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Copied with thanks from the Arguments for a Workers’ Republic Website.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Encyclopaedia of Trotskyism On-Line (ETOL).
Matthew Merrigan died on 15th June. Although just 79, he seemed in good health, recovered from the death of his beloved wife, Rose, and looking forward to resuming work for his class.
Small physically, he was a giant of the left. He struggled consistently against capitalism and the vast compromising and careerist morass in his movement. As he wrote in his draft for his memoirs:
“The (Labour) leadership should point out the political lessons inherent in the dangers of entering a compact with employers and en employers’ government, to try and secure not only the pay elements of these pacts, but to secure the non-pay, or political elements without emasculating the movement industrially and politically, as well.”
Nor did he lose sight of the international working class wood for the Irish political trees. He was an international socialist:
“In spite of the damage of Stalinist reaction to the theory and practice of Socialism, the objective economic circumstances that put Socialism on the world agenda 150 years ago are still there – only more so. The underdeveloped countries in the world are now in the neo-imperialist grip of the developed world and their people stagger under the burden of foreign debt interest. In their inability to invest in their own agriculture and industry, millions starve and succumb to all the diseases that are heir to poverty; while to salve their consciences the same forces that create these conditions send a pittance to them as emergency aid which does nothing for sustained growth of wealth and further development.”
On the other hand, though he denounced the dogma of armed struggle, he recognised the need for Irish unity:
“The minimum required is: for the Labour Government to declare its intention to work for Irish unity with the Irish Government and all the praties in Ireland and to disengage from Ireland at the beginning of the process.”
As ATGWU District Secretary in the twenty-six county Republic, he performed his role in a manner often opposed to the actions of his opposite numbers in other unions. Unlike them, his Socialist beliefs prevented him seeing the way forward as being through national wage agreements supervised by the capitalist state:
“Economic and social consensus is not possible in a society riven by property and class differences.”
These insights remain those of an individual. Although the needs and common interests of industrial union work enabled him to recruit around himself a group of radical officials from disparate backgrounds, uniting them in opposition to state pay controls, he could never build lasting unity on a broader Socialist front.
The reasons for this lay in his early life. He was born in Dolphin’s Barn in June 1921 and grew up like most working class boys at this time, losing his father and, later, a brother to TB and leaving school at 14. From 1936, he was employed by Savoy-Rowntree’s confectionery works at Inchicore Road. Almost immediately, he was on strike for union recognition. The Amalgamated Transport and General Workers’ Union won and he remained a member.
Further radicalisation was not immediate. Though active in the union, he was irked by its inefficient and arbitrary procedures. Then, in 1941, there came the Government’s wartime Wages Standstill Order, followed by the Trade Union Act, aimed at limiting workers’ rights to organise. The Dublin Trades Council and the Irish Labour Party organised a Council of Action to oppose these measures. Mattie was active in his support for the council and was brought into the influence of the Labour Party, which he joined in the Spring of 1942.
Partly because of the intensified class struggle and partly for want of competition, the Labour Party was as radical as it had been since the civil war. The Catholic bishops and the national teachers had recently revealed the limits of this militancy by persuading the leadership to remove the aim of the Workers’ Republic from its constitution, but the party remained a threat to the establishment. In August 1942, Mattie Merrigan’s first participation in a bourgeois election ended triumphantly with Labour becoming the largest party on Dublin Corporation: a feat it has never repeated.
Almost immediately, a decline began. The leadership of the Irish Transport and General Workers’ Union feared that its hegemony in the Labour Party would be swamped and rigged the Dublin convention to select candidates in the general election. When this was revealed, it got Labour to expel the whistle-blower and started to denounce Communist influence in the party. Those Communist Party members doing deep entry work reacted by seeking to weaken the Trotskyists who were congregated in several branches in their localities.
Mattie Merrigan was one of the Trotskyists. He recognised that they would have to organise more effectively and, though correctly skeptical about the possibilities of expansion, he helped for the Revolutionary Socialist Party in 1944, becoming secretary of its Dublin Branch. Almost immediately, it was hit by the wash from a dispute in the Fourth International (FI). Was the Soviet Union a degenerated Workers’ State carrying possibilities of renewing its local Socialist potential, as Trotsky had insisted, or was it a new form of society – Bureaucratic Collectivism – distinct from both capitalism and socialism? In Ireland, the new party split; Mattie and the Party chairman, Bob Armstrong, supported the Bureaucratic Collectivist analysis, while the national secretary, John Byrne upheld the old line. Their party survived until the FI World Congress, in 1948, recognised it as the official Irish section. Then it collapsed.
Armstrong went to London, other supporters of the bureaucratic collectivist line abandoned the revolution, leaving Mattie as the line’s sole advocate in Ireland, facing John Byrne. During the fifties, the two of them worked together on the Dublin Trades Council and in the Labour Party, but they were never able to sink their differences enough to form a revolutionary nucleus. For himself, Mattie saw the movement being built pragmatically and feared forming what he believed would be just another sect. For a whole period, Trotskyism in Ireland meant recruitment for class struggle in Britain. At last, in the late sixties the real thing had to be reborn. We were unable to rely on the experience of Byrne and Merrigan to help us.
Still, the increasing radicalisation, world wide and in Ireland stimulated them, too. However, their answer was to build towers of Socialist babel within (the Liaison Committee of the Left) and outside (Socialist Labour) the Labour Party. These two bodies might not have been the failures that they were had Mattie, in particular, been willing to give a programmatic lead. He seems to have feared that, by doing this, he would have reduced himself to the level of the sectarians. As a result, he remained more politically isolated than any sectarian.
He had a lot to give his fellow workers. He gave them a lot. Perhaps it is ungrateful to say he might have given more. It happens to be true.
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Last updated: 2 August 2021