JJ was among the founders of the Irish Association, the objective of which was and remains to keep alive all-Ireland intellectual contact, despite the political barriers.

The first decades of the Association are chronicled in a pamphlet(1) by Mary MacNeill. This goes in some depth into the early days and the war period, and continues up to 1953, with a mostly Northern perspective. Corresponding information relating to the Southern Committee of the Association remains to be located; it is explicitly assumed by Mary MacNeill to be in existence. The Northern material is in the Belfast Public Record Office. There is however very little mention of JJ's Presidency to be found there; it extended from 1946 to 1954. He had succeeded the first President Lord Charlemont(2). I have however been unable to ascertain the circumstances of his election to office; there is a brief retrospective mention by Mary MacNeill.

I have extracted some notes from the Northern Ireland Public Record Office (NIPRO) archive which seem to me to be relevant to this narrative, and I have collected them in decade modules in the hypertext, to which I hope to be able to add material relating to JJ if and when I find it.

The NIPRO 1930s record(3) contains some insights from the MacNeill and Montgomery correspondence relating to the foundation process. The origins of the Irish Association were rooted in the perceptions of the de Valera Constitution of 1937, as seen from the angle of the Northern Protestants. It was a conscious attempt to stem the increasing divergence of outlook, and to preserve the opportunities for all-Ireland interaction presented by the status of the Free State within the Commonwealth. Names associated with its foundation were Frank McDermot and General Hugh Montgomery.

The NIPRO record in the 1940s decade(4) is dominated by the war; Mary McNeill records with gratitude the unsolicited dash to Belfast of the Dublin fire brigade on the occasion of the blitz, and the support given in the Free State to refugees.

There is in JJ's papers a copy of IA Bulletin no 3 dated June 1941, which records these events; a meeting planned for Belfast, at which PT Somerville-Large was to speak about the Mount St Club and the Dublin unemployed, had to be postponed. Papers read to meetings of the Association were summarised: Constantia Maxwell spoke in Dublin on the Ulster Plantation; Louie Bennett spoke in Belfast on Vocational Organisation; Rev Robert Crossett spoke in Belfast on the work of Muintir na Tire; Major-General Sir George Franks KCB spoke in Dublin on Irishmen Abroad. The latter paper on military history was supplemented in the discussion by references to the arts and medicine. William A Beers is listed along with Mary McNeill as being joint secretaries.

There was a Commonwealth Irish Association conference in 1943, with a keynote paper by Prof WGS Adams, Warden of All Souls, Oxford; the theme was 'Reconciliation with Ireland'.

In the aftermath of the war we had the declaration of the Republic, and Lord Charlemont's resignation, which was related to the move to promote the Council of Ireland. This was said to have been supported by JJ in the Seanad, along with James Douglas(5). There are indications in the MacNeill letters that Charlemont was not in a hurry to find a replacement for himself after the resignation, and that the atmosphere in the Association had been rendered difficult due to the declaration of the Republic.

In Mary McNeill's paper, after her mention of JJ, she puts on record an attempt to associate Northern interests with a national post-war planning exhibition held in Dublin in 1946. Post-war planning was then a fashionable concept. An attempt was made to involve the NI Rural Development Council, the Ulster Planning Group, the Tourist Association, the Young Farmers Clubs and the Womens' Institute. The then vice-chancellor of Queens was Chairman of the NI Advisory Planning Board, and the Irish Association approached him, but he blocked it. JJ then being in the Senate, and in the first year of his Presidency, would have been keen to make this all-Ireland episode into a significant happening.

There is practically nothing in the NIPRO archive relating to JJ's Presidency, which leads me to believe that he was, to an extent, non persona grata with the Northern Committee. There is however correspondence relating to Sir Graham Larmour's introduction to his pamphlet The Sickness of the Irish Economy, mostly with Eileen Calvert, then a Stormont MP, with whom he seems to have had a good relationship(6). There is in the NIPRO archive a letter from Irene Calvert to Jack Sayers, the editor of the Belfast Telegraph, urging that JJ's articles on 'agricultural anaemia', as published in the Statist, should be reprinted in his paper. JJ's paper to the Belfast Irish Association, planned for November 12 1956, was based on these articles(7) .

On the other hand however there was a debate organised in Kilkenny in 1954, in which Colonel Topping, then a Stormont MP, supported by William Douglas, Secretary of the Ulster Unionist Council, put the case for Unionism against Sean MacBride supported by Eoin (the Pope) O'Mahony. JJ and the Irish Association had a hand in setting this up, and there was local support from Hubert Butler and the Kilkenny Debating Society. There appears to be no record of this historic episode in the NIPRO Irish Association archive, which I find strange.

The 60s decade is one in which there could have been an overlap between my own interest in the North and my father's. He was on the Council, as a Past President, and I remember him drawing the Irish Association to my attention, and was prepared to explore its possibilities.

There is a record(8) of a Council meeting on 6/04/64, at which JJ was present. A meeting had been planned for November on 'science-based industry'; CO Stanley and Armin Frank had been approached to speak, but had declined. The matter was then dropped. This must have been my initiative, through JJ, because I was then acutely aware of Armin Frank, an engineer, who was the Chief Executive of Standard Pressed Steel in Shannon. He had been actively promoting among the engineering fraternity the need for Ireland to invest its intellectual capital, in the form of scientists and engineers, into high-technology industry. I had been cheering him on, and using his arguments in left-wing and republican political circles. JJ must have picked this up, or maybe I gave it to him.

At this time my own (basically Marxist) project was to politicise the republican tradition, and to rescue its 'Democratic Enlightenment' core-philosophy from the subsequent overlays of 'Catholic Nationalism' and 'IRB elitism' with which it had been infested subsequent to its 1798 origins. It was in this spirit that in the 60s I had become associated with Cathal Goulding and the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society.

When I heard of the projected 1965 Whit Conference of the Irish Association, I discussed it with Goulding, and we agreed that it would be an interesting indicator of the internal democratic reform potential of the Northern Ireland environment. So I went along.

The Derry Whit Meeting in 1965

Speakers to the main conference included Rev J Shiels, on the Swatragh co-operative movement, and Prof CF Carter, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Lancaster (he had been Economics professor in Queens, and had co-operated with JJ via the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society, and the Barrington Lectures). The topic of Carter's paper was 'Founding a New University', and the occasion was quite poignant, because all Derry had expected the New University of Ulster (NUU) to be based on Magee, and the IA meeting had been planned on this assumption.

Shortly before the IA meeting it had been announced that NUU was to be located on a green-field site near Coleraine. The frustration of the Derry people was palpable. John Hume was there, and this event undoubtedly was a trigger for the subsequent Civil Rights explosion. Steve McGonigal of the ITGWU had accepted an invitation to speak also, and was present. All the forces which subsequently became the NICRA were there in embryo, including the present writer, then active with the Dublin Wolfe Tone Society.

Also present was John Garmany, the Magee economist, who had earlier interacted with my father in the context of the latter's efforts to keep alive an all-Ireland view via the Statistical and Social Inquiry Society.

There is on record in the IA archive in NIPRO a copy of a resolution which was presented at the Derry meeting, which took place on June 5 1965. It is in my handwriting, but there is no mention of my name. It was referred to Council for consideration. The resolution welcomes the Lemass-O'Neill talks, and supports the policy of regional growth centres. It calls on the Dublin and Belfast Governments to nominate Londonderry as a growth centre for the Derry Donegal Region. I had clearly in mind the type of cross-border regional development body which has in the end emerged under the Good Friday Agreement.

A Council meeting was called for June 23 or 24 1965, in Ballymascanlon, and I was invited to attend. I remember that meeting; my motion was considered politely, and they decided to do nothing, it was not their role to attempt to influence governments. I remember at that meeting how Sir Graham Larmour regaled the company, with glee, how he had observed a prime example of north-south co-operation, in the form of an episode in which Herdman in Sion Mills had sacked his Catholic workers, who had come across the border from Castlefin, Lifford and other places nearby, and then gone to the IDA to get grant funding to start a factory for them in the Republic.

This confirmed me in my opinion that Partition was a bourgeois conspiracy to use the two States pro-actively to keep the working-class divided, and that the Irish Association, despite the best efforts of my father, of which I had been aware, was, in effect, party to this conspiracy, in its then policies. I then therefore decided that it was not a relevant forum in which the 'politicisation of the republican movement' project could usefully be pursued.

On a subsequent occasion, in 1966, when in the North making contacts with politicising republicans and others, I attended the Rev Shiels's church service, and talked to him afterwards; I had encountered him at the earlier Derry IA meeting, and was aware of his interest in the co-operative movement. There was on the agenda the promotion of support for the co-operative movement, as a cross-community unifying process, in the common interest. I was attempting to sell this idea to republican activists as a mode of useful work, with possible long-term positive political effects. Some of them I believe may have bought the idea, but subsequent events made it difficult or impossible to develop.

Dermot MacManus

I reference this(9) here, though it has no direct links with the Irish Association as such. A reading of the MacManus papers however will suggest that the Macmanus family was part of the 'patriotic landlord' tradition of which Lord Charlemont, Standish O'Grady, Hubert Butler and others belonged, including the likes of Yeats, Synge and Lady Gregory. These would have been in the lead in an 'all-Ireland Home Rule' socio-political scene. The Irish Association can perhaps be regarded as the surviving shreds of this tradition.

JJ's Papers

He produced a paper for the Irish Association Council to consider, in confidence, an outline plan for 1963-64(10). This foreshadows the type of developments which might have emerged out of the Lemass-O'Neill meeting, had the politics of that event been allowed to develop without forcing the pace. It also foreshadows what has come out of the Good Friday Agreement of 1998. In a letter dated September 24 1963 Irene Calvert indicated that she had sent a copy to Professor Carter, and had arranged to have it duplicated for circulation. She added 'I think your synopsis is brilliant. You should provoke some thoughtful discussion.'

There was a reception in honour of the incoming President, JF Dempsey, of Aer Lingus, followed by a 'discussion meeting' to which JJ's paper was contributed; the other main speakers were Professor CF Carter and Vincent Grogan. There is among JJ's papers a copy of the minutes of the Council meetings in March and July at which the foregoing discussion meeting was planned. The Council at this time consisted of JF Dempsey, Miss MA McNeill, Sir Graham Larmour, JJ, Edmond Grace, B NcK McGuigan, GF Dempsey, Irene Calvert and DR Reynolds (joint hon secs), Frank Benner, Capt Peter Montgomery and Tom O'Gorman.

There is a hiatus in JJ's record then until 1967, when there is a note from Sir Graham Larmour attached to a copy of a Belfast Telegraph article by Martin Wallace: "I think the enclosed article-copy will prove that our choice of President has been a wise one". The article attacks the Orange Order for their opposition to a proposed visit by the Bishop of Ripon: '...a few clergy are going to have to consider whether they should remain within the Order, whose devotion to civil and religious liberty is once more exposed as meaningless..'.

By this time JJ seems to have become disillusioned with the Irish Association, because there is among his papers a letter dated July 28 1967, in which he pays up his subscription, and bows out, to give priority to his Berkeley work. He castigated the Committee for not taking any interest in aspects of this work which he had offered them. There is however no record of this letter in the minutes of the September 1967 Council meeting, which he had kept, along with a copy of the printed version to Professor E Estyn Evans' paper on 'The Irishness of the Irish', delivered at the Armagh conference of the Irish Association on September 22, 1967.

As we have seen above, the Derry Whit weekend conference in 1965, planned to welcome the NUU, was an episode with many link-points. JJ had planned to participate in this, but did not get to do so, I suspect on health grounds, but I did, and I attempted to get the meeting to support a motion relating to the opportunity for a cross-border body to engage in regional development in the North-West. John Hume and others subsequently associated with the civil rights movement were there. There is no doubt that the location of the NUU in Coleraine was a rebuff to Derry, and a deliberate downgrading of the long-term collegiate link between Magee College and Trinity College Dublin. This was one of the many triggers for the subsequent Civil Rights movement.

In the aftermath I had a meeting with their Committee, my motion having been referred to the incoming Council. I gained an interesting insight into how the all-Ireland bourgeoisie actually takes advantage of the Border to keep the working-class divided.

I had little to do with the Irish Association during the 70s and 80s; if I find any relevant linkages I will record them in modules for these decades. I began to take an interest again in the 90s, somewhat marginally, and have contributed to the development of their web-site archive(11).

Notes and References

2. It is perhaps worth mentioning in passing that Charlemont was the landlord of the Johnston farm at Tomagh, near Castlecaulfield, where JJ spent his early years.

3. The NIPRO record contains a 1939 membership list, which includes JJ with the title Senator, and a record of a correspondence with de Valera in support of the foundation of an all-Ireland Students Association.

4. The record of Irish Association meetings during the war, such as it is, I have outlined in the 1940s module of this thread of the hypertext.

5. I have so far been unable to trace this in the Seanad stream of the hypertext; it may be that it occurred post-1948, when JJ was no longer in the Seanad, but Douglas was still in, and making the running.

6. I treat this, along with the Kilkenny Debates, in the 1950s module of this Irish Association thread of the hypertext, along with such additional JJ activity on behalf of the Association as I can track down.

7. A summary of this paper, probably a press release, I have edited into the hypertext, accessible from here and from the 1950s module of this thread.

8. The record is in Box 6 of the NIPRO archive. For a more extensive analysis of this 60s period see the 1960s module of this thread in the hypertext. The record of the Derry Whit meeting of 1965 is in Box 7.

9. I have reproduced this in the hypertext; it is available from here and from the 1960s overview chapter.

10. I have reproduced JJ's Plan in the hypertext, accessible from here and from the 1960s module.

11. The Irish Association web-site is publicly accessible at http://www.irish-association.org in its current evolved form. My earlier prototype web-site archive is accessible in the hypertext, at the state of development it had reached during 2001.

Some navigational notes:

Copyright Dr Roy Johnston 2002