The Politics of Illusion. Henry Patterson

involved in this process were Anthony Coughlan and Roy Johnston. Both had lived in England and been involved there in the activities of the Connolly Association, which had emerged from the disintegrating Republican Congress. A London branch reconstituted itself as a Connolly Club, and this was subsequently revived by an influx of Irish International Brigaders.²⁴⁷ Its monthly paper, the Irish Democrat, had been edited since 1947 by Desmond Greaves, a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain and author of a major, if tendentious, biography of Connolly.²⁴⁸ Under his leadership the Connolly Association concentrated on organising among Irish emigrants with two principal aims: ‘first their own defence, second the freedom of their country’.²⁴⁹ It also sought to influence the British labour movement away from what was seen as its dangerous mixture of apathy and pro-Unionism on the Irish question.

      During the border campaign the Connolly Association concentrated on attacking the Unionist government for interning republicans and began to press the British government to use its power under the Government of Ireland Act to legislate for civil rights in Northern Ireland.²⁵⁰ As early as 1955, the Irish Democrat had put forward the idea of a civil rights campaign as the way to shatter Ulster Unionism.²⁵¹ For a year in 1960-61 Coughlan acted as a full-time organiser for the Connolly Association, promoting ‘anti-Unionist political activity in Britain’,²⁵² including a march from London to Birmingham to raise the issue of British acquiescence in Unionist rule.²⁵³ A graduate of University College, Cork, who had been in London from 1958 doing post-graduate work, Coughlan returned to a lectureship in social administration in Trinity College, Dublin, in 1961. He was a fervent republican in the sense that he saw the central issue of Irish politics as the completion of the national revolution. He believed, however, that this could not be achieved by the physical force tradition but only by the creation of a broad national coalition in which the labour movement would play a central role. The objective of this movement was ‘real’ independence, not socialism. In Northern Ireland the objective would be to destabilise Unionism by reforms which would detach enough Protestants from the Unionist Party to create a ‘progressive’ coalition: ‘Stormont could then be used against imperialism,’ to quote Greaves, his friend and mentor.²⁵⁴

      Coughlan was invited to join the Wolfe Tone Society in 1964, when it was decided to maintain it as a permanent ‘think tank’ of ‘active people with roots in the language, trade union, co-operative, republican and other organisations’.²⁵⁵ The Wolfe Tone Society was to provide the intellectual resources for a unification of ‘the bulk of the radical-minded elements in the existing trade union and republican movement’ in a new revolutionary political organisation.²⁵⁶ Goulding and Cronin had played a role in initiating the Wolfe Tone Society, but its subsequent development was not heavily influenced by the IRA. In fact, the IRA was undergoing a parallel process of development in which some of the central ideas propagated by the Wolfe Tone Society were to play a crucial if controversial role.