Dublin Anarchist Group, May Day 1978

click here to download

This was the first leaflet from the Dublin Anarchist Group, and below is a sneering and very inaccurate report from a Stalinist journal of the time.

The DAG only lasted for a year or so before it had a friendly split. The minority got together with some likeminded people from the Belfast Anarchist Collective and formed the Anarchist Workers Alliance. That can be seen as a forerunner of the Workers Solidarity Movement (formed in 1984).

The majority, who favoured a looser and less politically defined group, went on to establish the ABC bookshop in Marlborough Street and published two issues of a magazine called Resistance. Proving that Dublin is a small place, they shared that building with the Socialist Labour Party and the 32 County Feminist Federation.

The DAG’s membership included Jackie Crawford, Hugh McPartlin, Patricia McCarthy, Joan Stephenson, Alan MacSimoin, Don Bennett and Valerie McCarthy

This snippet comes from superSPI, the often humourous magazine of the Socialist Party of Ireland.  This had no connection to today’s party of the same name.  It was a small hardline Stalinist split from from the Official Republican Movement in 1971, which sought to win the Moscow franchise away from the Communist Party.  Over its 11 years of life it never spread beyond Dublin and the remnants ended up in the Labour Party.

Getting three things wrong in just two sentences wasn’t bad going! The leaflet was not distributed in Trinity College but on that year’s Dublin May Day march. The Dublin Anarchist Group didn’t have an office in Rathmines, and not having an office it couldn’t have been courtesy of the Student Christian Movement.

The real story was far less interesting. The Dublin Anarchist Group had been formed a couple of months previously. The Student Christian Movement allowed a multitude of campaign groups to use their address for mail, and the DAG asked if they could also use it for a few weeks until they sorted out their own.

I don’t think there were any Trinity students involved (though I could be wrong), though there was a WUI shop steward from Trinity. There were a couple of students from UCD but a good few of the 25 or so members of the group were ex-republicans (both provo and sticky) or union activists. I can remember people from the CIE works in Inchicore, Dublin County Council, and Ardmore Film Studios.

And whilst talking of ‘interesting’ things, the SPI who covered Ballymun and Tallaght with anti-Provo “Isolate the Gunmen’ posters, had originally funded themselves by an armed raid on Ballymun post office.

**superSPI is available for download at the excellent Left Archive of the Cedar Lounge Revolution blog: cedarlounge.wordpress.com/category/irish-left-online-document-archive/socialist-party-of-ireland-spi

Anarchy magazine – Craigavon New Town – early 1970s

From the British Anarchy magazine in the early 1970s (this issue is Second Series, Vol. 10, No.1 but undated), an article by Roger Willis about Craigavon New Town. This was to incorporate Portadown and Lurgan in an urban centre of the future with new houses, lots of jobs and great facilities. Needless to say, it didn’t turn out like that.

click here to download

Anarchy magazine, special issue on Ireland – 1971

Anarchy magazine, edited by Colin Ward, was published from London in the 1960s. A second series, with no direct connection to Ward’s, appeared in the 1970s. Issue no. 6, from 1971, was largely given over to articles written by members of People’s Democracy.

click here to download

It kicks off with an introduction looking at the reforms won by the civil rights movement, and the response of the left in Britain to internment.

Next is a detailed account of the police mutiny during the 1907 Belfast dock strike. The author, John Grey, went on to expand this into a book; City in Revolt (Blackstaff Press, 1987). The revolt was sparked by the refusal of Constable William Barrett to escort a wagon driven by a scab, and soon saw the majority of RIC men in the city put forward their own demands for pay and pension increases. The spirit of Larkinism was seen in statements like that condemning their officers for doing “all in their power to humiliate the Belfast police in the eyes of the public by turning them into “blacklegs” – to please their friends the capitalists”.

A biographical article about James Connolly emphasises his syndicalism, but the unknown author gets carried away by his own enthusiasm when he quotes the socialist poet Robert Lynd as proof that Connolly was not only a syndicalist but specifically an anarcho-syndicalist.

The history of People’s Democracy by J. Quinn takes us through the early PD’s development from a student civil rights group to a revolutionary socialist organisation. It gives us a real sense of how the most dynamic left group in the six counties at the time saw things at the beginning of the ’70s.

‘Major Mullen’ (the late John McGuffin) describes his arrest and time in Crumlin Road jail.

The 22 week strike by workers at Cement Limited in Drogheda and Limerick in 1970 saw PD helping the strikers by picketing scab deliveries coming into small non-union ports like Cushendun, Kilkeel and Ardglass. The Orange state responded with over 100 summonses, numerous arrests and several jail sentences. PD were also accused of responsibility when in Armagh “within the course of two weeks no fewer than 21 lorries owned by scabs mysteriously combusted” and in Newry when “over 200 people came out of their houses and stoned the boat (loaded with scab cement) out of the harbour”.

Finally, there are book reviews looking at the Blueshirts, Church & State in modern Ireland, and anarchism in urban life.

Anarchists stop theft of strikers’ money

As reported on the cover of the Anarchist Worker below, the gardai tried to seize money collected for the McDonalds strike fund as the AWA had no permit for a street collection.  Refusing to hand over the buckets of cash, the AWA members were quickly joined by a large group of fellow trade unionists and the cops backed off after taking a couple of names.

£200.04 was delivered to the union office the following day.  (This would be roughly €1,200 at 2012 values)

Anarchist Worker – May/June 1978

Anarchist Worker, published by the Anarchist Workers Alliance in the late 1970s/early 1980s, can be regarded as one of the forerunners of the Workers Solidarity Movement. The AWA existed in Belfast and Dublin but was always more of an idea than a reality, with membership never going into double figures. The print run was about 750 (ranging from 500 to 1,500).

click here to download

As befits a first issue, we get a page about the Anarchist Workers Alliance and why it was formed. Other articles look at the McDonalds strike for union recognition, the PAYE tax protests, the post office strike, the H-Block & Armagh prison protests, and the six county Payment for Debt Act. Longer pieces look at why the CIE craft workers committee collapsed, and the law that legalised contraceptives in the 26 counties. That was Haughey’s ‘Irish solution to an Irish problem’ which required a doctor’s prescription to buy a condom.

The centre pages are given over to an explanation of how the Spanish anarchist CNT union structures itself, with the conclusion that it “tries to abolish the bureaucracy that comes with centralisation by making sure that decisions effecting workers are taken by, and only by, those workers effected.”

Black Rag – February 1978

click here to download

Published from Belfast, with a few supporters in Dublin, it’s aim was to encourage “organising in small affinity (friendship) groups which cooperate in a non-hierarchical way and support individuals or small groups involved in direct action”. Its politics were feminist and there was a concentration on “oppressions” (prison conditions, drug laws, anti-gay laws). There was never a second issue but some of those involved joined the Belfast Anarchist Collective.

Amnesty International gets slated for doing little when anarchists (and ex-Official IRA members) Maire & Noel Murray were sentenced to death for the killing of a garda in Dublin during a bank raid. And in a review of an early Boomtown Rats gig, we see early indications of the Bob Geldorf we all know. “Then came the first of the many pseudo-intellectual lectures to the misguided audience who waited n every word. These varied from the complete overthrow of the system in Ireland to the fact that they wre not making enough money because of the response to their latest album. This sold only 175,000 copies that week.”

A Wee Black Booke of Belfast Anarchism (1867-1973)

click here to download

Historian Mairtin O Cathain’s A Wee Black Booke pulls together reports of anarchism in and around Belfast in the years from 1867 to 1973.  With no local movement for much of this period, the pamphlet looks at some individuals whose political activity merited mention in the media of the time. O Cathain’s work stops before the emergence in the late 1970s of the groups from which contemporary organisations Workers Solidarity Movement and Organise can trace their roots.

Some readers will be aware of the Irish Citizen Army’s Captain Jack White who became an anarchist after seeing the Spanish revolution in practice. The others will be unknown to all but historians. Bolton Hall and William Baillie emigrated to the USA, where Hall was involved in communal experiments, propaganda, and union organising.  Baillie was more of an individualist, though he still realised that “personal freedom was tied inexorably to collective and economic freedom.”

John McAra was a Scottish anarchist who came to speak in Belfast, where he was arrested and jailed. A group did form from his activity, but appears to have died away after the First World War.  Jack McMullen was a public speaker and socialist with anarchist sympathies, who campaigned against slum housing and unemployment in the 1920s and 1930s.

Finally there is John McGuffin, a founder member of the Belfast Anarchist Group, who was involved in the early Peoples Democracy and the civil rights movement.

Anarchist Worker – October 1979

click here to download

Contents include the (successful) squatting of the Mansion House by families from Dublin’s East Wall unable to get Corporation housing, a strongly secular approach to education, and an emphatic pro-union stance. There is also a double page spread on Anarchism and Religion which uses as its starting point the then recent visit of the Pope.  The article on the last page which criticises punishment shootings, resulted in threats and accusations of “black propaganda” from INLA members.