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.
Read more about this topic: Jack White (trade Unionist)
Famous quotes containing the words irish, citizens and/or army:
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“If we are to take for the criterion of truth the majority of suffrages, they ought to be gotten from those philosophic and patriotic citizens who cultivate their reason.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Man is the end of nature; nothing so easily organizes itself in every part of the universe as he; no moss, no lichen is so easily born; and he takes along with him and puts out from himself the whole apparatus of society and condition extempore, as an army encamps in a desert, and where all was just now blowing sand, creates a white city in an hour, a government, a market, a place for feasting, for conversation, and for love.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)