“there was a belief, I could do things” .Women in the Irish in Britain Representation Group; genuine grassroots activism.

This is the text of a talk I gave for the Women’s Grassroots Activism Conference.

I am  an activist, not an academic. I am Mancunian and  second generation Irish. From 1985-2000 I was a member and a National Officer of the Irish in Britain Representation Group and I am now archiving the life of the organisation. The archive is at the Working Class Movement Library in Salford. https://www.wcml.org.uk/

In 1981 a new wave of Irish activists became involved in not just the campaign for a united Ireland but also civil rights and equality for the Irish in Britain.

These  were critical times during the conflict in the North of Ireland; it was the  time of the hunger strikes when 10 young men died for their right to political status.

It was a time when a new generation of second and third generation Irish people became active in a variety of organisations from the Troops Out Movement to the Irish Abortion Support Group and the Irish in Britain Representation Group (IBRG).

It was a time when there was an active group of people in the Labour Party who fought for a progressive policy on the North of Ireland and  supported the rights of the Irish in this country while a number of  labour Councils were prepared to fund groups such as IBRG.

At the same over 40,000 Irish women and men  each year  were travelling  every to Britain for work, education,  some of them joined organisations such as IBRG.

The IBRG was set up in 1981. It was  a community-based organisation with branches across the country.

IBRG attracted not  just a more politicised generation of Irish born and 2^nd generation   but also  attracted  women who played a significant part in the organisation as members and officers

From 1981 to 2001 there was a female president (Maire O’Shea), two female chairs (Bernadette Hyland and Virginia Moyles), two secretaries (Judy Peddle and Virginia Moyles.) There was a Women’s Subcommittee, a Women’s Officer (Majella Crehan)  IBRG women’s meetings,  while in  common with many radical  organisations at that time, crèches were provided for all national meetings. 

IBRG  took up issues affecting women in Britain and Ireland. This included strip searching, divorce, abortion, and contraception as well as welfare and civil rights issues

The IBRG had branches across the country, reflecting where the Irish were living.  There were several in London as well as  Birmingham, Cardiff, Coventry, Manchester, Bolton, N.E. Lancs,  Leeds and Merseyside. Over the years branches flourished and declined by turn, reflecting the problems of organising events and activities and finding activists and funds to keep going. Central to its ethos  was that it did not kowtow to the Irish government nor the Catholic Church, unlike the traditional Irish organisations.

Looking through the IBRG archive one of the defining characteristics of the organisation is the number of women involved – even its early days as Judy Peddle, National Secretary from 1983-85, who lived in Cardiff,   recounts.    “ in 1982 I became friendly with two London based members from Co Leitrim, Bridget Gavin and her late sister Colette They suggested I join and contacted the founder John Martin, who was working tirelessly across the UK to set up branches, and a small branch was set up in Cardiff.”

In later years National Secretary Virginia Moyles worked tirelessly to produce National Minutes which are a cornerstone of the history of IBRG.

Many women took part at a branch level; organising the meetings, fundraising, making links with other groups. In Bolton, the first branch I joined,  the women involved  included a teacher, a playwright, and several  working- class woman , including Margaret Mullarkey who played a key role in the branch. In other  branches   Laura Sullivan in Hackney , Ann Hilferty and Joan Brennan in Manchester , Jodie Clark in Southwark, and Theresa Burke in  Lewisham played significant roles.

Women  from IBRG attended the annual International Women’s Day weekend in the North of Ireland to show solidarity with Irish women political prisoners.

In 1989 an IBRG delegation went  to both parts of Ireland which included visits to women’s groups in Belfast, Cork, and Dublin.

In common with  trade unions and other community organisations of this period IBRG gave women,  and particularly w/c women,  opportunities to educate themselves,  including political education. It also encouraged women to believe that they could initiate activities and take positions of leadership  within IBRG and other organisations.

In the 1980s a new wave of Irish women was organising not just in IBRG but in other groups including the London Irish Women Centre as well as  issue-based groups such as abortion and strip searching. The biggest Irish community was in London: a number  of Irish organisations  funded by the Greater London Council and  also some  local authorities. IBRG benefited from this funding stream and we  had several  offices across London.

Jodie Clark’s involvement in  IBRG reflected the way in which the organisation drew in Irish working- class women who were prepared to get stuck into grassroots organising,  women who were experiencing  anti-Irish racism of the everyday variety,  but also the more corrosive institutional racism endemic in British society. Due to her experience of anti-Irish racism Jodie  involved with the Tenants Association in Peckham.  She says:  “one of the first things I did was to make sure that anti-racism was in the constitution of the organisation.”

She went onto to join IBRG and with like-minded activists she was active in Southwark Irish Forum to represent the needs of local Irish people. Like other parents of children in IBRG her children were included in organising political events, going on marches and cultural events.

Manchester IBRG, unlike the London branches,  had no funding or opportunities to set up funded groups.  The Irish made up 10% of the Manchester population with a history of activity in Republican, trade union and labour movements from the C19th onwards.

Women played an important role in the branch. In 1990 19 of the 34 members were women. These women took the important roles;  chair/treasurer and public relations officer were all women.

IBRG in Manchester attracted women because of its policies and because it was an organisation that, unlike other organisations, including trade unions, it was not dominated by men trying to make careers for themselves with women at the margins.

My experience in the Manchester Irish community was frequently   one of rampant sexism by an older male  hierarchy, often with business interests, who were also happy to exploit my father and his comrades on the building sites of the north west. It was not surprising that we attracted younger women and single parents who were not prepared to put up with the   “parish pump” politics of the Irish Centre.

IBRG attracted women who  had been active in the traditional Irish community but felt sidelined and also  younger women who wanted to take up issues relevant to them.

IBRG  offered them the  opportunity to take positions in the branches and at a national level  as well as taking  part in campaigns that affected them and were important to them.

This included challenging anti-Irish racism, representing IBRG in meetings with the council and other organisations, supporting issues such as abortion and strip searching and campaigns including that of  Kate Magee,  and promoting Irish culture and history  in the  education service.

Laura Sullivan sums up her experience in IBRG  

In IBRG the women also stood out for me. There were a few women that I worked  with eg  Virginia Moyles, Bernadette Hyland, Majella Crehan and Caitlin Wright. Among the things I did with these women was organise a workshop for Irish Women in Hackney with Virginia and was encouraged to write in the IBRG Magazine by Bernadette. I got asked to speak to speak at meetings, facilitate at conferences and attend delegations. Because I had a supportive group around me there was a belief, I could do things.

From Women’s Liberation to Irish Liberation: making the links.

This is a picture of me in 1977 picketing Hull Irish Catholic MP Kevin McNamara’s surgery alongside other women and men  in the local National Abortion Campaign branch.  Later, he was as useless for the Irish community in Britain as he was for women.   Returning to my Irish Mancunian and  Catholic  working- class family I did not get the response I expected. 

When I returned home proudly wearing my NAC badge to my amazement my parents told me they supported abortion because they had seen so many terrible things happen to women in Ireland. They were also probably secretly happy that I was not involved in Irish politics… but that would come later.

My politics were shaped by those of my family. Overtly by my dad’s (Patrick) Republican and  socialist ones, and covertly by my mother’s (Betty) more subliminal ones of “don’t get married,” “make sure you earn your own money – and keep it!”  They were  part of the generation that had escaped Ireland after the Second World War and were wanted over here for their labour  –  but not otherwise valued.  

My mum told me she was free here, she had been able to live with her friends, get a job (and be paid) and was  able to do what she wanted outside of work hours. She probably did have more freedom than most of the working -class women she worked with.

Getting married changed all that for her; but like many families we benefited from the post war Welfare State. I represented that “advancement” when I got a place at university in 1976.

But as I grew up, I became aware of the real world my parents inhabited. Around us in Manchester in the 1970s Irish homes were being raided by the police, innocent political activists such as the Gillespie sisters were framed and sent to prison and the Irish community retreated from voicing their views about Britain’s continuing colonial presence in the North of Ireland.

During the summer holidays I went to work at the local factory where my mother worked part time.  For the first time I heard people making anti-Irish comments. When I told the women I worked with that I was making money to go to Ireland to see my  family there they were horrified. They told me I would be blown up because that is what happened to English people who went to Ireland. I suddenly realised what my mother must have been experiencing as she had an Irish accent., though I do not think I talked to her about it.

 Later, I found out that Irish women experienced racism differently from men. My father worked (or rather was exploited) by an Irish firm with mainly Irish workers but  Irish women, like my mum, were vulnerable after an IRA bombing, and might  be abused verbally or as happened to a friend’s mother,  might be  refused service in a shop.

Working in Liverpool in 1982 it was through my involvement in my union, National Association of Local Government Officers, that I came across women who were pushing for better terms and conditions for women members: not just equal pay but  negotiating  time off for women to have a raft of health checks.

 Over the years I have been a trade union activist and been inspired by and written  about many women from history,  who were active in the trade union and labour movement.

In 1985 I was living in Bolton and came across a branch of the Irish in Britain Representation Group. IBRG was a group of working-class women and men who were part of a grassroots, national organisation that had been set up 1981 to raise the issue of Britain’s colonial role in the north of Ireland;  campaign against anti-Irish racism and discrimination;  and promote Irish culture, history, and language.

IBRG reflected not just a more politicised generation of Irish born in this country,  but an organisation that was 50/50 women and men. From 1981-2003 there was a female president (Maire O’Shea), two female chairs (Bernadette Hyland and Virginia Moyles) as well  a Women’s Subcommittee, a Women’s Officer, IBRG women’s meetings,  while in  common to many radical  organisations at that time, crèches were provided for all national meetings. 

IBRG was an organisation that ensured that it took up issues affecting women in Britain and Ireland. This included sisters in Britain taking up issues including strip searching, divorce, abortion, and contraception.

Women and progressive men dominated the organisation and few arguments took place at meetings around these issues. But in my  branch in Manchester a group of reactionary men had dominated the organisation until I joined in 1986.

Moving the meetings away from a Catholic club which was not easy for women to get to (or want to get to) and recruiting women drove these men out. Our branch had women with children, working class women as well as students and professionals such as myself.

The sexism came from the traditional Irish community organisations;  particularly from  (and well named!) the Council of Irish Associations – the CIA. They tried to get our women’s day excluded from the council-run Manchester Irish Festival as well as an event  on the Birmingham 6 campaign.

The Council was run by a left -wing Labour group that had adopted many progressive policies on Ireland due to the activity of the Labour Committee on Ireland locally and nationally.

The Council made sure we were involved in all the events and initiatives that they rolled out to the Irish community. They also took up the issue of anti-Irish racism and were prepared to challenge organisations that included Irish jokes or slurs in their material.

IBRG, like many community- based organisations,  offered experience and opportunity to women to become active on many issues. Working-class women benefited the most because it gave them the confidence to change their lives which also meant they changed society. Today, those  women are absent from many organisations and society is poorer because of it.

The history of the IBRG can be accessed at the Working Class Movement Library see https://www.wcml.org.uk/  or on my website Lipstick Socialist https://lipsticksocialist.wordpress.com/

My review of “Children of the Revolution” by Bill Rolston

Reading this book reminded me when I joined on a protest sometimes in the 1980s  outside the West Midlands Police HQ for the Birmingham 6. I remember the children and grandchildren of the  imprisoned men who stood alongside campaigners. They too, have an important story to tell.

Of course, unlike the people in this book,  they were not the children of combatants, but survivors of  a conflict that affected the Irish community in Britain in different ways.

Written in 2011 Bill Rolston’s book is groundbreaking in giving a voice to the children of the war in Ireland. He is the right person to produce the book, coming  from Republican West Belfast  where he worked as a youth worker  and personally knew many of the families. I think this insight is invaluable in any research and missing from much of the academic books produced about working-class history. To quote my friend,  historian and communist  Eddie Frow,  “there is bosses’ history and workers’ history.” This is definitely  workers’ history.

Many books have been written about the Northern Ireland conflict but, as Bill says:   “towards the bottom of the narrative ladder is the story of the children and the conflict, and within that, the direct voice of children of combatants has barely been heard at all. To tell at least part of that story is the reason for this book.”

The combatants were members of Republican and Loyalist  militarised groups in the North during the thirty  years of the conflict; chiefly, the  Irish Republican Army and the Irish National Liberation Army one side and  the Ulster Volunteer Force and Ulster Defence Association on the  other  side, although there some small groups.

Of the 20 children interviewed  by Bill only two had parents who  were not combatants.

Reading their stories makes for an emotional experience, even though as an activist in the Irish in Britain Representation Group  and having been  involved with prisoners’ campaigns,  I  was aware of some of their experiences.

Their stories are the stories of childhoods lived out in a war zone and the  constant presence of police and army in their homes and on their streets; of parents taken away for  long absences; of  journeys to prison;  and of  broken up relationships.

One of the issues that struck me is that of class. Most of the families were from poor families and the impact of their father (and sometimes their mother, too) being incarcerated was  not just a devastating emotional blow but an economic one.

 Jeanette Keenan, daughter of lifelong Republican Brian Keenan, had a very different life,  even from other Republican children. She says; “we did live in poverty in that mammy had to sustain six children with virtually no money.”  Brian was in prison in England and money had to be found if they were to visit him there.  Her mother got together with the mother of framed prisoner Paul Hill of the Guildford 4 who was also trekking across to England to visit him and together jointly forced  the Department of Health and Social Security to provide the money for a monthly visit to the men. Over the years in this country  prisoners support groups were started up to support the prisoners and their families.

But, on a visit to London by herself,  her mother was arrested and held in prison for a year whilst awaiting trial. Jeanette was now 15 and her brother 17 so they stayed in the family home , looking after themselves.  “When my mammy went on family visits, we all knew how to run the house; she had taught us that.”

Jeanette went on to become involved in Tar Anall,  a youth project to support  the children of republican  prisoners.

Speaking to children from the Loyalist community proved more difficult for Bill.  “Republican ex-prisoners have been traditionally more rooted in their community and less likely to be wary of breaking cover.”  Some of the children he interviewed from the Loyalist community did not want to their names or the names of their fathers to be used.

John Lyttle, son of Tommy “Tucker” Lyttle a leading member of the UDA West Belfast Brigade,  was happy to use  his name and talk freely about his relationship with his father.  He grew up in a household where one night he went downstairs to find his father torturing a man in his kitchen.

John had a secret life. “Thank God I was gay. I was able to stand outside, live in parallel and look in. I never bought it.” When he was 18 years old, he left Ireland and has lived and worked as a journalist over here since then.

This is an important book. There are few books that allow the children of activists,  including those who were active in the Irish community in this country, to tell their story and to explain how it has affected them in their lives.  

My overwhelming response to the stories is one of admiration for the children and their amazing fortitude in growing up in a society with so much violence. As Bill says :“In the end, some individuals were clearly traumatised by  their experience, but all display a remarkable level of resilience in the face of what violent conflict brought their way.”

Buy the book here http://www.billrolston.weebly.com

Margaret Mullarkey of Bolton Irish in Britain Representation Group; her life seen through the eyes of her children.

Bernadette, Margaret and Nuala

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In the history of the Irish in Britain Representation Group many women were active; but,  as in other organisations,  their role has been often  marginalised and underestimated.

One of those women was  Margaret Mullarkey of Bolton IBRG. Sadly, she is now dead,  so  I turned to her daughters,  Bernadette and Nuala,  to find out more about her life and activity within IBRG,  in the Bolton community and as their mother and Joe’s wife.

Margaret was born in Bolton with no Irish connections until she met and married Joe Mullarkey.

She was born  on 24  April 1945 into a family of seven children. Her father was an alcoholic while  her mother died when she was 13 years old. And Margaret then became responsible for bringing up her two younger brothers. She finished secondary school and then gained catering qualifications through a job at a local Army barracks where she met her first husband. They had 2 children –  Tracy and George –  but the marriage failed and her brothers helped her escape.

Looking for a new relationship she wrote a letter to the local paper and Joe Mullarkey replied. In 1972 they married and had two children;  Bernadette born that year and Nuala in 1974. On marriage Joe adopted Margaret’s children by her first marriage.

Joe worked in a local factory;  Margaret would work at night in various places,  including a cinema and a  bingo hall.

In 1981 Joe was one of the founders of the IBRG. Their life would change when  he started a Bolton  branch in 1983. He  recalled: “My motivation in convening the inaugural meeting of the Bolton branch of IBRG in 1983 was to give a voice to Irish people like myself whose views and concerns particularly in relating to events in Northern  Ireland were never heard as a community and  we were treated with derision, grossly stereotyped by the media as drunken, stupid, bigoted, and sectarian.”

Joe was  an activist in his trade union, a republican and socialist. His politics  would dominate the life of the family.

Margaret’s politics according to her daughter Nuala,  were  “grounded in coming from a  poor, unequal community. She cared for people; in the local youth club, in the older people’s group.”

Margaret and Joe wanted their children to have a better education than themselves. Bernadette remembers how she wanted to learn the flute but  there were no peripatetic teachers in her school. “Mum would pick me up from school and we would spend an hour on the bus so that I could get to a music lesson.” 

Typically,  Margaret and Joe  lobbied the local Council for music lessons for all children and by the time Nuala wanted to learn the violin the Council was  employing  music teachers in the schools across the borough.

Bolton IBRG revived Irish culture in the local area and Margaret was involved in creating Irish dances and encouraged Bernadette and Nuala to get involved with Irish dance and music.

Bernadette was in her school orchestra and when they were scheduled to play for the local Freemasons Joe asked her not to take part and she agreed. “He used to pick me up after the concerts but would not come in until after the National Anthem had been played!”

I asked them if they remember any problems they had as young people with Joe  having a prominent local profile. Nuala says “We were not unique. We went to school with the children of Paula and Noel Spencer who were IBRG members and Labour councillors. We knew Neil Duffield’s  (chair of Bolton Trades Council and Bolton Socialist Club) children .”

Nuala does remember going around to an English friend’s house and the news was on with an item about the IRA. “The reaction was ‘put them all against the wall and shoot them.’  I was shocked that people did not have a clue. We were more informed than our English friends. But I was young and just kept quiet.”

Nuala went to work for Bolton Council , and with her father’s prominence locally,  she says:  “I was tested by them, asking my opinion but I just kept out of it.”

Looking back, Nuala  reflects: “Growing up Irish in England there was a responsibility to get involved. Mum and Dad wanted us to keep the connection through going to GAA matches and Irish dancing and music.”

Bernadette says: “Mum was always 100% supportive of Dad’s politics. She expressed her politics through her compassion for vulnerable people and would do anything to help people.”

The work that women do in groups such as IBRG is often unrecognised. Margaret for instance  only attended one national meeting in Manchester where she ran the creche.

In 1986 She went on the annual International Women’s Delegation to the North of Ireland,  Coming from a similar background she could relate to the poverty and oppression of the family she stayed with on a West Belfast council estate. She kept in touch with the family,  and when she returned, she encouraged other women to go on the delegation.

The Mullarkeys   were very active in the cultural life of the Irish in Bolton: activities  that in the 1980s was seen as political.  Margaret and Joe were harassed locally through smears about their Bolton Irish Festival being a “fundraiser for the IRA” which was a headline in the local paper.

In previous eras it could have meant the whole family arrested and charged under the Prevention of Terrorism Act. IBRG existed so that Irish people could express their Irishness in everything from a cultural festival to an opinion on Britain’s role in Ireland.

In the 2000s IBRG folded.  Joe and Margaret retired to Ireland. Joe kept up his activity for disabled people while  Margaret created  a new life for herself in Mayo.

Margaret died in 2019, Joe in 2022.

Bernadette, now married with her own children, is proud of her Irish heritage. “After Joe left, I took over his role as chair of  Comhaltas in  Bolton and today I am still a member.”  Nuala  now lives in Ireland with her husband and children and is not involved in politics. “We are living in different times,  and although my children were born in England, they see themselves as Irish.”

The lives and commitment of Margaret and Joe  show how working-class people can change their own lives and their community for the better.

Read more about Margaret here https://lipsticksocialist.wordpress.com/2020/01/19/margaret-mullarkey-working-class-boltonian-ibrg-activist/

Read more about Joe here https://lipsticksocialist.wordpress.com/2021/04/05/my-review-of-memoir-my-early-life-by-joe-mullarkey-2021/

Find the IBRG archive at the Working Class Movement Library here https://www.wcml.org.uk/

My review of “Out of the Window” by Madeline Linford

Madeline Linford

Madeline Linford (1895-1975) was born and brought up in Manchester until she was sent to a boarding school in Surrey. At the age of 18 she started working in the advertising department of the Manchester Guardian where promotion led to a job in the editorial department, In 1919 the editor, CP Scott, asked her to go to Europe to report on the post-war conditions in Austri and Poland, and on her return she became the paper’s first Women’s Page editor. Madeline also wrote  a biography of Mary Wollstonecraft and five novels, the last of which,  Out of the Window, was published in 1930.

Essentially a story about class,  Madeline brings together the two protagonists,  Ursula and Kenneth,  at  house  of a friend who has asked Kenneth,  a trade unionist and engineer, to speak about a local strike.

Ursula, a middle-class young woman from the leafy suburbs,  is taken with the good-looking working-class speaker, very different from Charles,  a friend who wants to marry her : “a young man and quite dreadfully rich.”

Madeline is writing about the social class she comes from and that is where the strength of the novel lies.  In the character of Kenneth and the other working-class characters she flounders,  reverting to stereotypes. We have no idea why Kenneth is a speaker at the house, other than a passing mention of trade unions and a strike. His life at work does not exist in the book, neither his job  nor his involvement in his union.

I feel that Madeline  did not know many working -class people, nor visited their homes , nor understood their way of life. There is little written  in her novel that is positive about Kenneth, his mother ora local woman,  Dorothy.  

Yet in  1930 in Manchester, which is where I am assuming she based the novel, there was a thriving leftwing and  working -class community. Women were active in the trade unions, they went on strike and marched for equality and justice.

Manchester 1932 Spinworkers strike.

As a character Ursula  reflects the social class that Madeline came  from herself,  except  that  Madeline  started working at 18. Ursula does not work, amuses herself with  voluntary work but her life is totally centred around herself and her privileged lifestyle.

The novel really only comes alive when Ursula and Kenneth marry and start life together  in a corporation house. Without servants and with no real experience of cooking, cleaning, and managing on her husband’s wage, Ursula struggles to  to adapt to her new role. To her unmarried aunt who visits her , Ursula laments:“You know, there ought to be some other solution for girls in love…The marriage service should be postponed until they had lived together for a while and the glamorous side of it had got less interesting.”

In Out of the Window  East Manchester meets East Didsbury, and while it  is a well written novel,  for me  it lacks authenticity in its descriptions of working- class people in  the 1930s.

Read more about Madeline Linford here https://madelinelinford.wordpress.com/

You can buy a copy from Persephone Press here https://persephonebooks.co.uk/pages/Madeline-Linford

My review of “The Sky is Falling” by Lorenza Mazzetti

Lorenza Mazzetti (1927-2020) was a  writer, filmmaker,  and theatre puppeteer who wrote this, her first novel,  in 1962, published as II Cielo cade. It was only published in this country in 2022.

“The Sky is Falling” is a fictionalised account of the early years of her life. Born in Italy,  Lorenza’s  mother died when she was a child and her father sent her, and her younger sister, to live with his sister and her husband on a farm in Tuscany. Lorenza was brought up in a highly cultured family: her uncle was Robert, the cousin of Albert Einstein. We know little about her aunt. She had two cousins, Anna Maria, and Luce.

In the novel it is Penny (much younger than Lorenza at the time) who is the main character, and drives the narrative of the book. Together with her younger sister (whom she calls Baby) they are taken to school in a chauffeur-driven car.  A Catholic school,   Jesus and Mussolini  dominate the life of the school and the students.

Lorenza expresses  this as each chapter begins with a brief statement called a pensierino in  which Italian students are expected to write to practise their spelling etc. One exercise reads : “We love Mussolini as if he were our own father.”

Penny and Baby lap up the organised militarisation of the school, singing fascist hymns, dressing up  as little fascists, and becoming a part of the seamless  marriage of Mussolini and  Catholicism.

But Penny and her sister are constantly attacked by the teachers and the Catholic priests as the uncle they live with is a Jew, while  they do not attend church. She agonises: “I had to save Uncle Wilhem, Aunt Katchen, Marie and Annie along with the guests and the Pekingese dog. And then, of course I had to save myself and Baby.”  

Outside of the school Penny plays with the local kids, hanging upside from the trees and doing back flips. Upset by her cousins,  she seeks a motherly figure in the cook: “I’d cried a lot and then I’d gone to stand between Elsa’s knees so she would comfort me, and Baby had followed.”

We know what happens in Italy in the 1930s and,  although there is much joy in the story,  the war dominates their lives, bringing hatred and death to her family.  Her life is shattered when the Germans invade her home and kill her Jewish  family. Penny and Baby are saved because they have Italian names. “What can a child do to change the rules or the choices of grownups. Nothing.”

Lorenza dedicated the book to her uncle, aunt and cousins. “This book attempts to describe the joy and happiness that their family gave me during my childhood, welcoming me as an “equal” though I was only “equal” to them in joy and “different” at the moment of death.”

After the war Lorenza came to England to work on a farm, like many displaced people. Her story is taken up in her book  “London Diary.”   Life changes again when she becomes part of the Free Cinema movement of the 1950s in London.One of her most powerful films, completed with the assistance of   Lindsay Anderson,  is called “Together.”  Made  in 1950s London,  and shot in black and white,  it follows two men  – who are deaf and dumb –  as they navigate working on the docks, living in a boarding house, and drinking in the local pub. And the local children are there, racing after the men, pulling faces, and using the docks as a giant playground.

 

Buy the “Sky is Falling” from women’s cooperative News from Nowhere.

Watch a clip of “Together” here

 

 

 

Every Badge tells a Story; Armagh Women and the Strip Search Campaign

 

The Working Class Movement Library  collects badges as part of archiving the history of the labour movement. Recently a new collection of Irish badges was donated.

As a member of the Irish in Britain Representation Group whose archive (and badge collection) is now in the WCML I immediately wanted to view the collection and see if I recognised them. I was unable to find out who donated them and therefore the story, so far, about how and why they were collected is a mystery.

This new collection records the Irish struggle in Ireland; none of the badges refer to campaigns in this country.  It is hard to find, in the labour movement, few badges that record women’s struggles and it is a similar story in the history of Ireland.

This badge (above) is unusual in recording  the campaign of Irish women political prisoners in Armagh Jail. Armagh was the only women’s prison for political prisoners. Most women were under 25 and the population of the prison varied from 60-120.

When the British Government withdrew Special Category Status ( being treated as political prisoners) alongside the men in Long Kesh Prison (their protest had started in 1978)   the women responded by a “No work protest” and the women refused to wash, use the toilet, empty chamber pots  or clean their cell.  The worsening sanitary conditions led to abuse by the prison guards. In 1980 three women took part in the Long Kesh Hunger Strike. There are many badges about the men’s Hunger Strike but this is the only one that I have seen that records the women’s protest.

The Hunger Strikes of 1981 sparked protests across the world- and in the Irish community over here. It led to a group of people, from different generations of the Irish community, to decide to set up an organisation that would give a voice to the demands of Irish people and make the link between British colonialism in Ireland and the state and status of the Irish in Britain. This organisation was the Irish in Britain Representation Group.

Between 1980 and 1986 the strip searching of female republican women  prisoners in Armagh Prison  became a local, national, and international issue. The women interpreted its use as a weapon of war against them personally and the wider republican community.

Three years after IBRG was set up the Minutes record at the Ard Feis/AGM that a motion was passed, sponsored by Manchester IBRG calling for “The ending of strip searching in Armagh Jail and the organisation of a campaign in Britain against strip-searching.”

A national campaign against strip searching was set up in Britain and meetings were held across the country. Organisations that were involved included the IBRG, Women and Ireland Groups,  Troops Out Movement, London Irish Women’s Centre, and  Labour Women for Ireland.

On 23 March 1985 the IBRG held their AGM/Ard Fheis at Brent Town Hall, Wembley. It agreed to affiliate to the National Committee to Stop the Strip Searches.

1985 was the year when IBRG President Moira O’Shea and others were arrested.  It was the year when IBRG member Bernadette Hyland attended the annual Women’s Delegation to the North of Ireland and spoke about the use of strip searching at Armagh Prison on a local  BBC Manchester community radio programme called Irish Line  and run by Manchester IBRG. It led to the replacement of the programme  by a more docile show and presenters in a new Irish community programme called Come Into the Parlour.

1985 Women’s Delegation to Ireland

The use of strip searching of Irish women did not just happen  in the North of Ireland. It was used against other Irish women prisoners in England  including Moira O’Shea and many women active on Ireland.

In 1985 at a regional IBRG meeting (Ard Choiste) in London a motion protesting the strip searching of Irish political prisoners in Brixton Jail of Ella O’Dwyer and Martina Anderson was passed.

In 1987 a Women’s Committee was set up in IBRG. Women were prominent in the organisation from its beginnings but were not represented in officer roles.

Women from IBRG went on the annual Women and Ireland delegations to the North of Ireland to stand with the women at Armagh Prison and extend solidarity with the republican community. Bolton working class IBRG member Margaret Mullarkey went on the delegation in 1986. Here is her report.

Strip searching was an issue that was constantly on the agenda in IBRG national and local meetings. Members were asked to join the campaign and attend the pickets of Brixton prison where Irish political prisoners Martina Anderson and Ella O’Dwyer were being held.

On 20^th March 1988 the IBRG March for Justice went   from Hyde Park to Kilburn with over 1,000 marchers. The speakers at the rally included Teresa McCann from the Strip Search campaign.

March for Justice 1988

In the same year the IBRG magazine an pobal eirithe featured an article by National Officer Virginia Moyles on a conference she had attended on the “Campaign against Strip Searching”. Organised by the London Strategic Policy Unit on 5 December 1987 at Lambeth Town Hall. Speakers highlighted the way in which it was now being used against many individuals and groups.

A resolution was passed saying “It is a technique of repression used systematically against Irish republican women and it is now being used increasingly against Black and Asian women, Black youth, political activists, lesbians and gay men, and against people in prisons and at customs, in police custody at military establishments and even in the streets.”

In 2023 the use of strip searching is widespread – even against children. In March 2023 a report by the Children’s Commissioner highlighted that ‘strip searches of children under stop and search powers have a pronounced and deeply concerning ethnic disproportionality’.

Find out more about the IBRG archive at the WCML here https://www.wcml.org.uk/whats-on/events/online-talk-the-irish-in-britain-representation-group-archive-at-the-wcml-a-major-addition-to-the-irish-collection-/

 

My review of “Rewriting the Troubles War and Propaganda Ireland and Algeria” Patrick Anderson

The formation of the Irish in Britain Representation Group, a national grassroots-based community organisation in the 1980s, challenged the  traditional Irish organisation  – the Federation of Irish Societies  – and its toadying to the Irish Government over the relationship between Britain and Ireland.   

In  1984 on the lead up to an anti-internment march IBRG issued a press release calling  ‘on all Irish organisations and individuals to give full support to the Rally. We (IBRG) call on Irish people to stand up for their rights in Britain and join us on the march to show clearly that the PTA will not intimidate us or silence our voice. We ask them to remember the previous generations of the Irish in Britain who stood up and marched for Irish unity and freedom, and we ask them to march in that proud tradition. Let us all march together to show that we stand with the Irish people against British oppression and colonial rule in Ireland.’

IBRG March for Justice. credit T.Shelly

In this groundbreaking new book Patrick Anderson shows what we as an organisation (and those who supported us) were up against.   He examines the British media’s role  during the war by comparing how it reported the “Troubles” with a similar conflict in Algeria. He shows how the British press  were ( and are)  intrinsically conservative and pro- establishment and  were quite happy to take on the British government’s narrative with little questioning.  He also shows how most of the British Left, with some honourable exceptions, ignored human rights abuses in Ireland.

The British Army’s media campaign began in 1969.  According to Anderson:  “…by 1972 some 262 civilians and police and 1,858 army officers had received media training”.  Reporters who  went to Ireland and tried to report the reality of the War were threatened, harassed, and even told that they would face legal action for challenging the Army’s  version of events and killings. “Bernard Falk was imprisoned for four days under contempt legislation: Duncan Campbell was tried for treason under the Official Secrets Act.”

This is a complex and compelling study  of the war in the North of Ireland and the comparisons with  France’s  war in Algeria. Many activists on Ireland, like myself, will be surprised to find that politicians in Paris described Algeria as France’s Ireland and that a British cabinet discussed withdrawal under the code word “Algeria.”  It is not a surprise that the British portrayed themselves as pursuing a policy of “restraint” in their war while the French in Algeria  were seen as “ruthless.”

But this policy of “restraint” is  exposed by Anderson.  “Accusations of British torture were rejected as IRA propaganda or unavoidable excesses, even schoolboy antics. Official British sources were accepted and defended.”

Reviewing this book and looking at  IBRG history I see a major gap in that it fails to acknowledge the work of our organisation (and others) in challenging the  British narrative of acting as a referee between two warring communities and in exposing how the war in Ireland impacted and undermined the human rights of the Irish on both sides of the water, as well as the democratic institutions in both countries.

“Rewriting the Troubles” is a pioneering book, telling a complex and yet recurrent story of imperialism in  the Irish context. Britain is still involved in Ireland, the story is not over, even though most people on this side of the water may think /hope it is.  This book is an important contribution to understanding the complex story between the two islands.

Patrick has kindly donated a copy of the book to add to the Irish Collection at the Working Class Movement Library.

It is also available for loan from Manchester Public Libraries.

Buy it from women’s cooperative bookshop News from Nowhere.

My review of “Isaac and I: A Life in Poetry” and “The World is in Our Words” by Chris Searle.

Chris Searle is a poet and a teacher. This is his autobiography, spread over two books.   In the first book he writes about his greatest influence the East London Jewish poet Isaac Rosenberg. Chris, unlike Isaac, came from a lower middleclass English family, but failed the 11+ exam and went to the secondary modern school which in those days, the mid-1950s, and for most working-class children was a sealed fate for their place in society.  

For Chris it was the opposite as he met an English teacher (with no degree but a certificate) who opened his the world. “I felt that I needed no other teacher but him, that he was teaching me everything, that he was opening up a world to me that I had to dive into.”

Chris’s story is one that is intertwined with the history of one of the most radical eras in this country.  In these two memoirs he captures the history of the period running from the 1960s to the 2000s.  It is an era of revolutions and as a teacher and poet he plays a role in places as diverse as the East End of London, Trinidad, Grenada, and Mozambique. Over the years he has written or edited fifty books, set up a community publishing initiative and much more.

Eddie Frow, communist and co-founder of the WCML with Ruth used to say; there is bosses’ history and workers’ history. I would like to add that there is also children’s history. And that is theme running through these books as Chris through poetry that he gives his students, many of them poor and working class, the power to speak about their lives, their hopes, and dreams and live a freer life.

In the 1970s, in Stepney,   Chris with his students discussed how four Catholic 15-year-old boys in Belfast  had been arrested at school by the British Army and interned. Some of the students were from Irish families and some had family who were soldiers in the North of Ireland. This discussion led to this poem.

Everyone should share this sacred land

Run children, run before the bomb hits you,

Run children, run before the soldiers get you!

You think we’re unlucky, well look at them, this is misery.

Chris, in his band “Two Fingers” wrote the powerful “No Recruiting Song” which includes the verse

“For Alex, Kevin, Seamus are your schoolmates

And they have got troops against them night and day

So, give them your support and free their people

And get the soldiers out their country’s way.

In 1971 Chris was sacked after publishing a book of his student’s poems “Stepney Words”. His students went on strike and took their outrage onto the streets and into the national press. Two years later Chris was reinstated.

Chris has taken the words of Bob Marley “None but ourselves can free our minds.” and lived them and shared them with his students and the communities he has worked in. His memoirs are an inspiration to everyone today that opposes the increasingly right- wing agenda that is being forced on every aspect of society. He says;

“If life has taught me anything it has taught me this: that with struggle, perseverance, imagination and optimism, there will be a new and more just day for all of us, the ordinary and working people of our world.”

You can buy Chris’s books here https://fiveleaves.co.uk/  They are also available in Manchester Public Libraries.

My review of “Mater 2-10” by Hwang Sok-yong. Translated by Kim-Russell & Youngjae Josephine Bae

How many novels have been written about Korea, communism, and trade unions? Few, if any.  This award-winning novel by HSY is a revelation to many of us in the west who, like me, might be trade unionists, have worked  alongside communists in the  labour movement but know very little about the history of Korea and its place in the global labour movement.

HSY is an activist and socialist. He has been imprisoned in South Korea for his political activities and his novel is both personal and political.  It is an important novel because it gives the rest of the world an insight into the history of the ordinary Korean and their fight for an independent and democratic country. 

The novel begins in modern day  Seoul as Jino is staging a sit in at the top of a  chimney on  a power plant standing 45 metres high. He is in his mid-50s and has worked in factories for 25 years. His protest is to get his and the other union members jobs back. His company, like many others  regularly shut their factories down and sell it off to other companies. But he, and his comrades have refused to accept this and now at the company’s headquarters in Seoul  they are fighting to get their jobs back.

Hwang takes us back through the history of Korea and the lives of the working class as they live through Japanese colonial rule. As he recounts in 1910 “the country was officially swallowed whole by Japan.”

The consequences for working class Koreans are dire as they struggle to find work and make a living.  Japanese domination is reflected in the way they build a railway line through the country; devastating villages, forcing Koreans to build the track  and killing and raping any protestors.

But Japan faces opposition from an Independence Movement and a Joseon Communist Party which was set up in 1925. Koreans took part in labour and agrarian disputes all over the country and hand to hand fighting in the border areas of Joseon and China.

Hwang weaves the history of Korean resistance through  a series of characters. He shows how women play an important role in the labour movement. Many women work in the textile factories, learn about communism through book clubs but are radicalised by their slave working conditions. They were the lucky ones as many Korean women end up in forced labour or in brothels.

This resistance has a price and Hwang details not just the brutal response of the Japanese to labour activists (women and men) but also the way that Koreans are used to inform on their comrades.

I have  to keep reminding myself that this is a novel but Hwang insists on educating the reader on the real lives of Koreans over a century of struggle for a united country. His aim is  to fill a gap in Korean literature and put industrial workers centre stage.

His novel is also unique, unlike many western novels, he puts socialism as at the centre of the  labour movement during Japanese colonialism and afterwards.  There is a great deal of hope in this book and Hwang believes in a better future. “Whether this period of suffering will be short or long is entirely up to the efforts of those of us living in the present. The traces of our lives and the time we lived in may be no more than a few specks of dust compared to the life of the vast universe. And though change happens slowly – very, very slowly – I don’t want to abandon my hope that it changes for the better.”

If you live in Greater Manchester you can borrow it from our wonderful public libraries. Or buy it from News from Nowhere here.

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