Reading Brendan Clifford’s article about the BICO in the August issue of the Irish Political Review jogged a few memories. I was a comrade of Eddy Spence in the Sixties: He was a member of the Communist Party of Northern Ireland (CPNI) and I was in its youth wing the Communist Youth League (CYL). As Brendan Clifford points out, Eddy was a brother of Gusty Spence, a leading commander of the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF) and the killer of innocent Catholic Peter Ward in 1966. It was one of two sectarian murders in Belfast in that year. An elderly Protestant woman was also accidently killed when the UVF firebombed a Catholic pub beside her home.
Eddy had been an Apprentice Boy, one of the Orange Orders with a particular affinity to Derry, but had long since rejected their sectarianism. When he went to Britain in 1956, Eddy joined the British Communist Party. On his return to Northern Ireland, he joined the local Party.
Eddy committed two major sins in Gusty’s eyes— not alone was he a Communist—he had married a Catholic! Kathleen told me that Gusty had threatened to kill them both on their wedding night, something not mentioned in Roy Garland’s biography of Gusty Spence. Indeed, Garland—perhaps for diplomatic reasons—downplays Eddy’s Communism, merely commenting that he was a Party member “for a time” and was a socialist. Eddy, in fact, was a committed Communist for a number of years—both as a card-carrying member and as an independent Communist. When I knew Eddy, he had a jaundiced view of socialists and was fond of quoting the Mao Tse Tung aphorism “scratch a social democrat find a social fascist”.
The CPNI was created out of political expediency during the Second World War; it had been the Northern section of the Communist Party of Ireland; the latter had been formally dissolved in order to deal with the political realities arising from the War (the Republic was neutral while the North was part of the UK’s War effort). Consequently, the Party leadership thought that the different geographical memberships should pursue policies effectively in line with this reality. In the North the CPNI was formed, while in the South members were told to join the Labour Party and secretly work as a group. A secret co-ordinating committee of the respective leaderships met from time to discuss strategy.
The CPNI grew in size, with over a thousand members organised in 35 branches, and was mainly drawn from the Protestant community. Concomitantly, senior cadres won leading positions within some Trade Unions in Northern Ireland. This lop-sided community support obliged the Party to develop a duplicitous position on the question of Partition. Publicly it recognised the “present constitutional position of Northern Ireland”; at the same time it would “win over progressive sections of the Unionist Party” and oppose sectarianism. Privately, however, a 1946 internal document argued that the Border had been imposed on the Irish people against the will of the majority:
“but that in the immediate situation, we cannot and will not raise the demand to end Partition as that would only serve to further divide the working-class.”
In an exchange of emails with Wilson John Haire some years back, he told me that, during his time in the CPNI in the Fifties, the rank and file had a quite sectarian character. If this was the case— and I have no reason to doubt it—there was a serious ideological disconnect between the leadership and many of its members at that time. Clearly such a situation couldn’t continue—and indeed it didn’t. By the time I joined the CYL [Communist Youth League] in 1966 there was only a tiny membership. While the Party continued to obfuscate publicly on Partition, the membership, by and large, were certainly in favour of Irish unity. (Betty Sinclair would occasionally complain in her diary about the CPNI’s “anaemic position” on the National Question.)
In truth, the members’ attention was mainly focused on either British labour politics or matters relating to the Soviet Union . In 1967 there had been talk within the CYL of a possible merger with the sister organisation, the Connolly Youth Movement—the youth wing of the post-War communist Irish Workers Party. I remember much mumbling within the CYL that the Southern comrades were more nationalistic than communist. The merger talks failed for reasons that were opaque.
The main issue that engaged the CPNI/CYL at this time was the Sino-Soviet split in the international communist movement. The controversy was mostly centred in the CYL, where Eddy Spence’s Maoist faction (which included myself) attempted to oust the pro-Moscow leadership. (Incidentally some CYL members were also in the Party). The CYL secretary, Madge Davison, quipped that one needed “slanty eyes” to get into the CPNI’s West Belfast branch, whose Secretary was Eddy Spence. The Party leadership eventually stepped in and expelled the most vocal members of the so-called ‘Anti-Party Group’. It goes without saying that splits and expulsions are not a new phenomenon in left-wing groups; the smaller the sect the more intense the split.
Left to their own devices the Maoists floundered until Eddy, and another old comrade Billy McDermot came into contact with the Irish Communist Organisation (ICO) which was based in the South. The latter dispatched Trinity graduate Len Callender to Belfast in order to ascertain if there was an ideological affinity between the two groups. The only fruits of this engagement was the publication of a single issue of The Worker: Ostensibly this was the product of Eddy’s group, but it had all the hallmarks of an ICO venture. The latter was a serious political endeavour which engaged in much theoretical work, while Eddy’s group was—quite frankly—a very doctrinaire collection of individuals not that removed from being a Mao Tse Tung fan club. In short, Eddy’s group drifted off in different political directions. (I alone back in Newry became a member of the ICO).
I had been obliged to return to my hometown of Newry following my arrest some months earlier by the notorious RUC Special Branch officer Harry Taylor. I had been selling Unity on the Falls Road when Harry pulled me in and eagerly attempted to convince me of the errors of my ways (in the traditional fashion).
Derek Peters, the then Secretary of the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association (NICRA) dealt with my complaint, which he toned down to keep it less ‘political’—at the time the NICRA had some dupes from the Young Unionists and Liberal Party involved with it. Its slogan was ‘British Rights For British Citizens’. Behind the scenes NICRA was essentially run by the Republican movement—certainly in its early stages.
Meanwhile, the Special Branch weren’t finished with me: T hey visited my employers—a Protestant firm—where my political affiliations were revealed. I was sacked. The ‘Branch’ then went to my lodgings: In my absence my belongings were searched and political papers removed never to be returned.
It was Betty Sinclair, NICRA chairman, who took details this time. No one ever got back to me, so I never found out if it was ever processed. In 1972 I met Derek Peters in the Labour Club in Belfast, and I asked him about my original complaint. He told me that Stormont’s Minister of Home Affairs, Billy Craig, had dismissed it saying that I had been “acting suspiciously” on my paper round. Even at the age of sixteen I had thought all this police attention was a tad excessive. I could only wonder what Republicans had to put up with!
Be that as it may, without an income, Eddy had taken me under his wing and I was put up in his family home—occasionally farmed out to other comrades’ abodes. It was a joy watching Eddy berate the hapless Mormons that foolishly knocked at his door; he would follow them down the street denouncing their execution of Joe Hill. But obviously living in his house was an unsatisfactory situation, not least for Eddy’s family, so I returned to Newry to find work and establish a communist group in the town.
After I became a member of the ICO, Len Callender would periodically visit Newry to help me try to fashion something purposeful out of an odd collection of individuals. A difficult task at the best of times but particularly difficult in a small Catholic town, as civil rights became the issue of the day. After 1968 there were groups like the PDs to complete with. Len and I attended most of the NICRA marches: On one occasion some of the Newry PD members attempted to stop us selling our magazines (although to be fair the local leader, Gerry Ruddy, was both tolerant and affable).
On the Right, the Nationalist Party MP, Michael Keogh, complained to the Sunday Independent that the RUC had failed to arrest us for selling The Irish Communist at one Civil Rights march. This may surprise some people, but it was par for the course: In 1967, when Stormont banned the Republican Clubs, Nationalist Party MP, Austin Curry, told the press that the local Communist Party should be banned instead of the Republican Clubs. Civil Rights, it seems, can be a tricky business!
Incidentally, Eddy’s son, Ronnie, attended the famous 1968 march in Derry that essentially kicked off the Troubles: Eddy told me the RUC over-reaction had politicised him. In 1977, Ronnie was imprisoned for Official IRA activity. Eddy (like myself, alas) believed that the marches should be turned into confrontations with the RUC. He disparaged Betty Sinclair for being “a Martin Luther King” character. Sinclair confided in her diary that she considered the PDs and others like them “quite mad”. Certainly, there was much infantile leftism on display during the period. This was Northern Ireland. It was delusional to think that class war could emerge from the turmoil of that period: it was inevitable that a conflict about Partition would be the outcome.
After the 1969 pogrom the Irish Political Review contributor, Jack Lane, bumped into Eddy and Billy McDermot at a neighbourhood defence post in West Belfast. And in 1974, Gusty reconciled with Eddy and his family. The last I know about Eddy’s politics is gleaned from an interview he give to The Leninist in 1987—a now defunct magazine produced by a Marxist Leninist faction inside the British Communist Party. The interview makes it clear that Eddy at that stage was still very much the type of communist I knew him to be back in the Sixties.
Eddy told the magazine he had no time for Gusty’s apparent conversion to left-wing thinking, explaining that his brother “hadn’t studied Marx. He couldn’t see that only the real alternative was Marxism”. As for Gusty’s party, the Progressive Unionist Party, “it is semi-fascist…(like) Strasserism in the Nazi Party”. Regarding Partition, Eddy told the magazine “Nationalism seems to me be a progressive force because it opposes the Six County State…..Loyalism is the opposite. It’s reactionary”.
Eddy was also critical of Workers Party sloganising about workers’ unity because, “if you ignore the division of Ireland, nothing can be done. Partition undermines all attempts to bring the working-class together.”
What Eddy made of the political developments after the Good Friday Agreement was signed is anyone’s guess; perhaps he mellowed in old age. I somehow doubt it.
Bill McCamley
