JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

90 SAOTHAR 13education 'quite equal to that of a skilled artisan'. According to Haddow, the indigenous minersexpressed resentment towards 'the untrained Irishmen who flock into the pits'. In a paragrapharticulating the typical racist sentiments of the time, Haddow said: 'B ut differences there are, and thechief one is that the ScotocIrishman seldom seeks to rise or get beyond where he is. He is clamorousindeed for big wages, and is generally a strong union man, whereas the Scotsman as a rule looks askanceon unions and the men who manage and manipulate them. As one of a crowd the Scoto-Irishman is loudin the demand for what he thinks his rights ... The strain of Irish blood is predominant in him, he likesto have a grievance and to ail his discontent'. But in most other anti-Irish writings, the Irish-Catholicimmigrants did play an important role in the Scottish labour movement. Haddow was not a particularlyreliable chronicler of working class self-activity.4In the recently published A Century of the Scottish People, 1830-1950, T.C. Smout asserts that amajor weakness of Scottish socialism was 'theinability of the Independent Labour Party (in the 1890s)to carry the Irish, who were deterred by their priests from backing obvious socialists, and equally wereoften putoffby the visible distaste of men like Keir Hardie and Bruce Glasier for Irishmen, whom theystill openly inclined to regard as simple victims of superstition and POpery'.5 Yet despite the very visibleand widespread anti-Catholic and anti-Irish prejUdices in the labour movement as well as in the widerScottish society from 1880 onwards, the gradual growth of the important twentieth-century Catholicvote behind Labour and socialist candidates in Parliamentary elections was the outcome of the IrishCatholic immigrants' social assimilation.6Notwithstanding the powerful anti-Catholic prejudices in Scottish society between 1880 and 1926,the Irish-Catholic immigrants and their descendants played a crucial and often pioneering role in thedevelopment of modem socialism. Indeed, the Irish-Catholic immigrants' assimilation into the Scottishlabour movement began about 1880. In 1881 a few Irish-Catholic immigrants were active in theabortive attempt to found a Scottish Labour Party in Lanarkshire under the leadership of John Dunn;7and in 1885 the immigrants' newspaper, The Exile, was already chronicling their activities in the labourmovement. sWhilst the Scottish labour movement played a crucial role in the process of assisting the Irish­Catholic immigrants to assimilate into the wider society, the indigenous Scots developed a dualconsciousness.In depicting the consciousness of the Scottish working class from Chartist times, S moutargues that: 'Such dualities of consciousness -of being Scottish and British, of being Breton and French,of being Catalan and Spanish - have been much commoner in European history since 1800 than is oftenacknowledged'.9 Just as the indigenous working class Scots often displayed duali ties of consciousness,so the Irish-Catholic immigrants developed a dual-identity within Scottish society between 1880 and1926 ..In discussing the problems of such dualities of consciousness, Hobsbawm argues that: 'An Irishlabourer migrating to Boston, his brother who settled in Glasgow, and a third brother who went toSydney would remain Irish, but become part of three different working classes with different histories.At the same time, and as this example suggests, it is also wrong to assume that the members of suchnational working classes are or ever were homogeneous bodies of Frenchmen, Britons or Italians, or,even when they saw themselves as such, that they are not divided by other communal demarcations,or that they are exclusively identified with the State which defines their effective existence as a classand an organised movement'.lDIn a pioneering book, The Irish in Modern Scotland, the late Father James Handley was verysensitive to the Irish-Catholic immigrants' dual-identity. Although he did not deal with the pioneeringwork of the Irish-Catholic immigrants in the Scottish labour movement in the 1880s and 1890s, hecoped with the implicit question of their dual-identity by devoting a chapter to what he characterisedas 'the Scoto-Irish'. Nevertheless there was considerable evidence of the role of Catholic priests, theAmerican Knights of Labour and the individual endeavours of Michael Davitt, Dr. William Carroll ofPhiladelphia, and John Murdoch, the crofters' leadcr, in raising socialist consciousness in the coalfieldsof the west of Scotland.!!