THE file on James Gralton's deportation is lost, it seems, and the Labour TD, Declan Bree, suspects it was destroyed by persons unknown to cover up responsibility for a shameful act the deportation of an Irish revolutionary from his native country for trying to help his people, by a government for which he had fought 11 years earlier, to satisfy religious zealots.
The New York journalist, Joseph Mitchell, who died last May 24th at the age of 88, met Gralton, the deportee, in a hall off Union Square on a hot August night in 1933. Franklin Roosevelt was five months in office. Mitchell's by lined story ran in the New York World Telegram the following day.
Revolutionary Stock
"James Gralton used to be a barkeep in Daniel O'Rourke's old belly front saloon at Third Avenue, and 126th Street," the story began. "Also he used to drive a taxicab.
"Then he went back to Ireland and became a revolutionary leader in County Leitrim, leading throngs of evicted small farmers against the priests, the conservative cattle ranchers and the gombeen men. For months he led a movement similar to the recent agrarian revolt in the Middle West. The priests called him: `the agent of an anti God campaign'.
"His meeting hall was bombed. He was captured in an obscure mountain pass near Effernagh. He was deported. Now he is an American citizen jobless."
Joe Mitchell gave some background. "There are two types of revolutionaries in Ireland," he wrote. "Some are mystics. Some are fighters. Gralton believes in action. He comes of revolutionary stock - his father, who died just before he was deported, was an old Fenian. Gralton is tall, muscular, bald headed. He is matter of fact; there is no rhetoric in him."
He quoted Gralton: "My home is a farm of 25 acres in Effernagh, County Leitrim. My mother lives there now. We grow potatoes, oats, cattle and pigs. There is a bare existence there.
"I left home early. I was a stoker on ships. I was a coal miner in New South Wales. I emigrated to the United States some 25 years ago ... I went back to Ireland to fight the British. I fought in the Leitrim brigade, Irish Republican Army, against the Black and Tans.
After the truce I returned to my birthplace. I hated the treaty. Well, at home we fixed up a hall the Tans had destroyed. There we taught Gaelic and dancing and reading and writing. The parish priests opposed us, of course."
Worker and Communist
During the Civil War, Free State soldiers raided the hall for republicans. They mounted a machine gun outside, trained on the door. "They arrested 14. There were orders to shoot at sight. I was forced to leave. In 1922 I came back to New York and for 10 years I was a taxicab driver and a bread salesman and a communist.
"Last year my brother died. My parents were past 75. They wanted me to come home. I went back again. When I got back things had not changed. There were evictions again. I started right in and schemed to rebuild the old hall. We soon got it fixed up, a sort of community centre it was, a sort of revolutionary community centre.
"Well, the good old man, Father O'Dowd, the parish priest, couldn't be still. He started the anti God propaganda. On Christmas Eve we were having a dance, an old time Irish dance. Plenty of fun, laughing and singing and all. In the night they fired 50 rounds of shot against the walls. We kept on dancing.
"A little later they placed a landmine, a home made bomb, on the floor. It didn't do much damage. A week later they saturated the hall with oil and burned it to the ground. I still made speeches against the evictions.
"In February of this year the Minister of Justice signed an order authorising my deportation on March 4th. My father died. They had tried to intimidate me. They would drive me into the fields at night. They would throw stones at the house. They saw that the only way they could intimidate me was to deport me.
"I armed myself with a shotgun, a revolver, and four home made bombs and took it on the run. They tracked me all over, the hills ... The whole country was interested. I left [home] on February 14th. On August 12th they caught me in the mountains
"They took me to Cobh and put me on the Brittanic. There was no criminal charge. There was no public trial. And here I am, looking for a job. I became - an American citizen soon after I came here in 1907. Now I imagine they would just call me one of the unemployed
Connolly's Writings
Gralton may have been unemployed, but he was not idle. The Civil War republican generation - the defeated "Legion of the Rearguard" - flocked to America when they came out of prison camps. In New York, many worked in the city subway rail system. Hours were long, pay small. Gralton taught Connolly's writings on trade unions and how to organise them at an Irish Workers' Club. In April 1934, some of Gralton's students founded the Transport Workers Union. They included Mike Quill of Kerry and Austin Hogan of Cork.
Harold Ross, editor of the New Yorker, hired Joe Mitchell as a staff writer in 1938. He remained at the magazine for the rest of his life and produced prose that will endure. "McSorley's Wonderful Saloon is `this city's Dubliners'," the New Yorker wrote on his death. His last book, Joe Gould's Secret, in 1965, was called "his masterpiece". It's about a bum in Greenwich Village who claimed to have written "an oral history of our time".
In 1992, Pantheon published a collection of Mitchell's writing, Up at the Old Hotel. He worked at the New Yorker every day but had produced no copy since 1964. A perfectionist, whatever he wrote displeased him, or the well had run dry. His favourite writers were James Joyce and Mark Twain.
His colleague, Brendan Gill, wrote: "Though he was mostly of Scots descent, Joe loved the Irish as a people, and he would sit talking by the hour to old tads at McSorley's saloon, upon which, by having written about it, he had bestowed an unintended fame."