Communism in Modern Ireland     [1985]

Communism in Modern Ireland     [1985]

[Desmond Greaves wrote the review below of Mike Milotte’s book “Communism in Modern Ireland: The Pursuit of the Workers’ Republic since 1916” in the June 1985 issue of the “Irish Democrat” under the heading “Written by an Enemy”.  He signed it with his frequently used pseudonym “Feicreanach”.  The book was published by Gill and MacMillan, Dublin, in 1984.]

After the execution of James Connolly in 1916 Irish Marxism went into temporary eclipse. It was revived by Connolly’s son, Roderick, who in 1921 secured the leadership of the small Socialist Party of Ireland, a descendant of Connolly’s Irish Socialist Republican Party, expelled the moderate leaders and took it into the Third (Communist) International. The party was renamed Communist Party of Ireland.

It opposed the “treaty” of December 1921 and some of its members fought on the Republican side in the Civil War. The party did not flourish, and the hopes of the “left” for a time rested on James Larkin who returned from the USA in 1923.

His “Irish Worker League” flourished no better. Attempts were made to relaunch the CPI, but without success. Around 1929 a fresh attempt was made with the establishment of the Revolutionary Workers’ Groups, which ultimately coalesced to form the second Communist Party of Ireland in 1933.

This party notched  up some modest successes in the establishment of the Republican Congress and a very material contribution to the International Brigade that fought in Spain against Franco and his German and Italian backers. It was partly thanks to loss of cadres in the Spanish war that the party found itself considerably weakened, and under the conditions of the Second World War confined to Belfast.

The Irish Workers’ League was founded in 1948 in Dublin. This became the Irish Workers’ Party [in 1962] and ultimately this fused with the northerners to reconstitute the Communist Party of Ireland [in 1970].

Communism has therefore contributed a small but distinct strand to the web of Irish history, and has produced notable figures such as Roderick Connolly, Patrick Gaffney, Sean Murray, Peadar O’Donnell and Elizabeth Sinclair [Patrick Gaffney was elected a Labour TD in the 1922 General Election. He joined the CPI in protest at the Constitution of the Irish Free State requiring the Oath of Allegiance from all legislators. He died in 1943.]

To find out what these people did, what function their movement performed, and its relation to Irish Republicanism as a whole, even if the writer thought the whole thing mistaken and deplorable, would be a service to the public.

Mr Milotte accumulates much information for which the reader is grateful, but unfortunately feels himself compelled not only to say what was done but to imply at every point what ought to have been done, had the Irish communists only had the advantage of Mr Milotte’s Trotskyist insight.

This insight is essentially anti-national. Mr Milotte inveighs against what he calls the “stages theory”, which distinguishes the struggle for national independence from the struggle for socialism, and implies that the former takes temporal precedence.

He asks the question “Was there a national solution to the national question, or could it only be resolved within an international revolutionary process?” It would be nice to know what his answer would be. What does he mean by an “international revolutionary process”?

It is unfortunate that Mr Milotte judges his subject matter in the light of concepts as vague as this. 

Though, his prejudices apart, the broad outlines of the history can be taken from this book, there are very many errors of detail. The Irish Citizen Army was not “the first ever proletarian ‘Red Army’”. Larkin did not leave for the USA “immediately” it was established, but nearly a year later. The Tom Bell who went to Ireland in 1930 is identified with Connolly’s old associate. There is no connection. And Mr Anthony Coughlan, who was never a member of the Communists or the IRA, is not likely to appreciate the implication on page 265 that with Roy Johnston he was a “newcomer to the Republican ranks”.

The subject deserves a dispassionate study, but Mr Milotte is too obsessed by his own brand of politics to do justice to those of other people. A pity. He might have made a job of it.

• Feicreanach