Nestled in the sleepy countryside of county Leitrim, Effrinagh is a small village that holds a significant place in the hearts of many Irish trade unionists.
Its picturesque green fields and winding country roads charmingly disguise its importance as the birthplace of one of Ireland’s most remarkable, though often overlooked, socialists—James Gralton.
On Friday afternoon in Effrinagh, SIPTU members from across the North West gathered to kick off the Markievicz/Partridge Summer School by honouring the memory of Gralton, a man whose dedication to the working class and egalitarian values left an indelible mark on this community and on the left in Ireland.
Gralton’s life and work serve as a timely reminder of the power of collective and common struggle, and the deep injustice he endured at the hands of a reactionary state that sought to silence him.
In this week’s Sunday Read, we publish SIPTU Deputy General Secretary, Ethel Buckley’s keynote speech at the event, where she connects Gralton’s struggle to current challenges facing workers in Ireland, emphasising the need for stronger protections for union organising and respect at work for all.
Comrades,
We are here in Effrinagh, the homeplace of James Gralton, to commemorate the memory of our comrade and to acknowledge the wrongful treatment and illegal deportation of a man whose work in this community and whose legacy to the left in Ireland is worthy of commendation.
It is fitting that we as trade unionists stand here today. And it is fitting that we are joining with representatives of the Gralton Labour History Committee, whose hard work and dedication has ensured that Gralton’s social and political beliefs and activities are not lost to history.
The activities of a coalition of reactionary forces to silence Gralton, to attempt to censor his beliefs and ultimately to deport him from his own country, should also never be forgotten. Their ilk are on the rise again in communities across this island.
Gralton was born here in 1866 to Alice and Michael Gralton, small farmers who farmed 25 acres of poor land.
Michael Gralton, Jimmy’s father, was a founding member of the Kiltoghert Cooperative Creamery. And no doubt the young James would have taken inspiration from the collectivism of the cooperative movement to which his father belonged, and which offered the power of collective bargaining to small farmers in the early years of the last century and indeed to rural communities around the country to this day.
James left school at the young age of 14. He worked for a time in a shop in Carrick-on-Shannon where our Summer School will be based, and like so many before him and since, he emigrated across the water to work in Liverpool, working on the docks and in the mines in Wales, and onboard ships sailing the international seas from the South Pacific to South and North America.
It was in this experience of travelling the world that he developed a strong sense of internationalism, which would shape his worldview in the decades to come.
After a period serving in the U.S. navy, Gralton became an American citizen. He returned to Leitrim during the War of Independence to find that the Black and Tans had burnt down the parish hall in Effrinagh. Gralton and his friends and comrades set about the task of building a community hall to fill the void.
The local people here fundraised the resources required for the materials and volunteered their labour in a sort of meitheal to rebuild.
The new hall opened, to great excitement and local pride, on New Year’s Eve in 1921.
It was named the Pearse-Connolly Memorial Hall in honour of our great fallen leader, socialist, trade unionist, and founder of the ITGWU, James Connolly, and Padraig Pearse.
It was the socialist and republican martyrs of the Easter Rising that the people of Effrinagh chose to salute in the naming of their hall.
Fittingly, the hall, utilised for communal activities and events, was democratically run and communally owned.
The hall was used to hear and arbitrate cases relating to local agrarian disputes. In the agrarian conflicts that afflicted the people of this place in the 1920s and 1930s, we see the power imbalance between those who live by wealth and those who live by work—the privileged graziers and the precarious small farmers and their families.
In many ways, this imbalance mirrors the imbalances of the labour market between the bosses and workers. It is only through collective and common struggle that the downtrodden can summon the power to win what is rightfully and equally theirs.
James Gralton knew this as we trade unionists know it.
He and his comrades’ belief in equality and the fair redistribution of resources was perceived as a threat by disparate forces, from the Catholic Church to the local IRA.
The IRA feared that socialist politics would distract the people from the national question and would act to weaken patriotic fervour.
Gralton was denounced from all sides, including from the pulpit, for leading the people astray, and he was arrested by Free State soldiers in 1922.
Detained in Carrick-on-Shannon for a week, where protests involving trade unionists were held calling for his release, Gralton returned to Effrinagh while a dance was taking place in the Pearse-Connolly Hall.
Gralton soon left Leitrim for New York, where he would spend the next decade active in the American communist movement. When he returned to the reaction of 1930s Ireland, he joined Fianna Fáil, as many farmers did, and became active in the Revolutionary Workers’ Group.
In 1932 and 1933, the Hall here in this exact place was a site of socialist and republican organisation and agitation but also a lightning rod, splitting the local community left and right, progressive and conservative. It was burnt to the ground on Christmas Eve 1932.
Twelve years of dancing, music, social justice, and community were brought to an abrupt end. This practice of reactionaries burning buildings to the ground has many echoes today, in asylum centres across Ireland.
Two days after burying his father in February ’33, a deportation order was issued for James Gralton on the basis that, as an American citizen, he was ‘an undesirable alien’. In order to discredit and demonise Gralton and his ideas, the regime of the day could think of no better attack than to call him and them foreign.
Of course, as an Irish citizen, Gralton was wrongfully and illegally categorised as an alien—but that was a detail of little significance to the authorities.
ITGWU organiser and comrade of Gralton, the great Peadar O’Donnell, campaigned alongside many others in his defence, and Gralton went on the run for six months before eventually succumbing to the power of the State. He was arrested in August and deported to America from Cobh.
James died in New York in December 1945, alienated from his native Ireland and from the Leitrim he had loved.
1930s Ireland was a cold and hostile place for socialists, communists, and trade unionists. Gralton’s treatment at the hands of the state is emblematic of the oppression of progressive people more widely in that era.
In some respects, Ireland today remains a cold and hostile place for workers.
Although we do not endure the same repression as the 1930s, we continue to lag decades behind our neighbours.
Ireland has the weakest workers’ rights in Western Europe, with many in this country today victimised for attempting to organise their workplaces.
Today, it is big business that sets the rules, and their workers too often endure a climate of fear.
Workers deserve better. All workers deserve respect at work.
“Respect at Work” is the theme of the Markievicz Partridge Summer School this year, and I commend the Sligo Leitrim Roscommon District Council for choosing this theme.
We have a window of opportunity in the coming general election and the transposition of the Directive on AMW to change the game for workers in Ireland.
Over the next two days, we will discuss and debate the reality of Irish workplaces and the harsh conditions that workers in Ireland face when they attempt to organise in the workplace along the lines that Gralton did in this community.
We will hear shocking new evidence of victimisation, discrimination, and dismissal of workers for unionising their workplaces, and we will hear directly from a number of brave workers who are coming forward to tell their story of how they themselves have been treated by union-busting bosses.
Tomorrow in Carrick-on-Shannon, in the spirit of Jimmy Gralton and his comrades, we will launch our general election campaign to demand new workers’ rights laws.
Laws that will afford:
- The right to protection, so that no worker is punished for organising for better pay and conditions at work. We want robust new protections for employee representatives when they stand up for themselves or their colleagues.
- The right to access a trade union, so that employers are not able to keep workers in the dark about their entitlements and how to organise for better. Everyone should be able to access information in the workplace about their rights at work through a union.
- And we want a legal right to discussion. Too many employers gag their employees from discussing their pay and conditions with colleagues at work. Without this right to discussion, the conversations that lead to organising are too often cut short.