Jack White (trade Unionist) - The Irish Citizens Army

The Irish Citizens Army

In 1913 he proposed the creation of a workers militia to protect picket lines from assaults by the Dublin Metropolitan Police and gangs in pay of the employers. The notion of a Citizen Army, drilled by him, was enthusiastically accepted. Its appearance, as White recollected, "put manners on the police".

He later put his services at the disposal of the Irish Volunteers, believing that a stand had to be taken against British rule by a large body of armed people. He went to Derry, where there was a brigade of Volunteers who were largely ex-British Army like himself. But he was shaken by the sectarian attitudes he found. When he tried to reason with them and make the case for workers' unity they dismissed him as merely sticking up for his own, i.e. Protestants.

When Connolly was sentenced to death after the 1916 Rising, White rushed to South Wales and tried to bring the miners out on strike to save his life. For his attempts, he was given three months imprisonment. Transferred from Swansea to Pentonville the day before Roger Casement’s death, White was within earshot of the next morning’s hanging.