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Irish Democrat was the paper of the Connolly Association, a diaspora organisation established to build support for Irish republicanism within the British labour movement. The Connolly Association and the Irish Democrat had strong links to the Communist Party of Great Britain, which advocated for a peaceful mass movement to challenge the British presence in Northern Ireland and to remove discrimination faced by Catholics in the Six Counties. Encouraged by the wave of decolonisation across the British Empire in the 1950s-60s, both the CA and the CPGB saw the struggle against Unionist rule in Northern Ireland as analogous to events in Asia, Africa and the Middle East. This paper explores the narration of anti-colonial and national liberation movements elsewhere in the British Empire in the pages of the Irish Democrat and the overdetermination of Irish national questions by post-war discourses of radical decolonisation. It also traces the formation across difference of specific solidarities between the Connolly Association and other migrant communities within the multicultural political geography of post-war Britain, including out of campaigns against racial discrimination, the "colour bar" and post-war immigration controls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the dissolution of the Comintern, the Communist Party of Great Britain (CPGB) was given the responsibility to co-ordinate socialist and anti-colonial activism across the British Commonwealth. This paper argues that the 1947 and 1954 Communist Parties of Empire Conferences are illustrative of the new-found importance of developing networks across Britain's empire in the post-war period. The Empire Conferences served as a body for the exchange of ideas, people and knowledge, and in some cases involved promises of financial resources. The paper will argue that the conferences were conducted on two levels. First, using the networks formed during the Comintern, they were an attempt to co-ordinate and function as a hub for activity across the Commonwealth. Second, in line with the 'transnational turn' in the area, the Conferences highlight the transmission of ideas across the international movement, showing the difficulties faced by individual parties, as well as opportunities for development and collaboration. In 1947, the CPGB was adrift from many of its sister parties over the vibrancy of its anti-imperial activism. Similarly, seven years later, whilst its anti-colonial activism had become more prominent, the CPGB was again criticised for its assumption of a 'fraternal association' between the empire's centre and its former colonies. The paper aims to shed light on the increasingly prominent divisions in cold-war international communism, and the transnational dimension of communist relations within the British Commonwealth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]