Given that Christy Moore’s dirge about the lads who went to fight for Stalin’s International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War appears to have acquired something of the status of a left liberal anthem perhaps it ought to be updated for historical accuracy.
This marginal episode in Irish history remains uniquely central to the weltshauung of the Irish left, unique to any country other than Spain itself probably, and is laden with myth and distortion. What other bunch of corporate funded NGOs would have as its rally theme tune a song about Irish Communists and fellow travellers from the 1930s to justify an entirely unrelated and out-of-control immigration system?
Some historical housekeeping then, is clearly required.
As Moore himself intones “This song is a tribute to Frank Ryan” who occupies the same place in the pantheon of leftist icons as Panti Bliss and Bambie Thug. Ryan died in Dresden in June 1944 under the protection of the German Abwehr who had facilitated his release from the custody of Franco’s forces in July 1940.
Had Ryan survived to see the liberation of Dresden by the Red Army in 1945 it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that he might have been executed by them as a collaborator or despatched to the Gulag. Or perhaps his release in 1940 had been part of the murky prisoner exchanges that were part of the secret policing aspects of the 1939 to 1941 alliance between Stalin and Hitler?
Who knows. What we do know is that Ryan went to Spain as a witting or unwitting agent of the Stalinist International Brigades, and that he died at a time when he was effectively a witting agent of Stalin’s former chum Hitler. And yet while Seán Russell, who died in August 1940 on a German U Boat carrying himself and Ryan to Ireland as part of an ill-conceived mission involving the IRA, is considered by many to have been a Nazi collaborator, Ryan is a left hero of Leninlike stature.
Presumably the self-styled “anti-fascists” who have vandalised Russell’s statue in Fairview Park would never even consider doing something similar to anything which commemorates his comrade Frank Ryan. (There is no evidence by the way that either man was ideologically sympathetic to Nazism. The connection between a small minority of Irish republicans and Stalin and Hitler was rejected by the overwhelming majority of members and former members of the IRA and was motivated by stupidity mostly.)
The place which the Stalinist International Brigade and Ryan have in the iconography of the post nationalist republican left is problematic in its own right given that the small number of republicans who fought on the side of Stalin were mostly men who had been forced out of the IRA over concerns about Communist infiltration, facilitated by Ryan’s mentor and friend Peadar O’Donnell.
Likewise, Trotskyists – the largest section of the Irish far left – appear to have forgotten that the main killers and torturers of their side were not the Francoist “fash” but the Stalinists in Barcelona and Madrid who handed members of the POUM and of the anarchist CNT and FAI to the NKVD and their apprentices in the “security organs” of the Republican side controlled by the tiny Spanish Communist Party.
Something that ought to be mother’s milk to any leftist who has read George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia. Andreu Nin the leader of the POUM with whom Orwell fought was abducted and allegedly flayed alive by Communist interrogators under the command of Alexander Orlov the NKVD “liaison” with the Republican secret police who was also involved in the Soviet theft of the Spanish gold reserve. Charming people.
Where this segues – don’t you just love that word? – into contemporary Irish politics is the connection between another unsung hero of the Christy dirge and the upcoming election for Mayor of Limerick.
How so, you demand. Bear with me. For you see despite the myth that the ragtag and bobtail who were enticed to Spain by the agents of the Communist International among the Communist Party adjacent republican far left and the actual tiny Communist Party of Ireland being some sort of red Wild Geese they were part not of a separate Irish brigade at all but of the British section of Christy’s beloved “15th International Brigade.”
And who was their commander? Was it Frank Ryan? No, it was not. It was one George Nathan. And who was George Nathan? Well, he was none other than the Samuel George Montague Nathan who was an officer with the Auxiliary Division of the Royal Irish Constabulary and was almost certainly present on March 7, 1921 when they murdered not only the serving Sinn Féin Lord Mayor of Limerick George Clancy but in separate attacks the former Mayor Michael O’Callaghan and a city clerk Joseph O’Donoghue.
Nathan was identified by Clancy’s wife Máire and by several others including Auxies as having been part of the officially sanctioned death squad. Nathan’s role was known to Limerick and other republicans but this has been denied or excused by some Irish leftists. Former leader of the Communist Party of Ireland Michael O’Riordan who served under Nathan in Spain referred to him in one account as “the British commander.”
Frank Ryan’s biographer Seán Cronin said that “Nathan and Ryan got along well.” Cronin claimed that the Auxie terrorist was a “popular officer in the brigade” and dismisses the evidence against Nathan as “circumstantial and sketchy.” Cronin quotes Paul Burns, an American Communist later revealed by the Venona transcripts to have been one of Stalin’s spies in the United States, as having claimed that allegations against Nathan were part of a “character assassination.” Witnesses for the defence do not inspire the court with confidence.
Anyway, back to the present and the Limerick elections. In the interest of historical veracity and proper commemoration of real anti-fascists who did more than post anonymous threats on social media, I make two proposals.
The first is that Christy pens a new verse about George. “Many Irishmen heard the call of Stalin, joined the Auxies and the NKVD too…” You get the idea.
The second is that if Maurice Quinlivan of the reconstructed post nationalist Sinn Féin or one of the other left liberal opponents of the “fash” win the Limerick Mayoral election that they immediately move to have Samuel George Montague Nathan properly commemorated in the city where he made such a decisive calling out of backward nationalism in 1921.
In a city where one of the candidates, Elisa O’Donovan of the Social Democrats, protested against the saying of the Rosary during the Covid panic, a man like Nathan who stood up to backward Catholic nationalism would surely have welcomed such an honour. It is the least his fellow Anti-fascists might do.