The failure of socialist republicanism in the Irish revolution and its aftermath - Part 10


Frank Robbins in Irish Citizen Army uniform (from 1913committee.ie website).


CONTINUED FROM PREVIOUS POST.

 Disunity 

In his testimony to the Bureau of Military History, given in 1951, Frank Robbins, a former sergeant in the Irish Citizen Army, describes a meeting he had with Larkin in New York in 1917. Robbins had conveyed a message to Larkin from Thomas Foran, a leading figure in the ITGWU. According to Robbins, "Larkin seemed less interested in hearing the message I had to give than in making wild charges against John Devoy, Judge Daniel F. Cohalan [both senior members of the Irish nationalist community in America] and other Irish People in America". He then, according to Robbins, went on to declaim against James Connolly, Pádraig Pearse and Thomas McDonagh, all signatories of the 1916 'Proclamation of the Irish Republic', who had been executed by the British for their role in the Easter Rising, stating that "Connolly had no right whatever to bring off the Insurrection as he, Larkin, had sent him a cable, over the signature 'Mary', telling him to call it all off". Later in the account of the interview, which took place in Larkin's hotel room, Robbins says that Larkin "drew his valise from under the bed and in a most dramatic fashion showed me two small sticks of gelignite, stating, 'This is the kind of work we are doing here'" (this gesture may have signified a desire, on Larkin’s part, to be seen as just as willing to engage in secretive violent plots as the likes of Connolly had been).(1) 

 

Later in the account, Robbins recounts a story told to him by the feminist and Irish Citizen Army member Margaret Skinnider, in which Larkin had accused Liam Mellows (like Skinnider, an Easter Rising veteran then in self-imposed exile in America) of being involved in "secret moves that were being made from New York". When Mellows claimed to know nothing of any "secret moves", Larkin threatened to turn him in to "other authorities", to which Mellows replied that "Irishmen have a way of treating informers".(2) It seems that Larkin, with his controlling personality, had a gift for alienating potential allies, not only in the socialist republican movement but also senior members of the advanced nationalist movement. As a leading figure in socialist republicanism, both before 1914 and in the early years of the Irish Free State, Larkin's difficulties in working with other leaders would most certainly not have helped advance the fortunes of that movement, or the potential of the disparate socialist republican groups to unite in the interests of their common cause. 

 

How important a factor was the lack of unity amongst the leadership of the socialist republican movement in the Irish Free State of the 1920s? Certainly Roddy Connolly, son of the executed Irish republican socialist leader James Connolly, believed that unity amongst socialist republicans was crucial. In a letter to the editor of the Irish Independent in May 1923, Roddy Connolly, then leader of the Communist Party of Ireland, appealed for harmony between the ITGWU leadership and its former leader James Larkin, who had returned to Ireland the previous month. Not only was Larkin in dispute with the ITGWU over the ownership of various union assets, but the Irish Independent itself had begun publishing letters which had been made available to it by James Connolly’s widow, Lillie Connolly, and by former leading ITGWU official, then Labour TD for Dublin South, William O’Brien, which were highly critical of Larkin’s behaviour and motivations prior to his emigration to the United States of America in 1914. These letters had the effect of exacerbating the feud between Larkin and his former colleagues in the Labour movement – O’Brien in particular. 

 

In his letter, Roddy Connolly stresses the importance of unity within the Labour movement, even criticising his mother for having allowed the letters to be published. He warns that the dispute between Larkin and the ITGWU leadership could “consume the whole splendid organisation of the I.T. and G.W.U., built so laboriously and well by the Irish working class, and result in reducing the workers to impotency and despair once more”. He describes the division within Labour organisations as being contemplated “gleefully” by the “master class” and urges all those who adhere to the spirit of his father’s principles “to do all possible to overcome the present unfortunate misunderstanding or split and help to reform the ranks of Labour into a united front against aggression”. At the end of the letter, Connolly again calls for “the joint creation of a united front of Labour against the coming days of storm and stress”.(3) 

 

Despite Roddy Connolly’s calls for unity, neither Larkin nor O’Brien appeared willing to bury their personal differences in the interests of socialist republican unity. More than two months after the publication of Connolly’s letter, on the eve of the 1923 general election in which William O’Brien was once again standing for a seat in the Dublin South constituency, O’Brien wrote to the Freeman’s Journal to complain about a handbill that had been issued by James Larkin, “containing a number of lying and slanderous allegations concerning me by which he hopes to throw dust in the eyes of the workers and stampede them into voting against me”. The article which reported the contents of O’Brien’s letter also mentioned several letters sent to him by James Connolly between 1911 and 1913, which O’Brien had recently made public. The letters are extremely unflattering to Larkin, describing him as “unreliable”, not wanting “a democratic Labour movement”, “simply unbearable”, “consumed with jealousy and hatred of anyone who will not cringe to him and beslaver him with praise”.(80) While these phrases and the letters themselves may not necessarily have given the full picture of the relationship between Connolly and Larkin, who had, after all, worked well together on many occasions, the actions of William O’Brien in publishing them in the newspapers at this time do not indicate a prioritising of the need for organisational unity within the socialist republican movement of the early 1920s. 

TO BE CONTINUED IN NEXT POST


1. F. Robbins, Bureau of Military History witness statement, BMH WS 585, pp. 119-120.

2. Ibid., pp. 126-127.

3. R. Connolly, ‘To the Editor’, Irish Independent, 14 June 1923.

4. ‘Connolly and Larkin: Ald. O’Brien’s reply to an election handbill’, Freeman’s Journal, 27 August 1923.

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