The Connolly Column

In preparation for the 2025 IBMT Annual General Meeting in Belfast, we revisit this article by the late Manus O'Riordan in which he describes how the more than 200 Irish International Brigaders overcame hostility and sectarian divisions at home to create a united fight against fascism…

The sheer viciousness of the propaganda and hatred faced by those Irish who took such a courageous stand against fascism in Spain was summed up in a series of articles that ran all week in the Irish Independent in the new year of 1937 and concluded with the following fascist curse pronounced on those Irish International Brigaders who met their deaths. These began with Achill islander Tommy Patten in December 1936 and ended with Jack Nalty and Liam McGregor in September 1938: 

In concluding these articles, I wish to state that the present Government of Madrid is 100% Red and violently opposed to the Catholic Church. Any Irishman preparing to fight for or defend vicariously this regime is defending the enemy of his faith. 

The IBMT honours the memory of all those who had the moral courage to confront unpopularity on the home front in Ireland through their defence of the Spanish Republic.

Michael O’Riordan (left) and Bob Doyle, next to a 1938 memorial banner now held at Dublin’s National Museum at Collins Barracks.

They were led in the south by that brave republican priest who had read the invocation on the occasion when the freely elected first Dáil met to ratify the Irish Republic in 1919 – the former vice president of Sinn Féin, Father Michael O’Flanagan.

And they were defiantly led in the north by the then chairman of the Northern Ireland Labour Party and future Unionist Party Minister for Education in the postwar government of Northern Ireland, Harry Midgley. 

As for those who volunteered to go to Spain to fight, the wording of a plaque unveiled in Belfast in September 2006 was broad enough to encompass both strong and weak, because we knew what it cost each and every one of them to take the stand they did. It was dedicated to those volunteers ‘who stood against Fascism’. 

It was pleasing to note that this wording was unequivocally solid enough to exclude any honours for the man who claimed to have been the first Irish volunteer, Charlie McGuinness of Derry. He initially did go out to Spain but, when offered the opportunity actually to fight for the Republic, he promptly returned home in December 1936 and, during that same month, while the first Irish International Brigaders were being killed in action, he commenced producing such scurrilous – but all too influential – fascist propaganda for the Irish Independent. 

It was none other than that same McGuinness who had been the author of that fascist curse quoted above. Despite his betrayal of Irish International Brigaders, we will always honour those heroes, to mention just two of them named in Christy Moore’s song ‘Viva la Quince Brigada’: 

I accompanied McGrotty’s late brother John in 1994 and 1996 to the mass grave of 5,000 fighters where Éamon is buried near Jarama. John brought soil from their parents’ grave to mix into that mass grave and brought some of Jarama’s soil back to their grave. He carried his brother Éamon’s own missal with him on both occasions, and retold the double hurt experienced by his family when they sought to have a mass said after Éamon’s death in February 1937 and the Bishop of Derry refused them, saying that a mass would be no benefit whatsoever to Éamon, as he was ‘now in Hell’. McGuinness’s dirty work had borne fruit. 

Bob Hilliard was a Church of Ireland pastor 
From Killarney across the Pyrenees he came 
From Derry came a brave young Christian Brother 
Side by side they fought and died in Spain. 
Éamon McGrotty was that Derryman’s name. 

Stained glass window in Belfast City Hall, created by Derry-based Alpha Stained Glass. It was unveiled in 2015 and depicts the way that the anti-fascist cause in Spain brought together the different communities in the city.

Thanks to research undertaken by Ciarán Crossey and Jim Carmody, we have an ever-expanding roll of honour for the Irish volunteers. Of the northern volunteers on the roll published by the International Brigade Commemoration Committee in Belfast, six of them had served alongside my father, Michael O’Riordan, in the British Battalion in the 1938 Battle of the Ebro. 

One Ulsterman who survived that battle was the first of my father’s immediate comrades-in-arms that I remember from early childhood, Hughie Hunter from Ballyclare, Co Antrim, who always brought his mouth organ down with him from Belfast to play tunes for us in our Dublin home and whom my father brought to life in an interview with Ciarán Crossey. He recalled Hughie carefully saving his few pesetas at the front in order to send home a regular donation to the Communist Party of Ireland’s unity fund in Belfast. 

Anybody fortunate enough to have heard the 2006 BBC Radio Ulster programme by Diarmaid Fleming could not fail to have been moved by the accounts of volunteers from the north: Peggy Mount talking about her brother Dick O’Neill from the Falls Road; Liz Shaw talking about her father Joe Boyd from Co Tyrone; Harry McGrath being recalled by his Shankill Road nephews. Such volunteers came both from Catholic and Protestant religious backgrounds; from republican, communist, labour and loyalist political traditions. 

People from all those traditions have come together at a succession of events to honour the memory of the volunteers. Such coming together does not abolish real political differences but it does enhance the human relationships that make dialogue possible. And while such events provide no solution for the Irish question, in our coming together to honour all who defended the Spanish Republic we might note that in that one particular struggle there was in fact an interchange and identity of language used in Spain itself, where every republican was a loyalist and every loyalist a republican. 

The volunteers who hailed from the south were all Irish republicans in the Wolfe Tone tradition – Catholic, Protestant, Jewish and atheist. There is space only to name a few. 

Bill Scott came from a Dublin Protestant working class tradition that had seen his father take up arms as a member of the Irish Citizen Army alongside his leader James Connolly in the 1916 Rising. 

Belfast-born Frank Edward grew up in Waterford.

Frank Edwards was a Waterford teacher who had already been victimised by the Christian Brothers and who, on his return from Spain, found himself blacklisted by Catholic schools for his Spanish republicanism and by Protestant schools for his Irish republicanism, but who also found that the one and only school prepared to employ him was Dublin’s Jewish National School. Frank had been born in Belfast in 1907 to a Catholic family that was subsequently forced out of its home by sectarian conflict and then settled in Waterford. 

Another Irish volunteer was Maurice Levitas – known to family and friends as Morry – from a Dublin Jewish working class tradition, his parents being refugees who had fled Tsarist antisemitism in Latvia and Lithuania. During the course of the Second World War, Morry’s maternal aunt Rachel and her family would become Holocaust victims in Riga. His paternal aunt Sara, her family and neighbours would be locked into their own Lithuanian village synagogue and burned to death. 

A paternal uncle in Paris, whom Morry had visited on his way to Spain in 1938 and again on his way back in 1939 following his release with Bob Doyle from the San Pedro de Cardeña concentration camp, and who thought he had emigrated far enough west to be safe, would also be murdered on his own doorstep by the Gestapo at the very end of the war. 

Christy Moore’s song speaks of ‘the rising fascist tide’, and it was that tide which those International Brigade volunteers – so derisively referred to by the British and American establishments as ‘premature anti-fascists’ – had fought so hard to halt. 

Olympian, cleric and International Brigader Robert 'Bob' Hilliard.

Another volunteer, originally from Kerry but for a number of years intimately linked with the city of Belfast as a Church of Ireland clergyman, was the Reverend Robert M Hilliard, who was to fall at Jarama in February 1937. Hilliard was a Protestant republican, not only in respect of the Spanish Civil War, but also in respect of his native Ireland. Hilliard had in fact been an IRA volunteer in Kerry during the Irish Civil War. 

In 1931 he was to serve as a Church of Ireland curate in Christ Church, Derriaghy, and in 1972 that church was presented with a communion chalice, paten and cruet in his memory by a fellow International Brigader who was himself an agnostic, the Co Tyrone Independent Labour Party volunteer, Joe Boyd. 

After he had been appointed to the Belfast Cathedral Mission in 1933, Hilliard became greatly radicalised by the social upheavals in Belfast at that time. Personal problems saw him subsequently leave for London where he became even more radicalised in later years, joining the Communist Party of Great Britain and volunteering for Spain in December 1936. 

Hilliard’s last message to his family was dated 24 January 1937 – a fortnight before his death. He wrote: 

My dear, Five minutes ago I got your letter. There is a Daily Worker delegation here who will take this back. They leave in ten minutes so I have time for no more than a card which will have an English postmark. Teach the kids to stand for democracy. Thanks for the parcels, I expect they have been forwarded to me, but posts are held up very long & especially parcels. Do not worry too much about me, I expect I shall be quite safe. I think I am going to make quite a good soldier. I still hate fighting but this time it has to be done, unless fascism is beaten in Spain & in the world it means war and hell for our kids. All the time when I am thinking of you & the children I am glad I have come. Give my love to Tim, Deirdre, Davnet & Kit. Write when you can, it will help. Love to you, Robert. 

Ulsterman James Patrick Haughey.

The very last Irish volunteer to reach Spain was an Ulsterman, James Patrick Haughey from Lurgan, Co Armagh, who had fought shoulder-to-shoulder with my father, Michael O’Riordan, in the Battle of the Ebro during July and August 1938; and who was captured and imprisoned that September in the concentration camp of San Pedro de Cardeña. As with the letters of the Reverend Bob Hilliard, the following extract from a letter written from Canada after Haughey’s release from that fascist hell brings us still closer to the great humanity of all such volunteers. The letter from Jim to his sister Veronica is dated 25 May 1939: 

It would be impossible to describe the humiliations we suffered after that [capture] until we arrived in the concentration camp. Here we met some more international prisoners of war. There were 36 different nationalities including Irish, British and Americans (some time I will describe this camp, it was very interesting). Here I had my head dressed and settled down patiently to await the day when we should be liberated. There were 400 of us in a room which would hold 50 comfortably, no smokes, no books, 1 toilet and one water tap for 400 men, abundance of lice, very little food, beans twice a day. For the last 3 months before we were released we were fed on bread and water, nothing else. 

Jim Haughey went on to prove his continuing anti-fascist valour. He volunteered for the Royal Canadian Air Force in June 1941. He was killed in a plane crash on 12 September 1943, and his name is engraved on Canada’s World War Two Book of Remembrance. Like Charlie Donnelly, he had expressed in verse the anticipation of his own death, which also occurred at the age of 23. 

On 31 October 1943 The Times of London posthumously published Jim’s poem – simply entitled ‘Fighter Pilot’ – over the name of Séamus Haughey. These verses have echoes of the WB Yeats poem ‘An Irish Airman Foresees his Death’, but possess the greater authenticity of being the actual premonitions of a real airman, rather than Yeats’s attribution of his own imagined thoughts to Robert Gregory. What I hadn’t realised until 2005 was that Jim had already lost his father a year before. Able seaman James Aloysius Haughey had been killed at sea – torpedoed by a Nazi German submarine – on 1 February 1942. 

Reflections on his father’s death at sea are also present in the first verse, where James Patrick speculates about his own forthcoming death. 

I think that it will come, somewhen, somewhere 
In shattering crash, or roaring sheet of flame; 
In the green-blanket sea, choking for air, 
Amid the bubbles transient as my name. 

The final verse is a tribute to him and to all of his internationalist comrades who stood against fascism in defence of the Spanish Republic. 

When peace descends once more like gentle rain, 
Mention my name in passing, if you must, 
As one who knew the terms – slay or be slain, 
And thought the bargain was both good and just. 

To find out more about the IBMT AGM, see the provisional programme. To book tickets, go to Eventbrite. The AGM is being organised by the Belfast-based International Brigade Commemoration Committee (IBCC).