Come Here To Me!

The Ballyfermot Co-Op of the 1950s, to quote one of its central activists, had the misfortune to fall”foul of reaction.”

From an earlier anti-communist poster, 'Keep The Red Off Our Flag' (Edited by Lookleft Magazine)

While grocery co-operatives formed an important part of many communities in the Ireland of the time, in West Dublin a red scare campaign succeeded in forcing the closure of an important local service. In Dublin’s newly built working class suburbia, the co-operatives offered more than just affordable goods, providing people with inclusive local organisations and a sense of community.

The controversies around the Ballyfermot Co-Op arouse from the belief it was a communist infiltration scheme, with a letter to the press denouncing its presence in the area signed by the secretaries of the local Fianna Fáil, Labour and Fine Gael branches. Much of the hysteria was whipped up by The Standard, a religious newspaper which didn’t hold back in attacking the Co-Op, and even managed to evoke the name of Joseph Stalin in the process.

In his autobiography Just Joe, Joe Duffy recalled the very real power of the church in the Ballyfermot of the 1960s, but pointed back to the story of the Co-Op a decade earlier, writing that:

Ballyfermot was run – in a very real sense of the word – by a big, gruff, silver-haired Kerryman, Canon Michael Charles Troy….He was a larger than life country parish priest transplanted into a sprawling, uncontrollable, volatile urban area with the population of a small city. One of his first acts was to savagely quash attempts by a group of locals to open a co-op shop to bring down prices. Troy smelt a whiff of communism in the ‘co-op’ notion and bullied people into turning against it.

If Troy got a whiff of communism off the Co-Op movement in the locale, it should be noted that leftists were central to its foundation, though it became a much broader movement. One central figure to this story is Joseph Deasy. Born in Dublin in 1922, Deasy was raised at ‘The Ranch’ in Ballyfermot and later Goldenbridge Gardens in Inchicore. He devoted much of his life to progressive politics, and was elected to Dublin Corporation as a Labour Party Councillor in 1945, an impressive achievement at a mere 22 years of age. It was a fellow Labour Party activist, Tim Graham, who initiated the co-operative movement in his area. The first meeting was held in the Workman’s Club on Emmet Road,which led to the opening of a grocery shop on Grattan Crescent in Inchicore, before  the opening of a larger presence on Decies Road in Ballyfermot, leased from the Corporation.

Members of the Co-Op,  including Deasy (back row second from right). Image from Irish Left Review article ‘Joe Deasy: Irish Marxist’

Writing in the Irish Workers’ Voice in November 1952, Joe Deasy remembered:

In September, Ballyfermot and Inchicore witnessed one of the most scandalous and unscrupulous campaigns ever waged against a people’s movement – the Inchicore-Ballyfermot Co-operative Society…

…This Society was founded in 1945 and was based on the democratic principles of all co-operative movements…After a short period in existence the Society purchased a small shop in Inchicore…In 1951, through hard work and initiative, the allocation of one of the rented shops in Ballyfermot was secured from the Housing Committee of the Dublin Corporation. The membership had in the mean time increased considerably and reached a figure approaching 400 paid -up members and 300 partially paid-up.

Deasy recalled that “the Ballyfermot shop was a splendid, first-class grocery and provision store.By careful and conscientious management it was well on the high road to success and promised to be a real asset to the people of the area.” While Deasy had been a member of the Labour Party at the time of the inauguration of the Co-Op, he had departed for the Irish Workers’ League, a forerunner to the Communist Party of Ireland which was frequently the subject of negative media attention from the Catholic newspaper The Standard. It was perhaps unsurprising when they mentioned him by name in a November 1952 edition alongside more famous names:

Everybody who knows the slightest thing about communist technique knows that its first objective is contacts. What better contact, than the unsuspecting members of a co-op?…It was Ballyfermot’s misfortune to be selected for infiltration. How appropriate are the names of Ballyfermot? Sarsfield, Decies and Cremona? They might have been changed to Lenin, Stalin and, perhaps, Deasy Road.

In addition to being denounced in the Catholic press, the Co-Op was also condemned from the pulpit. The presence of members of the Irish Workers’ League on the Committee of the Co-Op caused great concern, at a time of heightened anti-communism. Deasy recalled that:

Four of the Committee of twelve including myself were members of the Irish Workers’ League. Now it could be argued that having regard to the environment at the time we made ourselves rather vulnerable. The Cold War was hotting up and a very strong anti-Communist feeling prevailed. There were also several details about the nature of the attack which were personally upsetting. As a result of denunciations from the pulpit my parents couldn’t go to mass locally but had to go to Church in the next Parish

This publication includes Deasy's 1952 article on the Co-Op. Digitised by Irish Left Archive.

Rumours spread throughout Ballyfermot, some of them outlandish. Deasy remembered one rumour that he “had gone into the Vestry and physically attacked Father Troy. This would have been rather unwise on my part considering the impressive physique of the man.” Troy, a former Kerry footballer, was not to be messed with. Plenty of column inches went on the Co-Op in the national press too.

In attempting to appease those who feared the communist influence of the Co-Op, the IWL members made it clear they were willing to resign from the Committee of the group, but not the Co-Op itself. This wasn’t enough for some however. The members of the Co-Op sought outside assistance; Secretary Tim Graham met with the Civil Liberties Association, though he found them less than helpful. Deasy sought advice from the veteran socialist Peadar O’Donnell, who advised him to write to Paddy ‘The Cope’ Gallagher in Donegal, as he had successfully established a Co-Op there. Fearful of communist association, Paddy refused to support the Ballyfermot activists. In the pages of the national press, opponents of the Co-Op wrote that “we would all like a genuine co-operative, but it is false to say that the movement arose in Ballyfermot by spontaneous desire.”

In the end, pressure on the Co-Op grew so great that it eventually closed, despite labouring on for a few difficult months after The Standard denunciation. Deasy would later wonder if there was more at play than anti-communism in the whole affair, recalling that:

Perhaps the whole campaign was sparked off by local shopkeepers who would have had a vested interest in preventing the progress of the Co-op. The clergy did promise the people that they would start a Christian co-op based on Christian principles. This idea never materialised.