The Connolly Association was established in 1938 among Irish socialists in Britain. Campaigning mainly through the trade union movement, the Connolly Association aimed both to promote the interests of Irish workers in Britain, and to seek Irish reunification. Its founding watchword implored the Irish in Britain to establish class unity for the cause of labour and of the Irish republic. The Connolly Association’s founding cohort included former International Brigadiers who had fought for the republic in the Spanish Civil War: one of the Association’s first campaigns was to demand that General Franco’s fascist regime release Frank Ryan. By 1940, it had branches in London, Wealdstone, Wellingborough, Manchester, Liverpool, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, Coatbridge, and Portsmouth. The Birkenhead-born Communist Party activist and historian C. Desmond Greaves joined the Association the following year, and proceeded to become its leading activist, serving until his death in 1988.

In 1969, when Lord Fenner Brockway proposed a Bill of Rights to establish equal civil rights in Northern Ireland, the Connolly Association petitioned sympathetic MPs, such as the member for Manchester Blackley, Paul Rose, to lend their support too.
But the Connolly Association did not advocate such reforms as ends in themselves. On the contrary, establishing civil rights, they argued, would stimulate class unity across the sectarian divide, and pave the way for Irish reunification. Establishing equal rights of voting, housing, and employment in Northern Ireland, the group’s newspaper postulated in 1969, would ‘open the road to the ending of partition’.

After the conflict erupted in Northern Ireland at the turn of the 1970s, the Connolly Association consistently demanded a programme of reforms and a Bill of Rights to establish parity between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Activists like C. Desmond Greaves envisioned such equity as the precursor to a united class struggle for Irish independence.

Reviewing the Association’s career almost half a century since its foundation, Greaves told a conference in London in 1985 that the Connolly Association was ‘the oldest Irish organisation in Britain’ and ‘the only one that has always approached the Irish question from the standpoint of internationalism… it holds that it is the international duty of English Labour to work for Irish independence’.

After the conflict erupted in Northern Ireland at the turn of the 1970s, the Connolly Association consistently demanded a programme of reforms and a Bill of Rights to establish parity between working-class Protestants and Catholics. Activists like C. Desmond Greaves envisioned such equity as the precursor to a united class struggle for Irish independence.