JOURNAL OF THE IRISH LABOUR HISTORY SOCIETY

96 SAOTHAR13evidence of political conservatism on their part. Some Irish-Catholics - who were otherwise sympatheticto Maclean - were probably alienated at a mass eve-of-the-poll rally where Maclean said: 'Therewere two Jews - Jesus Christ and Karl Marx.One appealed to the heart and the other appealed to thehead' .55 Yet despite the most obvious political feature of the Irish immigrants' sub-culture - that is,the Catholicism which often made them more radical, yet divided from the Scottish workers on somesocial issues - the Easter Rising ended the Irish question in Scottish politics by creating the Anglo-IrishTreaty in 1921.At the same time as they supported Irish independence, John Leslie and John L. Mahon dissociatedthemselves from bourgeois Sinn Fein and the Easter Rising and asked Irish-Catholics to vote Labour.Whilst the process of social assimilation was not complete, the dual-identity of Irish immigrants wasnow reinforcing the still evolving class solidarity of the Irish and the indigenous Scots. In the dramaticelectoral breakthrough in the general election of 1922, John Wheatley, Hugh Murin and Joseph Sullivan(1866-1935) were elected as champions of the Scottish working class .. Certainly; there were setbacks; and in the general election of 1924 J oseph Sullivan lost his seat inParliament as the result of an Orange backlash in the North Lanarkshire constituency. But elsewherein Scotland the militant Irish-Catholic immigrants played a new role in the labour movement andassisted their own assimilation into working class Scotland. In 1922 the Irish-Catholic immigrantshelped to elect Emanuel Shinwell in the West Lothian constituency. By 1924 the Irish-Catholicimmigrants were accepting their class identity within Scotland; the Catholic Socialist Society waswound up and absorbed by the wider Scottish labour movement. 56Although the dual-identity of the Irish immigrants was evident from at least the 1880s, it was notinconsistent with, indeed was sometimes a force for, activism in Scottish working class politics. AlsothIs dual-identity ultimately facilitated Irish incorporation into the Scottish labour movement. Thisconclusion is consistent with the observation made by Joan Smith that working class support forLiberalism in Glasgow before the First World War helped to contain 'the Protestant-Catholic divide'.It is also compatible with Patrick Renshaw' s assertion that the supporters and advocates of the IndustrialWorkers of Great Britain (IWGB) were either Scottish, Irish, or Welsh, the' 'immigrant' workers fromthe Celtic fringe'. By 1926 the Scottish workers - or rather the minority of them involved in politics -entered the General Strike as a more unified political force than they had been at any time since 1880.The dual identity of the Irish immigrants had played an important role in this new development. 5 ?NotesJames D. Young1. John GaIt was allegedly the first of the Kailyard novelists. Kailyard propagandists asserted that Scotland wasa democratic society with an almost irmate 'democratic intellect', a rural idyll remote from strife or classconflict. The Kailyard was, however, threatened by the Irish-Catholic immigrants. As one influential Scottishhistorian put it: 'Scottish democracy was the ideological basis of the Liberal Party in Scotland, but it couldnot apply to the Irish, Roman Catholic, uneducated, and not too concerned with the digni ties of man in the faceof struggle for survival, the Irish working class (and there were not many in any other class) seemed a threatto the Scottish way of life '. James G. Kellas, 'The Development of the Liberal Party in Scotland., 1868-1895' ,.PhD, University of London, 1966, p. 26.2. M. Flinn (ed.) Scottish Population Historyfrom the 17th Century to the 1930s, (Cambridge, 1977), p.303 andp.365.3. James Handley, The Irish in Scotland, (Glasgow, 1950), p. 348.4. Robert Haddow, 'The Miners of Scotland', The Nineteenth Century, September 1888, pp. 360-368. In aninteresting description of the sexual jealousy between the Scottish and Irish-Catholic immigrants, T.e. Smoutsaid: 'Indeed, sometimes Irishmen were guilty of precisely the same double-standard as the middle-classScottish male: Patrick MacGill in his remarkable autobiographical novels oflife among Irish harvest workersin Scotland described how experienced men would go with Scottish prostitutes but condemn with horror a