Comrades Brothers & Sisters

Kerry Dougherty talks to Michael O'Riordan about fifty years of Irish Communism.

The Communist Party of Ireland celebrates its fiftieth anniversary this month in its headquarters in the New Book Shop off Parliament Street in Dublin.

In the half century of its existence the party has presumably made some gains in membership - although numbers are secret - but it has failed to stand a single successful candidate in general elections North or South and has had little impact on the political, economic or social life of Ireland.

Why has the party remained so small and insignificant while other socialist parties have been born, grown, and even elected candidates to the Dail?

"The question should be, how did we survive at all over the past fifty years," says Michael O'Riordan, the 66 year-old General Secretary of the Communist Party, who has been a member since 1934. "When you look at the Cold War - the years from 1948 until just about five years ago - it is a wonder we were able to exist at all."

Placing his considerable bulk into a wobbly office chair in the meeting room behind the party book store, Michael O'Riordan recalled the dark days when the United States and the Soviet Union seemed poised for war and when "communist" was a dirty word. Ireland then had its own form of red-baiting in the guise of the Church.

Not only were Irish communists denounced by the Church but they were followed by the Special Branch and listened to through invisible phone taps.

"Back in the fifties the Church said you couldn't even read a party paper", he recalls with a smile. "When I ran for the Dail back in 1951 (from the Dublin South West constituency) the Bishop declared that to vote for O'Riordan was a mortal sin.

"Times have changed, however. Today you have priests fighting side by side with the Communists in. El Salvador and no one ever blesses themselves when they see me coming down the street and believe me, they used to do that."

O'Riordan says he knew for certain things had changed when he was asked to address a group of priests and nuns in Maynooth about Communism recently. The only problem he encountered was what to call the assembled. As a communist, O'Riordan couldn't, in good conscience, greet the group with references to Church hierarchy and he feared they would be offended if he simply called them comrades.

"I settled on 'comrades, sisters and brothers'," he says with a smile.

To Michael O'Riordan and the other old-timers in the Communist Party, these seemingly small changes in public attitudes toward the party are the things they point to when asked to cite their major accomplishments. They admit that trying to promote communism, in one of the most Catholic and conservative nations in the West, has not always been easy.

"If you look at our members you'll find a lot of older people, about my age and quite a few young members, but we did miss out on the middleaged. They were all scared away by the Cold War," O'Riordan says.

Michael O'Riordan's own baptism into communism is interesting - especially considering he was born into a devout Catholic family in Cork in 1917. By the age of 17 he had read James Connolly - whom he calls the first Irish communist - and was won over by the man's beliefs.

In 1934, over the protestations of his parents, young Michael O'Riordan came to Dublin and joined the fledgling Communist party of Ireland. Three years later he left Ireland to fight in the Spanish Civil War, returned when the war was over and devoted the next 40 years promoting the Communist cause in Ireland.

Although he is reluctant to speak of his own family, O'Riordan, who is a father and grandfather, admits that should any of his offspring develop a capitalistic leaning he would object as strongly as his parents had when he first became a communist: "I'd send for a psychiatrist", he says.

To ensure that there will be a next generation of Irish communists, the party has started communist youth groups which serve as a sort of "communist boy scouts" organisation for the children of party members.
For these up and coming young communists, Mr O'Riordan says he believes they will have a more active role to play in history than did his generation which was plagued by the Cold War. The fact that 66 years after the Russian Revolution there is a growing global trend toward socialist states encourages him in his hopes for Irish communism.

"People are going to find that they can't keep patching up the capitalist system. It just isn't patchable," he says. "Dick Spring thinks it is, but he's going to find out otherwise."

The Irish communists are widely criticised for being the most Stalinist and pro-Soviet in the Western world. When asked whether that was an accurate description, Michael O'Riordan replied: "If I were asked that in a court of law where I had to answer I would plead guilty. Proudly guilty to being the most Stalinist.
"Make sure you put down that I said that with a smile", he said.

An exhibition of photographs and paintings, depicting the history of Irish communism is now on display in the New Book Shop off Parliament Street in Dublin. Other anniversary activities include several lectures which are being scheduled through the shop. •