Jay Carax will be back from Manchester next week.
C. Desmond Greaves (1913-1988)
Earlier in the week, I came across this fascinating (private) letter from C.Desmond Greaves, editor of The Irish Democrat to Harry Pollitt, General Secretary of the Communist Party of Great Britian (CPGB). Pollitt was asking his ‘comrade’ for information on the Irish Catholic community, their relation to the Church and the influence it has on their politics. Greaves was seen as an expert on the issue.
The letter was a part of a larger collection of files on the relationship between the CPGB, their Catholic members and debates on how they could best approach the Catholic Community.
It was five pages long, I found this to be the most relevant and interesting section:
“The division between English and Irish Catholics is very important. Though divided on class lines English Catholics are in the main better off. The great county for them is Lancashire where Irish Catholics also exist. I estimate 800,000 Catholics who are Irish or of Irish descent. These again vary and cannot be approached in one way only. Broadly speaking however the existence of an unsolved national problem among the Irish gives the possibility of splitting off this section as a democratic reserve. They consist of about a quarter of the total Catholic population and I would say they are a much larger proportion of the Catholics in the Labour Party.
The Irish are subdivided into ‘New’ and ‘Old’. The ‘new’ are 400,000 immigrants since 1924 when the U.S.A. refusing to accept immigrant, diverted the stream of vigorous young Irish to Britain. Those who came since the war (200,000) are a generation which as forgotten 1916 and is less bitterly nationalistic, and more open to progressive ideas than the older ones. The Irish Democrat circulates almost exclusively among these newer sections of the ‘new’ Irish. Irish affairs are very much alive and they have a direct influence on Irish politics by going backwards and forwards, between the two countries.
The old Irish have lost all political interest in Ireland but a vague and often embittered nationalism apart from the number in the L.P. (they mostly vote Labour I think) have now little Irish left about them but religion. Thus the strength of the anti-partition league is largely a consequence of the backing it receives from the church. Hence also the attempts being made to ban Communists out of it. We of the Irish CTTE have not solved the problem of these older Irish. But we think a broad movement could be build round the Irish Democrat on the basis of demanding Democracy in Ireland (esp. The North) though the forms of organisation would have to be flexible in the extreme; it would be a movement rather than an organisation. The content of the paper would have to be modified though not radically changed.
One asset in working amongst the Irish Catholics is the repeated struggles which all the nationalist leaders of Ireland had against the Catholic Church, and Connolly’s ‘Labour, Nationality and Religion’ is a great asset too. I understand that Roddy Connolly would put no obstacles in our way if we wished to republish it. Thus I think there are two main kinds of Democratic forces amongst the Catholics … the working class, and the Irish. These are the reserves we want to get…”
Letter from C. Desmond Greaves to ‘Comrade’ Pollitt. 28 April 1948.
CP/IND/POLL/09/15
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Donal
Ciarán
Sam
Come Here To Me! 
Very interesting. MI5 also carried out extensive surveillance on Greaves, there are 5 files on him in the National Archives, Kew. I don’t have my notes to hand with the exact file references, but the files can be found under the general call number of KV2. I’ll post the exact ones later in the week. Also in KV2 can be found two files on Frank Ryan, one on Sean Murray, and a few others of relevance to the Irish left. Maybe I’ll post a general post on this on my blog this week.
And yet there are some people who would claim that the CP had nothing to do with the Connolly Association!