“Once it was Ireland, Now it is Kenya”: anti-colonialism and internationalism in the pages of the Connolly Association’s Irish Democrat in the 1950s–60s

Abstract

ABSTRACT Irish Democrat was the paper of the Connolly Association, a diaspora organisation established to build support for Irish republicanism within the British labour movement. The Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat had strong links to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which advocated for a peaceful mass movement to challenge the British presence in Northern Ireland and to remove discrimination faced by Catholics in the Six Counties. Encouraged by the wave of decolonisation across the British Empire in the 1950s-60s, both the CA and the CPGB saw the struggle against Unionist rule in Northern Ireland as analogous to events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This paper explores the narration of anti-colonial and national liberation movements elsewhere in the British Empire in the pages of the Irish Democrat and the overdetermination of Irish national questions by post-war discourses of radical decolonisation. It also traces the formation across difference of specific solidarities between the Connolly Association and other migrant communities within the multicultural political geography of post-war Britain, including out of campaigns against racial discrimination, the “colour bar” and post-war immigration controls.