Part of a series of articles on Connolly: workersliberty.org/connolly
Introduction: Connolly, Larkin and The Irish Worker, by Sean Matgamna
Both Jim Larkin and James Connolly were Catholics, children respectively of Liverpool and Edinburgh Irish immigrants. Connolly was a “mick-mac”, an Irish Scots Catholic. Both received the religion as part of what they were. Both passed themselves off in Ireland as Irish-born, Connolly from Monaghan.
Connolly’s real age and origins were given in the official history of the Social Democratic Federation in 1935. With Desmond Greaves’s biography in 1961 they became more widely known.
Connolly was married in a Scottish Catholic church to a Dublin Protestant woman, Lillie Reynolds. That meant that they both promised to bring up any children as Catholics.
Waiting to be killed by the British Army in May 1916, Connolly received the Church’s death rites and the assurance that his soul would go straight from the killing yard to eternal bliss in Heaven.
While on the Executive of the Communist International in Moscow, wherein, he was, he told Dublin crowds, one of the rulers of the world, Jim Larkin went to Catholic mass.
This dimension is important in explaining that whole phase of Irish history. The Church was activity hostile to the Irish Transport Workers’ Union which Larkin and Connolly led. It denounced it, tried to get members to leave, strike- broke during the 1913 Labour War, and collaborated with the strike breakers and thugs of the anti-union Ancient Order of Hibernians (Board of Erin). Yet there was no big or stable break of workers towards secularism, as there had been in some European countries.
Republicans too were denounced by the Church; in detention in the mid 1920s some of them discussed forming a break-away Irish national Church, but did not. The break for the Dail in 1921 in the middle of discussing the Treaty, and the Catholic pressure to which Dail members were subjected “at home” over Christmas, may have won the eventual majority of seven for the Treaty. The Church denounced the Republicans in the civil war of 1922-3, saying in effect that by ignoring the priests, they were Protestants.
The four anti-Treaty Republicans, Liam Mellows, Rory O’Connor, Joe McKelvey and Richard Barrett, believers all, six months captives of the Treatyite Free State, told in December 1922 that they would be shot within hours as hostages, had to haggle in their last hours with political priests for their souls.
Yet all the leaders were and remained Catholics. So also Larkin and Connolly.
This was the more remarkable given that the great divide in Ireland took the form of religious division. It was much easier to get Protestants and Catholics to see the whole super-nature thing as nonsense than to get either to adopt the other’s history or theology.
A break with the Church was the natural course for both Protestant and Catholic. But that required leaders who had themselves broken. It also required commitment to an intra-Irish solution to the communal divide, and commitment to a secular labour movement and a secular national movement. Those conditions were not given.
The Irish Worker, a weekly edited by Jim Larkin, started in May 1911, and in its first months was explicitly antisemitic.
What never disappeared, what with Connolly as editor while Larkin was in jail in 1913, became worse, was an element of Catholic sectarianism.
In an early issue of The Irish Worker (26 August 1911) there is a nasty cartoon. Larkin was sufficiently aware that he put a self excusing caption on the cartoon, but that made it worse. “We have no objection to any man, Jew or Gentile, on account of his Nationality or Creed. What we do object to is the practice, which is becoming all too common, of Foreigners masquerading under Irish Names”. There are four or five all-print slurs on Jews. All that was before the Holocaust. But it fed into the Holocaust. These items read like material produced by professional “funny” papers and used to fill the The Irish Worker. We know where that was leading, and they did not.
Except for circulating the paper in Belfast, where he was Transport Union organiser, I doubt that Connolly had anything to do with this. Connolly on his earlier period in Dublin had issued literature from his Irish Socialist Republican Party to Jews in their own language (1902). Meanwhile had come the pogroms of Father John Creagh in Limerick city in 1904, which drove the small Jewish community to migrate to Cork.
There were probably protests about the antisemitism in The Irish Worker, because the antisemitic material ceased after a while.
The other sectarianism was presenting The Irish Worker as explicitly Catholic, in a country like Ireland with a 26% Protestant population. 25% of Dublin were Protestants, including Sean O’Casey, the future dramatist, and first secretary of the Citizen Army, and Connolly’s wife, Lillie Reynolds.
No paper that aspired to unite the workers, North and South, would have allowed that Catholic bias. The Irish Worker carried open speculation and comment on the election of a Pope (22 August 1914).
The third episode of Catholic sectarianism was the starting of a regular column by the Ancient Order of Hibernians in The Irish Worker. The Hibernians were split into the Board of Erin Hibs and a smaller AOH.
They had a chequered history. A group in the Philadelphia coalfields had responded with Irish agrarian secret society terrorism to the breaking of a strike, and wrote a glorious chapter in labour history, their methods notwithstanding; but the Board of Erin opposed unions and broke strikes. They provided thugs to beat strikers in the 1913-14 Labour War.
In 1909, under Joe Devlin MP, they took control of the Home Rule political party, provoking a split, and grew very powerful. They grew enormously in Catholic Ireland until they fell foul of the Catholic priests.
The other AOH steered clear of Joe Devlin and wrote as the AOH in The Irish Worker. It was probably to the union’s advantage against the Board of Erin to have the other AOH faction write. But all Hibernians existed to promote Catholics against Protestants, whether or not they opposed the union.
Writers such as Patrick Pearse blamed the activity of Devlin’s AOH as much or more than they blamed the Orange Order for partition. Yet the AOH, albeit a different faction, had a weekly column in The Irish Worker.
Faith and Fatherland, by James Connolly
Connolly ’s Yiddish leaflet to workers in Dublin
Running in a municipal election in 1902, Connolly distributed a Yiddish leaflet written for him by East London Jewish socialists.
The Dublin Municipal Elections, 15 January, 1902
Friends! On 15th January the Municipal elections will take place and you are asked to consider for whom to cast your vote. But, before you reach your decision we, Jewish Social Democrats, wish to say a few words,
There are three candidates on the list for the Wood Quay Ward: you have here a Home Ruler, another a publican, and one labour candidate of the Irish Socialist Republican Party, James Connolly, who is supported by the Dublin United Labourers Union.
For which of the candidates will you vote on 15th January? For the Home Ruler, the candidate of the bourgeoisie?
No, you cannot and you ought not do that! It is the bourgeoisie which always has the bag of gold before its eyes. Everything that stands in its way, everything that does not agree with its gut interests it tramples underfoot no matter how sacred that may be. It is the bourgeoisie that arouses race hatred, incites one people against another and causes wars. The bourgeoisie is the cause of anti-Semitism; with its press it provokes hatred of the Jew and seeks to throw the blame for everything upon the Jew in order to deceive the people and conceal its sins against its own people.
No, you cannot vote for the Home Ruler, the candidate of the bourgeoisie! The Home Rulers speak out against the English capitalists and the English landlords because they want to seize their places so that they themselves can oppress and exploit the people. No matter how nicely and well the Home Rulers talk or how much as friends of man they seek to appear or how much they shout about oppressed Ireland — they are capitalists. In their own homes they show their true colours and cast off their revolutionary democratic disguise and torment and choke the poor as much as they can. And you, Jews, what assurance do you have that one fine day they will not turn on you?
You ought to vote for the Socialist candidate and only for the Socialist candidate. The Socialists are the only ones who stand always and everywhere against every national oppression. It is the Socialists who went out into the streets of Paris against the wild band of anti-Semites at the time of the Dreyfus case. In Austria and in Germany they conduct a steady struggle against anti-Semitism. And in England, too, the Socialists fight against the reactionary elements who want to shut the doors of England against the poor Jews who were driven to seek a refuge in a strange land by the Russian government’s brutality and despotism.
The Socialist candidate is the only one for whom you ought to cast your vote.
In conclusion, a few words to you, Jewish workers of Dublin. Upon you rests the obligation to support the Socialist candidate as much as you can. The aims of the Irish Socialist Republican Party ought to be close to you. These are your own interests, the interests for which every knowledgeable worker must fight. These are the objectives for which every worker must strive. What does this party want? It wishes to abolish that system of private ownership under which the working class is condemned to labour, to create the wealth of the world and enjoy for itself absolutely nothing. It wishes to construct a system in which the worker shall have the right to benefit from his labour and live a free, happy and enlightened life without bosses and rulers over his body and soul.
Jewish workers! No matter how small your numbers are you can achieve much. Do your duty and work earnestly hand in hand with your Irish brothers. Canvass for votes, vote yourselves and persuade others to vote on the 15th of January for the Socialist candidate, James Connolly.
With Socialist greetings — The East London Jewish Branch of the Social Democratic Federation.
You must cast your vote at the New Street School.
James Connolly, 26 Fishamble Street, Dublin.
• Translation from Connolly Socialism and the Jewish Worker, by Manus O’Riordan, Saothar, 1988