Memorial banner honouring Irish Volunteers of the 15th International Brigades

On 11 November 1938 the radical Irish priest, Fr. Michael O’Flanagan, unveiled this banner at Dublin’s Molesworth Hall to commemorate Ireland’s fallen International Brigade volunteers. A small audience of two hundred observed two minutes’ silence at the meeting which was organised by the Irish Friends of the Spanish Republic to mark the second anniversary of the brigade. 

Acknowledging the lack of public support for their cause, Fr O’Flanagan recalled that the founder of the Irish Republic, Patrick Pearse, had been ‘the object of scorn of the vast majority of the Irish people’ when he was executed in 1916. Praising the attendees’ moral courage, he expressed deep shame at his countrymen’s failure to support the Spanish Republic. 

The banner is believed to have been designed by art students led by Maurice Cogan, acting under the supervision of Aida Kelly, in her family’s shop on Amiens Street. Aida Kelly was the partner (later wife) of the socialist artist Maurice MacGonigal, a founder of Dublin’s Radical Club.  

Fr. O’Flanagan’s prediction that Irish opinion on Spain would change proved prescient. Although International Brigade volunteers were widely vilified as atheistic communists when they left for Spain, they are now recalled in collective Irish memory as anti-fascist defenders of Spanish democracy. 

Many of the forty-four men whose names feature on the banner – such as the Tyrone poet Charlie Donnelly –  have been prominently remembered over recent decades by poems, songs, biographies, and memorials. The banner also lists one volunteer who did not die in Spain. Reported missing on the Aragon front, John O’Shea subsequently returned to his unit, fighting in the Battle of the Ebro, before finding his way safely home to Waterford. 

The history of this banner’s display demonstrates the importance attached to the memory of the Spanish Civil War by the radical Irish left, and how this evolving legacy has come to be embraced by the mainstream labour movement and Irish society more generally. After the Spanish Civil War, the banner was prominently displayed at the Communist Party of Ireland’s headquarters at James Connolly House in Dublin’s Temple Bar. In November 1991, it was presented by Michael O’Riordan, a veteran of the International Brigades and communist party leader, to the Irish Labour History Society where it was displayed at their Beggars Bush museum until 2006. It was then loaned to the National Museum of Ireland where it now forms part of ‘Soldiers and Chiefs – The Irish at War at Home and Abroad from 1550 to the Present Day’, an important exhibition housed in Collins barracks.