The three jacks

In researching the how and why of my grandfather’s participation in the Irish War of Independence and Civil War, I came across an unrecorded socialist revolution.

The history of this revolution is scattered through a dozen books, some highlighting this or that event, but never following the socialist thread from event to event in a coherent timeline. Instead, each event is treated as an anomaly, historical cul-de-sacs leading nowhere. I began to realize how in the aftermath of the civil war an Orwellian narrative took hold, with Irish statesmen, historians, and academics eager to create a new myth, something glorious to be sure, something worthy of the bold Gael. But their idealized saga of the new and ancient nation required a slight of hand that encased James Connolly in amber while pouring quicklime over the corpse of Ireland's socialist movement. Your intrepid reporter has carefully re-assembled its bones in the Tale of the Three Jacks.

Sean Dowling was from Queenstown (modern-day Cobh), the harbor town below the city of Cork. He self-identified not as a revolutionary, but as a propagandist, believing that social revolution was only possible through the creation of class-consciousness. His radical newspaper, BOTTOM DOG, was published in Limerick during the years 1917 and 1918.

On May Day, 1918, with the war in Europe still raging, a “monster meeting” took place in Limerick and resolutions, written by Dowling, were read out in support of the revolution in Russia. That summer, with England starved for troops, she looked to Ireland for additional cannon foder. The newly reformed Sinn Fein, absorbed into the republican movement after the Rising, staged a one-day “Strike Against Conscription.” The Irish Labour and Trades Union Congress did yeomen’s work in support of the strike, working hand in hand with Sinn Fein. The strike was a phenomenal success, but it was clear that riot and anarchy would follow should it be attempted to prolong the work stoppages. A one day walk out can close a country, but the people still must eat. Electricity still must flow.

Dowling drew up a plan that incorporated boycotts, strikes, and occupations that would facilitate a longer strike. It carefully delineated which industries needed to stay open, which could be closed outright, and how to regulate prices to avoid black markets. This “blueprint” was then utilized during Belfast’s twenty-day General Strike in support of the shipyard workers, Limerick’s two-week “Strike against Militarism” (The Limerick Soviet), and again during the three-day General Strike of 1920, an island-wide demonstration of Irish solidarity.

Jack Hedley was an English merchant seaman who jumped ship in Belfast, no longer willing to cross an Irish Sea filled with German U-Boats. He served time in the Crumlin Road Jail where he met the militant separatist Austin Stack. He was not an Irish Volunteer and was threatened by some of the Vols for trying to convert Austin to Marxism. After his release from prison, Hedley became a union organizer in the Belfast shipyards and a key player in the aforementioned city-wide strike. The Belfast strike is particularly notable in that it was non-sectarian, both Catholics and Protestants supporting the shipyard workers.

By early 1920 Dublin Castle was beset by assassinations, first of their lead political detectives (the G-Men), and then a spectacular, if failed, attempt on the life of Lord French, Viceroy of Ireland. Literally flailing without the services of the G-Men who had been tasked with keeping the revolutionaries in check, the Castle began making sweeping raids on all they considered dangerous and disaffected, suspending Habeas Corpus and holding prisoners without charge. William O’Brien, who had succeeded Connolly as president of the Irish Transportation and General Workers Union, and other labour leaders, were arrested and exiled to England's Wormwood Scrubs prison. Without recourse to the courts, they began a hunger strike. O'Brien and the others were released and returned to Ireland, but another round of arrests begat a new hunger strike in Dublin’s own Mountjoy Prison.

Once again Sean Dowling’s Blueprint was put into action, this time on an island-wide basis, in solidarity with the political prisoners and demanding their release. Excepting in Belfast, the General Strike of 1920 was an unprecedented success. Workers marched with red flags throughout the country, taking control of urban councils and municipal corporations, locking out management in key industries, and setting price controls.

With reports of soviets and red flags across the Emerald Isle, and fearing another humiliating loss of position (he had previously been sacked as Commander in Chief of the British Expeditionary Force in the midst of The Great War), Lord French himself ordered the discharge of the hunger-striking prisoners.

Hedley was among those set free, and he reemerged one month later in Knocklong, County Limerick. Fearing both the Castle and the rebels, he changed his name to O’Hagan. Along with Sean Dowling he organized the occupation of creameries across the Golden Vale. As O’Hagen, he assumed management of the Knocklong milk factory, the central distribution point for all the creameries.

John McGrath, our third Jack, was an ITGWU organizer from Waterford. He joined with Dowling and Hedley and, anticipating reactionary boycotts, he secured additional buyers for butter, expanding Knocklong's client list to firms beyond the previous scope of Cleeve's operation. As a result, the Knocklong facility was able to continue production at a profit and provide higher wages to the workers while also decreasing the price of goods. Eventually Cleeve’s management acquiesced to the workers’ demands for higher wages, better hours and working conditions, and the re-hiring of some previously fired workers. The occupations ended, but a strong impression was left on the people, who witnessed the flying of red flags on many of the properties, and banners proclaiming “Knocklong Soviet: We make Butter, not Profits.”

It was not coincidentally that a reign of terror was shortly begun against the people of Ireland. Special constables were soon flooding the country. These new recruits were ex-military, recently de-mobbed from the late war and psychologically ravaged from years of inhuman deprivation in the trenches of Europe. It was like throwing gasoline onto the already burning tinderbox of the guerilla war.

The rebels, newly re-christened the Irish Republican Army, had begun a campaign of barrack attacks and ambushes against the English soldiers and police. The new force of paramilitaries, nick-named Black and Tans by the populace, staged reprisals in the form of burnings, both of the homes of suspected rebels and, increasingly, of their workplaces. Knocklong’s creamery was reduced to ashes only months after the settlement of the strike.

As the fighting and violence reached new heights of brutality, labour activism was (mostly) put on hold until the “national question” was resolved. But once a truce was called, another labour dispute erupted in Bruree, and again banners were raised proclaiming “Soviet Mills: We make Bread, Not Profits.” However, at that time, with the threat of renewed war hanging over the island, The Dail’s Labour Minister, Constance Markievicz, called the three Jacks to Dublin and demanded a stop to the occupation. Sympathetic as she was to the socialist cause, Markievicz would not condone any action that would break the fragile peace.

It was the Treaty that opened the flood-gates anew, and our three Jacks were again in the thick of it, organizing strikes, occupations, and soviets across Munster. Agricultural and industrial workers, domestic servants, dock workers, and railway men were on strike at various times in the lead up to and during the civil war, the tragic denouement of the war for independence.

The civil war was ostensibly fought over the terms of the Treaty, particularly: the oath of loyalty to the Crown of England required of all ministers to the Dail, the continued occupation of Irish ports by the Royal Navy, and, of course, the partition. But there are hints of a parallel, unacknowledged revolution.

First, the soviets and occupations thrived in the so-called Munster Republic. It took the arrival of Free State troops to end the occupations (Upon his arrest, John McGrath, was singled out in a dispatch as the leader of “all the trouble”).

Second, and perhaps most damning, is that Liam Mellows, the anti-treaty leader most associated with the ideals of James Connolly, was among the very first to be executed by the Free State. Many more executions would follow.

One might note the presence of Eamon De Valera in the ranks of the irreconcilables, and point to the reactionary government he would ultimately lead for decades, as a counter to my thesis, but I beg the reader to keep in mind Dev's supple turns of mind and purpose throughout the war, the truce, and into the nineteen-thirties: his concentration on power for its own sake and volt-face from the Irish Republican Brother and from Sinn Fein when it suited his purposes. Does anyone really know what Dev stood for? Here was a man dedicated to the proposition that only a finite number of angels could dance upon a pin. And only he knew that number.

Tracts have been written about the political pressures on the labour leaders in Dublin, particularly William O’Brien, but the bare facts are that O’Brien disassociated his union from the three Jacks, firing them from their posts as organizers for the ITGWU. Further, he removed all agricultural workers from the union’s rolls, literally halving his own membership overnight. Industrial unionism, the syndicalist unionism of James Connolly, in the new nation was a dead letter.

At one time, O’Brien had been a colleague and friend of the martyred James Connolly, the indisputable leader, nay, the very avatar, of Irish Socialism. Much had changed. As Ireland struggled to assert her independence from Britain, and especially during The Crisis, as she called World War II, the accepted history of the revolutionary years was molded to fit a pattern acceptable to the powers that rule the world, agreeable to the powers of capital and finance. In creating that history, polishing and smoothing its rough edges, the story of the Three Jacks, of red flags and soviets, was excluded from popular memory and the official annals.

The cooperation and conflict with and between Sinn Fein politicians, militant separatists, and Connolly-inspired socialists, is a major theme in my recently published novel, COLLINS RISING, available on Amazon.