Irish Labour and Working Class History

Lord Mayor, ladies, gentlemen and comrades.

For me this day is the culmination of many years of involvement with the papers Communist Party of Ireland.
When I first discovered in 1994 when doing an M.A that that the CPI had an archive on the upper floors of 43 East Essex Street, little did I realise that it would lead to an terrific discovery. It took me two years to reach the point where I was allowed to look through the papers.

By this time both Sean Nolan and Geoffrey Palmer had died and they brought with them their filing system. Consequently the only way of knowing what the collection contained was to sort through it slowly and painstakingly. The papers were spread chaotically over the second and third floor of the building. The were stored in several ways,

Old newspapers, from the 1930’ to 1990s were piled in heaps, boxes containing of political pamphlets both Irish and international, Minute Books dating form the 1940s, and many brown paper parcels tied with string. I never met Sean Nolan or Geoffrey Palmer but as I slowly worked my way through the papers I began to get a sense of them. The brown paper parcels were the annual accounts of the Bookshop. Both Men kept meticulous records and at the end of each financial year, they tied that year’s accounts, letters and receipts in the brown paper.

The two men kept all records of the party, a small sample would be the papers of the Frank Ryan Release committee completes with the petition and all its signatures. There is the minute book of the Trinity College Prometheus Society and a Civil War Journal written in Mountjoy Jail. This has contributions from Liam Mellows written in the weeks before he was executed in December 1922 and may possibly be his last writings. There are many propaganda posters, journals, and films from the Soviet Union. My favourite are the WW2 anti fascist posters, which are really funny and unique.

As I read my way through this material, I began to realise that this collection was special and needed to be saved because it contained aspects of Irish social history as well as the political. he collection needed to be and kept safe. Eugene McCartan was keen to do this and, so for a few years I became the ‘strange women in the attic cataloguing the material .

The Heritage Council who were very supportive gave the party a grant to buy a computer and contact an archivist to write a report on the papers.

The Collection essentially begins in 1934-35 in the aftermath of the attack by a mob who set fire to the party offices and bookshop at Strand Street in Dublin. After the fire, they moved to Ormond Grey and, here the collection really begins with the large correspondence between Sean Nola to Malachy Grey about the publication and sales of the party’s paper the Democrat.

From Ormond Quay they moved to Sackville Place, then for some years, to Pembroke Road in Ballsbridge, they moved back to the city to Pearse Street, for from there to Parliament Street and finally in the 1974-75 to 43 East Essex Street. Every time they moved, Sean Nolan and Geoffrey Palmer moved every scrap of paper.

It was in Essex Street that the papers were almost lost. In the 1980 there was a fire next-door (42) and the building lost some of it original wall but the Dublin Fire Brigade saved the building and the wall was rebuilt.
The second occasion was the day the building came close to collapse in 1998.

August 1998, was very wet and the rain fell monsoon like for almost a week when Eugene was away on holidays. There were builder working on the roof of no 44, which was being restored, and in the process, they made a significance hole in the roof just about the stairwell of 43.

The rain came in and this necessitated moving all papers from the third floor down to the second and this took three days and, all the while, it rained incessantly.

On the fourth morning I came in to discover the stairs were soaked through and, the four flights of stair was on the point of becoming a waterfall. Just to make it more interesting there was a man working on the roof next door (No 44) and in the course of his work he began to dislodge lumps of the wall plaster and it too began to began to rain down the destabilised stairs.

The cavalry that day were Henry Dent who worked in the shop and Dermot Nolan the building engineer.
Henry rang Dermot who arrived removed the man off the roof and insisted that the builders place struts along the stairwell, and then he closed the building for a week.

The most interesting aspect of this story was our priorities. While Henry and Dermot were concerned building falling down I too was concerned, but my focus was the collection because if it was destroyed that day, so much would have been lost.

Happily, due to Henry’s quick thinking and Dermot’s work both the building and the collection were saved for posterity.

Just one more thing I have been asked on many occasions over the years sometimes dismissively, what was so important about this collection, and my way of explaining it is that if Irish 20th Century history was a Jigsaw the CPI collection would from a small part of it, and so without it the story would remain incomplete.