Jack Carney with a very early written response to Ireland’s Easter Rising. Carney was a founder of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union and co-worker of James Connolly’s from their time in Belfast where they worked together on ITGWU’s paper. He seems to have been in Scotland during the Rising and immediate aftermath, on his way to live in the United States and work with his mentor Jim Larkin, arriving here later that summer. The Rising and Connolly would, of course, loom large over Carney’s later political identity, with many future articles devoted to the topic.

‘The Irish Rebellion’ by Jack Carney from Industrial Worker. Vol. 1 No. 10. June 17, 1916.

There is no need to recite the details of the recent rebellion in Ireland. The fellow workers already know the details.

So many big-paunched vampires in America are shouting for Irish freedom that while a member of the working class of Ireland. I am mixed up as to what freedom really means. In Dublin William Martin Murphy, the vilest sweater in all Ireland, believes in Irish freedom; yet he starved the Dublin workers in 1913 and paid the policemen, also now for freedom, to outrage the women and children of the Irish workers. John E. Redmond and his party believe in Irish freedom. All the Irish parasites in America believe in exactly the same kind of freedom in Ireland.

Their idea of freedom is beautifully summed up in Jim Connolly’s pamphlet:

“After Ireland is free we will protect all classes; and if you do not pay the rent, you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under the command of a sheriff will wear green uniforms, and the harp without the crown, and the warrant turning you out on the road-side will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic.”

While Larkin and Connolly were portraying the real condition and pointing the workers to the only real road to freedom, through the control of the workshop, lovers of Irish liberty such as Martin Murphy, and Redmond joined hands with Edward Carson and his gang of labor sweaters, in denouncing Larkin and Connolly.

Talk about freedom, Irishmen, but keep your eyes off the Irish sweaters. In Dublin the men who through a damnable industrial system have driven our “colleens” on the streets, degrading the manhood of Ireland and prostituting its womanhood through the necessity for bread believe in Irish freedom. In Belfast the men who starve the workers are for English rule and against the friends of “Irish liberty.” But when in 1913 the Dublin workers struck for economic freedom, without which any other form of freedom is impossible, Dublin bosses and Belfast bosses joined hands to trample under foot the aspirations of the Irish workers for liberty.

Poor Connolly, his voice is forever stilled. But I remember how Connolly and myself were abused by the lovers of Irish freedom. What does it all mean. It means that the freedom they believe in is the freedom of Irish bosses to loot the workingmen and women of Ireland. The lovers of Irish freedom object to English bosses doing the looting of Irish workers. They could do it so much better themselves. Being robbed by any bosses other than Irish bosses “destroys our national characteristics.” Ye gods!

The one thing important above everything for the Irish workers would be freedom in the shop and factory and against this freedom they will find arrayed the capitalism of the North and the South of Ireland and of England.

I knew many of those in the Irish rebellion. I admire their courage. It was as grand as it was unavailing.

When the Irish workers become organized they will be on the one and only road to freedom. Then they can have a real revolution with something tangible to fight for and a freedom worthwhile to live and die for. Enslaved in the factory they are fools who expect a change of flag to bring freedom, it can at best bring but a change of masters.

Irish fellow workers in America, if you want freedom fight for it in America. We of the I.W.W. stand for one big union for freedom for all workers. We are wider than any nation. Irishmen in the big cities of Ireland, your sisters are forced by the cruel urge of hunger to sell their bodies for bread. In Ireland your fathers and mothers are worked like pack animals, and when no longer useful to the masters of Ireland they are thrown on the scrap heap! like worked-out machines. In Ireland your children die in the fetid atmosphere of the slums.

The same conditions exist in England, Germany, America, and all other countries. Capitalism, its bloody hands at the throats of the workers, is international. The cure must be international.

In the words of Byron:

Those who would be free,
Themselves must strike the blow.

We must organize and where we are robbed–in industry–there demand freedom. It must be fought for. Freedom is never granted; it must be taken.

JACK CARNEY.

The Industrial Union Bulletin, and the Industrial Worker were newspapers published by the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) from 1907 until 1913. First printed in Joliet, Illinois, IUB incorporated The Voice of Labor, the newspaper of the American Labor Union which had joined the IWW, and another IWW affiliate, International Metal Worker.The Trautmann-DeLeon faction issued its weekly from March 1907. Soon after, De Leon would be expelled and Trautmann would continue IUB until March 1909. It was edited by A. S. Edwards. 1909, production moved to Spokane, Washington and became The Industrial Worker, “the voice of revolutionary industrial unionism.” A victim of finances and internal disputes, the IW ceased publication in 1913, only to be revived in 1916 and surviving as a weekly, sometimes more, until 1931. Easily among the most important working class newspapers in U.S. history and an essential resource on the wobbly, and larger radical labor experience.

PDF of full issue: https://washingtondigitalnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=IWW19160617