Series 13 - Frank Robbins, Under the Starry Plough

285pp

Paperback copy of Under the Starry Plough: Recollections of the Irish Citizen Army by Frank Robbins (Dublin: Academy Press, 1977). Frank Robbins (1895-1979) came to prominence during the 1910s as a member of James Connolly's Irish Citizen Army and later became a leading figure in the Irish trade union movement and the Labour Party. Part of the memoir details his time in the United States between 1916 and 1918. The passage (pp. 163-199) details how the Irish Transport and General Workers' Union, asked Robbins to go to the United States to ask James Larkin, the high-profile Irish labour leader, to return to Ireland. Larkin had left Ireland following the defeat of the Dublin Lockout. Robbins ended up remaining in the States for a year, becoming closely associated with John Devoy of Clan na Gael and Liam Mellows, who had also been involved in the Easter Rising and fled to America in the aftermath. Robbins and Devoy would form a lasting bond, and ten years after Devoy's death in 1938, Robbins would return to New York to personally bring Devoy's papers back to Ireland. In 1918, Robbins returned to Ireland, where he set about trying to bring the Irish Volunteers and the Irish Citizen Army together; ultimately the ICA would not participate in the Irish Civil War.