Peter Graham (Irish Trotskyist)

Peter Graham (Irish: Peadar Ó Gréacháin, 1946–25 October 1971) was from the Liberties of Dublin, working as electrician in CIE, and was a trade union activist. He joined the Connolly Youth Movement, where he gained his Marxist grounding, but later joined the Young Socialists of the Socialist Workers Party before becoming active in Saor Éire.

He argued for a combination of socialist politics and traditional physical force Irish republicanism, opposing the common socialist republican belief that "bourgeois nationalist activity would turn to socialist revolution". He is best remembered for his authorship of the Saor Éire 1971 Manifesto. He was a victim of a rival internal faction of Saor Éire in an internecine conflict.

Political activism

He joined the Connolly Youth Movement, where he gained his Marxist grounding, but later joined the Young Socialists before becoming active in Saor Éire, which was carrying out spectacular bank robberies, with many of its members, such as Frank Keane and Joe Dillon, being imprisoned.

The main Irish Trotskyist organisation, the League for a Workers' Republic, which Peter joined, was a passive and rather sectarian group. But Ireland's own endemic guerrillaist tradition was so pervasive that it found reflection among Peter's sectarian-Trotskyist comrades, even while they ritually crossed themselves and mumbled what they thought were the standard Marxist caveats about "terrorism".

The middle-class (and young) leaders of the group "repelled him with their dry paint-by-numbers 'Orthodox-Trotskyist' passivity",^[1] while simultaneously shunting him towards "the anti-imperialist militants" of Saor Éire.

The thrilling physical-force-now Saor Éire revolutionaries, Ireland's own "Guevarists", were seen by them not only as part of a division of labour in Irish revolutionary politics, but as an advanced, heroic and serious part of a developing movement.

Saor Éire was a group of and dissident Republicans-turned-gangsters, a few of whom were ex-Trotskyists. They robbed many banks in the South between 1967 and 1971, and shot Richard Fallon, an unarmed Dublin policeman who tried to stop a robbery. In 1970 Taoiseach Jack Lynch went so far as to announce that to deal with Saor Éire he had activated the law allowing internment without trial. Then, amidst political uproar, he drew back. Politically, as Peter discovered, nothing could be done with such a group, selected on the basis of "action" and not political ideas.

Peter Graham came to London when, after the shooting of Guard Fallon, the hunt for Saor Éire was intensified in Ireland, but also secretly because he was under threat from a rival faction within Saor Éire. Peter remained in London for perhaps 15 months, working first with Liam Dalton, an ex-IRA Trotskyist who was a jobbing builder, and then as an offset litho printer for the IMG. He helped in building the International Marxist Group and the Fourth International United Secretariat. Along with Tariq Ali, Bob Purdy and Liam Dalton he helped in publishing an underground newspaper, Red Mole. Also while in London he wrote and published the Saor Éire manifesto in May 1971.

Ignorant of the threat to Graham's life by the SE faction, Bob Purdie, then the London Organiser of the International Marxist Group, gave him permission to return to Dublin to help build the small Irish Revolutionary Marxist Group. Working with people such as D. R. O’Connor Lysaght and Maureen Keegan, he established the Irish Section of the Fourth International and saw this as complementary to his involvement with Saor Éire.

Death

Peter was sharing the Dublin flat of the chief intellectual of the RMG, Rayner Lysaght in St Stephen's Green. On the 25th October 1971, rival members of Saor Éire broke into the flat, where he was interrogated, tortured and killed. He had been beaten with a hammer, subjected to other indignities, and then shot in the neck and left to choke on his own blood. He was 25 years old. He had been falsely suspected of diverting money from a bank robbery and they had tortured him in an attempt to make him confess. Some time later imprisoned members of Saor Éire issued a statement which confirmed this version.^[2]

His funeral was attended by hundreds of people, with large numbers of communists and republicans marching behind the coffin. Leading Irish and British socialists attended, including sisters Mairín and Áine Keegan, Bob Purdie, Bernadette Devlin, Michael Farrell and Charlie Bird. The funeral processed through the Coombe, the historic working class district in which Peter had grown up. It was a Catholic funeral, arranged by his family, including a Requiem Mass. The oration was given by Tariq Ali, who said there were not many Peter Grahams and that his death was a blow not just to building the Fourth International in Ireland but to the Irish working class, which had lost a leader of great potential.^[3] Many socialists then stood at his graveside holding up clenched fists. In the theatrical style he used on Vietnam demos in London, Tariq vowed that they would find the killers and avenge their comrade.^[4]

Notes

References

• "Communist Party of Ireland" Peter Graham Tribute Socialist Review Publication November 2011, retrieved 25 October 2016.
• "Workers Liberty" Peter Graham Tribute Article 6 June 2008, an article from Workers' Liberty no. 36, November 1996 by Sean Matgamna, retrieved 25 October 2016.
• "Workers Liberty" Peter Graham Obituary, published in Workers Fight no.1, 14 January 1972 by Sean Matgamna, submitted on 8 March 2012, 16:42, retrieved 25 October 2016.
• "The Irish Revolution" Peter Graham Memorial Article, written 20 December 2011, retrieved 25 October 2016.