The Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Centre






The Centre Opens & The Macpherson Report



Murder and Racism in the Playground



Breaking Down The Stratified Education System




Collecting Stories from Manchester’s BME Communities





Article by Arwa Aburawa


Abundance Manchester

Abundance Manchester was established in the summer of 2008 with the aim of collecting fruit from public trees and people’s gardens and redistributing it to people in need. The volunteer-run organisation now collects fruit from around 60 gardens every harvest and drops off the produce on bike trailers to a homeless shelter, a centre for destitute asylum seekers and the Salvation Army in south Manchester. Inspired by groups such as ‘Grow Sheffield’ which highlights the amount of food waste that occurs in an urban environment, the volunteers at Abundance Manchester also say their work illustrates the ways that environmental groups can help with social issues such as homelessness.

“It’s such a simple idea, you take fruit from people who don’t want or need it and then you give it to people who do. Most people can’t believe it hasn’t been done sooner – everyone benefits,” beams Nicola Scott, a volunteer at Abundance Manchester. Passionate about growing food locally and organically, Nicola says that what drew her to Abundance was a realisation of the amount of food waste that occurs in people’s gardens: “People seem to just inherit these fruit trees or buy houses with existing trees and just don’t know what do with them…There are some people who really care about their trees but then you do get people who still go out and buy apples from their local supermarket even though they have an amazing apple tree growing in their backyard!”

Tackling Food Waste In The City

Once the organisation was set up, the core members set about tackling this issue of waste by advertising their project and asking people who had a glut of produce to contact them so that they could collect the extra fruit. Gradually, they built up a list of available fruit trees and so they started working on developing links with local charities and organisations who could make use of their harvest. “We had one volunteer at the time who worked with an asylum seeker project called The Boaz Trust – they help destitute asylum seekers who have no recourse to any funds at all, either because their asylum application has been rejected and they are going through the appeals process or they have just newly arrived in the UK. It was decided that they would be the key recipient.”

Since then, Abundance Manchester has worked with projects such as the Cornerstone in Hulme which helps homeless people, the Safestop Hostel which assists young homeless women as well as the Salvation Army. They have built up an e-list of 300 volunteers offering to pick fruit during the harvest season – which runs from late July to the end of October – and also to make chutneys and cook fruit pies for those organisations without a kitchen. As they rely on bike trailers to transport their goods, the projects focuses on small area in south Manchester which covers Didsbury, Chorlton, Withington, Whalley Range and Ladybarn. Despite this limitation, they often struggle with the logistics of carrying the abundant fruit they pick, “Sometimes we have so much we have to drop off the first lot at our base and come back for the rest- it’s amazing how much free food is available even in inner-city neighbourhoods,” says Nicola

‘It Doesn’t Look Like That At The Supermarket!’

It seems that hundreds of fruit trees across the city go unpicked because people think it’s not safe to eat fruit from the trees or they are not sure who the trees belong to. “People are so disassociated from where our food comes from that when the fruit has got blemishes – which are completely natural – they think well it mustn’t be safe to eat,” explains Nicola. “It’s a shame really, we’ve become so detached from our food, we expect it to be all shiny like it comes from the supermarket.”

The reluctance of people to pick from public trees is also an issue which Nicola thinks could be easily resolved with a couple of signs encouraging people to take the fruit at the time of harvest. “Last summer we found that there were loads of cherry trees in Moss Side, literally ten metres away from Princess Parkway and so we started picking the cherries in late June. We got loads of people coming out of their houses saying ‘What are you doing? ‘These are public trees, are you allowed to pick them?’ and we were like ‘Yeah, of course’ and eventually there were loads of people coming out to pick the trees.”

Growing With Asylum Seekers

As well as connecting people with the food available on their neighbourhoods, Abundance Manchester has also helped raise awareness of social issues such as homelessness and immigration amongst people who wouldn’t normally engage with such matters. “Working with Abundance meant that I got to find out more about asylum seekers through our workshops and they taught me stuff like how in Zimbabwe they use the young leaves of courgettes as spinach leaves,” says Nicola. “So you get all these cultural exchanges and I learnt about issues I normally wouldn’t be involved in.”

Nicola adds the fruit donors, who open their gardens to Abundance volunteers, also make links with socially marginalised people such as refugees and homeless people. “When we go to the richer areas of Manchester where we collect fruit, it’s very unlikely that these people will be in contact with destitute asylum seekers and I think sharing the food is a way for them to give and help other people.” Indeed, Nicola says that what Abundance Manchester wants to see in the future are more people and organisations with fruit trees taking their own initiative to link up to local groups and charities who could put the food to good use. “For example, the Hulme garden centre asked whether we would take their excess fruit but then we realised that there was a community café round the corner from them, so it made a lot more sense for them to just get together and work out a way to share the produce,” explains Nicola.

Sharing Food and Becoming Sustainable

In January 2009, Abundance Manchester acquired an allotment in West Didsbury which its now uses as a base to store fruit and as a drop-off point for those wanting to donate a glut in fruit or vegetables from their own allotments. The allotment also means that they can now host workshops encouraging locals to grow food in their own homes and gardens with limited resources, space and time. “I think with food price hikes as a result of climate change, we’re going to need to know how to be more self-sufficient and growing your own is a simple way to live more sustainably,” says Nicola. “It may not be for everyone, I understand that completely, but I think there are things that everyone can do like growing salad leaves and herbs in a container on their balcony.”

Article by Arwa Aburawa

Manchester Irish in Britain Representation Group, part 2


The axing of the “Irish Line” radio programme



Relations with Manchester City Council



Manchester Irish Week 1988








Prevention of Terrorism Act






The War in Ireland









Article by Michael Herbert

Okasional Cafes

During the late 1990s and early 2000s, anarchists and environmental activists in Manchester organised a series of squatted cafe-social centres around the city, under the name Okasional Cafe. This article is based on interviews with two people – both of whom wished to remain anonymous – who were involved in organising several of the cafes and running events in them.

The first Okasional Cafe, in 1998, was supposed to be in a former kebab takeaway on Peter Street, near the junction with Deansgate, on the site now occupied by Bar 38.

“There was a big row of Victorian shop buildings and a takeaway called, I think, the Topkapi Palace, which had already closed down in preparation for being demolished as part of the redevelopment plans for the huge warehouses behind and Great Northern Square,” recalls one of the people involved in looking at this initial site. “Four of us went in to recce it, which involved a small person having to go through a hole in the brickwork where there had been a heating vent, and letting the others in. It was perfect – the big industrial-scale catering cookers were still there, which would have been great for events. But it stank from the barrels of kebab fat too…”

In the event, the organising group decided that this site wasn’t suitable because the demolition date for the buildings was imminent and, although the organisers were anticipating having to fight eviction orders, they didn’t want this to be the focus of their activity, or for scared developers to take aggressive action to evict them. The second choice of venue was the former Temperance Movement building on Oxford Road in South Manchester, immediately opposite the Manchester University Students’ Union, now Kro Bar.

At this point, the Riotous Assembly open radical activist meetings had not yet started, so the recce teams for both sites had been recruited at the Earth First! meetings which at that time still took place in the Friends Meeting House in Manchester city centre.

“I remember meeting the people who were going to turn it into the pub,” says one participant. “The head of what is now the Kro empire, I remember him saying, well the weekend you moved in we were planning on moving in as well, but we thought well, we can take a bit more time. His brother, who was on the dole, was helping him with the building work, and they had a month’s less rent to pay so they weren’t bothered.”

As one interviewee recalls, the cafes were meant to be “a point where social and political activity could go on reasonably freely and workshops and film showings could happen, but also secondly that it was supposed to be an access point for new people who might not come to a meeting but would be comfortable coming and having a cup of tea and a piece of cake and picking up some leaflets and then might come back again for something else a few days later and actually speak to somebody about getting involved.”

Another interviewee emphasised that “about people having an access point for ‘our’ ways of working – ie anarchist – and forms of actual direct action. I remember it definitely as being for both those purposes, and also that there were actions actually happening at the same time, so people could go to the cafe, hear about an action, go to a meeting about it and get comfortable with the idea and then actually go along on an action and get involved, as well as providing a space for people who were already involved to meet together and have that contact. It’s also in my head as a post-Manchester Airport protest camp thing – lots of people had moved to Manchester, had been active and the EF! Meetings were too big and unwieldy and some people had the idea that everything in the meetings had to be agreed by everyone and others thought they were a forum, a place to go to where you could say, we’re doing this anyone want to get involved?”

“For me,” he continued, “the reason Okasional Cafe came round was that it was a physical point of contact, because people had had the experience of living on protest camps at the Airport together, and that was really important, and there was nowhere for people to meet and spend time together. I was completely sold on the model of squatting a place, holding it for a month, saying ‘we’re going to be here for a month’, not trying to do it for longer or make it a permanent place, not trying to say we’ll keep it for longer but put that burst of energy into it for that month and then do other things the rest of the time, rather than having a permanent centre…”

The first Okasional Cafes were not simply spaces where people could come and talk, but had well-organised schedules of events, including political meetings, exhibitions, film showings and fundraising parties. A distinctive logo was designed, probably by a resident of the ‘Redbricks’ estate in Hulme, and in the weeks preceding the squatting of a new cafe several waves of publicity would take place, starting with the logo being fly-posted around town, followed by posters bearing the words ‘it’s coming’ and then after the building have been occupied posters and bookmark-format leaflets with the address and workshop timetable would be distributed in cafes, pubs, bookstores and ‘alternative’ shops like those in Afflecks Palace.

“I’m not sure I can imagine such organised publicity happening now,” commented one participant. “people rely too much on the internet, they think that when they’ve put something on Facebook they’ve publicised, whereas actually they’ve just told a load of people they’re already in touch with, and they think they can advertise something the day before, instead of having to put in some work to really get word out.”

Okasional Cafes around Manchester

After the success of the initial Okasional Cafe on Oxford Road, a number of other squat cafes took place across South and Central Manchester over the next four years. Sites for these included an old canal keeper’s cottage on Dale Street in the Northern Quarter, a second one at Kro, one on Birch Grove in Rusholme and two at the Hacienda, one of which was a fundraiser for the massive J18 anti-capitalist protests which took place in London in June 1999.

There was also an abortive attempt to hold an Okasional Cafe in St Peter’s House, opposite the Peace Gardens and Central Library. “It was in November one year,” says a participant, “and people hadn’t really thought about the issues around that but it was just before the 11th and the police really cracked down on it because they thought it was an anti-war protest in time for the Armistice Day commemorations, which it wasn’t. So they just smashed their way in through the plate glass windows, using the fact that there was a back staircase which was shared with another building as a legal pretext for evicting the squat.

The Charles Street Okasional Cafe

Another site used was a former auction house on Charles Street, just off Oxford Road next to the BBC. One memorable event held there was a showing of the film Injustice, about the struggles for justice by families of people – mainly black men like Shiji Lapite and Roger Sylvester, but also including Harry Stanley and women like Joy Gardner and Sarah Thomas – who had died in police custody.

The Police Federation had tried to take legal action to prevent the film, which called for the prosecution of several serving police officers, from being screened. Venues were harassed and threatened with having their licenses revoked, and cinemas were told by police lawyers that they might face expensive libel suits. So when the Cornerhouse Cinema on Oxford Road was intimidated into cancelling a showing, people involved with the Charles St cafe, just round the corner, stepped in to offer an alternative.

“But we managed to prime one of the directors, Tariq Mehmood, who lives in Rusholme, so that when they reached the end of their talk and had to tell the audience that they couldn’t show the film there, they announced that the people who had just stood up could lead them to a venue where they could see it.”

The Cornerhouse cinema, according to one of the people involved in the Okasional Cafe screening, event loaned chairs to allow enough audience members to go to the alternative screening, and some of the box office staff had made significant efforts to deliver the coded message to people buying tickets for the event that although the event had been formally cancelled, something else might be afoot…

The Charles Street Okasional Cafe was also the scene for exhibitions giving ongoing information about the mass protests – and police brutality – which took place at the G8 summit in Genoa in July 2001. But, despite some of the good events which went on at Charles St, it was also an example of some of the things that could go wrong with such an enterprise.

“My take on what happened.” says one participant, who had been involved in many of the other cafes, “was that a lot of people were involved who nowadays would be curating slightly alternative art galleries or working for the World Development Movement or the Big Issue, but then, because it was the exciting ‘in’ thing they were there. But for the first part of the Charles St cafe, the people putting most time in were people who had less long-term experience or hadn’t made the same connections so the way it was organised was messier and events weren’t publicised. There were also problems because the site was near an all-night Spar and a big homeless hostel, and some people turned up from a protest came and stayed and behaved like arseholes, so there were social problems being dealt with by people with very little experience.”

The solution was to close the squat down for a week, regroup the organising committee and remodel the space. The main room was painted white to give it a completely different feel from the previous dark space, and the cafe was re-opened for several more weeks before it was finally evicted. “The eviction was,” says one of the people involved, “one of those classic developer things where they come to court and say they want to use the building for such-and-such and work will start straight away and the judge says ok, kick them out, and now eight years later it’s still empty, and there is still as Okasional Cafe sign over the door…”

Decentralised organising

As one interviewee who was involved in organising several of the Okasional cafes recalls, the networks and personal connections which had grown up during the protest camps at Manchester Airport were still in place during this era. “Although people were campaigning on different issues it tended to feel more like they were part of the same thing than it seems to now,” he says. “Animal rights people or whoever might be doing their thing, but a lot of the allocating work and responsibilities happened because various different people with different skills were involved. In terms of anarchist forms of organising there were weekly meetings at the cafe which set up the events for the week after and sometimes there were more regular meetings if there were other issues that came up.”

The tension between weekly and more regular meetings was, he says, “interesting, in that the people with most time and the people who were living there to hold the squat sometimes acquired more power than others. So some people were arguing that it’s more democratic to have weekly meetings because more people can actually come to them.”

Tactically, different methods were used to actually initiate the occupation of the squatted buildings. For the Hacienda events, many of the first groups of people to enter the building were asked to meet at a fairly public site in Hulme and then led away in small groups, under cover of darkness and sometimes through the gardens of squat sympathisers on a nearby estate. As a result, the police failed to notice that the crowd they were monitoring was actually slowly dispersing.

At most of the other Okasional Cafes, a small group would crack the squat in advance in order to take legal control, and then other members of the organising group would collect a larger selection of people who’d gathered at a publicly advertised meeting point and bring them to help with preparing the venue – cleaning, decorating and if necessary connecting water and electricity. “It was a balance of recognising that you have to keep some things secret for them to work, while making the process as open and participatory as possible,” commented one person who was involved in a number of the cafes. “And because we had the networks from the Airport protests and other direct action and free party scenes we knew who to get in touch with if we needed the water and gas and electrics to be turned back on. A lot of that was the result of lessons from 1990s direct action and Reclaim the Street.”

Decision-making processes about how the cafes would be run were also decentralised, bringing in a range of experiences, ages and backgrounds. “I remember in the first OK Cafe there was a No Smoking room,” recalls one participant. “When that was first brought up some people were like, Noooo! But for me that was an example of the difference between two simplified versions of anarchism – the more individualistic, which I think is called Sternerite, and the more collectivist or community-based – ‘I can do what I like’ vs ‘I can do what I like but understand its impacts on other people.’ So there were lots of debates, and in the end there were No Smoking times and room in Okasional Cafes.”

Over the course of the various cafes, many lessons were also learned about the kind of events, activities and messages participants wanted to use the sites for. “The first one was around the time of an election, and it was also near a church,” recalled one person. “Someone put a big cross up outside with a politician hanging from it and labelled it ‘use your cross wisely, crucify a politician.’ And there were things like free stalls and also what became People’s Kitchen, ie experimenting with cheap meals and food by donation. That was quite hard, because especially being in a student area you felt you were putting in lots of effort to feed lazy students who’d got enough money anyway. So it shifted, became really nice set meals with candlelight or poetry performances but also with a suggested donation. Soft drinks would be free or donations but alcohol was a set price because there was a sense that if people wanted to spend money on alcohol it should be a fundraiser. There were also party night which were fundraisers too, and usually they were donations on the door and some people would just ask casually and people would put a few coppers in, but some more savvy ones would say ‘three quid, three quid’ as people came in and a well-run night at the Kro site could easily raise a thousand pounds. People lost that ability with some of the later cafes, especially the Kickstart ones that were done by a different group of people later on, people involved in residential squatting in Whalley Range, because they just weren’t as organised and people would nick the money and they didn’t really have a sense of how to replicate some of the really creative stuff we were doing at OK Cafes.”

To evict or not to evict?

In almost all cases the OK Cafe squats were time-limited, held for just a month and then handed back to their owners. They were also largely in commercial or public buildings rather than residential ones. One exception was the sixth squat, on Birch Grove in Rusholme in 2000, which – with the approval of the house’s owner – became a residential squat for at least six months after the Okasional Cafe there closed down.

Even though it had become a residential squat, the Birch Grove site did remain a hub for some direct action activity, serving as the meeting point for groups of Manchester activists who went to the Close Campsfield noise demonstration and actions against the asylum seeker detention centre in Oxfordshire.

In some other cases the landlords of squatted properties were less co-operative, although the reputation of the protesters occupying the buildings sometimes meant that evictions weren’t carried out. “With the first Okasional Cafe,” a participant remembers, “people remembered us from the Airport, where people felt they had to power to say to a landlord, ‘yes you can take us to court and get an order and evict us, but we’re going to resist, you’ll need bailiffs. Ask the Under-Sheriff of Lancashire, Andy Wilson, he’ll tell you that we’re going to be really expensive.’ It’s in your interest and our interest to negotiate – give us a month. And landlords would go, OK. At the Kro Bar site, Andy Wilson came along and people pretended to have been in tunnels and had dirt on their faces and head torches and he just backed off and from then on we had the reputation with other landlords that – take them to court, but negotiate with them.”

The one exception to this rule was the Hacienda squat. The police had succeeded in having the superclub closed down and, as one participant thinks, saw its re-opening as a challenge. They evicted it quickly and at times brutally, and were therefore furious when it was then re-squatted a second time – giving rise to graffiti in one of the rooms reading The People 1: Police 0 which was them amended to The People 2: Police 0. A number of people arrested in the first eviction successfully sued Greater Manchester Police for wrongful arrest. “The second time,” recalls one interviewee, “only once we we had negotiated our way outside did we see that there were lines of riot cops with battering rams all lined up by the walls, where we couldn’t see them from the inside. There was also a moment where, while they were using quite a lot of violence to clear the area, we saw one riot cop who was well known for being very big and violent whack someone across the back with the truncheon, and the person he’d hit getting out his badge and saying ‘I’m undercover!’ And that was great to watch…”

Article by Sarah Irving

Paddy O’Donoghue

Paddy O’Donoghue was head of the Irish Republican Army in Manchester 1919-1921, co-ordinating jail escapes and attacks on buildings. He was jailed in 1921 but freed after the treaty was signed between Britain and the Republican government in 1922.

The leader of the IRA in Manchester between 1919 and 1921, Paddy O’Donoghue, was a native of Barraduff, Killarney who ran a grocers shop on Lloyd Street, Greenheys. Before the War of Independence he was best known as the organiser of the annual Irish concert at the Free Trade Hall but he was also intimately involved in the Republican movement in Manchester. O’Donoghue was a close friend of Michael Collins, who had been his best man when Paddy married Violet Gore. Collins apparently brought him into his intelligence and arms-smuggling network in England as early as 1917.

In February 1919 O’Donoghue played a key role in the escape of Eamon De Valera from Lincoln Jail. De Valera was very anxious to get out of jail and go to the United States to present the Irish case for self-determination. A devout Catholic, he served at Mass with the prison chaplain and managed to get an impression in the wax of a candle of the master key . The design was copied onto a Christmas card by Sean Milroy and sent to Sean McGarry’s wife in Ireland but she failed realise the significance of the design. The three prisoners then wrote to Paddy O’Donoghue in Irish and he contacted Collins immediately. A key was then cut to the design and smuggled into the jail in a cake but it did not fit the lock. A further card with the key design was sent to O’Donoghue with the words “ Eocair na Saoirse” (The Key To Freedom”). O’Donoghue had another key cut in Manchester and sent it in but once again it failed to work. Collins now came to England to personally take charge of the operation.

A further key was made inside the jail and on 3rd February, by prior arrangement, three prisoners made their way to the front door of the jail where Michael Collins and his close friend Harry Boland were waiting along with Frank Kelly. Disaster seemed to have struck when Collins’ key broke as he put it in the lock. Fortunately De Valera was able to push the broken key out with his own copy and open the door. The three prisoners made their way to where O’Donoghue was waiting with transport.

Collins and Boland went to London and then back to Dublin. The others journeyed back to Manchester by way of Sheffield. Milroy and McGarry were hidden by leading Manchester IRA commander Liam MacMahon in his own house, while De Valera stayed with a local priest, Father Charles O’Mahony. The police were looking for De Valera, of course, and MacMahon was warned by Thomas Walsh, a sympathetic detective in the Manchester force, that they were getting close. On 18th February, dressed as a priest and escorted by two young Irish women, De Valera travelled back to Dublin. At the beginning of June he went to the United States.

O’Donoghue was involved in another extraordinary episode when he arranged for two young boys to be kidnapped from Barry in South Wales. They were the children of Josephine Marchmont , who worked in the Cork military barracks as a secretary to a senior British officer. She had impeccable security credentials, being the daughter of a Head Constable in the RIC, while her husband had been killed in the war. Her children, however, were in the custody of her mother-in-law in Wales.

Michael Collins learned of this and offered Josephine a deal in which he would arrange for the children to be brought back to Ireland if she would pass information to the IRA. She agreed and with the assistance of Paddy O’Donoghue the two boys were seized and brought to Manchester, where they stayed in his house and were then taken to Cork to be reunited with their mother. Josephine kept her side of the bargain and her information was invaluable to the IRA. Her deception was apparently never uncovered by the British authorities.

In April 1919 a number of IRA prisoners were transferred to Strangeways from Belfast after disturbances there over the issue of political status. Their leader was Austin Stack, Sinn Fein MP for West Kerry, who had commanded the Kerry brigade during the Easter Rising and had been sentenced to death, though this had been commuted to life imprisonment. Also in the prison in Manchester was Piaras Beaslai, Sinn Fein MP for East Kerry.

In August Fionan Lynch, Sinn Fein MP for Kerry South, was released from Strangeways and made contact with Paddy O’Donoghue and Liam MacMahon, who set in motion an escape plan. Violet O’Donoghue arranged for messages and maps to be sent into the prison baked in cakes or buried in butter and jam. Collins followed the development of the plans closely and wrote to Beaslai several times using a code. Rory O’Connor was sent over to examine the plans, followed soon after by Collins himself who actually visited Stack in Strangeways, using a false name and unrecognized.

The escape took place on Saturday 25th October. A dummy pistol already been smuggled into the prison in butter while the prisoners had got hold of handcuffs from a sympathetic Irish policeman in Manchester. They overcame the prison warder on duty, gagging him and placing him in a cell, and then rushed into the prison yard where a rope with a weight was thrown over and, after some mishaps, came within their grasp. The prisoners hauled on the rope, bringing over a rope-ladder, and each in turn climbed up it and over the wall.

Outside the prison some twenty men from Manchester, including Paddy O’Donoghue, held up the street and preventing anyone from passing the prison. Beaslai was taken by a young men named George Lodge in a taxi and then by tram to his house in a Manchester suburb while others made their escape on bicycles. After a week Collins visited Stack and Beaslai and three days later Liam MacMahon and George Lodge escorted them to Liverpool from where they were smuggled home in a steamer to be met by Joe O’Reilly, Collins’ right hand man, at the quayside. The other escapees were Paddy McCarthy (later killed in action), Sean Doran, DP Walsh, and Con Connolly.

According to the report of the escape in the Manchester Guardian the IRA men left behind a letter exonerating the warder from any blame. Sean Doran was later recaptured in Ireland and brought back to Manchester where he was sentenced on 18th July 1921 to two months imprisonment for escaping, to run concurrent with the unexpired sentence of 12 months. Piaras Beaslai played a small but important part in Irish history when on 14th January 1922 he moved the motion to approve the Treaty at a meeting of members of the Southern Irish Parliament, convened by Arthur Griffith as chair of the Irish delegation to London.

The most spectacular series of IRA operations in Manchester took place on 2nd April 1921 when between 6am and 7am a number of Volunteers tried to set fire to offices, hotels and cafes in the city centre. Later that same evening a large number of armed police raided the Irish Club on Erskine Street, Hulme and shot dead Sean Morgan, a member of the IRA. The police arrested a large number of men at the Irish Club and also picked up others over the weekend, including Paddy O’Donoghue (a memorial to Sean Morgan was unveiled in Moston cemetery on the ninth anniversary of his death in 1930.)

The arrested men appeared in court on 4th April with the Chief Constable of Manchester present, accompanied by many officers. The prosecution produced dozens of revolvers and cans of petrol as evidence, claiming that the Irish Club was an arsenal or base of operations from which outrages in Manchester had been planned and carried out.

The twenty-one accused appeared in court again on 26th April before the stipendiary magistrate Edgar Brierley. There was tight security with every entrance to the court guarded by police and even the press having to show cards before they were admitted. A number of men, including Paddy O’Donoghue, were charged with the attempted murder of police officers and there were numerous other charges, including one of “making war against the King”. The police prosecutor claimed that one of the defendants, Daniel McNicholl, had admitted that there were 60 men in the IRA in Manchester, formed into three companies, one based at Albion Street and two at Erskine Street. In a confession to the Chief Constable, McNicholl had also alleged that O’Donoghue held high rank in the IRA and had shot a police officer.

The trial of those charged with treason-felony began on 7th July at the Manchester Assizes before Justice Rigby Swift with the prosecution led by the Attorney General himself, Sir Gordon Hewart. Nineteen men were now charged with treason felony, as well as with arson and shooting with intent to murder. The Attorney General alleged that Paddy O’Donoghue had hired a garage at 67 Upper Chorlton Road, Whalley Range on 13th November of the year before, which had been used to store explosives and firearms. On 25th May the police had arrested a number of men when they came to the garage to retrieve materials, presumably believing that the coast would be clear as some weeks had passed since the arrests of their colleagues. He also alleged that O’Donoghue had shot Constable Boucher at Bridgewater House in the chest and arm.

There was a dramatic incident in court on Monday 11th July. Over the weekend the Irish Republican government and the British government had finally concluded a truce in the armed conflict, which would come into force at noon. At that precise moment one of the defendants Charles Harding gave an order in Gaelic and the rest of the prisoners sprang to their feet and stood to attention for a moment, resuming their seats after another instruction from Harding. That same day, amidst scorching weather, Eamonn De Valera arrived in London to begin talks with the British Government and hundreds of Irish people greeted him at Euston railway station.

On 13th July O’Donoghue made a statement from the dock in which he pleaded guilty to the charge with respect to the garage admitting that the arms had been paid for by him as an officer in the IRA. “It is my firm belief that had the IRA been better equipped negotiations for the settlement now in progress would have long since been held”. He denied however having anything to do with shooting policemen. “I have always fully realised that I was committing an offence against the constitution of this country in smuggling arms to Ireland but at the same time I felt I was morally bound to help my country to regain its freedom”. Sean Wickham also made a speech from the dock, adding that he was an officer in the IRA. Addressing the court he contended that the signing of the truce was virtually a recognition of the claim of the accused to be treated as prisoners of war and he also rejected the Treason Felony Act.

The Manchester trial was raised in the House of Commons by Captain Redmond, Irish Nationalist MP for Waterford, who asked Lloyd George whether the Crown would discontinue the charges of conspiracy against certain Irishmen now being held at Manchester Assizes. In his reply Lloyd George claimed that they had pleaded guilty (which was a lie) and were entitled to a verdict.

Captain Redmond persisted, asking a logical question. “How can the government reconcile their actions in taking proceedings against certain Irishmen in England for conspiring with whom the government themselves are at present entering upon open negotiations during a period of truce?” Lloyd George dodged the question, merely repeating his previous answer.

Only two men – Nicholas Keogh and Daniel Mullen – were acquitted by the jury. The rest were found guilty and sentenced to varying lengths of prison.

The Treaty was finally signed in the early hours of 6th December 1921 but fell well short of the independent Republic the Irish had already proclaimed, conceding only Dominion status to twenty six counties of Ireland within the British Empire under the title of the Irish Free State and confirming the partition of Ireland for six out of nine counties of Ulster under the political and military domination of the Unionist Party.

After a lengthy and sometimes bitter debate Dail Eireann approved the Treaty on 7th January 1922 with 64 votes in favour and 57 against. Sinn Fein had already effectively split into two camps with De Valera opposing the Treaty and Collins and Griffith supporting it.

Republican prisoners in jails in Ireland had been let out as soon as the Treaty was signed, as had those imprisoned in Britain for offences committed in Ireland. Those convicted of offences committed in Britain still remained in jail, however, and on 11th February the Irish Self Determination League organised a demonstration in Trafalgar Square to press for their release. Five columns of Irish people carrying tricolours marched in from different parts of London. and were addressed by Art O’Brien and Alderman John Scurr. There was an unexpected third speaker – Shaun Wickham from Manchester – released that morning from Wandsworth Prison. Still dressed in his prison clothes of a cheap grey coat and striped trousers, he shivered in the February cold. The Manchester Guardian wondered why his friends had not bought him a warm coat.

Wickham had been freed because the previous day the British and Irish governments had simultaneously issued statements of amnesty. Collins’ statement granted amnesty to the British aimed forces and civil service “in respect of all acts committed in the course of the recent hostilities”, while the British statement (issued by the Colonial Office and not the Home Office) granted the immediate release of prisoners now in custody “for offences committed prior to the treaty in Great Britain from Irish political motives”.

Back in Manchester prisoners were also released from Strangeways and the authorities told the Evening Chronicle that all the Irishmen imprisoned there for political offences had now been released. So unexpected was their release that there was no welcoming crowd. The following day, however, thousands marched to London Road station to greet ex-prisoners, although they actually arrived at different stations. Several men eventually did make their way to the station and were given a tumultuous welcome and, Irish band playing, escorted to Central Station. Some sixty other prisoners were released and most went to London.

Paddy O’Donoghue left England for Ireland and in his later years managed a greyhound stadium.

Article by Michael Herbert. Michael is author of The Wearing of the Green: A Political History of the Irish in Manchester (2000), copies of which can be bought by contacting Michael directly at mossley [at]