Spanish Civil War memorial window, Belfast City Hall

This stained-glass window, unveiled at Belfast City Hall in 2015, illustrates the evolving meaning of Belfast’s role in the Spanish Civil War. It references the colours of the Spanish Republican flag, the International Brigade’s three-pointed star, Dolores Ibárruri (La Pasionaria), and her celebrated slogan ¡No Pasarán! The battle-sites where International Brigade volunteers also feature prominently in its design. 

In response to a proposal by the Belfast-based International Brigade Commemoration Committee, Belfast City Council commissioned the memorial ‘to reflect the contribution of citizens from Belfast to the fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War’. In addition to honouring forty-eight Belfast-based XV International Brigade volunteers (twelve of whom were killed), the memorial commemorates Belfast’s Spanish Aid campaign. 

The Spanish Civil War exacerbated communal tensions within Northern Ireland’s divided society. As was also the case south of the border, most Catholics supported Franco. Many within Northern Ireland’s majority Protestant unionist (pro-British) community disliked both Franco (who was identified with Catholicism and authoritarianism) and the Popular Front (which was associated with republicanism and communism).  

Efforts to support the Spanish Republic were led by a radical minority of communists, left-wing republicans, trade-unionists, and the Northern Ireland Labour Party. Around seventy-eight men from Northern Ireland fought in the International Brigades, while two others served with an ambulance unit. Approximately twenty died in Spain.  

The conflict divided labour and republican organisations in Northern Ireland. Many Catholic workers opposed the efforts of their (British-based) trade-unions to support the Spanish Republic. In 1938 Harry Midgley, a Protestant Northern Irish Labour Party politician, lost his seat in the local parliament when Catholic voters withdrew their support due to his opposition to Franco. IRA volunteers fought on both sides, with most backing the Spanish Republic. 

The memorial is one of at least forty-five in Ireland (some twenty of which are in Northern Ireland) to commemorate International Brigade volunteers. Cross-party support for the initiative on Belfast City Council reveals how the social memory of the war, which deepened sectarian tensions at the time, has evolved in post-conflict Northern Ireland. In a city that remains divided along sectarian lines, the presence of anti-fascist memorials to International Brigade volunteers on the loyalist Shankill and republican Falls is presented as ‘a brilliant moment of unity for its working class populace’. 

Some of the labour organisations now active in memorialising the International Brigades denounced their communist organisers as their ‘bitterest enemies’ at the time. Although the IRA banned its members from fighting in Spain, republicans also lay claim to the legacy of the International Brigade (although not that of their members who fought for Franco). Two IRA men who died in Spain, Protestant Bill Tumilson and Catholic Jim Straney, are listed on a memorial in Belfast’s Short Strand which commemorates nineteen local IRA volunteers killed during twentieth-century republican campaigns. 

The rehabilitation of the International Brigades through political commemoration reflects how a war that was widely perceived in Ireland as a struggle between Catholicism and communism is now remembered as an anti-fascist struggle in defence of democracy. Ironically, the failure of the radical Irish left to sustain itself through a deeply reactionary decade has been largely obscured by the memory of its participation in the greatest setback encountered by the international left in the 1930s.