Category Archives: General revolutionary history
Connolly’s view on the defeat of the clans
These are my notes on Connolly’s Labour in Irish History, chapt 8.
The defeat of 1641, according to Connolly, ended the old clan system. The involvement if old Anglo-Irish noblemen, he says, weakened the Irish side as they mainly wanted to maintain their own class position, in turn based on earlier confiscations. These contradictions meant they were riddled with equivocation and treachery. This movement of clans was huge and powerful, but had this fatal weakness: its own class divisions (like the Republican Movement in the Tan War period, I might add.)
With the destruction of clan society came a mixture of feudalism and capitalism, says Connolly.
He is very insightful about how the Protestant landed gentry and capitalists used more fanatically Protestant types to drive down the Catholic masses while, at the same time, exploiting the Protestant lower orders. (This is what later came to be in a really concentrated form, of course, in the six counties statelet.)
Incipient Irish capitalism was stymied by British rule, as the British capitalists did not want competition. But it reproduced opposition in Ireland over and over.
Once the economic reason ceased to drive Irish landlords and capitalists into opposition the upper elements ceased championing independence. Meanwhile, common suffering opened the way to the unity of Protestant and Catholic masses, argues Connolly.
The United Irish movement, he notes, represented the coming together of a series of developments in Irish society, an exceptional person (Tone) – or generation! – and a galvanising event (the French revolution).
Connolly notes how the French revolution changed the consciousness of both Catholics and Protestants, helping bring them together. Tensions between Catholics and Protestants gave way to conflict between the ruling class and a new force, which Connolly class “the democracy”. He reflects that Tone was waging a class war. It is very important to grasp that class war was key.
Moreover, United Irish and the English could only unite when Ireland was independent (a point very reminiscent of what Engels said.)
Connolly recorded that the aristocracy was “anti-freedom”, the Irish fight was part of a global struggle and that Irish fighters were allied with British revolutionaries. (Of course, today it is quite hard to find these today!) The Irish struggle represented what in those days were called “the rights of man” in Ireland.
Tone had asserted that when the aristocracy go forward, the people fall backward, and we might say that when the Irish capitalist class today run things, the masses (in particular, the working class, goes backwards).
Connolly records the celebrations in Belfast over the fall of the Bastille.
Lastly, in this chapter, he records that Tone was combining the national and the socio-economic. He was for making a revolution.
Now, we resume
Well, a month has gone by and nothing. But today or tomorrow I will be getting up some notes on Connolly’s Labour In Irish History from a study/discussion group organised by Eirigi. It’s a couple of chapters where I led the discussion, chapters 8 and 9, in particular dealing with Emmet’s rebellion, which was even more radical than the main United Irish movement which had been crushed in 1798. Emmet was the kind of “last gasp” of the UI movement and especially proletarian.
2021 Calendar – commemorating the 1981 hunger strike
Éirígí’s 2021 calendar is a very special one to mark the 40th anniversary of the 1981 hunger strike.
Including information, artwork, photos and key dates relating to one of the most important events in modern Irish history, these are not to be missed.
Available for just €10 each, all proceeds go to help fund our campaigns, including housing, natural resources, an Teanga and to build support for a new all-Ireland Republic!
Éirígí does not receive any funding from the state or wealthy donors. And we don’t have the backing of any state or private media outlets. Instead we are entirely reliant on the generosity of our party members and supporters who give what they can, when they can.
Copies of the calendar are available from Siopa Éirígí here.
Political activist and radical photographer Séamus O’Riain,1937-2014
by Mick Healy
“There are those of us who try to follow the path once taken by Casement, Pearse, Connie Green and O’Hanlon. We seek to put through the charter that was bought with blood of our glorious dead in 1916, which the Free State Regime failed to do, a charter that would make an All-Ireland Workers Republic.” – Séamus O’Riain, HM Prison Brixton, September 1967.
Séamus (Ryan) O’Riain was born into poverty on September 2, 1937 to Katherine Ryan in Dublin. When Katherine married a Tom Ryan, Séamus was fostered out to a family called Corbally; unfortunately he was to end up in Drainages children’s detention centre in County Offaly. What’s more, he remained there for about three years before he was reunited with Katherine and step-father Tom at 51 Viking Road, Arbour Hill, Dublin. (Drainages treated the children more like slaves than children, stated a commission in 2009 that inquired into child abuse at the detention centre.)
O’Riain became an accomplished photographer; his employment for a number of years was with Jerome Photography Studio at 4 Henry Street, Dublin. He created hundreds of remarkable images which are a vital history of Republican and left-wing activity. Moreover, the photographs with his Phoenix Company in London featured Brendan Behan, The Dubliners and Tom Barry, the former Commander of the IRA’s Third West Cork Flying Column during the Irish War of Independence. Tom Barry praised him in a letter dated 24, August 1977, “A hundred note of thanks for your splendid set of photos. They are the finest I have ever seen and I have, unfortunately, had hundreds taken.”
Seamus’ association with radicalism went back to his youth when he joined the IRA along with his comrade Liam Sutcliffe, during Operation Harvest (the IRA 1950s border campaign). Like others of his generation, O’Riain Read the rest of this entry
Phil O’Donoghue and Operation Harvest
This is the story of Phil O’Donoghue who in 1954 joined the Irish Republican Army in Dublin and subsequently participated in Operation Harvest/the Border Campaign. On New Year’s Day 1957, Phil was a member of a military column during a raid against an RUC barracks in Brookeboroug, in which Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon lost their lives. Along with 38 volunteers he was arrested at an IRA training camp in Wicklow and was imprisoned in the Curragh camp.
O’Donoghue became the National Organiser of the 32-County Sovereignty Movement that was founded on December 7, 1997.
This interview was done by Mick Healy who sent it on to me, along with the intro above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYkW_l6VvnU&feature=emb_logo
Seán Cronin on The Untold Story of The Clan na Gael (1992 talk, New York)
Seán Cronin was originally an officer in the Free State army, who subsequently joined the IRA and became chief-of-staff planning and overseeing Operation Harvest (1956-62). Later he lived in the USA and became US correspondent for the Irish Times. He is the author of several books too, most famously Irish Nationalism: a history of its roots and ideology (Dublin, Academy Press, 1980). Here he is in New York, 1992, speaking on Clan na Gael, the Fenian organisation in the United States in the 1800s and 1900s.