Geoff Rose – Nixie Boran
Nixie Boran
Geoff Rose
The life and times of Nicholas “ Nixie” Boran by Professor Ann Boran, read by Geoff Rose.
It is difficult to be objective about one’s own father, even, I think, to fully understand what he was about. Memories are mixed with childhood impressions, with unspoken gleanings of activities that one didn’t fully understand at the time and didn’t think to ask about. Years later, sharing similar interests it would have been good to discuss such things, but he was no longer there.
However, my memories were of a quiet spoken man who loved to spend hours on his own reading or meditating, yet who was open to a constant stream of miners coming to the house at any hour. He rose at 5.30 a.m. and spent a few hours of quiet before going to morning Mass and then to his office in Castlecomer, not the pattern of conduct one might expect of a communist subversive, perceived as a threat to both Church and state in the early thirties. True, he was no longer a professed communist, he let go-of. that in the mid thirties but he remained a socialist and a dedicated member of the Labour Party until his death in 1971.
My father’s name was Nicholas Boran, known an Nixie to all who knew him. He was born in 1903 in Massford, Castlecomer — the heart of the Leinster mining district. The lands and mines of the area were owned by the Wandesford family, invited to Ireland by Thomas Wentworth, Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1637 and given a large estate around Castlecomer. Mining began in the area in 1640. Over times the technological limitations of early mining efforts, inability to cope with excess water and lack of ventilation, were overcome, and primitive shallow mines were abandoned for deep mining, seven to eight hundred feet underground. Mining was done in passages about 3ft high or less, the miner lying on his side for shifts of 10 hours in the harshest conditions. When Nixie came on the mining scene in 1917 at the age of 14 yrs, miners were paid according to production and a sliding scale based on the market price of the coal. He earned 4/- a day at that time. Deducted from a miner’s wage was the price of the means used to produce the coal, fuses, candles, gelignite, detonators etc. as well as rent on his house. Even the Church took a slice of the cake; payment towards the building of a new Church in Moneenroe was deducted in the 1920’s.
The mine owner in the 1920’s and 30’s, Captain Prior- Wandesford was a paternalist autocrat, intolerant of miner demands or strikes. The miners were in a vulnerable position, because of the depression of the 1930’s when there was a surplus of everything, including coal and a lack of support from the IT&GWU which appeared not to understand the problems of miners at that time. The economic base of the area centred around farming and mining, though no great solidarity or sympathy existed between these two groups. Some small farmers were forced to be miners also in order to subsist, but, in general the miners tended to form a class apart, looked down on by farmers often poorer than themselves. In Ireland, the demand for land and protection of it may radicalise and unite, but in general possession of it, tends to conservatise and weaken class solidarity.
Nixie was from a small farm and must have felt some of these tensions as he was forced to go to work early in order to supplement the family income. He seems, however, always to have had a radical streak in him. I do not know how he was first exposed to Marxist analysis and Communism but he often said he read any book he could get his hands on. Whatever his inspiration, he was to become a lifelong campaigner against injustice, a staunch follower of James Connolly’s ideas and a committed freedom fighter on the Republican side in the Civil War. This latter led him through many dangerous escapades. While ‘on the run’ he was wounded in Tipperary and had to be hospitalised under an assumed name in Limerick hospital, supposedly as a local farmer wounded by a hay knife. He had not calculated on a visit from the local Bishop who wanted to know his parish of origin and the name of his parish priest. Pretense at sleep did not work and a nurse’s attempt to explain his inability to answer as confusion due to the accident, alerted `Free State’ soldiers in the same ward. Rapid escape was essential, effected with the help of Dan Breen and Dinny Lacey.
Another episode involved a local Garda. While attempting a visit home an encounter with the Garda led Nixie to reflect on the comparative condition of their respective boots. The Garda was `persuaded’ to exchange his for the remains of Nixie’s and was also relieved of his trousers. Nixie was later captured and condemned to death, but while awaiting in solitary confinement in Clonmel prison he managed to saw through a thick wooden roof beam with his razor and escape through a hole in the roof during a rainy night.
Such daring was part of his character as a young man. They served him well in difficult circumstances and must have helped him take on the struggle of the miners in the 1930’s at such a difficult time in history. He did, however, bring an unexpected dimension to the struggle. He studied social attitudes and conditions in Russia, England, Scotland and Wales by actually going there and seeing for himself. Although the miners had been members of the Irish Transport and General Workers Union, the union seemed unwilling to take on the Prior-Wandesfords and the miners’ disillusionment led them to form a union of their own in December 1930. First, a branch of the Revolutionary Workers’ Group was. formed in the mines. Having been invited to send a delegate to the Red International of Labour Unions, held in Moscow in August 1930, the miners selected Nixie and on being refused. a visa by the Irish government he was smuggled out of the country on board a cargo ship bearing cement. He travelled extensively in Russia, visiting the mineral centre in the Urals, collectives in Samara, coal mines in the Donetz Basin as well as the cities of Leningrad and Moscow. His main objective was to-meet and talk with Russian workers. Three months later he returned to Ireland ready to put his experience into practice, but on arrival at his destination he was arrested by the local Gardai who questioned him on his Russian visit. He refused to answer any questions and as a crowd of miners who had turned out to welcome him protested outside the barracks, he was soon released.
On his return he was anxious to begin the work of setting up the new union, probably modelled on the United Mine Workers Union of Scotland. Bob Stewart of the British Communist Party and leader of the Scottish miners came to Moneenroe in December 1930 to offer advice and the benefit of his wide experience with miners and mining unions. The new union was clearly to be a Communist one affiliated `only with the Red International of Labour Unions’2, the only international organisation that was felt would not betray the interests of the workers. Its objectives were stated clearly in a letter by Nixie to the Kilkenny Journal in March 1931 as being `the ultimate overthrow of the capitalist system’, which the miners believed would `be the only genuine cure for the evils and miseries which the workers of Ireland are subjected to’. The name finally decided on for the union was the Irish Mine and Quarry Workers Union, and Nixie was elected chairman.
The new union immediately began formulating demands; a ton of coal per household per month at production cost, and improved wages of 3p per hour for the trammers who were the most exploited section of the miners. Management replied that the claims were `so unreasonable that they could not even be considered’.
Strike action followed in October 1932 and lasted for six weeks during which time the union had no funds to pay strike money to the miners. A campaign was launched by the Strike Committee to collect money and food from farmers, businessmen and other trade unions. The miners secured two thirds of their demands against great odds, but their victory lay more in the fact that for the first time in history the mine management had been forced to concede anything to strikers.
The union, formed to face one battle — that of bettering the living and working conditions of the miners — suddenly found itself defending itself on many front. The state felt threatened and constantly harassed union members. With the Church if it came to a choice between defence of workers’ rights inspired by Marxist ideology, and a defence of the owners’ position, the latter won every time. The local community was split in its support of the various factions.
The miners saw their exploitation and powerlessness but felt that none of the powerful institutions, trade union or Church were prepared to help them. Communism with its emphasis on an international alliance of workers promised to do so. I do not believe that they even thought about the atheistic side of communism, though they certainly had the opportunity of seeing how the Church can operate as the `opium of the people’. A full-scale attack was mounted on the new union by the Church. The local priest, Fr. Kavanagh preached from the pulpit, putting great pressure on the families of the miners. He denounced Nixie as being little better than the devil himself and of being a Russian agent and claimed that the new union was paid for by Russian gold. He canvassed each member of the union committee separately in an attempt to dissolve it and categorized the Workers’ Voice (the Communist newspaper) as the devil’s voice. The miners pointed out, often by means of the Workers’ Voice, that their union was financed in precisely the same way as was the local church — through miners’ contributions. Nixie answered the taunt that it was under Soviet control by stating `I think the real trouble is because it is solely and wholly under the workers’ control’. He often quoted extracts from papal encyclicals to support what the workers were doing. An aunt of mine told me how as a schoolgirl she smuggled the encyclicals from the local convent for him to read. She also tells a story of a visit, organised by Nixie, of Peadar O’Donnell (the Irish Communist leader) in the guise of a priest who came to speak to the people in the area, and how she was one of the school children primed to sing failte Romhat a Athar’ by the unsuspecting local school. The dare-devil tactics must have been trying for both Church and State.
The Bishop’s New Year pastoral in 1933, read out in all churches of the diocese, proclaimed `the whole Communist organisation and programme in the diocese to be under the ban of the Church’. The new organisation had all the marks of the beast, he said. `We had the secret inspiration from headquarters, the paid agitator, the preaching of labour unrest, the veiled incitement to looting and rioting’. He left no doubt as to where the Church stood in relation to the question; `Excommunication, therefore, is decreed against all miners who dare to remain loyal to the union’. The Bishop also appeared in the locality and berated them publicly. Nixie and the union members refused to obey the excommunication ban by continuing to go to Mass. The miners were asked to come forward and publicly renounce Satan at Mass (the union being considered synonymous with Satan). Nixie and his followers walked out. Some firm upholders of the Church’s position at the time decided to post themselves outside the Church to prevent Nixie, his family and the main leaders from attending Mass, but Nixie organised three men of his to stand quietly beside each one of theirs and he walked unmolested into church.
The union had little chance of surviving on its own against such odds and negotiations were entered into with the IT&GWU resulting in the Mine and Quarry Workers’ Union becoming a branch of the IT&GWU with Nixie as its leader. Mine owner and management were forced to sit across the negotiating table from Nixie for the rest of his working life where he fought for and got improved living and working conditions for the miners. Wages improved, they got a clinic, a cooperative was set up, miners burned the best coal at production cost and sometimes during my growing up I no longer met black faced miners on my way to and from school — baths had been installed in the mines. Of most benefit to the miners, however, was Nixie’s campaign and success in having the miners’ disease pneumoconiosis recognised by the government as an industrial disease and so eligible for compensation. He was elected to the executive council of the IT&GWU in 1952 and remained on it until his retirement in 1970. In 1957 he was proud to be the first Irish delegate to represent and speak on behalf of Irish workers at the International Labour Conference in Geneva. His last campaigning efforts were devoted to staving off the closing of Castlecomer’s 350 year old industry. He managed to secure government grants for three further years and when the inevitable end came in 1969, he was in the forefront of campaigning for new industries for .the area to reemploy the 500 who had lost their jobs through mine closure.
What can I say to sum up what may to some people seem like contradictions in his life? I do not think that there were any contradictions for him. He was a man of immense spirituality but he saw socialism as a natural expression of that spirituality. He thought Christianity had little to do with meekness when it came to improving the lot of the downtrodden. The stance of Liberation theology today would have made complete sense to him. As Tom Lyng said at his graveside in November 1971 `His spirituality was the love of the community in which he lived and worked … spiritually he was always around us’
REFERENCES
1. Workers’ Voice, 29/11/1930.
2. Kilkenny Journal. March 1931.
3. Idem.
4. Kilkenny People. Obituary, Friday Nov. 12th 1971.