Thomas Carnduff

Thomas Carnduff (30 January 1886 – 17 April 1956) was a working-class Irish poet, playwright and socialist active in his native Belfast.

Carnduff was born in Belfast. He was raised in the Protestant working-class district of Sandy Row, worked in the city's shipyards (where in 1920 he purportedly helped Catholic workers escape across the Lagan River from the fury of Protestant pogromists), and was a member of the early labour-supporting Independent Orange Order. Carnduff concluded that:"the lamentable condition of Ireland is mainly attributable to the false conception of nationality" and he welcomed Crawford's call in his Magheramorne Manifesto of 1904 for Irish Protestants to "reconsider their position as Irish citizens and their attitude towards their Roman Catholic countrymen". This, however, was the position that was to lead to Crawford's eventual break with Sloan and his expulsion from the Order in 1908.

His first collection of poetry Songs from the Shipyards was published in 1924. In the 1930s, there were a series of plays,

In Castlereagh (1935). Carnduff celebrated the United Irishman, James (Jemmy) Hope, the weaver from Templepatrick who insisted that the real causes of social disorder in Ireland were "the conditions of the labouring class". Carnduff was a friend of Peadar O'Donnell, and was drawn to the left-republican Connolly Association formed in 1938. He died in Belfast in 1956.