Willie Gallacher, former MP

[Obituary notice by Desmond Greaves carried in the “Irish Democrat” for September 1965] 

The death of Mr William Gallacher at Paisley, Scotland, at the age of 83 breaks one of the last links with the days of revolution and civil war, when Irish Republicanism was closely linked to the Socialist movement in Britain.

Mr Gallacher, whose father was from Co. Donegal, but whose mother was a Scotswoman, was born in Paisley and was early in life filled with the desire to improve the appalling conditions then suffered by the Scottish workers on the Clyde. His first years of public activity were spent in the temperance movement, but by 1905 experience had taught him that personal abstinence, however praiseworthy, was not sufficient to cure the social ills of poverty and exploitation. 

He joined the Social Democratic Federation, the same organisation James Connolly had belonged to ten years previously. When this became the British Socialist Party he remained with it, and finally when it fused with the Socialist Labour Party – of which Connolly was also a member – to form the Communist Party he became a leading member of that also.

Perhaps of the British “left-wing” only T.A. Jackson was comparable in his special interest in Ireland. Jackson’s contribution was intellectual and his researches into Irish history will give him a special place as long as this is studied. Gallacher brought an emotional fervour perhaps only explicable by his Irish blood.

During the Anglo-Irish War only the extreme Left in Britain were unequivocally in favour of an Irish victory. Considerable assistance was given to the Republicans, many of whom were helped on their way to the continent by the good offices of men like Gallacher. In this way he came to know and won the respect of Cathal Brugha, Liam Mellows and Rory O’Connor.

One of Gallacher’s most important assignments was to cross to Dublin in 1921 to warn the Republicans that the Treaty was being signed. In his memoirs he told how Mellows and O’Connor jumped up, hands on guns, to go to Dun Laoire and arrest the negotiators before they could swing the country for the compromise. Cathal Brugha, decisive in everything else, wavered on this crucial occasion and the chance was lost. What would have happened if it had been taken nobody knows. For better or for worse it was not.

Gallacher especially endeared himself to the Irish in his tremendous fight against the notorious Ireland Act of 1949 [This gave an explicit veto to the Unionist Government in Belfast on any change in the constitutional position of the North – Ed.]. With a handful of staunch Labour MPs he exposed the Bill line for line. He said afterwards that he was convinced that the Labour Government did not know what it was doing. The one or two members they had who warned them, for example Hugh Delargy, were curtly brushed aside and given to understand that their political careers were not so promising as they had been. In the end the Bill was passed by Tory votes, an immense number of Labour members abstaining. It was one of the biggest revolts on the Left in Labour history.

Although a Protestant, Willie Gallacher was especially sympathetic to the Catholic workers and never subscribed to the one-time fashionable theory in some sections of the “left” that there was something inherently reactionary about them. In this he was at one with Connolly. On three occasions he spoke from Connolly Association platforms and several times contributed to the “Irish Democrat”.

Even those who rejected the fundamentals of his political philosophy respected his fearless integrity and inexhaustible activity. He was one of those men with whom it was a pleasure to all, in the words of Pope John XXIII, to co-operate in causes that were just and dignified. He was the inveterate enemy of cant and humbug and yet it is safe to say that he died without a personal enemy in the world.