MayDay 1949

I’ve started doing walking tours / workshops again and it’s great because I get asked questions that wouldn’t occur to me because, well, I’m blind to my own research. One of them is: why did the Irish left lose that anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, comprador/middleman analysis that was so prevalent not only in Connolly’s writings but also in Irish marxism and socialist-republicanism in the 1930s as well?

I think May Day 1949 is a good way in to the answer. It was the largest single trade union demonstration in the history of the state up to then – over 150,000 people on the streets of Dublin.

The purpose was not to celebrate international workers’ day, mind, but to protest the incarceration of of two fascist members of the Yugoslav clergy who had collaborated with the Nazis during the second world war. They were Cardinal Mindszenty and Archbishop Stepinac. The reason why they were not shot after the war as collaborators was because they were clergy, so they were imprisoned instead.
The May Day rally in support of Nazi collaborators was backed by Irish trade unions who took out ads in the newspapers calling on their members to attend.

This rally of over 150,000 was held four years after the end of the war and news of the Holocaust and the concentration camps – so no illusions as to what Mindszenty, Stepinac, and the Catholic Church was supporting. This was also the time when the first set of edited collections of Connolly’s writings were released under the supervision of the former head of the ITGWU and ICTU, William O’Brien. The Connolly they created out of their editing of his works was one to match as much as possible this idea of trade unionism and the Irish State. It is also reflective of the utterly hostile atmosphere in which the Irish Communist party had to operate.

So yeah, largest May Day rally in the history of the Irish State (given the numbers and population at the time), and all for two Nazi Catholic priests in godless communist Yugoslavia.