IRISH LABOUR LEADER.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 65, 17 March 1928, Page 14

IRISH LABOUR LEADER.

BLUNT TOM JOHNSON.

A "MAN OF THE HOUR."

ENGLISH BORN AND BRED.

For the present, the Cosgrave Government is safe in Ireland, but its

margin is a very narrow - one and a slight change in party allegiances might cause its downfall. If thi9 should occur, Thomas Johnson, Leader of the Labour party, will very probably be called upon to form a Government, and here would arise a strange situation indeed, strange even in the ever-chang-ing panorama which has bewildered political observers ever since the Dail was first called together.

Thomas Johnson, the man of the hour in Ireland, illustrates the saying so often applied to the Emerald Isle, that "the inevitable never occurs and the impossible is always happening." Tradition, birth, name and political opinions all mitigate Tom Johnson as an Irish leader of serious or even minor proportions. Yet there he is on top leading and directing the effort to overthrow President Coegrave and his party and the government or administration they control in the Irish Free State. Tom Johnson was born near Liverpool. England, of English parents. He is therefore neither Gaelic, Anglo-Irish,] Scotch-Irish, English-Irish, Irish-Eng-lish or Irish-Scotch. In him all tradi-j tion is upset and upset so completely that the romantic school of Irish Gaeldon) is bewildered and plainly flabbergasted by it. Johnson is not a gentleman with a great house and broad acres as Redmond, Parnell, Smith O'Brien, O'Connell and Grattan were. Neither is the plain, blunt Tom Johnson a barrister or lawyer as Governor 'ieneral Timothy Michael Healey is, and as Isaac Butt, Patrick Pearse and many others were. Nor is Johnson a journalist or man of letters as -Justin McCarthy and Arthur Griffith were. Thomas Johnson belongs to ngne of the professions or businesses that are called "respectable" by the people and from which all other Irish leaders sprang.

The new leader is the very personification of the unostentatious, commonplace, conscientious type that enjoys plenty of hard work. He first visited Ireland looking foi j work. He got a job in Belfast as a salesman about 1913 and as he had mild socialistic views Johnson enrolled with the Belfast Independent Labour party. When the World War upset the even tenor of British and Irish parliamentary politics the salesman, as did the majority of the I.L.P. of Great Britain under Ramsay Mac Donald's and the late Keir Hardie's leadership, became pacifists and anti-war. While assisting at an outdoor anti-war meeting in the northern capital Johnson and his aides were savagely attacked by a pro-war Orange mob and that was the last Belfast saw of the Irish leader for several years. He found Dublin, where he fled for safety and for work, more to his liking.

It was inevitable that Johnson's Belfast experiences should be noised about and as usual considerably exaggerated in Dublin. In a little while he took on the proportions of a martyr or had the halo thrust on him, and after a few weeks' residence in the Irish capital Johnson was made secretary of the antiwar movement—a job he held until the organisation was dissolved by the government of Dublin Castle. Opportunity Offered. Easter week of song and story, with its revolutionary uprising and street fighting, saw Johnson taking no part in the attempt to establish an Irish republic. If the whiffs of grapeshot and the execution that followed the surrender of the revolutionary leaders wiped out the old parliamentary party of Redmond and Diiion it created other vacancies and vacuums in the unions and in the Labour party.

When the smoke f)f the Easter week 1916 battles had cleared away it was found that Connolly, O'Carroll, Partridge, Mallon, Skeffington and other radicals— the backbone of the movement and the fighting—were dead, with O'Brien and others in goal or deported. There was no man of calibre or standing or experience but Johnson.

Three or four months after the Easter week fighting Tom Johnson, at the Irish I Trade Union Congress, in a speech, while the delegates were discussing the tactics to apply in the struggle going on, said he "did not believe in the revolutionary uprising" and that "the men of the Irish and English regiments who died in France and Flanders died for freedom, too, and respect should also be paid to their memory." This bold statement marked Johnson as a careful leader and as a coming man. When the Dail approved the treaty between Ireland and Great Britain, Johnson was the first trade union man in Ireland to endorse it and welcome the Irish Free State. Why the extremists did not shoot him will always remain a mystery.

Violence Condemned,

At the first Free State general election Johnson was returned to the Dail from a Dublin constituency with the help of Republican votes on the second ballot on the proportional representation system. In the Legislative Assembly he was often on the side of the Government as well as on the Opposition, of which he was the leader. He never failed .to join with the moderates in condemning the guerrilla warfare and the shooting of political opponents. As a speaker he is careful and deliberate. Never has he shown any of the torrential eloquence of Jim JLarkin. In this respect Johnson shows a striking contrast to most Irish public men, in that he would rather speak to an assembly than sway a mob. If Johnson becomes the head of an Irish government it will be the first time in the long and strange history of the country that an Englishman was given power and leadership by the free consent of the people's representatives.