Captain Jack White, the Boer War hero who helped found the Irish Citizen Army, had a varied career, both in left wing politics and personally. One brief episode was as a Labour candidate in Donegal.
In the June 1922 general election labour had not fought the constituency. But for the 1923 elections, local labour decided early in the year to contest.
White was seen as being on labour's left wing. He would have been known personally to some in the area because, in the summer of 1914 he had drilled Irish Volunteers in Derry City, Inishowen and Tyrone.
The sympathies of the meeting in Raphoe that adopted him are
clear. He was invited to stand "as a candidate in the interests of the 'Workers'
Republic'. "
Within two weeks of this a Tirconnaill Workers' Council was
set up at a meeting in Letterkenny. It took a more revolutionary name, Workers Council,
rather than Trades Council. Six union branches were represented on the platform, one being
a National Union of Railwaymen branch that included Strabane, Co. Tyrone.
After the meeting, a "large number of the workers of
Letterkenny enrolled and formed a branch" of the Labour league set up that evening.
Within a week a public meeting for White was organised in
Letterkenny. He called for a "combination of the farmer and the labourer to change
the system at the root, and introduce communal ownership". But "without the help
of the Churches in remoulding human nature to believe and apply Christianity, what he
sought could not be achieved."
While personally a dedicated socialist, White the man was
erratic in the extreme. After about a week, he resigned as candidate. Writing to the Derry
journal, he described himself as a Christian communist, declared he was "not prepared
to go forward as the representative of any class or party, but only of a
principle…the voluntary change to communal ownership of the land" and the
"gradual withering of the poisoned branches of standing armies, prisons and the
workhouse system".
Dismissively, he found "that my invitation to contest
Tirconaill in the workers' interest issued only from a small group with no claim to
represent the district as a whole". Proclaiming his refusal to take the oath which
was required to sit in the Dail, he still appealed for co-operation from the churches in implementing communism.
