One of the most evocative events I have covered for this newspaper was the 50th anniversary reunion in Barcelona of the surviving members of the International Brigade in Barcelona, writes Deaglán de Bréadún.
The brigade had been stood down in 1938, shortly before the end of the Spanish Civil War. From late 1936 onwards, the Brigadistas came from many countries to support the cause of the Republic and its democratically elected government against the military coup launched by General Franco with the support of Hitler and Mussolini. In the words of W.H. Auden, they "migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower" and, as he wrote in Spain 1937, his controversial poem of the period: "They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch/ Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;/ They floated over the oceans;/ They walked the passes: they came to present their lives."
Seventeen years after that Barcelona reunion, my memories are still vivid. There was a large US contingent, the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. A prominent personality, since deceased, was Steve Nelson, a legendary figure in American labour and socialist circles. Nelson had the warmest recollections of Frank Ryan, but was unaware of the sad and ironic fate that befell the Limerick man, who was released from a Spanish prison and died a lonely death in Germany in 1944.
Another visitor to Barcelona in 1988 was Walter Greenhalgh, who worked closely with Ryan in the International Brigade. I happened to have a copy of the biography of Ryan by Sean Cronin, the distinguished former Washington Correspondent of The Irish Times, which features a photograph of the Irishman, wearing his Spanish Army uniform, with the great American writer Ernest Hemingway. Greenhalgh told me, with great amusement, that Ryan's interest in meeting Hemingway was motivated primarily by a desire to be introduced to the many attractive women who were part of the writer's retinue.
My recollections have been stirred by the reappearance, in updated form, of Michael O'Riordan's book Connolly Column, published by the Welsh-based company, Warren & Pell. This is the story of the Irish volunteers who joined the International Brigade. Initially there was thought to be 145 of them but the true figure was around 240.
Eugene Downing, who was one of that number and lost a leg on his first day in battle, used to point out to me before he died that there was no Connolly Column, as the Irish were divided between the British and US contingents. O'Riordan stresses in his book that it was never his intention to mislead. "At no stage did I ever maintain that this was the formal title of an actual operational military unit in which all Irish volunteers served in Spain," he writes.
It was to be expected that some of the Irish would be uncomfortable serving with the British group. An English veteran I met at the Barcelona reunion gave me an eye-witness account of an Irish volunteer pulling a gun on one of his British comrades when he discovered that the fellow had been, as my informant put it, "a Black-and-Tanner". But another International Brigader, Joe Monks from Inchicore in Dublin, told me how he was inspired by the bravery of the officer who led him into battle, Major George Nathan, even though it later emerged that Nathan had been an Auxiliary in Ireland in 1920-21 and may even have operated against Frank Ryan, who was an IRA activist in East Limerick.
There is by now a rich and varied literature about Irish involvement in the Spanish Civil War. O'Riordan's book was one of the first in the field and this second edition has been compiled by his son, Manus, well-known for his work as a trade union official with SIPTU and as the author of insightful letters on this page.
Ryan remains a fascinating and intriguing figure. On the Barcelona-London leg of my return journey in 1988, I had the good fortune to be sitting beside Tom Jones - not the singer but a Welsh miner who was imprisoned with Ryan in Spain. He told me how shocked the Irishman was by the Nazi-Soviet Pact of August 1939 as it seemed to place the communists on a par with the fascists. One wonders what he thought of the manner in which the Spanish Republic was being subverted by communist infiltration in its final days.
It seems unfair that Ryan, who risked his life fighting fascism, should now be labelled a Nazi collaborator by some. He was caught up in circumstances that were largely beyond his control: the only way he could avoid execution by Franco or a long stay in a Spanish prison was by crossing the border into Nazi-controlled France. He was also in very poor health, as photographs from the time clearly demonstrate.
Ryan's sister Eilis, who lived on for many years in Dublin, would have regarded it as a ludicrous claim that Frank, or Proinnsias as he was known, became a fascist sympathiser. It just didn't make sense. But she often told me of her concern that he would also be labelled a communist. Eilis had no difficulty with Frank's pronounced left-wing views but time and time again she stressed that he never abandoned his Catholic faith and she showed me his Irish-language prayer books to prove her point. She also told me that, as he left for his last fateful journey to Spain, he produced a rosary to emphasise his continuing religious devotion. Although Eilis expressed concern that the Irish Communists were hijacking Frank's name for ideological purposes, I suspect that others may be grateful these days that Michael O'Riordan, a long-time Communist, has stood by Frank Ryan at a time when the biggest danger to his reputation comes from those who are trying to wrap the Swastika rather than the Red Flag around his name.