'THERE WILL BE ANOTHER DAY.....'
By Peadar O'Donnell ; first published in January 1963.
When James Connolly preached Irish Independence he drew on himself the notice of men as dedicated as he to that cause and startled them with the intensity and urgency of his views. Basing himself on the Irish Citizen Army , fashioned within a trade union in the great lock-out of 1913, he made no secret of his plans for an armed uprising , and he and Padraig Pearse found common ground easily , within the situation created by the outbreak of war in 1914.
To Pearse , and those around him , England's difficulty was Ireland's opportunity and so , too , with James Connolly - but Connolly looked farther afield. The failure of the Socialists in Britain , France , Germany etc to make a stand against imperialist war was to him a great crime. He saw in an armed uprising in Ireland , in that setting , not merely a chapter in Ireland's fight for freedom , but a page in the story of world revolution - a signal to the workers within the warring nations that the hour for civil war had struck.
There were those who argued that in sharing leadership in the Rising , Connolly turned aside from socialism into nationalism but people who urged that view understood neither the national question nor socialism - but such a view was inevitable: British Socialists had to rationalise their failure to make a serious effort to save him from execution , and there were those in Ireland , too, who needed to excuse themselves for denying him.......
(MORE LATER).
THE PETER BERRY PAPERS....... The Top Secret Memoirs of Ireland's Most Powerful Civil Servant : Dirty Tricks, Election '69/ Spying on a Unionist Politician/ Keeping the (State) Taoiseach informed/ The Garda Fallon Murder/ Advice to Jack Lynch- 'Fire the pair of them...'/ Vivion De Valera's advice to O'Malley/ Rumours of a Coup D'Etat/ The Internment Plot, November 1970/ Secret Meeting with William Craig.
From 'MAGILL' magazine , June 1980.
MAY 21ST 1970 :
" At this time there was a general bank strike and accounts were frozen. Events were shaping in the direction of criminal charges being preferred , and the police feared that if the strike ended suddenly , bank documents would be cleared , and they were anxious to examine the accounts in the Baggot Street Branch of Allied Irish Bank to scrutinise the movements of moneys from the account 'Belfast Fund for the Relief of Distress'.
As I was returning from lunch in Leinster House to my office in 42/46 St. Stephen's Green South , I walked along the East Side of the Green to the traffic controls at the corner of Leeson Street where I stopped as the lights were red : a man , whose face was vaguely familiar but whose name I did not know , stopped beside me and spoke to me. I thought that he was a civil servant from the Office of Public Works or from Government Buildings. He expressed sympathy for the rough treatment that I had been given in the Dail debates earlier in the month in which Deputy Kevin Boland had named me.
As the lights changed and we were separating , he said - "If you want to know when the money for arms is coming , look under the names of 'White' and 'Agnes Kelly' in the AIB bank in Baggot Street." Then he muttered that it galled him that people paying sixty guineas for suits of clothes were mixed up in this......"
(MORE LATER).PAT Ó SNODAIGH AND AENGUS DOHERTY !
