SEARC'S WEB GUIDE - George Gilmore (1898-1985)

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Searc's Web Guide to 20th Century Ireland - George Gilmore (1898-1985)

George Gilmore was born in Portadown. He grew up in Dublin where he joined the Irish Volunteers in 1915. Gilmore partook in the Easter Rising of 1916, the War of Independence and the Civil War when he was Officer in Command of the South County Dublin Battalion of the IRA. Gilmore, like his brothers Charlie and Harry, was imprisoned many times during 1919-1923 and once escaped from Mountjoy Gaol with Joseph Campbell.
On November 25th, 1925 Gilmore lead an IRA unit who effected the escape of 19 republican prisoners from Mountjoy Gaol. He was arrested a year later and sentenced to eighteen months in Mountjoy Gaol during which time he refused to wear prison clothes in demand of political status.
It is believed that Gilmore travelled to Russia to seek military training for IRA officers in 1930. A year later he was arrested in Dublin and sentenced to five years imprisonment under the Treason and Firearms Act but was released in the General Amnesty of 1932. Shortly afterwards, in August, 1932, Gilmore was shot and wounded by the Gardaí in County Clare.
In 1934 Gilmore, together with Peadar O'Donnell and Frank Ryan, formed Republican Congress, an anti-imperialist umbrella group. Gilmore and Ryan were Honorary Secretaries of Republican Congress. In 1934 Gilmore published The Relevance of James Connolly in Ireland Today and, in 1935, a pamphlet Republican Congress from which the extract below is taken. Within a year the Congress disbanded after disagreements as to whether it should contest elections. In 1936 Gilmore recruited volunteers for an Irish Brigade, including Mick O'Riordon and Charlie Donnelly to fight the fascist forces in the Spanish Civil War.©

If we wish to attack an enemy with success, surely our first task is to make what the military text books call 'an appreciation of the situation'. To study the enemy's position - to see where his strength lies - where his vital hold is and what auxiliary forces and influences he can use as supports. And then to make a similar study of the forces in the nation that are, by their nature, opposed to him. To rally them on the basis of their natural hostility to him, and to direct the attacks so that it may not only shatter his defence forces but may destroy completely his grip on the country.
It will be admitted without question that there are within the Irish nation elements opposed to the overthrow of British Imperialism. It must be admitted that there are people who benefit by it. But it must also be admitted that the vast majority of the people of Ireland are oppressed by the burden of Imperialism and are capable of being mobilised for its overthrow. The unity in action of these - the oppressed, and therefore naturally anti-imperialist, people of Ireland - is the unity we seek.
The Congress is not a new movement - except in the sense that before it was launched the Republican movement had come to a halt. It is better to consider it as revivifying of an old movement for national independence.
As time moves on political forms change, but the struggle of the Irish people against British conquests is still fundamentally the same struggle, and the Republicans of today are fighting the same fight that the clansmen fought who marched to Kinsale with the princes of Tir Eoghan and Tir Chonaill.
The objective of the Republican Congress is an independent Republic of a United Ireland. Since the days of Wolfe Tone this has been the accepted definition of Irish freedom. Those political leaders who have attempted to make peace with England on any other terms have always in the end been repudiated by the Irish people. The United Irishmen fought for this in 1798 and so did the Young Irelanders of 1848 and the Fenians of 1867. The leaders of the 1916 Rising embodied this objective in their proclamation, and though some have since tried to persuade us that they would have accepted something short of National independence, and others have tried to persuade us that their aim was something different from the unity of the nation according to Tone's definition of it, still I think we can most safely look for their objective in the proclamation that they signed.
But there is this in the Republican Congress that is new: It is the first attempt to base the National independence movement upon recognition of the fact that Irish middle class interests are not the interests that will lead to the Republic, and that, consequently, their political representatives must not be the ones to lead the national struggle.
This does not mean that no member of the Irish Capitalist class has ever been, or can ever be, sincerely devoted to the cause of Irish independence. But it does mean that, owing to the connection that exists between Irish Capitalism and British Imperialism, he must to be an effective force against the latter, become so separated in mentality from his environment as to be able to work whole-heartedly against the interests of the former. It is rarely that the mental separation is so complete as that. This is no new theory. It was recognised by individuals in the Republican movement in other days, but it was never accepted as a theory governing the movement. When, in 1798, the Northern manufacturers who were the leaders of the United Irish Societies, fearing that in arousing a revolutionary spirit in the discontented peasantry and town workers they had set in motion forces which they would be unable to control, refused to take the field at the critical moment on the eve of the rising, [Henry Joy] McCracken said, in the bitterness of the betrayal, 'The rich always betray the poor.'
Fintan Lalor, in 1848, tried to impress this lesson upon the Young Irelanders. He urged them to make the fight for the land against the landlords the basis for the republican struggle. But he was not heeded by the leaders of that day, and indeed there is evidence to show that the property owning leaders deliberately prevented a rising because they feared that, if successful, it would drive out of the country not only British Imperialism but landlordism as well.
Of the 1916 leaders, Connolly left no room for doubt as to his view on the matter - 'We cannot conceive of a free Ireland with a subject working-class; we cannot conceive of a subject Ireland with a free working-class.'
But Connolly represented only one section of the leadership of that revolt, and after his death his teaching was never made the basis for Republican activities. That the oppressed people of Ireland - the working class and working farmers - are the people who have no interest in compromise with Imperialism, and who alone can be counted upon to free Ireland, is the basic idea of the Republican Congress movement - 'We believe that a Republic of a united Ireland will never be achieved except through a struggle which uproots Capitalism on its way.' © Searc's Web Guide 1997-2008

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