JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

ESSAYS" 91Although anti -Catholic prejudice remained strong in Scotland throughout the inter-war period, andalthough Scottish newspapers seldom used the expression' Scoto-Irish' after the Easter Rising of 1916,the intense antagonism and abuse engendered by the Orange Order ensured the survival of the dualidentityof the Irish-Catholic immigrants until 1922. When S. V. Bracher published The Herald Booko/Labour Members in 1923, he did not quite know how to describe the immigrants. In a sympatheticaccount of Joseph Sullivan, who had just been elected to Parliament for the North Lanarkshireconstituency in 1922, Bracher described him as 'an Irish Scot', though Sullivan had been born inCambuslang, Lanarkshire, in 1866.12Nevertheless the processes unleashed by the First World WaT assisted the Irish -Catholic immigrantsand their descendants to assimilate into Scottish society. Despite the Presbyterian Churches' intensifiedanti-Catholicism, the role of the 1918 Education Act in providing the Irish-Catholics with their ownseparate schools under the State system and the granting of a measure of Irish self-government helped"the process of assimilation. Furthermore, dualities of consciousness and dual-identity are not eternalor unchanging. By 1926 sectarian bigotry no longer kept the Irish-Catholic immigrants out of anysection of the labour movement: they were prominent in the General Strike in Glasgow, Perth, andFalkirk. 13Social being determines social consciousness, and some Marxists still insist that the way anindividual sees himlherself is part ofhislher 'social being'. By social being Marx meant something likecollective being (social experience) and by social consciousness he indicated something like commoncultural life. If so, the way an individual sees himlherself is individual consciousness - and certainlynot 'social being'.14The mid-Victorian labour movement was engendered within a specific national context in whichPrebyterian traditions, values and attitudes impinged on the consciousness of working men and women.The anonymous author of a study of British coal miners asserted that in Lanarkshire and the West ofScotland 'only the Irish or the worst of the Scotch from other counties' belonged to the miners' tradeunions'. But although the Irish were marginalised economically as part of the Scottish working class,they had a cultural cohesion as Irish immigrants. Moreover, when modern socialism was born in "the1880s, the Irish workers in Scotland had a greater potential to become labourites/socialists. 15 Racialprejudice was not only discernible later on; it was, in fact, very m uch accelerated. Far from the Scottishproletariat - and especially the disharmonious, foreign compdnent part of it, the Irish immigrants andtheir descendents - being stripped of national character between 1880 and 1926, it actually struggledto articulate the double national identities of working men and women who carried a distind culturalbaggage into the new factories, mills and coal mines. Instead of recognising and acknowledging thiscentral aspect of Scottish working class history, the dominant historiography focuses on uniqueindividual leaders - for example, James ConnoIly (1870-1916) and John Wheatley (1869-1930) -without attempting to relate them to the wider social and political forces unleashed by the process ofcapitalist modernisation within a particular national milieu.Long before Home Rule for Ireland became a controversial issue in Scottish working classcommunities in the 1880s, ethnic conflict and religious sectarianism coloured social, intellectual andpolitical life. While the intensity of religious sectarianism was reflected in nineteenth century books,novels and newspapers, the hidden assumptions of the dominant Presbyterian historiography obscurethe efforts o(those historians who want to portray the contribution of the Irish immigrants and theirdescendants to the Scottish working class movement.The Irish immigrants played an important role in the Irish National League in Scottish communitiesas well as in the infant Scottish Labour Party (cf. John Ferguson and R. Chisholm Robertson) and theSocial Democratic Federation. 16 In using a remarkably accurate phrase' Irishmen as Scottish socialists' ,H.W. Lee and E. Archbold went on to say that 'some of the best comrades in the socialist movementin Scotland were Irishmen' .17 The best known and most prominent of them included James ConnoUy,John Leslie (1856-1921), R. Chisholm Robertson, J. Shaw MaxweIl (1885-1929), Patrick or"PeteCurran, John Wheatley, Fred Douglas, Andrew McNally and Harry McShane. But although thos~