The Catholic hierarchy won some tactical battles against ‘the liberal agenda’ in the 1970s, but by the mid 1980s it was patently losing the war. By the 1990s, secular liberalism was the new hegemony. The Spanish Civil War served as a reminder of how things were, and how much had changed. The Connolly Column became re-imagined as a prophetic forerunner of modern, pluralist Ireland. Just as the Catholic Church had exploited fear of communism to demonstrate its imperium, so the left now used anti-communism to flaunt its new-found freedom, and excorcise the ghosts of its submission to clericalism. As O’Riordan observed on his invitation to address the Labour Party in 2001, it ‘revers[ed] the role of that Party during the War itself’. (28)

The first Irish memorial of the Spanish Civil War was erected in 1984. Others were unveiled in 1989, 1991, 1994, 1996, 1997 and each year from 2003. In all cases, the initiatives were substantially local, driven by local people seeking to remember local heroes or connect their locality with Spain. The first two were in a well-worn tradition of republican commemoration, and dedicated to two republicans. Subsequent projects were led mainly by trade unionists and social radicals. Typically, speeches at trade union led ceremonies focused on anti-fascism and international solidarity, representing the war as a conflict of good and evil, which attracted, almost magnetically, the best men to fight the good fight. The republicanism of the Connolly Column does not sit comfortably with the contemporary left. Belfast offers an acute example of selective, ‘present centred’ commemoration. No less than four memorials appeared in the city in 2006 and 2007, commissioned by the Workers’ Party, Sinn Féin, the Belfast Unemployed Resource Centre, and the IBCC. That Belfast volunteers were Catholic and Protestant makes them rather precious in a divided city, and as cross-community projects, the trades council sponsored Unemployed Resource Centre and the IBCC emphasise the diversity of their backgrounds more than anything else. The inscription on the splendid IBCC memorial in the centre of Belfast’s arts quarter uses the mincing language of Northern Ireland’s peace and reconciliation industry: ‘Dedicated to the people of Belfast, the island of Ireland and beyond who joined the XV International Brigade to fight Fascism in the Spanish Civil War 1936-39, and to those men and women from all traditions who supported the Spanish working people and their Republic’. (29)

What would the Connolly Column make of it all? Unfortunately, public opinion on the Spanish Civil War turned turtle too late for most. O’Donnell’s edited memoir in 1974 featured a chapter on Spain without generating much interest in the subject. (30) When O’Riordan’s Connolly Column appeared in 1979, it was printed in the German Democratic Republic for want of an amenable printer in Ireland. Not until the mid 1980s did a stream of related publications begin to flow, including including biographies, souvenirs, local and general histories, poems, plays, and songs, notably Christy Moore’s Viva la Quince Brigada, but only five autobiographical memoirs: by Joe Monks (1985), Eoghan Ó Duinnín (1986), Peter O’Connor (1996), and Bob Doyle (2002 and 2006). (31) To the five recollections can be added oral history interviews with Frank Edwards (1980) and O’Riordan (1990), and O’Riordan’s Connolly Column itself, which, if informative and factual, is a eulogistic CPI version of events. (32)

These six veterans and their memoirs have a number of characteristics in common. All went into print as a contribution to radicalism, most at the prompting of younger admirers with a romantic view of Spain, which explains why the authors, apart from Ó Duinnín, were all communists. Possibly because he left party for activism ‘in an individual kind of way’, or possibly because he wrote in Irish, his second language, which provided a sense of distance from the text and concealment from all but the few who read it fluently, Ó Duinnín offered the most candid account, peppered with amusing anecdotes showing comrades to be more human than the stainless heroes of legend. (33) All the autobiographers leave the reader wishing they had written more, or been challenged by what we know of the CPI since the opening of the Moscow archives. On balance, the memoirs said little on life within the communist party, on their authors’ understanding of communism, or on the Comintern and communist politics internationally. Glossing over the fractiousness of the Irish left in the 1930s, and the sharp shifts in Comintern policy, they represented the authors in relatively bland terms as idealistic radicals, and victims of Catholic intolerance. On Spain, they dealt with military life more than politics, and depicted the war as simply a struggle of democracy against fascism. All were republicans, and noted the importance of republicans to the Irish left and the Connolly Column. At the same time, they moved seamlessly from the ‘communist republicanism’ of the 1930s to the liberalism of the post 1970s. Veterans who spoke at public meetings on the International Brigades from the 1980s said little on republicanism, and presented themselves as anti-fascists more than communists, ever ready to support contemporary causes, but vindicated by the restoration of liberal democracy in Spain.

Conclusion

On the eve of Ireland’s accession to the European Union (EU), Lyons wrote of ex-Blueshirts and ex-IRA men reprising the Irish Civil War in ‘the will-o’-the wisp of the Spanish Civil War…that had nothing to do with any of them’. (34) Recent researchers have been more impressed with how European Irish mentalities were in 1936, and how tens of thousands identified with the Catholic church, or with anti-fascism, in Spain. (35) But the Connolly Column didn’t spring out of nothing. It was the product of the CPI and the Republican Congress, and the last hurrah of a socialist republicanism that can be traced to the foundation of the ITGWU by Larkin in 1909. When Labour abandoned republicanism in 1922, the communists stepped in, and the Comintern was remarkably successful in persuading a section of the IRA to adopt its Weltanschauung. Spain was the swansong of a politics throttled by clerical intolerance at home, and, equally, a last-ditch effort to sustain that politics in Ireland.

The image of pre EU Ireland – a station on the highway between Europe and America, speaking the most global of languages, practicing the most catholic of religions, with a large and far flung diaspora touching almost each of its families – as introspective and isolated endures in public perceptions: an asset to liberals and EU integrationists alike. And the Connolly Column, one of the great examples of Irish extroversion, has become subsumed into the myth. Not even the rehabilitation of Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (VALB) in the United States compares with the re-discovery and lionization of the Connolly Column. Like VALB, which was invoked by such as President Ronald Reagan, the Column’s history has been appropriated by some implausible friends. (36) In the process, its ‘communist republicanism’ has been sloughed off. Its published veterans did not deny their political pedigree, but their memorialists have other values and other agendas.

Notes

1 Russian State Archive for Social and Political History (Rossiiskii Gosudartsvennyi Arkhiv Sotsial’no-Politischeskoi Istorii, RGASPI), Moscow, Memorandum on Ireland, 22 May 1937, 495/89/102-5/9. Back to the text.

2 J.J. Lee, Ireland, 1912-1985: Politics and Society (Cambridge, 1989). Back to the text.

3 There are two general histories of Irish communism, Mike Milotte, Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers’ Republic since 1916 (Dublin, 1984); and Emmet O’Connor, Reds and the Green: Ireland, Russia, and the Communist Internationals, 1919-43 (Dublin, 2004). Except where stated, references to Irish communism are based on Reds and the Green. Back to the text.

4 See the British Parliamentary Paper, Intercourse Between Bolshevism and Sinn Féin, Cmd.1326 (1921). Another example of British propaganda is Richard Dawson, Red Terror and Green (London, 1920). Back to the text.

5 See especially T. A. Jackson, Ireland Her Own (London, 1947), the first Marxist general history of Ireland, and C. Desmond Greaves, The Life and Times of James Connolly (London, 1961), and Liam Mellows and the Irish Revolution (London, 1971). Back to the text.

6 The term was not coined until the 1970s, when it was suggested to Michael O’Riordan as a title for his eponymous history, but it has a true pedigree. The first Irish volunteers, serving in the 16th battalion, XV International Brigade, called themselves the ‘Irish column’, and later the ‘Connolly unit’. In January 1937 a James Connolly centuria was formed in the Abraham Lincoln battalion and survived until rendered inoperable by casualties in the battle of Brunete. Michael O’Riordan, Connolly Column: The Story of the Irishmen Who Fought in the Ranks of the International Brigades in the National-Revolutionary War of the Spanish People, 1936-1939 (Pontypool, 2005), pp.2-3 (first ed, Dublin, 1979). Back to the text.

7 John M. Regan, The Irish Counter-Revolution, 1921- 1936: Treaty Politics and Settlement (Dublin, 2001), p.283. Back to the text.

8 Patrick F. Sheeran, The Informer (Cork, 2002), pp.1-12. O’Flaherty did say that the book was based on events in ‘some town in Saxony’, but he also claimed to be living in fear of his life in consequence of the novel. It would be quite out of keeping with his other work if O’Flaherty had not set The Informer in Ireland and based it on personal experience. Back to the text.

9 Betty Sinclair, ‘A woman’s fight for socialism, 1910-80’, Saothar, 9 (1983), pp.121-32; Joe Deasy, ‘The evolution of an Irish Marxist, 1941-50’, Saothar, 13 (1988), pp.112-19; Andy Barr, ‘An undiminished dream: Andy Barr, communist trade unionist’, Saothar, 16 (1991), pp.95-111. The oral history of Sinclair is based on two lengthy taped interviews, one of which is with the CPI and the other is in the archive of the Irish Labour History Society, Dublin. Back to the text.

(10) Century of Endeavour is also available in hypertext, with footnotes hotlinked to primary material, making it interactive for those wishing to engage with the author. Back to the text.

(11) The appeal of Ernie O’Malley’s memoirs, On Another Man’s Wound (Dublin, 1936), and The Singing Flame (Dublin, 1978), lies partly in their exceptionality in this regard. Back to the text.

(12) William O’Brien, Forth the Banners Go: Reminiscences of William O’Brien as Told to Edward MacLysaght, D.Litt (Dublin, 1969). Back to the text.

(13) Frank Ryan, quoted in Steve Nugent, No Coward Soul: Jack Nalty (1902-1938) (Toronto, 2003), pp.40-1. Back to the text.

(14) Two academic studies exist: Robert A. Stradling, The Irish in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939: Crusades in Conflict (Manchester, 1999); and Fearghal McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War (Cork, 1999). Back to the text.

(15) McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War, pp.182-90. Back to the text.

(16) Stradling, The Irish and the Spanish Civil War, p.132. Back to the text.

(17) McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War, p.58 estimates that half of recruits to the Connolly Column in Ireland had been in the post Civil War IRA. Back to the text.

(18) Communists accounted for approximately 60% of French, 62% of British, and 70% of United States volunteers. Richard Baxell, British Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War: The British Battalion in the International Brigades, 1936-1939 (London, 2004), pp.15, 23; Andy Durgan, ‘Freedom Fighters or Comintern army? The International Brigades in Spain’, International Socialism, 84 (autumn, 1999). Back to the text.

(19) Michael McInerney, Peadar O’Donnell, Irish Social Rebel (Dublin, 1974), p.179; McGarry, Irish Politics and the Spanish Civil War, p.58; O’Connor, Reds and the Green, p.281; Uinseann McEoin, The IRA in the Twilight Years, 1923-1948 (Dublin, 1997), p.769. Back to the text.

(20) Frank Ryan (ed), The Book of the XV Brigade: Records of British, American, Canadian, and Irish Volunteers in the XV International Brigade in Spain, 1936-1938 (Pontypool, 2003), p.91 (first ed, Madrid, 1938); O’Riordan, Connolly Column, pp.2-3, 77-8, 124. Back to the text.

(21) Comparison between Ireland and Spain was particularly marked in the Irish Democrat. See also the ‘manifesto’ of 13 International Brigaders then resident in Ireland in the Irish Democrat, 23 October 1937. Back to the text.

(22) O’Connor, Reds and the Green, p.222-3. Back to the text.

(23) See, for example, the attack on the IRA by Victor Halley, SPNI, Irish Democrat, 12 June 1937. Back to the text.

(24) O’Connor, Reds and the Green, pp.220-1. Back to the text.

(25) From Christy Moore’s ballad of that name. Back to the text.

(26) RGASPI, Pat Devine, ***(p.206) Back to the text.

(27) Niamh Puirséil, The Irish Labour Party, 1922-73 (Dublin, 2007), p.71. Back to the text.

(28) O’Riordan, Connolly Column (2005 ed.), p.4. Back to the text.

(29) The memorials (with date of erection and dedication) are located in:

See Colin Williams, Bill Alexander, and John Gorman, Memorials of the Spanish Civil War (Stroud, 1996), pp.52-7;

www.oocities.org/IrelandSCW/ Back to the text.