LABOUR LEADERS. THE IRA, SINN FEIN and the ANC by Donal Kennedy


On October 31 1920 , London Labour Borough Councillors, Aldermen and Mayors, in their Municipal regalia. walked in procession in the funeral of Terence MacSwiney who had died on hunger strike in Brixton Prison.

MacSwiney had been elected in the General Election of December 1918 as a  Sinn Fein candidate, one of 73 of the party’s sucessful candidates pledged to establish a sovereign Republic in Ireland. Having won 73 of Ireland’s 105 Parliamentary seats Sinn Fein established a Parliament in Dublin, appointed Ministers to run the Republic  and set about the work of government. In 1920 Sinn Fein had participated in Municipal, Co Council and other 

local elections throughout Ireland and the electorate gave them renewed support.

 Terence Mac Swiney was elected a member of Cork Corporation and was Lord Mayor of that City when he died.

Alongside the hearse as it made  its way through London streets, marched a uniformed Guard of Honour of the First Cork Brigade Irish Volunteers (aka IRA) of whom MacSwiney had been its Commanding Officer until his death.

 I don’t know the later record of any but one of the London Labour men who marched behind the IRA. But the Mayor of Stepney, Major Clement Attlee, who had served  with the British Army in Gallipoli , didn’t do too badly, as he said himself  –

“Few thought  he was even a starter

 There many who thought themselves smarter

 But he ended  PM

CH and OM

An Earl and a Knight of the Garter”

Some 40 odd years later Harold Wilson led the Labour Party to victory in four out of  in five General Elections between 1964 and 1976. He met the IRA’s Provisional Army Council in Dublin in rather irregular circumstances. He was in Opposition at the time and  under the pretext of visiting Irish Labour Party leaders in international fraternity, he was acting at the request of Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath. The Irish Government was eager to arrest and imprison the IRA leadership and would have had the support of Irish Labour, not to say Fine Gael Opposition members.

At the time Sinn Fein had not a single elected TD or  MP , perhaps even a local councillor in the whole of Ireland.

 It was an underhand, discreditable contemptible act of Wilson and of Heath. An insult to elected Irish elected politicians and those Irish citizens  who had elected them.

  But Wilson escaped  censure in his own party as Heath did in his.

 Contrast  that with the fate of Jeremy Corbyn. Corbyn met Gerry Adams in London openly. There was no subterfuge. There was no warrant for Gerry Adams’s arrest. Like Corbyn, Adams was a democratically elected public representative, Adams is now an international

figure of some stature who was honoured at Nelson Mandela’s funeral more favourably than any European Royal.

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